I’m done with regret, thinking about a bagel

Lent is upon us starting Wednesday except for us old fundamentalists for whom it is a yearlong observance. We didn’t go to movies or imbibe euphoric beverages or use tobacco or read fiction and, for fear it might lead to dancing, we didn’t even tap our feet or sing rhythmically, and so Lent was merely Catholics imitating us, and now, in my twilight years, I’ve already given up most of the things I might easily sacrifice, such as Debussy, for example. I can’t stand Debussy. I never could. Same with superhero movies, chicken livers, buttermilk, chin-ups, Henry James, the list goes on.

To us old Brethrenites, the idea of Lent, forty days of repentance, is odd: we sat under serious preaching about imminent death and so we were told to repent NOW, this very moment, which was problematic for me as a child, listening to the preacher describe the sinking of the Titanic, souls swept into eternity, which could happen to us at any moment, though we were not out on the Atlantic but on 14th Avenue in south Minneapolis, so I should repent and come to the Lord now, immediately, but I felt this should involve weeping, falling to my knees, not just checking a box but crying out to heaven, overwhelmed with feeling, but how can you overwhelm yourself? I couldn’t. I envied Southerners their emotional liquidity. We of the northern latitudes did not have their latitude.

Why I’m not running for anything whatsoever

When I come to Presidents Day, I remember the pictures of Lincoln and Washington hanging side by side over the blackboard in the front of Estelle Shaver’s first-grade classroom at Benson School and I thought they were married since Washington’s locks looked ladylike and I didn’t know them from the $1 or $5 bills, I only knew Adam and Eve and Mary and Joseph from my Bible Families storybook. And now Benson School is demolished, Estelle has gone to her reward, blackboards are green, and the pictures have been replaced by — I don’t know what — Snoop Dogg and Taylor Swift?

This is why we need millennials to rise up and take over; there are too many people my age in power whose minds are like attics, packed with disposable antiques. I want someone to be elected president who doesn’t remember the era of doo-wop and long-distance phone calls. These memories take up brain space that could be used to replace fossil fuels with solar and wind.

The little-known benefits of raw oysters perhaps

I took up eating oysters on the half shell back in my late twenties, as a token of eastern sophistication. I was in New York and my editor took me to lunch and ordered a dozen and asked if I’d like some. “Of course,” I said, not wanting to seem provincial, and ate three, which resembled phlegm but with horseradish were palatable and went down easily, no chewing required.

Last week, passing through the lovely town of Easton, Maryland, across Chesapeake Bay from Baltimore, I enjoyed six Chesapeake oysters, which were larger, meatier, than the ones in New York fifty years ago and a man sitting next to me at the bar asked how they were — “They’re very good, they must be wild,” I said — and he said, “You’re from Minnesota, aren’t you.” I said yes. I did not say, “But I live in New York.” It doesn’t matter where you live, you’re still from where you’re from. Provincial is baked into my blood and I can’t escape it by wearing a nice suit or eating seafood, I’m still from the land of the Spam sandwich.

The gentleman said he’d driven through Minnesota once when he was twenty. Under the influence of reading Jack Kerouac, he’d driven from his home in Maine to Oregon and in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, he had pitched his tent in the cemetery and spent a peaceful night there.

Valentine’s Day: a reminder to men

We’ve been sort of mesmerized by the Winter Olympics and dangerously thin athletes speedskating, one hand behind the back, taking the turns semi-horizontally, and others flying off a ski jump spinning in the air so as to give their mothers cardiac arrest, and downhill events won by a margin of one-hundredth of a second, and all of it taking place in arid hills near Beijing, on artificial snow, and then seeing the Italians win gold in curling, which is like Bryn Mawr placing first in boxing. One astonishment after another, but I’ve kept my eye on Monday the 14th knowing that attention must be paid.

I am contracted to the woman I love but the vow to love and honor (at the altar, I whispered the word “obey” to myself) left out a great deal, such as “take careful aim at the middle of the toilet bowl” and “when asked what you’d like for dinner, the correct answer is ‘a green salad with oil and vinegar, please.’” Over the 26 years of marriage, other addenda have attached to the contract, including “do not give me articles of clothing as gifts because I will only have to donate them to the Salvation Army.”

Thoughts about toothpaste and patriotism

I am severely irked by the silver security foil protecting the tip of my tube of toothpaste, which I must pry off with my thumbnail before I can squeeze Colgate onto my toothbrush. It suggests that insidious persons are out to poison me via my habit of twice-daily brushing. When I order a cheeseburger in a café, it doesn’t come to me locked in a tin box; when I go to the barber, she doesn’t offer me a metal shield to prevent her from cutting my throat; the oranges in the grocery store don’t come wrapped in steel foil to prevent evil persons from injecting strychnine with a hypodermic: why the security cap on the Colgate?

I buy Colgate because they sponsored The Colgate Comedy Hour with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, a very classy show, and also I assume that Colgate University gets a percentage of the price; I know nothing about the toothpaste. I assume that all toothpaste is alike, Crest or Pepsodent or Natalie’s Natural, that probably it’s all made in a factory in Topeka. But the little silver foil offers a taste of paranoia that I don’t need.

