From the South Atlantic, blessings

We took a cruise ship out of New York to the Caribbean over the holidays, which was a good education. Twelve days among elderly people tells you what sort of elder you wish to be when you get there — mobile, standing up straight, cheerful, and conversing intelligently with others, not just to yourself. These elderly folks were carelessly frittering away their children’s inheritance, money that might’ve put a young person through Malarkey State for a degree in communications and a career as an influencer, but it was sweet to see the affection between the lengthily married, the exchange of glances, holding hands, the impulsive kiss. To stay in love, that’s a good way to maintain compos mentis.

Let the kids deal with AI, let’s U and I perch on the stern deck and watch the sun rise over Barbados and I’ll talk about my Yorkshire ancestors back in the 18th century and what if they’d immigrated here and started a plantation and enslaved the locals to cut the cane while the Keillors lounged on the veranda sipping rum and reading Jane Austen, but of course they were northern stoics like me and pleasure made them feel queasy so they wound up in Minnesota and got into dairying, no slaves available except your own children.

Once again, the star, the shepherds

Old Man Christmas (moi) has been out shopping and found a shop that sells hiking shoes so, being married to a hiker, I went in and saw beautiful alligator boots, also a pair of sharkskin, and wouldn’t this be perfect for my beloved venturing into ungenteel neighborhoods, boots made from man-eating creatures, better than pepper spray or a Smith & Wesson, but the pricetag was staggering –– I’m the son of a postal clerk –– so I moved on. I went to Macy’s on 34thStreet just to ride the wooden escalator and hear it clunking and I roamed past perfume counters but was distracted by the stunning beauties behind the counters, women who’d come to the city to become fashion models but were only 5”11” and were overweight at 117 lbs. and so were relegated to retail sales and now at 22 they’re over the hill.

It made me sad, the abandoned dreams –– you see it everywhere –– and I left the store and went to the public library on 42nd and sat in the Rose Reading Room and came back to my senses. My beloved and I have merged two. Domiciles into one and we are still in a deaccessionizing process and don’t need a pile of gifts under a tree. I’ll put some cash in envelopes for our building’s doormen and super and send some to little kids I know and a $100 bill to a few friends so they can buy a good bottle of champagne, not a chintzy one.

A small life has its own distinct moments

I walked down Columbus Avenue the other day and passed a young woman talking on the phone just as she said, loud and clear, “There is a reason for everything,” and it sticks with me, rationalism proclaimed publicly. I wish I’d stopped and asked her for some context; she seemed to be one of those bold women you could engage in a colloquy, unlike other women who shrink at a “Good morning” as you hold the elevator door for them. New York women tend to be bold, Minnesota women faint of heart and a man would do well to avoid eye contact, although in situations of mutual suffering — e.g., the long line at airport security at 6 a.m. — some sweet conversations with strangers do occur.

I lead a small life and think small thoughts. I read a long essay by a former colleague explaining how comedy works and was awestruck. I study the workings of a coffeemaker. I take my meds from a handy container with two little compartments for each day, one for morning, one for evening. Someone thought of this. An older person on a regimen of pills. Perhaps a postal clerk like my dad, who sorted mail into racks of little boxes, and what if he had invented the Med-O-Rack? We’d maybe have moved from north Minneapolis to a horse farm called Meadowcroft and I’d have competed in equestrian events instead of reading novels by flashlight and gained great confidence to go into venture capitalism and become a king of crypto and wind up doing time for fraud.

Our plan for Christmas and why

I love Christmas, coming as I do from fundamentalists, a bunch who don’t score high on the Festivity Scale. My mother hugged me only once, to keep me from falling out of a moving vehicle. I don’t recall my father ever telling a joke. So Christmas was a brief episode of flamboyant frivolity in an otherwise solemn life in which we looked forward to End Times and our flight up out of Minnesota into paradise, just us, not the Catholics.

This year my little family is taking a vacation from the holiday and on December 25 we’ll be on a ship out on the Atlantic. It’s our gift to us. No tree with a pile of gifts under it. We’ve done that and we need a reset. I used to roam through little shops buying Slovakian soufflé pans or Peruvian porcelain trivets and presenting them to folks who were not trivet-type people and whose annual soufflé output was approximately zero so the gifts wound up in storage, and when the recipients went off to Happydale, teenagers snapped up the soufflé pans for 15¢ and used them to heat up frozen pizzas and the trivets wound up as doorstops.

A Prairie Home Companion 50th Anniversary Program

A Prairie Home Companion 50th Anniversary Tour Program – Nashville, TN and Manhattan, KS

How did we get into this mess?

The ice hasn’t yet frozen solid on the lakes of Minnesota due to a warm November and the ice-fishing shacks are waiting to be towed out on the ice so men can sit in them and pretend to fish. Their real purpose is to get away from women so they can speak frankly and express improprieties that, on shore, would get them citations from the Woke P.D.

