A June morning, assessing the situation

June is here, the sun shines, the birds sing, and I feel the mood lift probably because we’re spending a week in rural Connecticut with no Times landing at the front door every morning. Ecclesiastes says, “Whoever increases knowledge increases sorrow” and that certainly has been true of the Times front page this year. With a very active adolescent president, it’s good to take a break to restore one’s belief in human progress.

Of course the country is deeply divided. This week the Supreme Court declined to take up Maryland and Rhode Island’s ban on AR-15 semi-automatic rifles, which are legal in most states. I don’t know anybody who owns one and if a friend of mine showed me his AR-15 I’d feel funny about him, same as if he showed me his collection of photographs of corpses.

Let’s join together, people, and hold hands

The world is advancing at a rapid pace and it’s hard to keep up. Last weekend, I learned about a liquid hand soap that smells like fresh-cut grass, an Earl Grey ice cream, and an app that when you snap a picture of a tree with your phone, it will tell you it’s a catalpa and the bird singing in it is a tufted titmouse.

Earl Grey is a tea, not an ice cream, just as Jim Clothes is what it is and would you make ice cream that tastes of perspiration?

Underwood man confronts an algorithm

The most infuriating website in the country is Amtrak’s and buying a one-way ticket from Manhattan to Old Saybrook the other day brought me to the verge of pulling out a pistol and blowing the laptop to pieces but I don’t own a pistol and there’s a decent novel in the hard drive, but I was seriously irked. But it’s good to be irked, good for the heart, good for the disposition. Calm is greatly overrated as an attitude. I’ve suffered from an excess of it for years.

The infuriation, of course, was my fault. I am a museum piece from back in the manual typewriter era, tapping on an Underwood, a handsome machine now found in antique stores and journalism schools in impoverished countries. I haven’t punched Underwood keys since I was in my twenties. I still like to take a good pen and a yellow legal pad and sit and write. I believe there’s a circuit between hand and eye that can produce sentences more elegant than the one I’m typing now on a laptop. But the laptop is my main instrument. I prefer it for its vast ability to Delete. Using the cursor I can gray out whole passages and poking the little red dot at the top of the file I could, if I wish, make thousands of words vanish from the world without a trace and never bothering anybody ever again. There’s something heroic about doing this. You can burn a paper manuscript but nobody ever does, they accumulate and turn yellowish and wind up in an archive.

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A night at the opera, my dear

We went to see Richard Strauss’s “Salome” at the Metropolitan Opera Wednesday night, or let’s say that my love went and I went with her, she because she loves opera and I because I don’t know enough about opera to be critical, I like everything just fine. But this opera was different. Men do not come off well in “Salome,” you’ve got King Herod for one thing and Salome’s dad who is weird and scenes with lewd men and little girls that make you not want to read the subtitles. There are men wearing ram’s heads and John the Baptist chained in the dungeon and more mental illness than in most operas but it’s in German. The music has its dissonant edges but it’s gorgeous, played by the 100-piece Met orchestra. So you have weirdness and insanity set to beautiful music, Salome wandering around singing “I want to kiss his lips” after the prophet’s head has been chopped off. There’s no intermission so it’s hard to leave early.

I went to see it, in part, because my friend Ellie Dehn was covering the role of Salome in this production. “Covering” means that she learned an extremely difficult role with a lot of crazy acting and was no more than 15 minutes from the Met before each performance and was focused and ready so that if the star soprano got out of a cab and was run down by a pizza delivery guy on a bike, Ellie would rush in, put on the white gown, and do the show, hit the high notes, be insane, do the Dance of the Seven Veils, so that nobody would feel cheated. It’s an impossible job, to be up for a heroic performance, knowing that the odds of your doing it are slim to none, but the roles have to be covered. Baseball postpones, parades cancel, opera doesn’t.

Sweet corn is ahead, life resumes

I buy my groceries at a gigantic market a few blocks away, owned by some billionaire, don’t know which one or his views on Palestine or if he was at the inauguration or how good a seat he got, I just buy his potatoes and 2% and granola, but the other day I was at my doctor’s a mile away and stopped at another market in the chain and it was quite a different scene. My market is on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and the doctor is on the Upper East. The UE is a young neighborhood of mothers with strollers, the UWS is the domain of grandmas with walkers.

