It’s a good time, there’s none better

I remember when I was six and was allowed to do dishes with my older brother and sister while Mother cleaned the kitchen with Lysol: it was a ceremony, a step into maturity, being entrusted to handle the family china, a mark of maturity for a little boy, and, busy, crowded around the sink, we talked a lot, a big pleasure in a family in which children were not encouraged to speak up. And I made my brother and sister laugh, describing my teacher’s upper arms that bounced as she wrote on the blackboard, that we named Hoppy and Bob, and also when I said that Washington looked like Lincoln’s wife. To think I could amuse my elders was a real spark of self-esteem.

The beauty of being a guy

When you bang up your knee so it swells up like an elephant’s and it brings tears to your eyes to take a step, the orthopedic guy gives you a knee brace to wear requiring four straps to be wrapped tight around the leg and hooked and held tight by Velcro strips, a piece of equipment that I, a professional humorist with less mechanical ability than the average primate, need to remove every night when I go to bed and reattach in the morning. My wife could do this in a jiffy but I made her go to Minnesota to play the opera (she’s a violist) because I love her and because I don’t want her to see me as a pitiful helpless wretch. You understand.

Why should two people be miserable? One is enough.

That cold day I was naked in Utah

The writing life is such a good life that I’m grateful all over again that I paid no attention in 11th grade Chemistry and didn’t become a pharmacist and got kicked out of Industrial Arts for being careless with power tools and was sent up to Speech and LaVona Person and recited original limericks for Oral Interp and made the class laugh and thus went down the literary highway. And now I’m hobbling with a cane after a bad fall, one more excuse to not go out to big fundraising dinners but stay home and work on a screenplay. I’m on page 38 and already there are three funerals, it’s a sure hit, a comedy, I need to have my tux let out for the awards ceremony.

Don’t ignore this. It’s important. Read all the way to the end.

Think things through. If you quit exercising because you feel good, you’re likely to take a fall and get injured and feel worse. If you fall in love with a married person, you’re likely to have a guilty lover. If you let your life go to pieces, you’ll be too depressed to do anything about it. In the end we live on trust, so don’t look too far ahead, take it one day at a time.

Every day, try to make a little progress; forward motion is good for the soul. Recently, I bought postage stamps online at USPS.com and it made me happy, skipping the line of cranky people waiting for half an hour behind the gentleman who’s sending money orders to Sumatra, Samoa, Szechuan, and the Czech Republic, and wishes to insure each one, and when you finally arrive at the embittered old crone behind the barred window and ask for a sheet of the Railroad Stations stamps, she snaps, “We’re out of that,” and suddenly your life seems meaningless and absurd — no, instead of that, I sat in my kitchen and filled out an extensive form, including a password with a capital letter, a numeral, a punctuation mark, and an Urdu character, and the answers to three security questions — my favorite hobby (writing), my first girlfriend (Corinne Guntzel), and what she saw in me (pure wit and raw sex appeal), and there it is, no need to leave home and run the risk of being killed by an e-bike.

A pound and a half? Really? Why?

It’s weird for a guy from the Sixties to read about my beloved Minnesota on the verge of legalizing marijuana, allowing possession of a pound and a half for people 21 and over, opening an agency to license shops, setting an 8% sales tax, erasing the convictions of old dopers. When I was in college, I went to parties where people sat in dim apartments, doors locked, an eye out for the cops, the Grateful Dead on the turntable, and illegality was a big part of the appeal. We were rebels in the cause of higher consciousness. But Minnesota lacked the reliable criminal element to supply quality reefer and our stuff was like mulch and the euphoria was mostly the stupefaction you get from holding your breath; we would’ve gotten more euphoria by riding a good roller coaster. The big thrill was looking around the room and wondering who might be an undercover cop.

I’m not opposed to legalization; I think it’s crazy to lock people up for wanting to be stupid, and if your doctor prescribes marijuana, goody-gumdrops for you, but when I smell marijuana smoke, I get away from it as quickly as possible before some pothead on a skateboard and wearing headphones comes crashing into me. Getting high lowers alertness.

