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 paid a visit to new parents last week, their first child, a 90-day-old girl, and it brought back memories of my own fatherhood — ignorance, dread, fear of dropping the child or over-swaddling it and cutting off oxygen to the brain and leading to drug abuse and years of treatment — but what astonished me was the calm of these parents, their confident pleasure, their mastery of the situation.
These two had studied up for this. They used terms like “cognitive stimulation” and “maximization of proactive engagement.” They kept a chart recording her versatility skills — vocal intensity, 2.4, and analysis/synthesis, 1.3 — intent on giving the infant the best possible start in life and nurture her individuality while also preparing her for the collectivist constellations of the high-tech life ahead. Back in my fathering years, I just hoped not to burp my baby too hard and cause disorganized thinking.
Read MoreMy neurologist says I have multifocal cerebral infarcts primarily cortically based and a narrowing of the left palpebral fissure, and yet I clearly recall the screech and rumble of the big yellow streetcars along Bloomington Avenue in Minneapolis in 1947, the jingle of coins dropping into the farebox, the clang of the conductor’s dishpan bell as the motorman swung the big wooden handle and the streetcar rolled down the street toward downtown. I was five years old. I remember standing up on Sunday morning and reciting my Bible verse in front of forty people. And I remember the coins in my fist that I stole from Mother’s change jar in the kitchen and walked down the alley between the rows of little white garages to 38th Street to the luncheonette.
A man held the door open for me and I said, “Thank you very much.” I had eighteen aunts and so I had very good manners. I climbed up on a stool at the counter, and the cook said, “What do you want?” and I said, “A cheeseburger with ketchup.” I put my 50 cents down on the counter. I heard a man a few stools away say “Goddamn it to hell,” which I’d never heard before in my life. The cook was smoking a cigarette, and the smell of tobacco smoke was new to me as well. He set the burger down on a white plate and I said, “But I wanted cheese.” And then I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Dad. He pushed the plate away and led me out the door. I said, “But I paid for it!”
Read MoreThe Delta jet landed at Minneapolis-St. Paul so lightly that it didn’t disturb my handwriting on a postcard — I wrote “I am coming to reacquaint” and the wheels touched down between the c and the q, no squish or squiggle. On the way out I saw the captain, slim, tall, neatly pressed, the picture of cool competence, and I said, “Beautiful landing” and he said, “Thank you, Mr. Keillor.” I love coming back to Minnesota where I was a local celebrity for a few years and where people still know me.
I never intended to be a celeb, I intended to be an important writer but I had a wife and child and needed to earn a living. So I did a radio show for forty years, not realizing what a beautiful thing it is to have people walk up smiling and say, “I know you!” and the doorman in the homburg at the Hotel St. Paul who asks how I’ve been and really means it or the woman in the lobby who walks up and says, “Would you mind if I give you a big hug?” and does.
Read MoreI grew up among Christian people in the Midwest, polite, soft-spoken, avoiding outbursts of anger, we only raged inwardly. We weren’t complainers. We knew we weren’t a great civilization like Greece, but their god Zeus was often violent, a god of thunder and lightning, liable to wreak destruction at any moment. We were gentle, as our God told us to be. We believed in an orderly world.
This all came crashing down last Monday night at JFK when I boarded a Delta flight to Seattle around 5 p.m. I consider JFK to be as close to a prison camp as I care to get. The Delta terminal is vast and crowded and ugly, endless lines at Ticketing, TSA agents whose badge entitles them to freely express hostility and contempt, miles of concourses lined with souvenir shops, the smell of bad food. Naming the airport for our late lamented president did him no service.
Read MoreIt’s a beautiful summer where I am, hiking on Sunday with my beloved through Central Park among people walking their dogs, pushing strollers, apartment kids feeling their oats, and the separate dog playgrounds, one for lapdogs, one for hounds and mastiffs. A man selling fresh fruit under a big red umbrella. Bikes skimming along on the bike lanes, runners jogging or loping or shuffling along, and we emerge from the park at 72nd and head down Columbus Avenue to an outdoor café and find a table for two in the shade, and look at each other and the perfection of the day is utterly stunning.
The Grand Canyon is on fire and you wonder if the DOGE layoffs didn’t contribute to the extensive destruction, meanwhile the Playboy Prez visits the Guadalupe River valley and insults the grieving by comparing the flash flood to an ocean wave that surfers would hesitate to ride — the man’s inability to express genuine empathy or even imitate it is remarkable — does he not have a wife and children who can instruct him? Meanwhile, the woman I love and I sit eating salads and a baguette, at peace in the hustle and rumble of cityfolk busy enjoying their Sunday.
