Columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
I flew to Dublin a week ago and even with jet lag, it was downright glorious and I’m eager to do it again. I flew out of JFK, a prison camp attached to a strip mall, and landed seven hours later and was struck by the friendliness. The immigration lady seemed glad I had come and I got into conversations at baggage claim simply by asking questions. I find the Irish accent impenetrable but when I cupped my ear and said, “Eh?” they instantly switched to clear English.
The cabdriver was friendly. I asked him about Gaelic and he said, “Yes, they teach it in the schools but we forget most of it except for a few words and not many of us could carry on a conversation.” I asked him about the Irish gypsies, the Travelling People, and he said, “Yes, you still see some horse-and-buggy folk but they don’t allow them to camp on the roadsides anymore. They’re trying to settle them.” The cab fare was 31 euros and I handed him a fifty and said, “Thank you,” and he hesitated. “Are you sure?” he said. A cabdriver trying to decline a tip. Remarkable.
Read MoreI once owned a house on Goodrich Avenue in St. Paul, across the street from a house Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald rented in 1921 when Zelda gave birth to their daughter, Scottie, and this slight proximity let me imagine that someday college kids would write dull term papers about me as they do about The Great Gatsby and The American Dream. I tossed that idea aside long ago. Now I’m38 years older than he when he died, and clearly I got a better life and what’s the purpose of longevity if not to enjoy it?
I had my adventures with gin and whiskey, as he did, and sat in a bar with vets going to the U on the G.I. Bill who thought the Army was ridiculous but then they hadn’t been shot at. I once tasted a Bordeaux from the year of my birth (1942), which was pretty magnificent, war wine from the grapes of wrath. I once was given a sedative for a wisdom tooth extraction that made me ecstatic for a day and a half. I was baptized in waist-deep water by a preacher in a suit and tie. I entered many churches and heard the Gospel and confessed my sins and was forgiven. I wrote for a great editor, Roger Angell, who sent me delicate rejections — passages of wonderful writing but somehow it wasn’t you at your best — and crisp acceptances — and pleading letters — Everyone around here keeps asking when will we see another piece by Keillor. Write, I beg of you. — and I felt privileged for twenty years.
Read MoreIt was a good week. It began with a night I lay awake for hours listening to my daughter’s hacking cough in the next room like an inmate in the county tubercular farm. We were both weary the next day until we remembered a ride at the Minnesota State Fair from 12 years before, the River Run ride, the two of us on a raft racing around a sluiceway, that I’d shot a video of with my phone. Last week I got a new iPhone but she found the video on it, two solid minutes of her hysterical laughter as she watched water splashing on her father’s lap so that it appeared he had wet his pants. I pretended to be horrified but I kept recording her crazy beautiful laughter.
We ate soup for supper and she, with no trouble at all, texted the Pee Ride video to her aunt Kay and our friend Heather, each of whom texted back within minutes their delight at this video. To me, this alone justifies the invention of the phone that can text, though I, along with every other elderly person, have said caustic things about texting in the past. So? I changed my mind. Now I can see the good it can accomplish in our troubled world. Kay had been watching her favorite basketball team get drubbed and Heather had been teaching first grade. Two minutes of my girl delighted by the apparent urinary tract problems of her elderly father was exactly what they needed.
Read MoreThe Democratic nominee proposes Medicare assistance for home health aides to help people who must care for elderly parents while holding down a job and perhaps raising children, and on the same day the journalist Bob Woodward makes serious allegations about the Republican nominee to which a Republican spokesman says the journalist is “a total sleazebag who has lost it mentally.” There is the 2024 campaign in a paragraph. Serious civics versus a bucket of bird droppings.
This is not the Republican Party that my father respected, the party he felt he could trust to separate truth from fiction. The party of Dwight Eisenhower has been hijacked by a New York playboy who wants Air Force One and the helicopter and the Marine honor guard and though he’s been convicted of sexual assault and fraud, 80 million Americans love him and it will give them a thrill to vote for him. I’m glad my father isn’t here to witness this.
Read MoreI flew home to New York from Seattle Saturday night, landed at JFK, retrieved my bag at Baggage Claim, headed for the taxi stand and there, in a long slow line, suddenly heard people shouting, “Doctor! Doctor!” and saw, fifty feet away, a twentyish woman lying face down on the sidewalk, an older woman kneeling over her. The kneeling woman shouted, “Does anyone know this girl? Anybody? Please!” Some traffic guys in bright orange vests ran off and came back with two big burly cops. The young woman lay motionless. One of the cops got on his phone and the other lay down next to her and put his hand on her back and spoke to her.
It was a dramatic sight, a lone person fallen in the midst of a busy scene in a huge city and you could see the alarm in the faces of the people in the taxi line: there but for the grace of God go I. I wanted to stay and find out if she was okay but I am not a doctor and the cops seemed to have it well in hand. So I got in a cab and headed home to Manhattan.
