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A night at the opera, my dear

We went to see Richard Strauss’s “Salome” at the Metropolitan Opera Wednesday night, or let’s say that my love went and I went with her, she because she loves opera and I because I don’t know enough about opera to be critical, I like everything just fine. But this opera was different. Men do not come off well in “Salome,” you’ve got King Herod for one thing and Salome’s dad who is weird and scenes with lewd men and little girls that make you not want to read the subtitles. There are men wearing ram’s heads and John the Baptist chained in the dungeon and more mental illness than in most operas but it’s in German. The music has its dissonant edges but it’s gorgeous, played by the 100-piece Met orchestra. So you have weirdness and insanity set to beautiful music, Salome wandering around singing “I want to kiss his lips” after the prophet’s head has been chopped off. There’s no intermission so it’s hard to leave early.

I went to see it, in part, because my friend Ellie Dehn was covering the role of Salome in this production. “Covering” means that she learned an extremely difficult role with a lot of crazy acting and was no more than 15 minutes from the Met before each performance and was focused and ready so that if the star soprano got out of a cab and was run down by a pizza delivery guy on a bike, Ellie would rush in, put on the white gown, and do the show, hit the high notes, be insane, do the Dance of the Seven Veils, so that nobody would feel cheated. It’s an impossible job, to be up for a heroic performance, knowing that the odds of your doing it are slim to none, but the roles have to be covered. Baseball postpones, parades cancel, opera doesn’t.

Sweet corn is ahead, life resumes

I buy my groceries at a gigantic market a few blocks away, owned by some billionaire, don’t know which one or his views on Palestine or if he was at the inauguration or how good a seat he got, I just buy his potatoes and 2% and granola, but the other day I was at my doctor’s a mile away and stopped at another market in the chain and it was quite a different scene. My market is on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and the doctor is on the Upper East. The UE is a young neighborhood of mothers with strollers, the UWS is the domain of grandmas with walkers.

The East branch has things I haven’t seen in the West, such as glass jugs of milk from pasture-grazed cows bottled on the farm and eggs from homing pigeons who get at least an hour of vigorous exercise per day. Vegetables grown in non-pesticided soil fertilized by B.S. collected at Ivy League graduate schools.

Sunday afternoon alone in the airport

I’ve often thought that we Midwesterners are the most compliant people on Earth, trusting to the point of accepting insult with a smile, and I thought so again on Sunday when I got the most painful massage of my entire long life. It was at a spa at the airport; I had two hours before my flight, so I signed up for a half hour and lay on a table for sheer bare-knuckle torture. It was deep to the point of being invasive. He may as well have been walking on me with hobnail boots. If I’d had nuclear secrets, I’d have handed them over, the formula for winning lottery numbers, the whereabouts of Amelia Earhart, the origins of the universe, but I lay there not saying a word, not even “Pardon me but could you not attempt to rearrange my bone structure?”

Having been brought up evangelical, I thought maybe this was payment for some transgression but couldn’t think of one except that I’d accidentally taken Jenny’s suitcase instead of my own and so she had to go to a drugstore and buy toothpaste and a toothbrush and borrow clean underwear from her sister. And then the guy bent my right arm back behind my back so hard it made me squeak, and because I need my right arm to sign checks and shake hands, I got off the bed. I did not say, “That was an agonizing massage and I’m going to report you for abuse of the elderly.” I said, “I have to catch my flight.”

A trip to Rochester for examination

I went to Mayo for some tests this week, a clinic that always puts me in a cheerful mood, even at 6:30 a.m. when the 9th floor receptionist said, “Good morning” and really meant it, and a young woman in blue scrubs led me into a dressing room, where I stripped down to socks and shoes, donned two hospital gowns, was led to a little room full of electronic gizmos and wires and screens, lay down on a cushioned examining table, was IVed and oxygenated, by two women in blue and one of them, Lindsay, laid a warm blanket on me and it was very moving. When you’ve spent the night using powerful laxatives to clean out your insides, this gesture of hospitality is meaningful, and before the doctor stepped in, we fell into friendly conversation as if we’d gone to school together, though they were young enough to be my granddaughters. It made me feel the future was bright. And then, running a magic anesthetic through the IV, they made me disappear.

It was a procedure in which tubes with tiny cameras are poked into your body from both ends, but it was not much more dramatic than a haircut, and there was no bad news after, and all was well.

