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’m an old man with a busted shoulder carried in a sling, and a shut-in, and the news is bad what with Minnesota, my home state, occupied by foreign mercenaries given license by our government to kill civilians in broad daylight and say it didn’t happen, so I’m feeling depressed, but probably it’s self-pity creeping in, which is disgusting so I called my cousin Betty who deals with a serious autoimmune disorder and also is managing a rural aid program in Uganda that runs a women’s health system and breeds imported goats that are immune, with native goats that are worm-resistant, and I told her, “I have no right to feel down compared to all you have to deal with,” and she said, “Suffering is not comparative.”
That’s a beautiful thing about Betty: she can come up with a crisp declarative sentence that clarifies everything.
Read MoreI am a very fortunate man of 83, deeply indebted to American medicine, still in possession of the marbles I need even though two weeks ago I took a bad fall in a hotel room in Nevada, wrecking my left shoulder and becoming a one-armed man in need of assistance to pull on my socks and zip my jeans, and the beauty of this is: gratitude — profound gratitude for the lunch at Docks restaurant in Manhattan in 1992 with Jenny Lind Nilsson who is still with me 34 years later.
Gratitude is highly appropriate at 83. I’ve been to see an orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery and he plans to replace the shoulder next week and promises that with therapy it’ll work better than the old one. But mainly I am grateful for the love of this woman. I am keenly aware of it every day as she hovers over me. I was aware of it last Wednesday evening as she guided me up the steps of Carnegie Hall to a concert of symphonies by Mozart and Shostakovich by the Cleveland Orchestra.
Read MoreI’m a lucky man; born in 1942, early enough to hear stories about the Great Depression, my mother selling peanut butter sandwiches door to door, to know the Great Generation that defeated fascism, early enough to get in on the Family Farm with chickens and cows and plow horses, before farming got industrialized, early enough to hear rock ’n’ roll when it was about cars and girls and surf, before it took itself seriously, and born late enough to take advantage of open-heart surgery and blood thinners and anti-seizure meds, which have given me a couple bonus decades.
And now here I am, having fallen two weeks ago and crunched my left shoulder and become a one-armed man, and I am scheduled for minimally invasive replacement surgery in New York by Dr. Samuel Taylor who showed me, with a video on his cellphone, how this will give me ten to fifteen years of usefulness.
Read MoreNow and then as He sees fit, the Lord drops us into an interesting situation to make sure we’re paying attention and a week ago Friday night, having begun a stand-up comedy tour in Bend, Oregon, to a full house and a standing O, I awoke in Carson City, Nevada, with a bump on my head, unable to move my left arm and my face was scratched and my left shin hurt.
No, I hadn’t been drinking; old age is excitement enough, no need for intoxicants, I set the bottle aside twenty years ago. My best guess was that I’d had a seizure — I’m 83 and on anti-seizure meds after a stroke, maybe two, and probably I tumbled out of bed and crashed into something, a bedside table, but had no memory of it, not a sliver. I went back to sleep.
Read MoreA Times story reporting that college students in a writing course do better when they go offline for a month makes perfect sense to me, same as if you say a writer does better at a laptop in the public library than shnockered on a sailboat in a storm, but the idea of persuading students to go offline strikes me as quixotic, like Amish evangelism or banning the use of chairs. The internet is here and we’re all caught up in it.
l was in my 50s when the World Wide Web came in. Its advent was not a big event to me; I was still working on a manual Underwood typewriter. I have a clearer memory of seeing Albert Woolson, the last living Civil War veteran, in a parade in downtown Minneapolis. I remember my uncle Jim farming with horses and Fibber McGee and Molly on the radio. And I remember boredom, which has mostly disappeared in America except perhaps among lighthouse keepers or attendants in parking ramps or felons in solitary confinement. And maybe imprisonment offline would be considered cruel and inhumane in a court of law.
Read MoreThe world comes to an end and the world keeps on going. Life is a series of sinking ships but still people go sailing as if it hadn’t happened. Disaster strikes and people wake up the next morning and have breakfast.