Read MoreI spent three days at the Mayo Clinic last week and found out that, for a person who doesn’t take care of himself, I’m in rather good shape. No aches or pains, no anxiety, not diabetic nor likely to be, no risk of colon cancer, skin looks good thanks to my dread of sunlight, heart sounds good, plenty of hemoglobin, and I have a lower percentage of body fat than two-thirds of men my age, and I probably shouldn’t brag about my prostate but I’m told it is soft and youthful. What more could one ask.
I was a devoted two-pack-a-day smoker for two decades, a dedicated drinker, thinking it obligatory for a serious writer, and I avoided physical exercise whenever possible. In a rare act of sheer will, I cut out tobacco and alcohol, and now, through no fault of my own, I feel limber and light and, for an old evangelical brought up on the flavor of brimstone, remarkably lighthearted.
Read MorePeople are always asking me if I know Bob Dylan, seeing as we’re the same age and both of us were at the University of Minnesota at the same time, and I’ve always said no, not wanting to get into the whole complicated story or claim any credit for his career. Dylan is a hard-working guy who deserves his entire $500 million fortune and the fact he never gave me credit for his name and never paid me back the ten bucks I gave him in 1960 at Al’s Breakfast diner is neither here nor there. He was sitting next to me, guitar on his back, eating two eggs over easy on hash browns with three strips of bacon and he said, “Hey, man, you got a ten on you? I left my billfold in my car and my girlfriend Elaine borrowed it to go pick up my suit at the cleaners. Soon as she returns, I’ll pay you back.
He looked like a nice clean-cut guy, pinstripe shirt with a turquoise bolo tie, blue Bermuda shorts, maybe too much Wildroot hair cream but what caught my eye was the Roy Rogers tablet he was writing on.
Read MoreI am an Episcopalian, an American citizen with a college degree, a published author, I have a great many more important concerns than trying to navigate the Delta Air Lines website to purchase a flight to MSP but I have now wasted an hour and a half and worked myself into a crimson rage trying to delete two expired credit cards from the site and put in a new one, and luckily for me I’m a liberal Democrat so I don’t own a gun, otherwise this laptop would be full of holes and cops in camo would be pounding on my door.
I see no reason Delta should treat me this way. I’m not an undocumented criminal migrant from Venezuela or a member of an Iranian sleeper cell — yes, I did dodge the draft but that was in 1971 — yes, I think the current Prez is a mafioso and his remodeled Oval Office looks like a bingo parlor and his use of capital letters reveals a Numbskull Education — and yes, I’m 83, an émigré from the age of the typewriter and the corded telephone — but my money is as good as anyone else’s and here I am grinding my teeth and cursing (dang it!) despite my evangelical upbringing, when a small hand reaches over my shoulder and finds a Delta app and fixes the problem — my wife, a graduate of a music school, a classical violinist — since when did Tchaikovsky become a prerequisite for buying a plane ticket?
Read MoreI look out our back door onto the rooftops of Manhattan’s Upper West Side and try to imagine it back in 1776 when Broad Way was a dirt road among truck farms, far from City Hall where the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed aloud on July 9. A small crowd of patriots stood listening to it being read, but most of the 20,000 city residents found other things to occupy themselves, including the farmers up our way. Their crops were in, there was cultivating to be done and livestock to tend, and revolution was not a priority.
They may have agreed about the unalienable rights but overthrowing the government was another matter. When the schoolteacher Nathan Hale went spying for George Washington on Long Island that September and was caught by the British and taken to the gallows and declaimed, “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country,” he didn’t speak for many. Most people preferred to use their one and only life to earn money, go dancing, fall in love, strip naked, and beget descendants. They mostly succeeded.
Read MoreI skipped the New York City primary last week because I assumed Cuomo had it in the bag with $30 million and a famous last name but no, the 33-year-old Muslim democratic socialist and his thousands of volunteers and his bold ideas and big smile captured the flag and everyone had to sit down and think again. This is the beauty of democracy, it’s an art and not a science, and sometimes it speaks clearly.
The cost of living is turning the city into a retirement home for the well-to-do with forests of skinny skyscrapers for billionaires and the folks who teach the kids and care for the sick and clean the streets and cook the meals can’t afford to live here and Zohran Mamdani promised rent controls, free child care, free buses, government-run groceries, and affordable housing, and to pay for it all by taxing the rich. Not taxing their pants off but taxing their jewelry and designer underwear.
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