Standing at 86th, waiting for a train

It’s never too late to be polite and once you’ve gone that far you may as well be friendly. I come from Scots and Yorkshiremen who were suspicious by nature and brought up judgmental and were happiest when alone in a stone hut working with wood but I’ve adopted the “Never too late” point of view after I called up a relative whom I’d avoided for fifty years because she’d said mean things about me and she was so happy to hear my voice that I reformed and became a Christian again. I’ve come to the Lord hundreds of times and it’s always a pleasure. I’ve said it before: life is good, never mind what the cranky and anxious may say, and that’s why so many of us elders are overstaying our welcome, snarfling up Medicare and Social Security, clogging the highways, standing confused at self-checkout trying to figure out how it works. We like it here.

Now of my three score years and ten,
Eighty-one won’t come again.
Subtract from seventy eighty-one,
It means my account is overdrawn,
Which makes me privileged to be
Surviving into bankruptcy.
I’m avoiding sickness and injury
And plan to live an entire century.

A Republican was sent to the guillotine for insurrection

One bright spot last week was a phone call from my niece Mylène with her Portuguese family in the car on their way back from Newport, including her dad, Antonio, an irrepressible free spirit who, though monolingual, walks into bars and cafes and shops and sprays Portuguese in all directions as if everyone was an old pal of his. Pure amiability.

She put her phone on speaker and I told her three jokes that she put through the Portuguese pipeline — the dying man who smells fresh apple pie and crawls to the kitchen and reaches for a knife, whereupon his wife brushes him away and says, “Leave it alone, that’s for the funeral” — the old man who buys two dozen condoms every week in the drugstore and when the clerk finally inquires what he needs them for, he says he feeds them to his dog so she poops in plastic bags — the man walking past the insane asylum who hears the inmates shouting, “Twenty-one, twenty-one” and puts his eye to a hole in the fence and is poked in the eye with a sharp stick as they shout, “Twenty-two, twenty-two” — and after each translated joke, I heard Antonio’s distinctive guffaws.

Why I’m looking forward to November

October chill is in the air even when the sun shines and we count on this to bring us back to common sense after the delusions of summer. Back in August I was contemplating what to say when accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature and now I’m cleaning out boxes of stuff in my closet. If I were a Nobel winner, the University of Texas would offer me a couple million for the stuff but now they won’t so I’m donating it to recycling. Smart move.

Some people want to eliminate the shortstop to permit higher-scoring ball games and attract more women in the 20–30 demographic who are bored by shutouts and double plays and consider that a “perfect game” would be one with 20 or 30 triples, but wiser heads have prevailed, thanks to the chill in the air.

A mighty fortress survives heavy shelling

String theory was once a hobby of mine — the study of how two adjacent fishing lines or cords or laces or reins will, even though carefully laid individually in a drawer or case, in the course of a night become promiscuously intermingled, tangled, even symbiotic ¬¬— and I thought it might help me understand the affairs of the world but now suddenly the news has become unbearable and incomprehensible.

The opinion columnists take the long view and offer reasonable analysis of the Palestinian dilemma and Israeli politics and the strategic thinking of Hamas, but the rest of us are witnessing the murder of civilians, women dragged away screaming, bleeding children in the arms of Palestinian parents, the wreckage of hospitals, homes blown apart, sheer evil unleashed on people like us, and we stare at the pictures until we can’t bear it and then we look again.

Visiting home after a long time away

We Minnesotans believe in low-key. We don’t make a big deal about it unless it’s about our kids. And so one morning last week, when I ordered steak and eggs for breakfast and got a splotch of ovular grease and sirloin of Percheron and stale toast, after I sawed away at the horsemeat and the waitperson asked how everything was, I said, “Fine.” It dawned on me in that very moment that I have never ever not even once sent food back to the kitchen.

It was a revelation. I think I would complain if a cockroach was swimming in the soup or a colony of ants resided in the wedge salad, but a breakfast like the one I got, I accept as the luck of the draw, same as you accept potholes or panhandling drug addicts. This is a Minnesota point of view: “Who do I think I am to complain about a tough steak in a world where so many go hungry?” I always regarded this as virtuous, but now it seems like cowardice, the fear of unpleasantness. 