I took a cab to JFK, which thus far has not been renamed Trump Kennedy Airport, and boarded a plane to Seattle, six hours over the Great Lakes (soon to be renamed Greatest Lakes) and the northern plains (Nowheresville) and the Rockies, and thanks to Wi-Fi I could watch CNN and see that the America we learned about in high school, a bastion of freedom, a bulwark against tyranny, a beacon of human rights and individual dignity, is not shared by our own government. There was Stephen Miller, the Secretary of Anger, yelling at Jake Tapper as if he had no right to question the current foreign policy of Whatever We Want Whenever We Wish and that, by God, America has a right to take Greenland by force if necessary and Tapper looked dumbfounded. It was like confronting someone on the street yelling that he is God’s envoy so get off the sidewalk and let me through. You’d look for a cop to take the poor soul to a safe place.
Read MoreWe stood at the window, my love and I, and heard the fireworks whomping and racketing away over Times Square at precisely midnight last Wednesday, as 2026 arrived and like many people my age I thought about aging — in sixteen years, Lord willing, I’ll be 100, which is astonishing; I’ve been avoiding exercise all my life. Meanwhile, the city was swearing in a new mayor, 34, born in Uganda to a Muslim father and Hindu mother, an immigrant at the age of seven, running as a Democratic Socialist, Zohran Mamdani. It appears that we Episcopalians’ grip on authority may be sort of fragile.
New York is the city to live in if you don’t have the time and dough to travel all over the world, just get an apartment here and use public transportation and walk in the parks. My love walked for a few miles around Central Park recently and heard a good deal of French, Arabic, several African languages, some Swedish, Spanish, and here and there some English. I read somewhere that eighty languages are spoken by students in the public schools.
Read MoreSome days I glance at the front page and see the name RUMP in three or four places so I flip back to the Lifestyle section and maybe find a wine review, “Fresh and vivacious with chewy tannins and bursts of flowers and fruits.” The deranged man with cognitive problems is a passing phenom, but bursts of flowers and fruits have been with us forever and even in January here in Manhattan one can find shops to walk into and feel flowers bursting around you and markets where you inhale the freshness of mounds of apples and pears and oranges.
The old king who goes mad is a character out of Shakespeare, he has no place in America, you walk out of a performance of King Lear and buy a bouquet of tulips and a bag of apples and you’re back to reality. When Van Gogh admitted himself to the asylum for the insane at Saint-Rémy in Provence, he spent the last years of his life painting the gardens and woods, the trees and flowers, paintings that were the finest of his life. He could’ve been destructive, set fires, broken windows, preyed on the weak and helpless, but he did not, he found solace in painting. This is the difference between an artist and a creep.
Read MoreThe Christmas blues hit me early this year, right around 10 p.m. on the 24th in church. The readings from Scripture were good and we sang Schubert’s beautiful Sanctus and various well-loved carols and then the sermon was just an expulsion of air. But the long walk home in the dark was good for the spirit, the city lights, the shops closed so there was no infernal Christmas music about jingling bells, holly, snowmen, sleigh, and when I got home I got out a fresh jar of dill pickles, which I find can be good at interrupting the blues if caught in its early stages.
My mother made dill pickles with cucumbers fresh from our garden and pickles from Zabar’s Deli remind me of hers. And remind me of her love of Christmas — to her, a chance to be cheerful and generous despite the sorrows of this world. A picture of her and her siblings hangs on our wall, nine girls, three boys, minus little Dorothy and her mother who died of scarlet fever. But Mother loved this day in the circle of family. So ours turned out well.
Read MoreI have managed to keep my Trump Derangement Syndrome under control recently by singing Christmas carols with audiences at the Christmas shows I’ve done, shows that are open to the general public, not only the deranged, and when they sing, a cappella, “Away in a manger, no crib for a bed, the little Lord Jesus lay down His sweet head. The stars in the sky looked down where He lay, the little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay,” everything else disappears except the wonderment at how good a couple thousand people sound while singing a carol they’ve known since childhood.
A great many famous artists have tortured that carol, trying to make it a vehicle for their particular virtuosity and view of life, but when I hum a note and sing the words “Away in a” and am silent, the American people pick it up and make it the exquisite tender harmonious lullaby it is and they will also do The cattle are lowing, the Baby awakes, but little Lord Jesus no crying He makes. I’ve heard this in dozens of cities and it’s always the same ethereal sound. Dim light helps, pitch-blackness even better. Maybe it’s somewhat stronger in the South and Midwest or in small towns. A Utah crowd with a strong Mormon element, the beauty will bring you to tears. In New York, the audience hesitates, they need to put their fine sense of irony away, but eventually they go along with it.
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