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
The temperature dropped a little this week, from the 80s into the 70s, a relief for us elderly who go back before global warming. I like winter and we used to get a touch of it in late September, a few snowflakes, a little frost on the windows. Winter is a beautiful time of quietude and reflection. Weathermen talk about Minnesota being “hit” by a snowstorm but snow doesn’t hit, it falls gently to the ground and lies there until plowed or shoveled.
I was around before lightweight thermal wear was developed and I walked to school through waist-high drifts knowing that if coyotes caught me and took me to their den and devoured me, the world would get along just fine in my absence, and so I was alert to coyote sounds and didn’t dally and felt great relief when I walked into Benson School.
Read MoreThe priest at church Sunday morning said, clear as a bell, “Do not be afraid. Receive the news with joy.” He was not referring to the Sunday Times, I believe, though I hadn’t read it and was feeling pretty good on a summery Sunday in September having been to hear a Schumann piano quintet the night before played by the Callisto Quartet and Philip Edward Fisher that really rocked out, it was what “Great Balls of Fire” could’ve been if Jerry Lee Lewis had been to Juilliard and studied composition.
I didn’t want to go to the concert but my wife said, “Great music is good for the soul,” so I went and she is right. Schumann suffered terribly back in the early 19th with seven kids to support and Brahms to compete with and he went mad and died young, but here is this great work that, played by brilliant young talents, can shake your nerves and rattle your brain in good ways, even if you’re old like me.
Read MoreI got a call Thursday from a Lutheran pastor in Iowa saying she was running for Congress and would I contribute money to her campaign and we talked for a little while. I was busy working on a book and could’ve said so but there was something unusual about her — her voice wasn’t loud, it didn’t grind, she didn’t talk in paragraphs, she talked in sentences and then she stopped and let me talk.
I told her that the news has been making me dizzy for months and now the lucrative deals between the Arab emirates and the Witkoff and Trump families and the FCC threat to cancel the licenses of networks that broadcast criticism of the Administration is taking us into a shadowy land of unreality that should arouse outrage but has become commonplace. But I was impressed that this soft-spoken woman was entering the fray. I’ve poked fun at Lutherans for years and they enjoyed it. They are hopeful people who look around and see the goodness of life.
Read MoreI don’t keep track of my stock portfolio for the simple reason I am utterly ignorant, having skipped Econ in college — too boring — so in the world of finance I am a mountain climber with no lantern or map and I hear woofing up ahead and hope to find a hut and a hermit who will offer me lodging. To me, it makes as much sense as Friday night bingo at Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy except not as sociable.
It does seem though that even with the national deficit rising and unemployment too and consumer pessimism and nobody has any idea where our Leader’s mood on tariffs is heading, Wall Street sees a candle in the window and is following the rainbow. The investment bank sends me a summary on the first of the month, and it keeps climbing and climbing, even with me without a map.
Read MoreI feel a little sad and sort of disenfranchised in September heading for October and for the fourth year in a row having missed the Minnesota State Fair and not eaten Pronto Pups or cheese curds or hot buttered corn on the cob. I am a Minnesotan, though I live in New York, and as such am sensible, wary of excess, and the Fair is our annual Feast Of Things You’ve Been Warned Against. We go see the livestock barns, the various gaudy breeds of poultry, bins of grains and vegetables in the Horticulture Building, watch the horse judging, but while walking the grounds we pick up our favorite forbidden foods, all of them portable. Walking gives us privacy and also aids in digestion. There is now a Fair Food app that will guide you to a Frozen Mango Tango or S’mores or Bison Meatballs. You take a break on the Ferris wheel and a carousel to settle the contents in your gut and then top off the day with a dish of Hawaiian Sunrise shaved ice and take yourself home to repent with a double Alka-Seltzer.
This is an extravagant exercise in the unwise that can plant your feet back on the straight and narrow just as releasing a bombshell of profanity can cleanse the heart of anger or listening to three Rolling Stones albums in a row can make you grateful to be elderly and leading a peaceable life.
Read MoreI went to Santa Fe to see some friends last week and it dawned on me that I’m a Northern guy with a keen sense of my insignificance who aims to be inconspicuous and that many Northerners go to Santa Fe to be picturesque. I saw grown men dressed up as desperadoes, wearing sombreros, black shirts with silver buttons, gaudy cowboy boots. I left that look behind when I turned twelve, the age at which you start to realize that work and competence are what give you your identity, not your outfit.
God designed Minnesota so we wouldn’t be distracted by mountains and could concentrate on getting the work done, cultivating the corn, picking potatoes. You don’t wear reds, yellows, and oranges, it would only attract blackbirds.
Read MoreYou’re reading a column by a guy of 83 for one reason and that’s to hear him tell you: Life is good. Boomer columnists are full of dread, millennials are discouraged, Xers are depressed, and Gen Z is downhearted, but I am old enough to see the advance of progress.
Yes, there’s pain, guilt, a sense of meaninglessness — welcome to the club — but we also have Thai takeout in little white paper containers, and same-day delivery has come to seem ordinary. There are more toothpaste options now than ever. More fragrances of soap.
Read MoreLife is an adventure, never ending; just when you think you’re on an even keel, the ground comes up to meet you. After church on Sunday I walked into the kitchen and slipped and fell and whacked my head hard into the corner of a wooden shelf over the table and felt blood on my forehead and went to find Jenny who was reading outdoors and she cried, “Oh my god,” and I said, “No, I’m only your husband.”
“Go to the bathroom!” she cried.
“Here? But I don’t need to.”
“Can you sit on the toilet?”
“I’ve done it thousands of times.”
I am an old man and quite aware of my earthly sojourn heading for Trail’s End, and me with much left to accomplish such as resume regular exercise and write a great American novel and set a new pole vault record for men over 80, but meanwhile I spend so much time searching for my glasses, my keys, my billfold, my cellphone, I probably could’ve written two or three great novels but then I wonder, “Does America really need another great novel?” Probably A.I. is taking over the field of fiction and soon we’ll see novels generated by ChatGPT such as The Great Moby-Dick in which Jay Gatsby sets out to impress Daisy Buchanan by water-skiing past her mansion on Long Island and is swallowed by the whale, or Grapes of War and Peace in which Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, disillusioned with capitalism, joins Ma Joad’s family on the road and is separated from Natasha who leads the Russian army against Napoleon and marries the wealthy Pierre, Andrei having fallen sick in the harsh winter, but is nursed back to health by Rose of Sharon.
A.I. would enable readers to get multiple novels for the price of one, such as Wuthering Eyre of Gulliver’s Expectations or Beloved Lolita on the Brave New Road, merging the best elements of each novel into a superior amalgamated mélange and save readers an enormous amount of time during which they could take up a program of regular exercise.
Read MoreMy shirts come from the cleaners starched and pressed, nicely folded and buttoned, every button, and I look at them and think, “Technical wizardry has not yet developed a machine that will properly button shirts, not breaking the buttons, so who does this labor? Children? There are child labor laws. No, someone does it who was accustomed to something much worse such as persecution, semi-starvation, life in a shanty with primitive sanitation, that’s who.”
So where do we come up with this rage against undocumented immigrants? For someone from parts of Africa or Asia, this work would be a godsend. Where do we get off sending armed masked men to round them up like cattle? They’re people who do difficult necessary work. Until we switch to tunics, so long as there are bankers and other stuffed shirts, this is a decent job.
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