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 went to a wedding in California last week, a beautiful wedding out under the eucalyptus trees, a rare pleasure for me, being at the age when friends are not vowing “till death us do part” but watching death part them, and it was fun. It being California, the men were very mellow, the women were all glamorous in bright strapless gowns and hugged each other and cried, “Oh my god, you look fabulous,” and effusiveness was the rule. The men were all socially engaged, tolerant of differences, committed to social justice. The parents stood up and gave speeches praising the bride and groom so lavishly, it made me wonder if the couple had been diagnosed with a fatal disease.
I’m from Minnesota where weddings are solemn and parents do not speak admiringly of their children. Not lavishly anyway. They worry. They wonder if the marriage will last. They wonder if the guests are having a good time. In Minnesota, it’s hard to tell.
Read MoreA balmy, even summery, fall in Minnesota and then suddenly snow fell and my aging homeowner pals back home are reconsidering their options. The supply of teenage labor to shovel walks is spotty and you hear horror stories about ice buildup in the attic, water dripping from the ceiling, tons of ice inside the roof because the vapor barrier was put in wrong, and then of course there is the ever-present danger of slipping on a frosty sidewalk and twisting your back as you fall and something cracks and suddenly you are on the waiting list for Cripple Creek Care Center. A friend told me about a squirrel who’d climbed down the chimney to get warm and fell into the old coal furnace and tore around the house in a panic, scattering soot everywhere until they finally chased him out: “I got a .22 and I could’ve shot him but he was moving pretty fast and anyway the kids were watching and they were cheering for the squirrel.”
These are true Minnesotans, stalwarts, stoics, not summer soldiers, and the thought of decamping for the Florida swamps or the Arizona desert is for them something like gender transition or conversion to Zen Lutheranism, something to be postponed as long as possible.
Read MoreThe simple pleasures of a long close marriage on a perfect October day, leaves dropping from the trees, eating an egg salad sandwich after her long morning walk, playing Scrabble. She talks about who and what she saw on her hike and I, the writer, am silent in thought, having played the word “irony,” which triggers the memory of a day long ago in Saginaw, Michigan.
I’d gone there to give a speech — don’t remember the occasion, only that afterward, a man in a shiny blue suit said to me, “It’s so hard to get good speakers to come to Saginaw.” And it wasn’t clear if this was a compliment or an insult.
Read MoreAn ordinary late October day and the world is dense with stately trees in variations of reds and gold and orange that Crayola never contemplated — no need to shop around for magic mushrooms or give up your life as a good citizen for something involving incense and flutes — just walk down the street ignoring the Halloween skeletons and let your heart be lifted. I’m descended from stoics, our emotional range runs from A to D, once or twice we’ve hit L, never W for wonderment but here I am in New York where something in the water encourages self-expression and I see a man on the subway platform do some little dance moves he’d maybe seen in the theater the night before. He’s not a dancer but he doesn’t let that stop him.
A short woman approaches and speaks something to me and I see she’s holding a cardboard tray of candies and a little boy clutches her pant leg and I remember reading about the Ecuadoran refugees who’ve come to the city, the women earning money just this way, and I reach into my pocket and pull out a twenty, which is a lot to pay for a small bag of M&Ms but how do you put a value on the look in the boy’s eyes. He is three or four and very keen. A train is coming into the station. This must be all strange to him but he isn’t frightened thanks to his anchor. He studies me, then the crowd emerging from the open doors, a man with a handsome dog on a leash, a guitarist playing into a little amp on the platform, and I board the train. But those dark eyes stay with me.
Read MoreThis should be a great time for journalism what with two wars going on, and ambitious writers should be packing their bags for overseas, not hanging out in Washington watching Republicans try to imagine what, if anything, they believe in. With cable news, print, news networks, websites, millions of podcasts, we are the most communicative people on earth; it’s no wonder we’re so sick of each other. We’re flooded with information and entertainment intertwined, inseparable, insufferable, and thank goodness for the Off switch and the Delete function and the pleasure of silence. But still we long to be smarter than we are.
The wars are complicated though and involve history, which we Americans try to stay innocent of and one would need to read dense books that would lead to more books, which might leave you more conflicted and confused. And that’s why the big story still is Mr. Presidefendant, irrelevant elephant though he be, and the Congressional Trumpists yelling at each other. There are rumors of Republican moderates but they don’t wear caps: they need to maintain deniability.
Read MoreIt’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.
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.
Read MoreOctober 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.
Read MoreString 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.
Read MoreWe 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.
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