A walk in the park in April

It was good to see clips of Joe Biden being welcomed by big happy crowds in Ireland, grinning, shaking hands, posing for pictures, kissing babies, quoting Irish poets, busy being beloved by all who waited to see him. Obama knew a degree of belovedness, thanks to his wife and daughters, and Reagan’s sunny disposition was well-received, but the White House hasn’t seen much outright love in my lifetime, which you could argue is proper in a democracy, for people to be wary of great power, but it strikes me as sad, walking around Central Park on a paradise spring day, the cherry trees in full blossom, a jazz trio playing under the trees, Frisbee players playing pickle in the middle, yoga folks striking poses, softball games, a runner pushing his little daughter in a cart, dog walkers, so much public happiness, to think of the cloud of bitterness over this generous country.

How many of these walkers and runners believe that the Illuminati use vaccines to cause autism, that the government is withholding the cure for cancer as a favor to Big Pharm, that a federal research facility in Alaska is engaged in mind control, that Bigfoot is drinking the blood of small children in Roswell, New Mexico, and that the shots came from the grassy knoll and not the School Book Depository?

A few thoughts about privilege

Over at my church last week we celebrated the risen Lord and the promise of our own resurrection and in my friend’s Unitarian church they heard a sermon about recycling, but despite this difference we get along very nicely — and why? Because we’re older than we were. The pride of possession of the Truth diminishes; the urge to share the sunshine succeeds it.

And a day later I made my annual pilgrimage to Rochester, Minnesota, where I was twice resurrected as my congenital heart problem was fixed when heredity said I should drop dead but instead here I am, having my say. Gratitude is the prevailing attitude at my age. My older brother went skating, slipped, banged his head, and died at 71; he was five years older than I and now I’m nine years older than he; it could’ve happened to me and it didn’t. He was a good man and I am a fly-by-night operator and his demise obligates me to be a better man than I know how to be. So I’m trying.

What a little train trip can do

Spring leaped out at us in New York last week — suddenly one day it was 80, just like me — it sprang at us shang a lang lang as once we’d sung so we were sprung from the steel corset of winter and I took a couple of Londoners to lunch at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station where, when I was 11, I ate my first oyster on a trip from Minnesota with my dad. I saw him eat one and so I ate one and I trace my independence back to that 1953 oyster — when you eagerly devour something that would disgust your beloved aunts, you’ve taken a step toward becoming your own person.

It was a marvelous day, Friday. We walked under the starry ceiling of the great arcade, in a crowd of amiable people, many of them shooting cellphone video of the scene, and we felt a keen urge to ride the rails and stepped up to the ticket window and boarded a Metro-North commuter train for Peekskill, but one man’s commute is another man’s adventure, and off we went, a beautiful sudden impulse.

Let me tell you why I’m happy

When I heard that UConn won the NCAA championship I thought of Inuits playing basketball on skates, a cheery thought, I having left the polar ice cap of Minnesota and flown to New York where it was spring. The cherry blossoms were out, runners trotting around the Reservoir, the dogs had taken off their down vests. My beloved was waiting at the door, I could smell the coffee. I look at her and see that I am a privileged man: it isn’t my wealthy dad or my Harvard degree or private jet or my network of influential pals, it’s her. That’s why I’m happy. She is my best-informed critic and yet we’ve made a good life together, a terrific accomplishment.

Cheerfulness is a great American virtue, I think: the essence of who we are when we’re cooking with gas: rise and shine, qwitcher bellyaching, step up to the plate and swing for the fences, do your best and forget the rest, da doo ron ron ron da doo ron ron.

Wild freedom as a foregone conclusion

I lead a small life. I got a big thrill last week from a headline in the Times (‘We’re Going Away’: A State’s Choice to Forgo Medicaid Funds Is Killing Hospitals), thinking I’d found a typo in the Newspaper of Record, like the Holy Father saying saecula saeculórus instead of saecula saeculorum, and I imagined calling New York and being invited down to Times Square to watch a young editorial assistant getting his or their or its fanny paddled, but no. Even though I, an English major, held the foregone conclusion that the correct word is “forego,” and that “forgo” is a forgery, it is there in the Merriam-Webster.

Had I forgotten? Or am I losing my mind and will I need to fly to Fargo and forge a new career fogging fig trees. So I did what one does in a moment of crisis: I called a friend and she feigned surprise at the “forgo.” “Oh my goodness,” she said. Well, I know when I’m being humored, I know the condescension of women very very well. I am 80. It says so on my ID. The mistake shook me badly. I thought maybe I should start keeping a daily checklist: brush teeth, shave, trim eyebrows, etc. I thought maybe I should avoid crossing busy streets.