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 don’t keep track of my stock portfolio for the simple reason I am utterly ignorant, having skipped Econ in college — too boring — so in the world of finance I am a mountain climber with no lantern or map and I hear woofing up ahead and hope to find a hut and a hermit who will offer me lodging. To me, it makes as much sense as Friday night bingo at Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy except not as sociable.
It does seem though that even with the national deficit rising and unemployment too and consumer pessimism and nobody has any idea where our Leader’s mood on tariffs is heading, Wall Street sees a candle in the window and is following the rainbow. The investment bank sends me a summary on the first of the month, and it keeps climbing and climbing, even with me without a map.
Read MoreI feel a little sad and sort of disenfranchised in September heading for October and for the fourth year in a row having missed the Minnesota State Fair and not eaten Pronto Pups or cheese curds or hot buttered corn on the cob. I am a Minnesotan, though I live in New York, and as such am sensible, wary of excess, and the Fair is our annual Feast Of Things You’ve Been Warned Against. We go see the livestock barns, the various gaudy breeds of poultry, bins of grains and vegetables in the Horticulture Building, watch the horse judging, but while walking the grounds we pick up our favorite forbidden foods, all of them portable. Walking gives us privacy and also aids in digestion. There is now a Fair Food app that will guide you to a Frozen Mango Tango or S’mores or Bison Meatballs. You take a break on the Ferris wheel and a carousel to settle the contents in your gut and then top off the day with a dish of Hawaiian Sunrise shaved ice and take yourself home to repent with a double Alka-Seltzer.
This is an extravagant exercise in the unwise that can plant your feet back on the straight and narrow just as releasing a bombshell of profanity can cleanse the heart of anger or listening to three Rolling Stones albums in a row can make you grateful to be elderly and leading a peaceable life.
Read MoreI went to Santa Fe to see some friends last week and it dawned on me that I’m a Northern guy with a keen sense of my insignificance who aims to be inconspicuous and that many Northerners go to Santa Fe to be picturesque. I saw grown men dressed up as desperadoes, wearing sombreros, black shirts with silver buttons, gaudy cowboy boots. I left that look behind when I turned twelve, the age at which you start to realize that work and competence are what give you your identity, not your outfit.
God designed Minnesota so we wouldn’t be distracted by mountains and could concentrate on getting the work done, cultivating the corn, picking potatoes. You don’t wear reds, yellows, and oranges, it would only attract blackbirds.
Read MoreYou’re reading a column by a guy of 83 for one reason and that’s to hear him tell you: Life is good. Boomer columnists are full of dread, millennials are discouraged, Xers are depressed, and Gen Z is downhearted, but I am old enough to see the advance of progress.
Yes, there’s pain, guilt, a sense of meaninglessness — welcome to the club — but we also have Thai takeout in little white paper containers, and same-day delivery has come to seem ordinary. There are more toothpaste options now than ever. More fragrances of soap.
Read MoreLife is an adventure, never ending; just when you think you’re on an even keel, the ground comes up to meet you. After church on Sunday I walked into the kitchen and slipped and fell and whacked my head hard into the corner of a wooden shelf over the table and felt blood on my forehead and went to find Jenny who was reading outdoors and she cried, “Oh my god,” and I said, “No, I’m only your husband.”
“Go to the bathroom!” she cried.
“Here? But I don’t need to.”
“Can you sit on the toilet?”
“I’ve done it thousands of times.”
I am an old man and quite aware of my earthly sojourn heading for Trail’s End, and me with much left to accomplish such as resume regular exercise and write a great American novel and set a new pole vault record for men over 80, but meanwhile I spend so much time searching for my glasses, my keys, my billfold, my cellphone, I probably could’ve written two or three great novels but then I wonder, “Does America really need another great novel?” Probably A.I. is taking over the field of fiction and soon we’ll see novels generated by ChatGPT such as The Great Moby-Dick in which Jay Gatsby sets out to impress Daisy Buchanan by water-skiing past her mansion on Long Island and is swallowed by the whale, or Grapes of War and Peace in which Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, disillusioned with capitalism, joins Ma Joad’s family on the road and is separated from Natasha who leads the Russian army against Napoleon and marries the wealthy Pierre, Andrei having fallen sick in the harsh winter, but is nursed back to health by Rose of Sharon.
