Small talk as the instrument of civility

A male nurse did a blood draw on me the other day, and as he tied the rubber strip around my upper arm, I said, “I’ve had this done about seventy times, you’re competing against some of the best, and you know that women are better at it than men. They have the kindness gene. Men are inherently aggressive. In your unconscious mind, you’re stabbing an enemy.” He laughed, a genuine hearty laugh — I’ve been in the business a long time, I can tell genuine from forced — and stuck me and said, “I’m afraid that was only a C plus. You made me self-conscious.” He chuckled.

In my old age, I believe in small talk as the conduit of civility. I got this from my dad who, though he was a devout Christian, loved to pass the time of day with strangers. The dictates of our faith commanded him to witness to them about Jesus and quote “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” but he didn’t, he talked about the weather and cars and his boyhood on the farm and ordinary things. This was curious to me as a kid, his friendly chatter with sinners. It’s still impressive to me today.

A day in the life of an American man

Being almost eighty, as I am, is a source of constant amazement and I would not trade it for the drudgery of being forty or fifty or the sheer stupidity of my twenties. I am starting to get a grip on things. I love home because I know how the shower works but I’m not attached to material things except two, both electronic. I no longer know who famous people are, especially TV stars and pop singers and contemporary authors, and I’m okay with that. I accept that males have become fringe figures with no particular authority in everyday life.

I was amazed to hear a man shout “Taxi!” the other day just as men used to do in the movies, especially big execs and private eyes. It was in New York, at Broadway and 64th, across from Lincoln Center, about 7 p.m. and the man’s cry was full-volume and the cab hit its brakes and stopped. Men in real life gave up that tone of voice some time ago when we took up cool irony and learned to say, “If you happen to hear me, maybe you could give me a lift,” which is a line that can’t be shouted.

The amazing grace of charismatic Piskies

I’ve been skipping the news about Senator Colon Gas of West Virginia lately and his objections to reducing greenhouse gases and I’ve been focused on the pleasures of being an old man, which includes the occasional steak-and-eggs breakfast. An old man must choose his vices carefully and I gave up smoking and drinking when the thrill was gone but if I were offered a Last Meal the night before I swing from the gallows, steak and eggs would be it and possibly (why not?) a glass of Pinot Noir, robust but subtle, moderate tannins, floral aroma, notes of cherry and plum with a slight rhubarb accent, otherwise a bottle of Grain Belt.

I am 79, and this year is a fine year and I’m not just whistling past the graveyard. I feel loose and free and jazzy and Sunday morning in church I fell apart, which is unusual for an old stoic, but the choir sang, “We shall walk through the valley in peace. We shall meet our loved ones there.” And then a jazzy “Amazing Grace” with Hammond organ, and at the end, our sins forgiven, we sang “I Am the Bread of Life” with Anglicans raising their arms up high like Pentecostals on the chorus (“And I shall raise them up”) and I got completely choked up and couldn’t sing, then “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and people clapping to it like Baptists. I come from fundamentalists who avoided rhythmic singing lest it lead to dancing but there was Mother Julie dancing like a cheerleader in the aisle, and I walked home, a pile of emotional rubble.

How long, o Lord, how long? Just asking

I am still processing the news that a pig’s kidney was successfully attached to a human and that an animal whose bacon Americans have been using to kill themselves may now be an instrument of healing. Pigs have provided heart valves for people and now kidneys are a possibility and who knows? Maybe knees and hearts and brain tissue.

Donor pigs, of course, would need to be treated with deference. An animal who saves your life you don’t keep in a pigpen and feed slop out of a trough. Donor pigs would live in comfortable condos with clean mud baths and be served individual meals on plates and would be transported aboard buses, not in livestock trucks. This goes without saying. A pig whose kidney might wind up in your body, you wouldn’t feed it on garbage.

Got the autumn blues, put on my walking shoes

 I love October and I hate to see it pass so quickly. My love and I ate dinner outdoors last Friday and it felt like the Last Time and as an old man I find Lasts rather painful. I rode the Amtrak into New York from Boston, with that delicious flight in Queens as the train descends toward the tunnel to Manhattan and we’re skimming the housetops like Clark Kent in pursuit of evil gangsters, and I thought, “When will I get to do this again?” and it pained me.

It pains me to see the wave of puritanism in the arts, arts organizations competing to see who can write the most militant mission statements declaring their dedication to Equality and Inclusivity and Anti-Elitism, which tells me clearly that the end is near. Art is elitist because some people are better singers than almost anyone else and some plays astonish and others only fill the time, and if equality is now the goal, then where do we go to experience the extraordinary? Art then becomes ideology, and for astonishment we must wait for the next blizzard or thunderstorm. A Manhattan thunderstorm is worth waiting for, but still.