The East branch has things I haven’t seen in the West, such as glass jugs of milk from pasture-grazed cows bottled on the farm and eggs from homing pigeons who get at least an hour of vigorous exercise per day. Vegetables grown in non-pesticided soil fertilized by B.S. collected at Ivy League graduate schools.

Sunday afternoon alone in the airport

I’ve often thought that we Midwesterners are the most compliant people on Earth, trusting to the point of accepting insult with a smile, and I thought so again on Sunday when I got the most painful massage of my entire long life. It was at a spa at the airport; I had two hours before my flight, so I signed up for a half hour and lay on a table for sheer bare-knuckle torture. It was deep to the point of being invasive. He may as well have been walking on me with hobnail boots. If I’d had nuclear secrets, I’d have handed them over, the formula for winning lottery numbers, the whereabouts of Amelia Earhart, the origins of the universe, but I lay there not saying a word, not even “Pardon me but could you not attempt to rearrange my bone structure?”

Having been brought up evangelical, I thought maybe this was payment for some transgression but couldn’t think of one except that I’d accidentally taken Jenny’s suitcase instead of my own and so she had to go to a drugstore and buy toothpaste and a toothbrush and borrow clean underwear from her sister. And then the guy bent my right arm back behind my back so hard it made me squeak, and because I need my right arm to sign checks and shake hands, I got off the bed. I did not say, “That was an agonizing massage and I’m going to report you for abuse of the elderly.” I said, “I have to catch my flight.”

A trip to Rochester for examination

I went to Mayo for some tests this week, a clinic that always puts me in a cheerful mood, even at 6:30 a.m. when the 9th floor receptionist said, “Good morning” and really meant it, and a young woman in blue scrubs led me into a dressing room, where I stripped down to socks and shoes, donned two hospital gowns, was led to a little room full of electronic gizmos and wires and screens, lay down on a cushioned examining table, was IVed and oxygenated, by two women in blue and one of them, Lindsay, laid a warm blanket on me and it was very moving. When you’ve spent the night using powerful laxatives to clean out your insides, this gesture of hospitality is meaningful, and before the doctor stepped in, we fell into friendly conversation as if we’d gone to school together, though they were young enough to be my granddaughters. It made me feel the future was bright. And then, running a magic anesthetic through the IV, they made me disappear.

It was a procedure in which tubes with tiny cameras are poked into your body from both ends, but it was not much more dramatic than a haircut, and there was no bad news after, and all was well.

The powerful drumming of graduation

I flew to Duluth Saturday to an enormous hockey arena to watch my tall handsome grandson in his black robe and mortarboard walk forward and accept his college degree and what made the long trip and the boring ceremony more than worthwhile — essential, imperative — was to witness the delight of his girlfriend, Raina, sitting next to me in the high bleachers, her focus on the processional during “Pomp and Circumstance,” her cry of “There he is!” and out came the smartphone for video and as he crossed the stage to get his degree, she whooped and yelled and hopped up and down and so did I.

More important than a college degree is the love of a good woman, and seeing this elegant funny well-spoken willowy woman in the long dress in love with him and he with her — I would’ve gone to Alaska to see it, Auckland, Tuscaloosa, Turkestan.

This is a great country

Fame is fleeting, especially semi-celebratedness is, as I know very well from my own experience, and that is exactly as it should be. The earth spins around the sun, the constellations pass by, tall trees fall in the forest, their trunks chewed by chipmunks, and Johnny Larson, once the emperor of late-night TV, is now a small footnote, Walter Contrite, Dave Caraway, all gone, and in my category of fame, Men of Letters, there is no such thing as true celebrity anymore, no Hemingways, no Frosts or Tennessee Williamses, just Caramel Cream, Cashew Crunch, and Cocoa Delight. I am Vanilla.

Fifty years ago a writer could set out to write about the weekly doings of a small Midwestern town, and so I did, but now you need dragons or vicious criminals or diaphanously clad ladies swanning around as described by artificial intelligence. I am a back issue.