Read MoreI am finally going to get my COVID booster shot, which I postponed while I was on the road doing shows after each of which I wound up in the theater lobby commingling with the crowd, shaking hands, patting shoulders, posing for pictures, 80-year-old ladies snuggling up to me, being breathed upon, which is the proper thing to do. When people’ve spent their Saturday nights tuned to your radio show, you don’t sit locked up in a dressing room.
This is an aspect of broadcasting I never imagined when I entered the field fifty-some years ago, the affection. It wasn’t my intention to make friends; I enjoyed radio because it made me feel important, more important than I had felt as a dishwasher or a parking lot attendant. Working in the parking lot during morning rush hour, I yelled at people a lot and now, years later, they don’t come up and press the flesh.
Read MoreI walked into an AT&T shop the other day and bought a new iPhone to replace my antique model and a bright young man waited on me who spoke what I’m fairly sure was English but which may as well have been Czech or Sanskrit. He asked dozens of questions to which I had no answers so he answered them himself and sold me a fine new phone that can do thousands of things, only four of which I need: to call people on the phone, to text, to read the paper, and locate the nearest drugstore. Or café. Or ATM. Or hospice, when it comes time for that.
I was once a bright young person myself. I was born because my parents couldn’t keep their hands off each other even as war was raging in Europe and they should’ve been focused on foreign policy and doing what they could for the war effort but no, they jumped into bed and made love, and out I came. I was doted on by my aunts who felt my timidity hid some profound talent. Autism hadn’t been discovered yet so I was labeled “gifted” instead.
Read MoreI got off a Delta flight in Fargo, N.D., last week and heard a brass band playing “Over There” and found the terminal packed with hundreds of people waving flags, holding up signs, welcoming a planeload of men returning from Washington who, I was told, were veterans who’d gone to the capital to see the sights. Many of them were old guys like me, Vietnam vets, and some were younger, from the Iraq and Afghanistan era, and the crowd was very boisterous and happy as they came down the escalator and the thirty-piece band, sitting at music stands, played through “From the halls of Montezuma” and “When the caissons go rolling along” and “Off we go into the wild blue yonder” and “Anchors aweigh, my boys” and the crowd was clapping along with these old upbeat tunes about the giddy pleasure of going off to war.
Little kids got caught up in the spirit of the moment and so did I, even though it meant that my baggage took forever to show up. A woman walked over to the band and yelled, “You sound great!” which simply wasn’t true — they sounded like a bunch of middle-aged men who enjoyed playing music without having to practice regularly, but it was such a happy occasion, I had assumed at first it was for a returning victorious football team or perhaps National Guardsmen returning from a tour in Kosovo, but no, it was simply for old vets returning from a vacation trip.
Read MoreI am a morning person, it is when I do my best work, and it took me until I was 40 to realize this plain fact, which is a shame, I being 82 now, which is why I intend to live to be 97 as my mother did, so I won’t have wasted half my life, only two/fifths. I spent twenty years trying to be an evening person by downing a glass of Scotch and then a glass of wine or two or three so as to be charming and witty, but for Christians glamor and wittiness is a steep and rocky path, we are meant to be productive, but the hangover from the Scotch and wine clouded my mornings and made my writing dark and ironic like Kafka’s, stories of hopeless struggle against a mysterious fate, which I don’t believe, I believe in redemption.
I quit drinking by quitting it. I didn’t want to spend a couple weeks in treatment at Alky Camp dealing with my underlying problems, I just wanted to ditch the Scotch so I did. I drank ginger ale instead. I also stopped smoking one day. I’d been a chain-smoker because I thought that’s what writers do, but all I really enjoyed was lighting the cigarette and exhaling, the inhaling part made me feel bad, so I stopped. I kept a pencil in my pocket and if I needed to, I stuck it in my mouth.
Read MoreI walked into the Baltimore airport at 7:15 Friday morning, checked a bag, and walked to the end of the endless Boarding line, which moved swiftly back and forth between the straps, was sniffed by a dog, photographed by a TSA lady, went through the hypermagnetic sonar encephaloscanner, was declared sane, and got to a café near my gate and my coffee was poured at 7:40. A good beginning to a day.
The night before I had done my solo show at the Strand Theatre in York, PA. The stage looked big and empty and I worried that the audience would expect me to dance or do cartwheels so I did the show from the house, walking up and down the aisles, which people seemed to like. I start off by singing a prayer, an Episcopal rouser, an anti-thong song, a hymn to perseverance (“So do your work, keep going straight ahead, and you can be a genius after you are dead”), an homage to summer and a descriptive song about the journey of sperm in search of a willing egg, all from memory while ambulating in close proximity to the customers and shaking a few hands. At first I was blinded by the spotlight and had to tread carefully lest I trip and land in someone’s lap but I ascended about one-third of the way back and then I could see people so I did the show from there — 400 people could see me and for the 200 down front it was like radio.
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