Where we went and why

A long day of writing is like a day of canoeing down a creek, twisty, some unexpected pleasures since I love writing whereas I hated canoeing. Other than that, they’re similar. I was paddling my canoe in Manhattan last Thursday and Jenny reminded me that we had a date to go hear the Met Orchestra play Bruckner and we should leave in half an hour. So I put on a jacket and took note paper and pens and took a train to Columbus Circle and walked to Carnegie Hall.

I’m not high on Bruckner and she is because she’s a musician and Bruckner wrote some gorgeous delicate passages for strings in between the detonations of brass. But I am glad to give the man another chance. He was a humble organist trying to break into the world of Wagner, Brahms and Beethoven, and who am I to turn my back on him?

Sunday morning once again

It’s been almost twenty-five years since I entered the pillbox community, men and women who own a little plastic container of fourteen little compartments, which we open morning and evening and take our pills, a sweet ritual for me, marking the time since I likely would have died. I was born with a heart defect that Dr. Mork heard when I was 12 and told me I couldn’t play football and that Dr. Orszulak surgically repaired when I was 60, an age at which numerous Keillors had dropped dead. The pills are to keep me functioning. There is no pill to make a man exercise regularly but otherwise I’m okay.

So in a couple months, I’ll be as old as my grandma Dora who used to send me a dollar on my birthday. She died of a stroke. I take pills to ward off strokes.

Another Monday night in Manhattan

A bagel got stuck in the toaster Monday and I stuck a fork in to pry it out and then smelled smoke and saw that a hot pad was in flames on the lid of the pan I was frying bacon in and I grabbed the hot pad and knocked the lid slightly askew and a big grease fire commenced and meanwhile the bagel was smoking. I put the lid on the pan, dousing the fire, and held the hot pad under the faucet, meanwhile the kitchen was full of smoke.

There are times in life when a man is grateful that his beloved wife is not on the premises. She was up in Connecticut visiting family. I am a professional humorist and my wife is a violinist, which is to say she is a perfectionist. Violinists don’t stick a fork into a toaster and don’t leave a hot pad sitting on a pan on the stove near open flame and they don’t eat bacon. They’d put kale on a bagel and slices of avocado spritzed with a light vinaigrette dressing. A humorist does dumb things often — it comes with the job. If I were a perfectionist I wouldn’t be in this line of work, I’d be a dermatologist and have perfect skin and remove precancerous moles from old ladies’ necks and advise them against Botox.

It’s a beautiful summer, says me

It’s good to be home after weeks on the road in motels, back in my own shower stall, not in alien ones designed by cruel engineers, where you must stand directly under the shower head when you turn the knob, not knowing if a clockwise turn will give you an Arctic waterfall or an eruption of hot lava. At home my office chair is set for accurate typing, not a cheap motel chair that’s a few inches too low and you glance at the screen and 797ebw33bq2yb0qtbrb9rt8ggwy.

And at home I have a cushy chair that when I sit in it and close my eyes, I fall asleep. A nap chair. This is crucial for any writer. The ten-minute snooze is the cure for writer’s block. You come to a dead end, you just sit in the chair, and minutes later, open your eyes and the road opens before you. So many writers in my generation tried to achieve this by taking LSD, peyote, heroin, cocaine, gin, etcetera, but the answer is: the nap.

I can’t help it, I’m a happy man

I like being old. When you reach your eighties you finally get to say what you think and people will listen and not interrupt even if they know you’re wrong. Being wrong is a privilege of old age. So shut up and listen and don’t contradict me.

My speech to the Class of 2026

I was chosen to speak at your graduation because I am phenomenally successful, America’s favorite columnist, a best-selling author, winner of countless awards, in demand as a speaker, a frequent consultant to the Vatican, the Pentagon, the U.N., and CNN, and it’s all because I was not bright enough to go into a technological field — my math skill ended with the multiplication of fractions — so instead I majored in English and read Melville and Henry James and the Brontës, which prepared me for a career in baggage handling, but now A.I. has come along and changed everything to my advantage. A.I. is an ace with numbers and it is El Estúpido when it comes to language.

On the road in the Snake Canyon

I sat in a bookstore in Enterprise, Oregon, Thursday morning and had coffee with four men my age, all Enterprise residents, an accidental coffee klatch due to my wandering around town waiting for a breakfast café to open and seeing a book in the bookstore window by my friend the poet Jim Harrison and I went in and smelled coffee and there were the four gents around a table and they offered me a chair and I sat down and they asked where I’m from and I said, “New York City” and that is all you need to start a good conversation.

The man at the typewriter goes clickety wham bam

Have I told you about the bad fall I took one morning a few weeks ago coming out of a breakfast café in Chicago, a café called Nookies, the morning after a show I did there? I have? Are you sure? I was coming out the door and there was a step down, which turned out to be two steps down and I crashed down on my right hip and right arm and two guys stopped and hauled me to my feet. I think what caused it was the fact it was the best breakfast I’d had in a long time. You go on tour and unless you’re Paul Simon or Bob Dylan, you stay at economy motels that serve a free breakfast of scrambled eggs that comes in tanker trucks from Hoboken and has nothing to do with chickens, it’s made from sawdust and cornstarch and recycled cellophane. This breakfast was one you’d serve to Paul Simon. Bob Dylan wrote hundreds of songs about being mistreated and misunderstood but when it comes to breakfast, he does not put up with sawdust and cornstarch.

Score one for the cowboys

The old man I knew when I was a kid was my Grandpa Denham who was irritable and not tolerant of playfulness and sat at Sunday dinner and was not amused if one of us kids spoke up — it was our house, he was a guest, we felt entitled to speak — so I imagined I’d wind up cranky like him and now I’m ten years older than Grandpa and I don’t feel it happening. He was a bookkeeper for the Soo Line Railroad and I did a radio show and maybe that’s the difference though I knew plenty of unpleasant people in radio because I was in public radio where folks take their pretensions very seriously and I was in the comedy business, which made me a rube in their eyes. Nonetheless I had a good time and now I feel rather lighthearted, even naively so.

Last Wednesday I flew from JFK to LAX and the plane sat on the runway for two hours while a thunderstorm passed and it didn’t bother me in the least. I sat and worked on a new book, which I think is the best thing I’ve ever done, which surely can’t be true, but I read a few paragraphs and think, “This is what Proust wished he could do but his English wasn’t up to the job.”

Summer is here and what could be better?

I am very fond of my current age, the age at which I no longer recognize the names of famous celebrities and when I go to YouTube to hear the songs of my youth I see commercials for walkers and stool softeners — and of the classmates who stood in our blue gowns on the football field that June day and were urged to go make the world a better place, a majority have slipped away into the hereafter.

And yet certain glories are more glorious than ever. A summer day, for one. I took summer for granted in my casual youth and now, grinding away at work all morning at my desk, I step outside into a Manhattan heaven, festive cliff dwellers stream through Central Park, the city is golden, and an old achy man feels it in his soul because today he skipped the newspaper, which is a catalog of decline, despair, and dereliction, and he is getting bulletins from the passing crowd that Americans are as free and brave as ever.