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
The beauty of this blessed summer is our chance to escape the news and devote ourselves to real life. I sat with my love on a hotel balcony overlooking a marina and we renewed our vow to never own a boat. I got up at 5 a.m. to send a niece to the airport and I gave her several coherent sentences of advice, drawing on my own mistakes. My love and I sat in the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station and devoured a dozen Malpeques and a lobster roll and scrod, the lights in the domed ceiling unchanged from when I saw it with my dad in 1953. In the subway heading home, she showed me snapshots of another niece holding her baby boy to her breast, minutes after delivery. The mother looked exhilarated, the babe surprised, the papa stunned. We couldn’t stop studying the pictures, the delight of them, which obliterated so much nonsense, the naked lie about the stolen election, the “weaponization” of law enforcement, the banning of books. We were back in the real America.
I wish they’d ban my book Cheerfulness so that more people would read it. I wrote it because the America I know and love is upbeat, enterprising, amiable to a fault, partial to jokes, and the mood of fracture and trauma seems fictitious to me, a far cry from the country that attracted our immigrant forebears. They didn’t cross the border in the hopes of taking vengeance.
Read MoreI clean up nicely and if I dress up I could pass for an ophthalmologist or at least an ornithologist and I try to walk briskly around New York and maintain a cheerful demeanor but I notice people are holding doors open for me and sometimes they look concerned, watching me descend two flights into the subway station. Evidently I look unsteady.
I’m only being careful. My days of taking a down staircase two stairs at a time no-handed are in the past along with my tennis game, but I am happier than ever and Monday night, my 81st birthday, I did a two-hour show up in Connecticut with my daughter, 25, sitting in the wings and a niece, profoundly pregnant, in the audience, and it was good. I walked back and forth on stage and Rob the piano player and I did a string of limericks and sonnets (sung) and I told funny stories about funerals and I even ventured into ribaldry.
Read MoreI took a ferry out of New London to the far end of Long Island, the end that is not Brooklyn, this week, which is a big deal for a Midwesterner, the ocean breeze, the big bass honk of the ship’s horn, the expanse of the Sound. It was an easy choice between that and four hours on the Long Island Expressway. I am done with freeways insofar as possible.
My late brother Philip grew up in Minnesota, same as I, but he came to love the sea by reading Horatio Hornblower novels, and after he took a wrong turn into corporate life in a suit and tie, he got straightened out and took a job studying shoreline erosion and thermal pollution on Lake Michigan, much of the time aboard a boat, wearing a windbreaker. He never regretted leaving the office cubicle.
Read MoreI am obligated to be an optimist because I’ve had a lucky life — I had a big career in a field for which I had no aptitude, my heart got surgically repaired, I married well on the third try — so it’d be dishonest to sing about the water tasting like turpentine and wanting to lay my head on the railroad line so the 4:19 can ease my troubled mind, so I don’t, I sing Van Morrison’s “These Are the Days of the Endless Summer,” but I respect skeptics and I’m glad that investigative journalism is at work shedding light on dark corners.
Take the recent piece in the Times about the NRA’s transformation from an organization of sportsmen to a powerhouse lobby that ruled Congress and expanded the Second Amendment so that we now have 400 million guns in the country and mass killings are a routine matter that has poisoned urban life. You read the piece with disgust at the machinations of politicians, and then you set it aside and enjoy the day. I got to ride the Keystone Express out to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and do a show at which I sang, with my friends Heather and Christine, Jerry Garcia’s “Attics of My Life” and Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl” and the audience joined in on the “Sha la la la la la la la la la la la de da,” which we repeated several times until we got the correct number of las. You cannot allow the existence of evil to overshadow the beauty of life in this splendiferous world we walk around in.
Read MoreA team of four men and one woman is on a mission to fix the 21st century and bring it more in line with the 18th and who can argue with the Supremes and who knows what the Ghost of Originalism may tell them to do next? At the moment, federal law prohibits destroying or tampering with restroom smoke detectors on airliners, a curtailment of individual liberty we’ve all come to accept but do the Supremes, riding around as they do aboard private jets owned by wealthy chums? We don’t know. Will small children’s right to work 12-hour days in factories be restored to them? Will the right of Lutherans to carry concealed weapons to the 11 a.m. service be upheld? You tell me.
I do believe that there is a Higher Law than what the Supremes declare and that a person is obliged to think Highly rather than Supremely, and one could argue that the right to Survival trumps (pardon my language) the Mind of Justice Alito, and as we look around and see petroleum and plastics degrading the planet, we might decide that the supremely wealthy who placed the five on the Court and who profit from pollution are thereby outlaws and the crime is giving their fortunes preeminence over humanity. What to do?
Read MoreI’ve heard enough about Barbie and Oppenheimer and Ron DeSantis, so let’s talk about me for a minute. I’m barefoot, wearing tan pants and black T, sitting under a potted maple on a terrace in Manhattan in a perfect summer twilight, an old man with a teenage heart, and I’ve been duly humble long enough but now I’d like a little attention and I’m sorry that the Florida Orange gave narcissism a bad name. In Minnesota, when I was a kid, we considered selfishness unseemly but what did I get for all my selflessness? Well, today is a new day and as of today I am a New Yorker. Today I bought a knish dog and a cream soda at a sidewalk stand. In Minnesota, we call it a pig in a blanket, but I’m a New Yorker now and I use the word knish. Okay? Got a problem with that?
