Open the doors, let the young mingle among the treasures

A glorious Friday night at the Met Museum in New York, the great halls packed with thousands of teenagers for Teen Night, admission is whatever you care to drop in the box, a couple bucks, the change in your pocket, high school kids mobbing the joint, the Picasso lady, the naked Venus, the Rodin folks, a 15th-century lady, the naked man with a sword, all looking down on rivers of youthful energy, and a teen gospel choir sings in one marble stairway and a brass jazz band plays in another and a dance troupe from India performs in a gallery — everywhere you look, something is happening. There is no dress code, nobody lecturing us on what this naked man’s nakedness means. It’s not the silent sacred temple it usually is; the kids are mingling, searching, scouting, sitting on the floors, jabbering, holding their cell phones high to take videos, the place is electric with youth. The guards, of course, are a little edgy, but I don’t see any lurking or skulking, just an incredible lightheartedness. My sweetheart is fascinated by the dancers, their ornate costumes, their quickness and balance, the chanting and drumming. I feel drunk on the happiness of the urban young amid all the antiquities. I am an antiquity myself and I realize the Met’s goal is to broaden its base by creating joy where there had only been awesomeness, but walking through the building makes me incredibly happy about the future of the country and the world. It just plain does.

I’m an old Democrat; I am descended from worriers. On this Friday I’ve read disturbing news, I’ve had long phone conversations about the unreality of American politics, about creeping antisemitism, the long shadow of authoritarianism, the health problems of old pals, but walking into the Met has blown all that away and I haven’t even looked at a Rothko or the van Gogh “Irises” — it’s simply the exuberance of youth.

A nation under threat, a man incapable of action

I live in a New York doorman building where, I hear, a doorman has been asked by a resident to change the battery in her cell phone and by another resident to unscrew a peanut butter jar lid; both women were college graduates, both married, the first to an author, the second to a man who lectures on leadership to business groups. What this tells me, people, is that we are being overtaken by China in basic skills, and one day we’ll discover that crucial highly specialized technicians have abandoned their careers and gone into songwriting and storytelling or have opened summer camps for gifted children and that the maintenance of our nuclear arsenal has been put out for bids and that Chinese restaurants in Nebraska have been getting enormous orders for Szechuan takeout from the United States Strategic Command.

I don’t know that Joe Biden can deal with this. The Oval Office is assisted living at its utmost: the Army Signal Corps maintains the cell phones, the Secret Service unscrews tight lids, and the memo warning of the level of Chinese cable TV viewership in and around U.S. missile installations is probably on the desk of an attaché in the basement of the West Wing Annex. The ubiquity of chopsticks, the Chinese ornamentation on the Golden Arches, the addition of McWontons and McNoodles to the menu: all have gone without comment by the President.

I rise to testify in my own defense

I spent 12 hours in a New York ER last Saturday and upon discharge was given ten pages of test results and now I have more information about myself than I know what to do with. I went into the ER on my own steam, by taxi, no siren, because I had experienced a few surprising memory lapses (name of principal physician, name of building I reside in, what I did the previous week), blanks that a few minutes of research could’ve filled in, but my love was alarmed so I left the West Side where the novelists live and went to the East Side where the neurologists practice, where they put me through CT, MRI, had me follow their finger with my eyes, and now I’m feeling fine, thank you, but now I must look at long diagnoses of lobes and fissures, global this and that, and the word “transient” bothers me. I know they don’t mean it this way but I imagine myself with baggy pants, holes in my shoes, holding a wine bottle, the kind with a screw top, and I don’t drink.

There was no intracranial hemorrhage, praise the Lord, and I do wish that a neurologist or a physician’s assistant had written “patient was focused and well-spoken and presented a chronic sardonic sense of incongruities that brought care providers to the verge of amusement,” but I will take what I can get, which was discharge and a cab ride home.