What endures is decency, believe me

I hear people complain about police and city planners and the health care system, but never about firemen or EMTs, and few complain about slow delivery of mail, perhaps because so few people write letters these days. I do and delivery is prompt. I wrote a postcard with a limerick for a new father:

Byron is his child’s wiper
And poop does not make him hyper,
He cleans the behind
With a calm focused mind
And fastens a fresh tiny diaper.

Flying around America, looking at crowds

I imagine that someday at America’s boarding gates, after the wheelchair passengers are boarded and Those Who Need Extra Time, then active military, there will be other categories of merit to be given precedence, Persons Traumatized By Flight, Persons In Need Of Affirmation, Persons Trapped In Bad Relationships, and why not add Unappreciated Poets and Third-Grade Teachers to the list. And then you let the Fat Cats board for First Class, and then the peons and peasants.

I am a Fat Cat, to tell the truth, and I’m sheepish about it so I walk, eyes averted, down the empty Elitist lane between long lines of the underprivileged, and I come to the TSA agent and am eyeballed and pass through the scanner and off to the gate and if this were Christian Airways the agent would ask, “Have you loved your neighbor as yourself? Have you extended a hand to the fallen? Do you love the Lord with your whole heart?” and of course the answer is No, no, no, and so I’d be seated in 27B next to a talkative Scientologist and denied a screwdriver and not allowed Wi-Fi and my seat wouldn’t recline and I’d be given a crying infant to hold, but I fly Delta so no questions are asked.

A fable about bewilderment

Every day the naked American emperor stalks us, hollering in the hallways, screeching from the screen, demanding attention, and who can avert their eyes from him, his enormous hairy hindquarters, his baggy pectorals and jowls, his tiny privates squiggled up under his protuberant belly, his bared teeth, the glare of his stare, the shouts of “Deranged!” and “Leftist!” and “Weaponization of Witches!” and how can other Republican candidates compete against this Enormity, this Never Before Seen, this Once in a Lifetime Solar Eclipse and Monsoon of a Man?

They can’t. They talk to six customers in a café in Grover’s Corners or address a couple dozen loafers in a Legion club or appear at a Pumpkin Fest in Plimptonville, meanwhile the World’s Greatest American commands millions of eyeballs every time he belches, his every twitch and tremor is discussed by a hundred columnists, he is in our dreams, every time we hit a bump or feel a lump or take a dump, we think of him.

All I know is what she tells me

I get the news from my wife, who sits reading the paper across the breakfast table from me and tells me what I need to know, ignoring much of page 1 and picking out the story of the Italian Jews who were sheltered in Catholic monasteries in spite of an anti-Semitic pope and saved from the Holocaust and the story about Florida’s war on undocumented workers, which deprives Floridians of a ready workforce to help clean up the wretched mess after a hurricane and the pictures of beautiful colorful clothing worn by Sudanese women even during their cruel civil war.

It’s not a partisan newscast, it’s humanistic, it’s not about issues but about people, which makes me think she should run for president, which would be good for the country — Mexico is going to have a woman president, why should we lag behind — and I do believe her style is a winning one. My mother was a conservative but she loved Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt because she felt they cared about people. Joe Biden’s trip to Maui to commiserate with fire victims by reminiscing about the time he almost lost his Corvette as a result of a kitchen fire — dumb, dumb, dumb, Joe — why did Jill let you say that stupid clueless thing? A Corvette is not the equivalent of someone’s home, Joe. Who is briefing you for these appearances? Fire him.

The meeting will come to order (bonk bonk)

Any American who saw Jim Jordan, the alleged chair of the so-called House Judiciary Committee, on TV Wednesday could’ve been charged with contempt of Congress for his harassment of Judge Merrick Garland, an excellent legal mind and dedicated public servant, Mr. Jordan being a bully and a hack from a gerrymandered district in Ohio who got his law degree from a church school in Columbus and never took the bar exam. He was a champion wrestler in the featherweight class and though heftier now, maintains his featherweight status. He never held a job but went straight from college into politics. Interviewed in 2018 and asked if he’d ever heard Donald Trump tell a lie, he said, “I have not.” He has been called “nuts” by Lindsey Graham, who knows about nuttiness. He voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election and then sent a note to the White House asking for a pardon in the event he was prosecuted. Ten days before leaving office, Mr. Trump gave Jordan the Presidential Medal of Freedom in a closed-door ceremony. He appeared before me Thursday under an independent subpoena issued pursuant to 515.2 U.S.C. and I hereby read into the record his testimony: