The road to contentment is sitting right here

An old pal is locked up with COVID this week and another pal is dealing with QAnon relatives who think liberals are vampires and another pal is suffering anxiety about having ringworm infestation, which his doctor says he does not have but he lies awake at night worrying and has been put on antianxiety medication, which doesn’t help all that much.

I’ve never suffered from anxiety, I don’t know any QAnon people and I don’t have COVID, so I am going to skip complaining today. I’m old and out of touch, and, as the old gospel song says, “This world is not my home, I’m only passing through” so what is the point of complaining, it’d be like going to Vladivostok and asking people to please speak English, or going to church and when the usher comes by with the collection plate, putting in a twenty and asking for a whiskey sour. Wrong time, wrong place.

I am a lucky man and these are wonderful times and we are all fortunate to be living now, in September of 2021, and of course there is poverty and disease and suffering and ignorance and cruelty and crabby people and inferior food and lousy service and poor Wi-Fi and unruly children and robocalls trying to sell you aluminum siding and this cursed printer that says there’s a paper jam though there is not, but there are beautiful advantages that our elders didn’t enjoy, and let me be grateful for the anti-seizure medication and blood thinner that keep me chugging along and YouTube, which has just now, for my benefit, played Don and Phil Everly singing “Let It Be Me,” and all it took was googling a few words and there it is, tender brotherly harmony.

A fresh start is a beautiful thing

Kathy Hochul took over as governor of New York on Tuesday and so far as I can see nobody said a single bad thing about her all week. In fact, the advance press was entirely favorable, about her extensive experience in local government, her good work habits, her love of getting out and meeting constituents and hearing their complaints. And, it must be added, nobody complained that she had laid a hand on them in a way that made them uncomfortable. It was extraordinary, a politician nobody is furious at. This is big news, people.

She’s from upstate and so to New York City residents, she is a complete mystery, as a Martian would be or a Mennonite, and this seems like a chance for everyone to get a fresh start and focus on the environment, health care, education, public safety, rather than the inappropriateness of commenting on a woman’s outfit. For years Governor Hochul served as an anonymous lieutenant governor to a man who hogged the stage, sang, danced, conducted the band, a man for whom public attention was oxygen. And then in short order he became a man whom people were thoroughly tired of reading about, or reading about anything that sounded like him, such as glaucoma, homogeneity, or combovers. When she took over, it was a huge relief.

September, the finest month, is on its way

We got good weather in August, good for a city guy with no lawn, and then a typhoon came to town and a torrent fell last Saturday during a star-studded concert in Central Park where my wife sent me a video of Barry Manilow on stage, whose facelift had destroyed his voice, singing his brains out as lightning flashed to the south which shut down the show, but now the rain has ended and the world feels like September with the smell of apples and possibility in the air and I feel young and indomitable, crossing the street in front of eight beefcakes on Harleys and I feel like saying, “Which one of you cream puffs wants to take on a retired radio announcer?”

We’ve been living small for two years now and the simple pandemic life has been good for us. We switched from Perrier to New York tap water and when we want bubbles, we blow through a straw. We’re done with loud restaurants and the social whirl. I gave my fancy clothes to the Salvation Army and now I’m seeing homeless men in Armani tuxes. But now I need a break and I’m thinking we should rent a house on the coast and do what Emerson said, “Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air …” Forget about memory loss and do some serious self-care. But do I dare suggest this to the boss?

The world is not my home but here I am

My favorite word today is “unsubscribe” and I’ve been online clicking it on dozens of emails asking for my cash contributions to their battle in behalf of the good, the true, and the beautiful, which one wants to support, but once you do, your name is transmitted to other righteous causes and now I’m getting appeals from folks running for city council in Omaha and a group petitioning Congress to outlaw the internal combustion engine, the chance of which is less than slight, so I unsubscribe and instead I gave to a soup kitchen raising money for school supplies for indigent kids: how could I say no? A nice red book bag, notebooks, pencils, a sharpener, a ruler, the same stuff I treasured when I started school.