THEY WERE SO YOUNG

Don’t name a library after me, please, I’m still writing

I had a long talk with my friend George Latimer, the mayor of St. Paul, last Monday, which went on for 54 minutes, which is a long time for a dying man, but Mayor Latimer is quite feisty at 88, has been in and out of hospice a few times so his intentions aren’t clear, and he was very funny, which is how I want to be when I am dying, should this ever occur. Though he left office in 1990, I still think of him as mayor because he is memorable. He won office despite being short and Lebanese, which some voters misread as “lesbian,” and is a native of Schenectady, which is not in Minnesota nor even near it, but he could talk like a bartender, speaking with great conviction while taking both sides of a question so as not to disrespect those who disagree and elaborating on the complexities so thoroughly that you forgot what he had said. And St. Paul was in rough shape at the time and why would you impose the mayorship on a friend? So we elected an out-of-towner. In St. Paul, you’re not a full citizen unless your grandmother was born there. From the mayorship, he descended into a spiral of deanships and professorships, board memberships, various eminent vacancies, and ten years ago St. Paul’s downtown library was named the George Latimer Library, which led many people to assume he was dead. He called me last week to tell me, in his own words, that he was not.

We agreed that the world we knew is slipping away. We were troubled by the Minnesota Republican convention the previous week at which their apparent presidential nominee said he’d won the state “by a landslide” in 2020 and the Republicans applauded even though he’d lost the state by roughly 230,000 votes, a margin that’s hard to ignore. In his speech, he said, “No matter how hateful and corrupt the communists and criminals we are fighting against may be, you must never forget … this is a nation that totally belongs to you. It is your heritage.” They paid $500 apiece to applaud this bilge.

Losing my mind in New York and then finding it

I went into a Manhattan ER last Saturday out of concern about incidental memory loss (name of primary physician, for one, name of building I live in, a vagueness about the previous two weeks) and if you need an ER, Manhattan is the place to be. My sweetie was in St. Paul playing viola in an orchestra. I took a cab, walked in the door of New York-Presbyterian, and a few minutes later I was peeing in a plastic container and ten minutes later a neurologist was asking me what year it is, what date, date of birth, name of spouse or loved one and had I recently ingested marijuana or cocaine or anything of the sort, and the answers were 2024, May 18, 8/7/1942, Jenny Lind, and no and no. (Had this been Fargo, North Dakota, she might’ve asked for the name of my wife and left off the “anything of the sort” but this is New York and there are all sorts of that sort of thing.

It’s a fascinating drama, beepers beeping, pagers, men and women in blue quickstepping about their jobs, the occasional wacko screaming, the various souls you and I have no wish to deal with, but what is most dramatic is the kindness, the sheer kindness, the unrelenting gentleness and politeness, the doctor’s gentle pat on the shoulder when the interlocutory is done. Do they teach this in Med School? I guess so. Everyone, even the orderly who pushes your gurney, tells you their name and calls you by name. Nobody is anonymous. A woman is crying in the next alcove: a nurse says, “I’m coming to help you, dear.” The woman says she is in terrible pain.” The doctor is on his way, sweetheart.” Two doctors query two young men about drug usage — marijuana? coke? — and the young men hesitate and the doctors say, “I’m not here to judge. Was it meth? Was it fentanyl? Do you not know?”

How I survived the solar flares and stayed sane

The geomagnetic storm caused by solar flares that hit Earth last week and triggered the Northern Lights and threatened to disrupt telecommunications and knock out power grids made me a little paranoid, sitting in a 12th-floor apartment in Manhattan, imagining my laptop computer getting fried, smoke pouring from the keyboard, and my novel-in-progress turned to ashes as well as my entire life’s work, leaving me to spend my remaining years in regret, but perhaps not many years would remain, perhaps the flares (which emanate from a sunspot 17 times the size of Earth) would also trigger thermonuclear war and within three hours Earth would be just another roasted planet like Mercury and Venus.

I worried about nuclear war as a child. In grade school, we practiced ducking under our desks in case of a nuclear attack but it only made us question the intelligence of our principal, Mr. Lewis. A nuclear bomb makes a deep crater, and ducking under a desk doesn’t change that nor is it protection against radioactive dust clouds. I’m sure the danger of nuclear war is very real and the prospect is horrendous but how long can you go on worrying over it? You move on to other things such as the prospect of electing a 78-year-old con man from Queens to high office. Didn’t we do that already? Why would we try it again?

