Thoughts from the back row of the memorial

I learned a new word last week: “anonymized.” It means just what it says, “made anonymous,” and was used in reference to government reports obtained by the Washington Post that contained truthful revelations about our 18-year war in Afghanistan that the government was lying to the American people about while spending a trillion dollars to achieve something that nobody in the Pentagon could quite define.

My uncles, may they rest in peace, would not have been surprised by the Post’s story. Their regard for generals was low, based on their own military service, and their opinion of politicians lower: they associated high office with adultery, alcohol, and bribery, end of discussion.  

So much one can live without and should

I keep unsubscribing from junk mail and it seems that the simple act of unsubscribing opens the sluiceway to even more junk. I get offers to pay cash for my current home, to consolidate my debt, to save up to 50% on things I don’t want, to get a credit card for people with bad credit, a hair implant, introduce me to other lonely people, and so forth.

So I keep clicking and praise God for the Delete key, the invention of which ranks with Gutenberg’s movable type in the annals of human progress, not so much for eliminating junk mail as for eliminating one’s own dim-witted writing. Back in the typewriter age we had erasers and liquid white-out and so-called “Lift-Off Tape” or correctable ribbon, which was okay for fixing a misspelled word, but Delete enables you to remove whole pages of pretentious garbage from your writing such as the passage about the privilege of washing blackboards in Mrs. Moehlenbrock’s fourth-grade classroom at Benson School, which I just deleted here and unless I click on “Undo delete” which I will not do, you need never read it.

The old man’s Sunday sermon to himself

Probably the greenhouse gas report of the U.N. Environment Program shouldn’t have come out the week of Thanksgiving, a time when gassy emissions are quite heavy in the U.S. and people are likely to use the newspaper for guests to park their snowy boots on, but there it was and the picture is bleak, perhaps dire. The planet is heating up at a rate faster than scientists had ever expected, the U.S. is turning our back on the issue, and most people are dozing comfortably through it all. The press leaps when the White House tweets but it doesn’t know how to cover the major crisis of our time, the slow demise of Earth itself.

What we did Friday night, if you want to know

I didn’t mention 1963 though the day is clear in my mind. I was 21, walking across the University of Minnesota campus, and a man ran by saying something weird about the president, and I went in the back door of Eddy Hall where KUOM had an AP teletype and there it was, clattering away, typing bulletins in incomplete sentences. He was dead in Dallas.

Lighten up, people, it’s Thanksgiving for God’s sake

It worries me that I’m using GPS to guide me around Minneapolis, a city I’ve known since I was a boy on a bicycle, and also that I text my wife from the next room, and when I get up in the morning Siri sometimes asks me, “What’s the matter? You seem a little down. Would you like to hear the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3?” And I say, Leave me alone, I just want to think, and she and I wind up having a conversation about delayed gratification.

Too much technology in my life. I used to go to Al’s Breakfast Nook and now I go on Facebook. Thanks to social media, my handwriting has become illegible. It took me half an hour to decipher a note I left on the kitchen counter that said, “Why am I here? What’s the purpose of it all? Who needs me?”

What I’m planning to do this winter maybe

It turned cold and gray in Minnesota last week and snow fell, which some people talk about as being depressing, but it’s not, it’s reassuring. The talk is ritual complaint, an attempt by people living comfy lives to acquire the dignity of suffering. Genuine suffering is on its way sooner than you think. One day we’ll be hit by a winter heat wave like the one that melted half of Greenland and then our real troubles will begin. One day I’ll step off a curb and my legs will buckle and strangers will call 911 and I’ll be hauled unconscious to a crowded ER and when I awake, I won’t be able to remember the words to “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide” or “Minnesota, hats off to thee.” It’s out there, waiting to happen. Snow is nothing.

Thoughts while waiting in line for coffee

I walked into a coffee shop Monday morning and stood in line for a cup of coffee, black, while people ahead of me ordered skinny lattes and half-caf cappuccinos and double-doubles and I didn’t mind the long wait — I was brought up to wait — we were a large family, service was slow. Waiting is an opportunity to think. I once stood in a long twisty line at airport security and in the course of shuffling along remembered how violent Pom-Pom-Pullaway was on the Benson School playground in 1950 and how I went in the library to escape being pummeled and fell in love with books and became a writer, all thanks to the lack of adult supervision. Had teachers kept the bullies under control, I might’ve become an anthropologist.

Memories of a citizen of Halloween

Every October it’s my duty to point out that my hometown, Anoka, Minnesota, is known, at least in Anoka, as the Halloween capital of the world, and it puts on big parades and a football game, the Pumpkin Bowl. Even as a child, I felt that a town of 10,000 was overreaching to consider itself an international capital of anything, but I kept my thoughts to myself. It was a big deal, even if people in Russia or China were not aware of it. In 1953, I saw the last living Civil War veteran, Albert Woolson, ride in the parade, and one year Hubert Humphrey came. Our high school drum major Dickie Johnson was the proudest, struttingest, highest-baton-thrusting drum major you ever saw. When you saw him coming down Main Street, you imagined that Pope Pius, the Queen of England, Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe might be coming along behind.

Where have you gone, Dave Barry, and why?

I miss the old days when newspapers used to publish humor columns, like Dave Barry’s — why did he go away? In Dave’s column, you learned things the New York Times didn’t print, stuff about exploding badgers or a man with a blade of grass growing out of his ear, or a story about the amount of methane created annually by dairy cows.  

Dave pointed out the fact that men will never ask for directions and that this is a biological fact, which is why it takes several million sperm to find one female egg even though, compared to them, it is the size of Wisconsin. I laughed so hard at that, I almost coughed up a hairball.

The days pass, and now and then one stands out

My father, John, would’ve been 106 years old on Columbus Day and though Columbus has been taken down a few notches, my dad is still on a pedestal. He left us at the age of 88. He’d been through some miserable medical procedures and said, “No more,” and went home to his eternal destination.