I loved school. I come from fundamentalist people and every year they asked that I be excused from square-dancing in gym class so that I would not be tempted by carnal pleasure, but still they didn’t object to my reading secular literature such as Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. They were gentle people, not like the bearded men with machine guns riding through the streets of Kabul, or the American mujahideen sacking the Capitol in January or Mr. Roseberry in his black pickup parked in front of the Library of Congress Thursday, claiming to have explosives enough to destroy whole city blocks. Finally he had to pee and he surrendered.

A suddenly older man scans life’s romance

I turned 79 a week ago and I’m quite satisfied with the promotion. I celebrated with lunch with five friends at an outdoor restaurant under a canopy on a perfect summer afternoon and in memory of my frugal parents I ordered the most expensive wines, and the Lord, who prepares a table in the presence of my enemies, prepared an even better one for my friends, and we feasted ourselves silly. My wife was away, tending to the settlement of the estate of a crazy bachelor uncle, and texted me, “I miss you too much,” a very nice touch. I can’t remember a better birthday.

The best gift I got was the word “disarray,” spoken on the phone by a niece in L.A. Somehow I had misplaced that word in favor of “chaos,” “mess,” “clutter,” “shambles,” but “disarray” is so elegant, it sounds French, like the name Desirée, an improvement over “clutter,” which makes confusion sound trashy. My niece agreed. “It’s what I do,” she said, “I bring glamor to confusion.”

At the age of 79, Less is More. Had someone given me a book, nicely wrapped, it would’ve been a burden, but the word “disarray” was perfect. It implies that once we were in array and soon will be again, as soon as the problem is solved. I was in disarray myself, having forgotten to wear a hearing aid, so I didn’t understand most of what was said and had to pantomime comprehension, which I am good at, having been an English major and sat through lectures about books I hadn’t read. The gentleman on my left, however, was a Lutheran minister — and still is, so far as I know — and he spoke loud and clear, so I was not without company. He is a Dane and in Denmark the Lutheran church has debated whether belief in a Supreme Being should be required for ordination. Richard Dawkins argued against God’s existence, saying that omniscience and omnipotence are contradictory. I believe God will clear this up when we meet Him, meanwhile we live with disarray and pray for forgiveness. In my remaining years, I hope to forgive myself. I feel I’m making progress.

Though interrupted, the writer persists in pleasure

The word from back home is that the sweet corn is not as good as hoped for due to the lack of rain at crucial junctures but I’m guessing the truth is that we expect too much of sweet corn, those of us who grew up with big gardens expect it to be redemptive whereas it is only a grain trying to be a vegetable. My father was a postal worker, a federal employee, not easily moved to rapture, but our sweet corn, which was 30 seconds from stalk to boiling pot, husked en route, made him very happy.

This was why God created suburbs, for the gardening, so that good country people with high standards wouldn’t suffer the indignity of packaged vegetables. My dad would’ve happily planted sweet corn right up to the foundation of the house, no need for grass (we had no cows), but Mother was a city girl so we kept a yard. Dad never bragged about his children but he was proud of his corn: it was the best in the neighborhood. And now, the garden suburb where I grew up is tending toward cellblocks of condos, the very prison life my father sought to escape. Standards are falling all around.

A somewhat interesting column but far from his best

St. Paul put on an excellent parade Sunday for Suni Lee, the 18-year-old Olympic gold-medal gymnast and hometown girl, a practically impromptu but very intense parade, which is no easy thing with no mainstream press around these days and everybody getting their news hither and yon and gun lunatics around who might put your picture on the front page, but thousands of skinny girls turned out along the route and the entire Hmong community, and a good crowd attracts a bigger crowd, and it was very festive. The fact that the mayor was there was of slight importance. Mayors do not draw crowds anymore, if they ever did, they try to follow them.