My position on congestion pricing, plainly stated

Congestion pricing comes to Manhattan in June, a system of tolls to reduce daytime traffic on streets that have become sluggish so they’ll start moving again and not turn into parking lots, which is a noble idea, just as no-smoking laws were back in the day: you don’t have a right to be a public nuisance. If you drive into Manhattan below 60thStreet, a license plate reader will assess you fifteen bucks, more for trucks and buses; your taxi fare will go up $1.25, twice that for Uber or Lyft, and the $1 billion collected per year will go to improve mass transit. Like most bold reforms, congestion pricing is unpopular, and New York being New York, people love to jump into the fray, lawsuits are filed, bureaucracies are denounced, families are split, lovers break up, conspiracy theories abound, the death of the city is predicted, dread mounts as June 30 approaches, and why shouldn’t I, a Minnesotan in exile in the city, not voice my concerns? I pay taxes here. I vote. Why should I be silent? You got a problem with that, pal?

I like congestion. It’s part of city life. Why try to turn Manhattan into Minneapolis? Downtown Minneapolis is a ghost town. Walk down Hennepin Avenue at noon, you feel like the lone survivor of a catastrophe. But a taxi ride from the Upper West Side down Columbus Avenue to a 1:30 appointment on 23rd Street is very very exciting. You jump in the cab at 96th and you cruise for a few blocks and in the Seventies it becomes a dramatic slalom run. The cabbie keeps switching lanes to avoid stopped vehicles. Delivery trucks are double-parked, reducing three lanes of traffic to a single lane. Sometimes cross-street traffic blocks the intersection so you may sit through a couple of stoplight changes. Bicyclists fly past, ignoring red lights. Motorcycles thread through the jam, helmeted guys with delivery boxes on their backs, zooming inches away from your cab. If you jumped out of the cab at any point, your mangled body would lie there until the cops arrive, further tangling traffic; eventually a hearse would pull up. Other drivers would curse you as they passed. There is extensive cursing in times of congestion: English and other languages are fully employed, horns honk, pedestrians shake their fists. Diners sit in the restaurant sheds built in the parking lanes back during COVID and eat their lobster rolls and Thai chicken while inhaling carbon monoxide and paying exorbitant prices. You sit in your cab as pedestrians pass, the whole carnival of diverse ethnicities and body types. Food aromas waft from the food trucks, hot dogs, burgers, felafel, burritos. It’s the Minnesota State Fair on amphetamines. Your awareness is heightened. You arrive at 23rd an hour late — your appointment is canceled, or you’ve lost the gig, or the lady’s left the restaurant and won’t ever speak to you again — but it’s thrilling.

All of me loves olive oil and this is why

I am now putting olive oil on my pancakes, in my coffee, sipping it from a wine glass, after reading that it is beneficial in holding dementia at bay. Don’t ask for proof, I believe what I want to believe, like most other people my age. I don’t want to spend my last years babbling in a seniors’ warehouse; I plan to do stand-up comedy until I’m 97 and then be shot cleanly by a jealous husband whose wife told him she wished he were more like me. A Republican husband — these guys can shoot straight — will aim his .44 and send me instantly, no mouth-to-mouth, to whatever paradise God keeps for us Episcopalian liberals. Probably a dorm where we’ll sit around and read the same copy of the New York Times over and over. No bliss, just boredom.

Do I sound demented to you, dear reader? Tell me if I do.

Let’s talk about honesty, grrrr, rrrfff, rrrfff

Whenever I open an egg carton, I think of the chicken at work in the factory, creating this elliptical work of art onto a conveyor belt, to be stolen away, and then the hormones in the chicken feed kick in and the process of creation repeats itself, sort of like me and limericks: I write a good one and it stimulates the next limerick and pretty soon I have a hundred of them, which I could collect in a book but won’t because very few people appreciate limericks — women do not, because so many cruel limericks have been written about women, and when men read a limerick they think, “I could’ve done better than that,” being the compulsive competitors they are, and meanwhile here I am with this work of art in my hand.

Minneapolis is great. Have you seen it?

The streets go from Aldrich to Zenith.

It’s the birthplace of Prince,

Than whom no one since

Has been any hipper, I mean it.

The city is good for the sickly.

The streets are numerical, strictly,

And alphabetical

All so that medical

Teams can get to you quickly.