A.I. would enable readers to get multiple novels for the price of one, such as Wuthering Eyre of Gulliver’s Expectations or Beloved Lolita on the Brave New Road, merging the best elements of each novel into a superior amalgamated mélange and save readers an enormous amount of time during which they could take up a program of regular exercise.
Read MoreMy shirts come from the cleaners starched and pressed, nicely folded and buttoned, every button, and I look at them and think, “Technical wizardry has not yet developed a machine that will properly button shirts, not breaking the buttons, so who does this labor? Children? There are child labor laws. No, someone does it who was accustomed to something much worse such as persecution, semi-starvation, life in a shanty with primitive sanitation, that’s who.”
So where do we come up with this rage against undocumented immigrants? For someone from parts of Africa or Asia, this work would be a godsend. Where do we get off sending armed masked men to round them up like cattle? They’re people who do difficult necessary work. Until we switch to tunics, so long as there are bankers and other stuffed shirts, this is a decent job.
Read MoreLife is so dear, I can’t imagine what we’ll do when it’s over. The other night I lay awake for a while trying to think of the first name of the Romney who ran for president against Obama. I remembered it was in 2012 and I ran through an alphabet of men’s names, Al and Bob and Cal and so forth, and Mark seemed to ring a bell. I remembered his dad, George, and I remembered all too well the name of the guy who claimed Obama was born in Kenya and was ineligible to be president, but the gap remained.
You lie in the dark next to the woman you love (Jenny) and resist the mounting urge to climb out of bed and google Romney and yet as you work to bring him to memory, memory goes elsewhere. I remembered seeing Jacqueline Onassis once at a New York Public Library event honoring authors, standing in a hallway chatting with a gentleman, and then noticed a shadowy gentleman 20 feet away watching her, and it suddenly hit me what a strange route her adult life must’ve been. I remembered sitting next to Michelle Obama at a dinner for Senate wives in the winter of 2008. I was the speaker and was expected to be humorous and it was highly peculiar to realize that I wasn’t going to talk about the one thing that was on everyone’s mind, including the waiters’ (maybe especially the waiters’). I couldn’t talk about it because it was too enormous, the fact of the first African American First Family in our history.
Read MoreI sat next to a woman I didn’t know on a flight from Minneapolis to New York and we fell into conversation and I got to know her. She said, “You look a lot like my father.” Quite an opener for a woman almost my age. She said he was a social worker, a good man who wanted to make the world better but he saw so much trouble that he couldn’t believe in God. “He was a man with a lot of demons.” She said, “He used to say, ‘Being your dad was the best job I ever had and I was the worst man for the job.’” Quite a start and she was only drinking mineral water. And then she said, “And he was your biggest fan. He absolutely loved your radio show.”
It gives you something to think about, being loved by a complicated man. Puts me in the same position as she. But I love that phrase, “a man with a lot of demons,” a wonderful old-fashioned way of putting it, meaning “too complicated to unravel, just respect it and give it space.”
Read MoreScott Fitzgerald would be quite disappointed that the theft of a statue of him in St. Paul was not a better story, was in fact about as dumb as a crime story can be. A 37-year-old dimwit with a drug problem swiped the figure and drove it in his Jeep to a metal recycling company and tried to sell it for scrap. He gave them his actual name. They concluded (duh) it was stolen and reported his license plate number to police who went to the dimwit’s house and found pieces of the statue. A blowtorch was in the jeep.
A statue of Fitzgerald is worth more than scrap metal. If you wanted to get a good price, you’d cut the head off and hold it for ransom. And you’d have a better motive than gaining a couple hundred bucks to feed your fentanyl habit, you’d do it to gain the attention of a woman who has slighted you in favor of a wealthy guy who can afford to take her to Greece for a honeymoon and buy her a lavish mansion on Summit Avenue overlooking the Mississippi.
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