Suni Lee won all-around gold with stunning impossible routines on the vault, uneven bars, balance beam, and floor exercise, and the fact she is one of us is hard to believe. We Minnesotans are built for stability — agility, not so much. Girls’ basketball and hockey are big, kids with German and Scandinavian surnames knocking each other around. And our culture aims the young toward a B-plus, slightly above average. We hope to be good enough and not that bad. Perfection is not talked about, lest the bar be set too high and someone miss a beat and end up discouraged and disconsolate and fall to pieces.

Eighty in sight, the life force still with us

I was on the phone with a woman from the bank who was helping me fill out a form online with my name, date of birth, SS number, email address, etc., and each time I wrote something down, she said, “Perfect,” as if I were doing a balance beam exercise. Being on the verge of 80 as I am, a day away from 79, I’m used to being kindergartened by the young. I went to a physical therapist once who said, “Wonderful” when I stood with my eyes closed and didn’t fall over. The message was clear: you’re a burned-out wreck and it’s amazing you’re still mobile. Next stop: Happy Acres.

The biblical allotment is seventy and after that you’re on the down escalator, a drain on the economy, a waste of space, you have little stake in the future and are voting for the past, you’re slowing down and becoming an obstruction. So the young are hinting it’s time to take the long walk across the ice fields and disappear.

Thank you but I would rather not, and anyway the ice fields are melting into enormous swamps and I’d return and track mud into the house.

The good fortune of not finishing first

The fastest man in the world is now Lamont Marcell Jacobs of Italy who ran the 100-meter dash in Tokyo in 9.80 seconds, and bravo for him, but when you peak at 26 you face a long descent into normality. You run that fast and you miss a lot such as the woman I saw as I strolled in the park the other day who said into her telephone, “I was not put on this earth in order to make him happy,” which made me happy to hear, a woman who’d gotten a clearer sense of mission. You find happiness by slowing down. At my age, you know that.

A few minutes later I saw an old man, younger than I, take a spill on his bike and hit the asphalt and was immediately surrounded by strangers asking if he was okay or did he need help. He sat, dazed, holding his right wrist gingerly, and then pulled out his phone and said, “I’m going to call my wife.” Two stories within a hundred meters of each other and Lamont would’ve missed both of them.

You give up the idea of speed at my age because you are slowed down by regret and anxiety and also by dealing with Social Security, whose initials are the same as Hitler’s Schutzstaffel, which is no mere coincidence. If you dial the SS number and get into the arms of their computer, you may feel you’ve been taken into a deep bunker and your wrists are bound to the chair and a 1,000-watt lamp is shining in your face. I called a few days ago to try to replace a lost Medicare card and I spoke my SS number to the computer, which could not understand me though I am a native speaker employed as a radio announcer for many years. “Let’s try again,” it kept saying in a voice like Orson Welles’s and after many tries I was shouting the digits, then screeching them, until Welles said, “Let me find someone who can help you.”

Smoke on the horizon, all’s well at home

I saw a young woman lying stark naked in Central Park the other day and of course didn’t stare but noticed an older man, fully dressed, sitting near her so I figured he was with her and if she needed me she could’ve yelled, which she did not. Where there are people, you’ll find surprises, and sometimes you’ll see solo dancers or a man juggling flaming torches and now a naked woman. I am more moved by the sight of young parents, sometimes they seem detached from each other, one irked and the other anxious. Two brave venturers and it hurts to see them unhappy.

You never get over parenthood, it simply never ends. I was 70 when my mother died and she still worried about whether the stories I told on the radio were true. I went into the comedy line of work because my mom loved comedians and I wanted to please her but still she worried. I have friends whose grandchildren keep them awake at night, friends who gave up religion long ago but who still believe in prayer because what else is there? Your beloved granddaughter has schizophrenia and you, a former atheist, switch to agnosticism so you can say, “Dear God, please look down on Angelina who is living in a bad dream and show her Your love.”