When I moved out of Minneapolis, I sorted through personal papers and it struck me that, in hundreds of pictures of me, I am not smiling in a single one. I look like a mortician with a migraine. Partly this is due to the cold. Winter is brutal and you keep your mouth shut so you won’t frost your lungs. Teachers told me that. Plus which, in Minnesota there never were many people around so what was the point of exercising personal charm? Plus which, there are strong Lutheran tendencies there, people consider humor frivolous, maybe sacrilegious. Jesus wept; He didn’t laugh.
Read MoreMoving out of an apartment as I’ve been doing recently convinces me at last to resign from American consumer culture and live with only bedding, one towel, two changes of clothing, a pair of shoes, and one suit to wear for shows and also to be buried in. Stationery, stamps, and a couple pens. I own 21 coffee cups; I only need one. Nothing plastic, thank you. I will still fly Delta but I’ll lose 25 pounds to lessen the load.
The pleasure of moving is the excavation of the past. I open a box and here’s a photo of my fifth-grade class, the eager neatly-combed-and-dressed boy with glasses sitting behind John Poate is me. I am still that eager boy, heavier but anxious to do well. There is a letter from a fan of my radio show, “Every Saturday at 5 p.m., everything else ceased and we gathered around the radio.” Also, in a brown envelope, eight color photographs of my innards taken by the surgical team that installed a pig valve in my heart: the valve is pale pink, the innards are dark red. And there is a letter from a beloved aunt in 1995, reproaching me for traveling to Rome with my fiancée, engaging no doubt in premarital sex, embarking on a path of philandering and adultery, for which there would be no forgiveness. It’s a powerful articulate letter and I admire her for writing it, which she did out of love.
Read MoreClearing out an apartment a man sees what a work of art domestic life is, and clearance demands an iron will, no shilly-shallying, no regrets. Hundreds of books must go. The painting of the blizzard must go; I bought it long ago because it reminded me of Minnesota mornings and walking to school, and now she informs me that it gives her the heebie-jeebies, and because I am in love with this woman I offer it up as a sacrifice. This impresses her and so she allows me to keep the stone busts of Mark Twain and Erato the Muse of lyrical poetry. Horse-trading. I keep the bust of Lincoln because it reminds me of my father.
I keep mementos of family and teachers. Now and then young progressive Democrats have said to me, when I expressed an opinion, “Well, you’re a privileged white male,” and of course they’re right. In first grade, Mrs. Estelle Shaver kept me after school to read aloud to her and one day the janitor walked in and she said, “Listen to him, Bill. Doesn’t he have a wonderful voice. I love to listen to him while I grade lessons.” It was remedial reading, of course, but she made me believe I’d been chosen for this privilege and she changed my life. In fourth grade I was leery of playground bullies, and Mrs. Fern Moehlenbrock let me spend recess in the library. She knew I loved to read. To know at the age of 10 what you love is a privilege.
Read MorePeople sometimes inquire why a man of 80 keeps doing shows and I got the answer last week in the hills of Virginia, an outdoor show near Lexington, a perfect summer night after a morning downpour, an amiable crowd, Robin and Linda Williams came over from Staunton to sing with me, I talked about Lake Wobegon where there’s now a veterinary aromatherapist and people are selling artisanal ice from Lake Superior. I talked about it as a museum-quality guy who saw most of the previous century and remembers cursive writing and lightbulb jokes, and the audience stood during intermission and sang “Going to the Chapel” and “In My Life” and “America” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” — in Virginia! they knew the words about the watchfires in the circling camps, the evening dews and damps, the dim and flaring lamps. A crowd singing in harmony after sunset: it was gorgeous.
I hung out with the customers before and after (there’s no backstage at this amphitheater so I entered and exited through the audience) and it’s startling to hear middle-aged people tell me they listened to “Prairie Home” as kids, grew up with Guy Noir and Dusty and Lefty, I was sort of a distant uncle to them. I was very busy those years, hosting the show, writing it, touring around, and I was an ambitious author. My hard drive is full of the rusted wreckage of unfinished novels and stories and screenplays. I was not paying attention to the radio audience, it was only a statistic and I didn’t really believe it. And now here were the statistics shaking my hand. I stood next to them while they took a picture of the two of us.
Read MoreI missed the Fourth of July parade with Uncle Sam striding along on stilts and a wagon drawn by Percherons with a band playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever” in double time, but maybe they don’t do that anymore, maybe they ran out of men who could walk on stilts with confidence and who fit the Uncle Sam suit. It was a slim fit.
I’m not nostalgic about olden times. I love these passwords and PINs that give me the sense of foreign agents trying to get into my email, steal my prescription for metoprolol. I am fond of the GPS woman who gives us directions in such a sympathetic tone, not condescending at all. I adore my laptop and have no warm memories of my Underwood typewriter. Someday I believe the GPS woman may become a therapist and tell me to put regrets behind and prescribe a memory-loss drug that will do exactly that.
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