The secret of my success is longevity

I was a lousy student in Lyle Bradley’s 10th grade biology class, and he was wildly generous to give me a B-minus given my ineptitude at frog dissection and tree identification, and since then I’ve descended into superstition and mythology and faith in vitamin E and chicken soup and in the story of Adam and Eve in the garden, the woman created from a spare rib because the man was lonely, but had God chosen, He could’ve made the man capable of creating egg and sperm and combining the two, perhaps by sticking his finger into his ear, and we’d have a world of a billion guys and there’d be no fashion industry, no beauty products, and what little opera there would be would not be very grand.

Had I worked hard in Lyle’s class I might’ve gone on to get a degree in science from a third-rate college and started a mediocre career and who needs that? Nobody. Instead, I looked for a line of work that didn’t exist anymore and became the host of a live radio variety show, of which there were maybe four in the country, and of those four hosts I was pretty good. And this is my advice to the young: don’t be a poet or video producer or proctologist or politician — you’ll find thousands of people ahead of you in line; chose something very rare — write a Canadian romance novel, make butterfly milk, design an app to tap maple sap, produce a podcast of pure silence. Be distinctive from the get-go. Become a Mob boss. The Mob is dead, so revive it. Some things worked better when the Mob was in charge. Be the guy in charge.

In Georgia, taking shelter from the storm

I am now officially done with looking down on the South, which I did for years as a good Northerner but I’ve now spent three days in the town of Carrollton, Georgia (pop. 26,738), enjoying the cheesy grits and pulled pork, collard greens and cornbread, and the waiters who when I say, “Thank you,” say, “My pleasure.” And when I pay the bill, they say, “Preciate y’all.” You don’t hear that up north. I holed up here to avoid getting stuck in the Atlanta airport during the blizzard in New York and Carrollton turns out to be a hotbed of amiability, where if you make eye contact people say, “Good morning” and maybe “How you all doing?” though there’s only one of me but all of me is doing just fine, thank you very much, and this easily leads into small talk.

I got up from breakfast at the hotel and passed a table with two couples eating breakfast and one man said, “How you all doing?” and I said, “Never better,” and I commented on the fact I’d seen a number of extremely tall young men coming into the hotel and he told me there was a college basketball tournament over at the University of Western Georgia a few blocks away. We discussed what it must be like to be six-eight or six-ten and on the court you need to be aggressive and rangy, but walking around indoors you feel constrained and you keep bumping your head and the bed is too short. One of the women said, “You see one of those giants trying to fold himself up and get into a car, it makes me grateful to be short and fat.” Up north, I all wouldn’t have been asked that question, and this small friendly exchange wouldn’t happen.

The future of escapism as I see it

I was in Las Vegas last Saturday, walking down the street at 7 a.m., looking for a breakfast joint, a bitter cold wind blowing past the neon avenues of casinos, and finally, feeling I was on the road to perdition, I walked into the Golden Nugget and was directed by a security guy past several acres of flashing dinging slot machines to a café back in the corner and there, among flashing lights and dinging, I ordered a garden omelet with a side of hash browns and coffee, and struck up a conversation with my neighbor, a guy from Long Beach who said he’d been to a burlesque show the night before and found it rather ho-hum. The women were big and manly and the comedian was “very gay” and mostly made jokes about his mother and the whole thing was less bawdy than your average post office mural. I looked over his shoulder at the few men playing the slots, a pitiful lot, men who looked like they’d been ditched by girlfriends and couldn’t remember where their car was parked, and it struck me as sad that a city designed for escapism should be so forlorn.

I was in Las Vegas to give a talk about growing up in the Fifties in a small town in Minnesota, the culture my generation strove mightily to escape, the righteous, abstemious, suspicious culture of our hardworking Depression-era parents. We took up the Beach Boys and Beat poetry and long hair and the Grateful Dead to get ourselves out of that Midwestern framework. We were named Gary and Bob and Sharon and Karen and we gave our children literary names like Emma and Annabella and Oliver and Noah and now, in old age, we find ourselves oppressed by our progressive offspring who hold us responsible for racism, poverty, the theft of Indian lands, and who police our language and expect us to honor them as survivors of our abusive parenting. Nuts to that. We’re out of here, kids. Bye. See you around.

She loves me enough so I live in New York

I’m a Minnesotan and I live in New York because my wife is in love with me and she loves New York. It is exactly that simple. She loves opera and fine art and interesting foods and observing human eccentricity and you don’t find much of that out in the Corn Belt.

I don’t belong here. People hear me talk and can tell I’m an outsider because I pronounce it “tock” whereas they say “towalk” and also because I say, “After you, please, go right ahead, I’m in no hurry” and New Yorkers say, “Watcher back!” and at a dinner party New Yorkers all talk over each other, conversations are multilayered, and I, who was brought up to wait my turn, sit silently for three hours and the other guests go home wondering, “Who was the weird guy? Obviously a non-English speaker.”

My mother told me and now I’ll tell you

January is a peaceful month, too cold to go anywhere so I sit in my spacious chair with a quilt around me, still in my pajamas at two in the afternoon, eating guacamole with tortilla chips and contributing nothing whatsoever to civilization or to the GNP, except for the occasional limerick.

January is good for the soul,/Down in my warm rabbit hole./In a pillowy bed/From toes to head/I keep myself under control.