Don’t know what’s wrong, but it’s okay

I am enjoying being an old man and I wonder why I didn’t get here sooner. There are benefits to being 79 that I would’ve appreciated in my late thirties. I look at the stories on the front page of the paper and I think, “Not My Problem” and the latest NMP is the shortage of goods due to shipping backlogs, freighters lined up for miles waiting to unload, docks piled high with containers, factory production slowed due to lack of parts coming from China, building projects halted, dire situations, workers idle, confusion, dismay — and here we sit, Madame and I, with the opposite problem, too much stuff, need to give it away.

We have about twenty big dinner plates and twenty small plates and when was the last time we sat eighteen guests down to dinner in this little apartment? Not since Jesus was in the third grade. I have eight suits in my closet: when did I last get dressed up? The number of unread books on our shelves would sink a pontoon boat. And why the whiskey glasses? Nobody in this household drinks whiskey. Neither do our guests, they’re all left-wing liberals and whiskey, in case you didn’t know it, has become politicized and is now reserved for patriots who are out to Stop The Steal. I wish they’d steal our whiskey glasses.

If you love your work, be sure not to finish it

 The life of a writer is a wild adventure you wouldn’t imagine simply by looking at the lonely figure in the black cloak sitting hunched in her/his niche in the cloister, scratching corrections onto the parchment with a feathered quill pen, but it’s true and someone really ought to write about this. At the moment, I am looking at a galley of a new book of mine as sent by a graphic designer named David and I am stunned by the elegance of it, which makes my own words seem almost of classical quality, which makes me want to revise the work to bring it up to the quality of the design, meanwhile my crew of overseers is firing off memos insisting the book be finished by Friday. This is what I’m up against: David’s graphic artistry has shown me how wonderful my work almost is while editors are banging on the door of my cell, threatening to withhold food until I turn the work over to them. It’s ugly.

The book is set in a small town in Minnesota and I feel that a good street fight, an insurrection of farmers versus townsfolk, with a lot of hacking and clubbing and shouting and cursing, would add some interest and maybe also a good gas explosion. I’ve written many novels and never put a major explosion in one and it’s appealing to me now, the chance to have people I dislike file into a building and then blow it up. Terrorists do this all the time, so why not novelists?

A few beams of light on our current situation

“Goodness gracious” was about as close as my mother came to actual profanity, that and “Oh fudge,” and now that our daily life is showered with profanity and obscenity, it is no more shocking than dog barks, whereas the words “Goodness gracious” still have (for me) a bite to them, and I can feel my mother’s dismay, which now I feel, hearing about the tidal wave of political narcissism opposed to the idea of social responsibility — Senator Graham was booed and harassed the other day by constituents when he suggested they consider getting vaccinated against COVID — people who deny that the state has a right to mandate vaccination or mask-wearing as a public health measure or enforce speed limits or restrain the sale of weapons meant for combat or the responsibility of parents to send their kids to school, and weird ideas that are being preached from pulpits by ministers who don’t realize that their own people are dying of COVID and in marginal states the plague may be delivering the 2022 elections to us socialists. To raging narcissism, I say, “Oh fudge.”

Lonely guy seeks old café and three buddies

I am an orphan, which is not so unusual for a man of 79, and like everyone else I know, I work out of my own home and at the moment I’m sitting at the kitchen table with a bowl of Cheerios beside the laptop and a cup of coffee (black). I have no office anymore. I’ve had offices, not cubicles but offices with doors and a window, sometimes a credenza, since I was 22 years old. I miss them.

If someone opens a Museum of the American Office, I volunteer to be a docent and I’ll show them around the office of fifty years ago with the mimeograph machine, the manual typewriter, and the big telephone with the long curly cord that went into the wall. There was no copier, we used carbon paper. Someone knocked on the door and I hid my copy of Portnoy’s Complaint in the top drawer and a woman poked her head in and said, “The meeting is about to begin.”

That’s what I miss, the meeting. They were like little morality plays, in which people assumed allegorical roles, Dreamers, Realists, Satirists and Strategists, and the outcome was usually to maintain inertia but they were entertaining. I was a satirist in my early years and then suddenly I became the boss and I was surrounded by realists, and at the end of my office career, I became a dreamer and the two women employees listened and took turns being the assassin who points out the deadly reality so not much happened but I was okay with that. The pleasure was in the meeting itself.

On Tuesday it all came down at once

The world is turning wondrous again, maples and ash and goldenrod turning golden Van Gogh colors and I got into a weepy mood on Tuesday, which is unusual for me, a man with dry eyes, but I was overwhelmed by everything happening at once, thinking of an old friend and sweet singer who’d died, and on Tuesday a reunion of my Anoka high school class (1960), feeling kinship to old rivals and antagonists but now we’re all in the same boat, a sinking ship. The names of some of our dead were mentioned, including Henry Hill Jr., a star athlete and a good guy who enlisted in the Army and made first lieutenant and was killed in action in Quang Ngai province in 1968, leading his unit of the 11th Light Infantry Brigade of the Americal Division.

The woman who spoke of Henry remembered a few lines of a song I wrote about him, “His picture’s on the piano in a silver frame and his family weeps if you speak his name. In ’68 he went off to the war and now he’s forever 24.”