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.

The Road to Mandalay – GK and Vern Sutton

Vern Sutton and Garrison Keillor – The Road to Mandalay

The six-minute video speaks louder than words

When you look at the body camera video of Nashville cops, guns drawn, dashing into the school, throwing doors open, shouting, “Shots fired, shots fired, move!” and a line of cops moving swiftly down the hall and up the stairs and shooting the attacker, you see men doing as they were trained to do, pursue a killer and take the killer out. From first call to completion of mission: 14 minutes. An expert operation carried out by dedicated public servants. And when you watch members of Congress tiptoe away from their duty to deal with the danger those men faced, you see cowardice in a pure form.

Everyone should look at that six-minute video of men moving down the hall of the Covenant School. Body cameras were meant to guard against police brutality and instead they show pure professional courage — they don’t stop to confer, discuss options — lives are in danger, terrified children in lockdown, and they run forward toward gunfire shouting “Police!” and giving the shooter a chance to surrender. This is something most of us would be incapable of. As for the heartlessness of politicians who decline to say what needs to be said and then carry it out, the language lacks the contempt that’s needed.

A plate of rigatoni with friends

The newspaper sets out to cover the full gamut of experience, from the Personals (Man, 45, seeks younger woman for mutual adventure and comfort) to the 50th anniversary party, George and Francine in their old tux and sparkly suit, and also the Letters of the Lovelorn (“He flirts with old friends of mine and our children’s teachers.”). If the rich and famous wind up in divorce court, the story can get very thick, and if one lover shoots another, the story becomes a novel. What the newspaper can’t cover very well is ordinary happiness because there is much too much of it and for us happy people, that is completely proper. You want to be able to eat your eggs and hash browns and sausage in the Chatterbox Café without a man with a pad and pencil interviewing you as to the cause of your good temper.

One cause is that you look back at your mistakes and know for a fact that you won’t do anything that dumb again.

Music as a means of detecting a heart

At least once in your long and delicious life you owe it to yourself to go hear Olivier Messiaen’s “Turangalîla-symphonie” and don’t wait until you’re 80 as I did but finally last week went to hear the New York Philharmonic take us on this wild 90-minute roller-coaster ride in which Catholics are kidnapped and Baptists go Buddhist and you think in French and fly in a formation of geese and get a taste of molecular physics as horses go galloping down the aisles, and in the gorgeous slow passage “Garden of Sleeping Love” you will fall in love forever with the person next to you so be very careful where you sit.

I sat next to my sweetheart and after years of thinking I was averse to modern music, here was a hymn to joy and time, movement, rhythm, life and death, with big Wagnerian chords, delicate intervals, a dozen percussionists, a genius pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, and we’ve been happily married ever since.

The longer you live, the better it gets

I went down to the Bowery one night last week to see Aoife O’Donovan sing to a ballroom packed with young people standing for two hours and whooping and yelling — I sat up in the balcony and whooped and yelled too — and what the woman could do with her voice and guitar was astonishing, utterly fabulous, and for a man my age to be astonished is remarkable, she was competing with my memory of Uncle Jim handing me the reins to his horse-drawn hayrack and my grandma chopping the head off a chicken and seeing Buster Keaton perform at the Minnesota State Fair and also Paul Simon at Madison Square Garden and Renée Fleming in Der Rosenkavalier, but there she is, Aoife, in my pantheon of wonderment.

I came home from the Bowery to learn that a dear friend, Christine Jacobson, had died — amazement and mortality in one evening, and it’s a rare privilege to be aware of both, the beauty of life and the brevity. I look down from my balcony seat on the heads of young people excited by an artist and in their behalf I am worried about our country, with so many of our countrymen in favor of resuming the Civil War, with our history of trillions spent on wars in Vietnam and Iraq from which no benefit whatever was gained, but the exhilaration of the young is better than bourbon, more wonderful than wine.