Women don’t go ice-fishing because where would they pee? Men do it on the ice, just as fish pee in the lake and deer in the underbrush. Women scorn this sort of behavior (“Where were you brought up? In a barn?”) and women’s scorn is powerful, a man shrinks in the face of it. Even I do. I feel small just mentioning it.

Looking around, I get the drift

Two days ago, a profound experience. I found a set of transcripts someone had made of monologues I did years ago on the radio and I read one. Someone had written down word for word what I said and when the audience laughed, they put in the word LAUGHTER. And guess what? I read through it and it wasn’t funny. LAUGHTER. Not even slightly. LAUGHTER. I had said it and back in 1982 a theaterful of people had loved it and in 2023 it was about as funny as a pile of bricks. LAUGHTER. Have you, dear reader, ever gone back to your distinguished past and been depantsed the way I was? LAUGHTER. No, you have not. I wanted to jump out a window. LAUGHTER. Fortunately, the windows in our apartment are childproofed and I can’t open them. LAUGHTER. And also it’s New York and I could hear children’s voices from the street and I don’t want my suicide to accidentally wipe out a bunch of eight-year-olds leashed together on their way to the Museum of Natural History. LAUGHTER. That’s not funny, by the way. LAUGHTER.

So I’m in the wrong line of work. I’ve wasted my life. I earned a good living at it and it was fun while it lasted but it contributed nothing of value to the world and I’d have been better off sticking with my first job, which was dishwashing. I was good at it. I ran racks of dishes through big industrial dishwashers and they came out steaming clean and I scrubbed the pots and pans by hand and I didn’t come back forty years later to learn that the cafeteria had been shut down by the health department on account of dirty dishes.

Missing Sandra O’Connor, the pragmatic voice

My life has gotten very small and I’m not happy about that. I used to know some farmers and got to hear them talk about their lives and now I don’t know any. I have very few friends who live in small towns. I know plenty of writers, lawyers, teachers, performers, and nobody who earns a living as a carpenter, plumber, or electrician. And so far as I know, none of my friends are Republicans. I used to have some but they died or became independents. I miss their points of view.

This struck home when I read about Sandra Day O’Connor who died earlier this month. I listened to an interview she gave the Times in 2008 on condition it be released only after her death. It’s a memento of Republicanism as it once was and which the country needs now, a party of civility and pragmatism and patriotism.

Bringing people along with me 101

So the news is out. Harvard will be offering a course on Taylor Swift in the spring. The professor, who is 52, is a Swift fan and describes her interest in Swift — “she’s someone who worked to become herself and makes her own decisions in a way that brings people along with her and doesn’t alienate people.” I suppose you could say the same about Shakespeare, though he did alienate some people who then wound up in engineering or medicine.

In the course, Swift’s work will be compared to other writers such as Coleridge and Wordsworth. “Wordsworth also writes about some of the same feelings that Taylor sings about: disappointment in retrospect, and looking back and realizing that you’re not the child you were, even though you might want to be.” Students will write three term papers but there may not be a final exam. “I have such mixed feelings about final exams because they stress people out. They’re a pain to give and they’re no fun.”

Singing to the Lord to save Herschel

The Communion hymn in church last Sunday was “All People That on Earth Do Dwell,” which I cherish for the lines “Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice:
serve him with mirth,” which is the only time comedy is mentioned in our hymnal, I do believe. There’s joy and rejoicing and gladness, but the thought of serving our Creator with jokes is rather rare and, I think, beautiful. I’m not sure I know exactly what joy is but I do know the one about the engineer who sees another engineer rolling a little pellet between his fingers and saying, “I’m trying to figure out if this is more rubbery or more like plastic,” and the first engineer takes the pellet from him and says, “There is plasticity to it but there’s a viscosity, a sort of liquidity too” and he puts it in his mouth and says, “And there’s a salinity to it as well. Where did you get it?” The other engineer says, “Out of my nose.”

A joke is a friendly transaction between two persons and even if it falls flat, it conveys a generous spirit. I have four friends who still tell me jokes, three men, one woman, all of them old enough to remember the Helen Keller jokes (How did Helen Keller burn her fingers? She tried to read the waffle iron.) and the lightbulb jokes (How many philosophers does it take to change a lightbulb? Define “light.”) or the “What’s the difference” jokes (What’s the difference between roast beef and pea soup? Anyone can roast beef.) and the “What did the blank say to the blank” (What did the maxi-pad say to the fart? You are the wind beneath my wings.) and double-amputee jokes (“What do you call a man with no arms or legs hanging on your wall?” Art.) and old guy jokes (Old lawyers never die, they just lose their appeal. Old actuaries never die, they just get broken down by age and sex.) and the Ole and Lena jokes (So Ole died and Lena called up the undertaker to come get him, and he said, “I’ll be there in an hour,” and she said, “I’m having my hair done in half an hour, how about I drag him out to the curb and you can pick him up there?”). And there were Viagra jokes but they petered out.