The powerful drumming of graduation

I flew to Duluth Saturday to an enormous hockey arena to watch my tall handsome grandson in his black robe and mortarboard walk forward and accept his college degree and what made the long trip and the boring ceremony more than worthwhile — essential, imperative — was to witness the delight of his girlfriend, Raina, sitting next to me in the high bleachers, her focus on the processional during “Pomp and Circumstance,” her cry of “There he is!” and out came the smartphone for video and as he crossed the stage to get his degree, she whooped and yelled and hopped up and down and so did I.

More important than a college degree is the love of a good woman, and seeing this elegant funny well-spoken willowy woman in the long dress in love with him and he with her — I would’ve gone to Alaska to see it, Auckland, Tuscaloosa, Turkestan.

This is a great country

Fame is fleeting, especially semi-celebratedness is, as I know very well from my own experience, and that is exactly as it should be. The earth spins around the sun, the constellations pass by, tall trees fall in the forest, their trunks chewed by chipmunks, and Johnny Larson, once the emperor of late-night TV, is now a small footnote, Walter Contrite, Dave Caraway, all gone, and in my category of fame, Men of Letters, there is no such thing as true celebrity anymore, no Hemingways, no Frosts or Tennessee Williamses, just Caramel Cream, Cashew Crunch, and Cocoa Delight. I am Vanilla.

Fifty years ago a writer could set out to write about the weekly doings of a small Midwestern town, and so I did, but now you need dragons or vicious criminals or diaphanously clad ladies swanning around as described by artificial intelligence. I am a back issue.

Stating the case as simply as possible

May is here and we only get one a year and a person needs to go outdoors and take a deep breath, walk away from the news, which rubs our faces in the angry arrogant pointless presidency of a bonehead, and walk in the park and observe the delight of kindergarteners leashed together like sled dogs, heading for a grassy lawn to be unleashed and go dashing around, yelling, laughing, New York apartment kids thrilled by freedom of movement, running in circles, playing tag, hiding behind trees. And the tulips are in full color and food trucks are grilling brats and street musicians are strumming and drumming and the world is joyful.

I grew up among solemn fundamentalist men and their dutiful wives, and though Scripture mentions joy they avoided it themselves, but we kids found it by chasing each other, skipping stones on the river, shooting baskets, skating, daredevil bicycling, and in May joy is hard to suppress, especially in the north, you walk down the street with a root beer float and smell new-mown grass and observe girls in summer dresses and hear “I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day” sung to a rhythm track and you realize that delight is a necessity, our sanity depends on it. Whatsoever things are lovely, think on those things, said the apostle Paul and so I put away the paper and go for a walk in the park and look for little kids and there it is. God did not put us here to be insulted and tormented, and live under malign corrupt leadership.

What I do for the sake of love

I board the plane at LaGuardia where everything goes well until I reach TSA and a uniformed woman asks if I have any metal implants in my body and I say that I do. “What do you have?” she asks. I want to say, “German shell fragments from the Battle of Ypres. General Haig sent us across muddy fields directly into point-blank Austrian artillery. A horse collapsed on me and saved my life and I alone am left to tell the tale.” But I say, “Pacemaker” and she directs me to a gentleman who gives me a full-body pat-down the same as if I were being deported to El Salvador, and I am cleared to go to MSP instead.

Delta Air Lines signs along the passage tell me I am soon to get the “Me Time” that I deserve and meet the flight crew that will Feel Like Friends and receive Nourishment for the Soul, but coming from the Midwest I doubt this. An airliner is not a recovery center.

What I go to church for

The Supreme Court is taking up the case of right-wing Christian parents who don’t want their schoolkids to be assigned to read storybooks in which gay persons are portrayed as normal, which reminds me of my childhood when my parents wrote to school asking that, for religious reasons, I be excused from gym class for the unit on dancing. So for two weeks, while other students did square dancing and ballroom in the gym, I sat in study hall and did my lessons.

As I recall, it was no big deal. I didn’t feel odd or set apart or estranged. I snuck off to some school dances and found that dancing to Little Richard, the Coasters, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, was pretty free-form, not the waltz or foxtrot or mambo they taught in gym. I saw no moral wrong in bopping around on the dance floor with a girl. I was 17 and becoming my own person.