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Mr. Socialist confesses a love of opera

Free enterprise is fascinating, especially for us socialist communists who want to make the world into a dormitory with a cafeteria where on Mondays everyone has mac and cheese and on Tuesdays franks and beans, and so forth, but with free enterprise you get to see old empires crash and bold upstarts take over the town, such as Uber and Lyft have done to the taxi trade. I’m a taxi fan, especially in New York, a great old taxi town where sometimes you run into a growly old cabbie right out of the movies who says, “Where to, bud?” and all the way through town he denounces the rich and famous, but nostalgia is no competition against smart technology.

You go on your app and it knows your location and you punch in “Where to” and in less than a minute it tells you that Muhamed will pick you up in three minutes and the charge will be $26.78 and three minutes later Muhamed rolls up. The cost goes to your credit card on file along with your designated tip. Muhamed is from Libya and doesn’t know the city like the old cabbie does but the lady in the dashboard gives him precise directions and he does very well. What’s not to like?

Free enterprise can be brutal. In New York, a couple years ago, owners of taxi medallions, the city-issued license to own a cab, conspired to drive the prices up, and corrupt lenders offered loans at high interest rates, and thousands of drivers got taken to the cleaners, just as the pandemic hit and Uber and Lyft were growing, and the Times reported nearly a thousand bankruptcies and eight driver suicides in one year.

So when I’m in New York, sometimes I hail a cab, out of socialist sympathy, but Uber and Lyft have come up with a better light bulb.

Capitalists say that you have to drown a few puppies in order to achieve progress, but I come from Minnesota, which is a socialist state in the sense that we identify with victims and feel guilty about whatever success we’ve achieved. In New York, success is admired and people love to go see Broadway stars on stage and world-famous sopranos at the Met and we expect the Philharmonic to be up to international standards. In Minnesota, we feel sorry for the sopranos who failed the audition, especially if they come from a dysfunctional family of modest means that couldn’t afford to hire a first-rate music teacher. We would support an opera company devoted to hiring disadvantaged singers rather than the shining stars and why not have them perform operas that have been rejected by other companies? Enough with the Puccini and Mozart, those guys have had their chance, let’s do the work of Tiffany Tufford and DuWayne DeVore. This strikes us as a Christian thing to do.

If you search through the homeless encampments and the treatment programs for substance abuse, you will find folks who used to play musical instruments, and why not hire them for your orchestra rather than privileged children from middle-class homes who took lessons from pros and majored in music at Juilliard?

Elitism is suspect in Minnesota, and this new opera company — let’s call it The Progressive Opera — would find a good deal of support. People would donate money to democratize opera who likely would not attend performances. This is where the idea of socialist art falls down. Art is visceral, it lifts you up or it lets you down, you can’t talk yourself into loving it. Puccini’s Madame Butterfly is so great that even if performed by the Grand Forks Opera Company by Lutheran singers, it will move you, and when you hear “Un bel dì” you will feel the tragedy, even if it’s Allison Nelson and not Anna Netrebko. But when they dump Puccini in favor of a justly neglected composer, the ship sinks. Nobody wants to sit in an auditorium and watch crappy shows except the relatives of people on stage and they’re only good for one performance.

So you’d need to give away sets of glassware or sell lottery tickets and the winner gets a trip to New York to see Bruce Springsteen on Broadway. People pay hundreds of bucks for those tickets who wouldn’t pay much to see my nephew Bruce Butler, the garage door tycoon in South Carolina. I just talked to him on the phone for an hour and he’s a good man, genuine and funny, but garage doors (unless you know something that I don’t) are not great art.

The darkness descends and I talk to friends

“Omicron” sounds like a pharmaceutical, an omnipotent drug against deadly microbes of a chronic nature, but it’s a flu variant just setting foot in America, whose ingenuity is not yet known, so we have one more excuse to stay home and not go to big fundraising dinners or games where unmasked people stand close together and sing the school fight song, emitting clouds of droplets in the air with every “Fight, fight, fight” and “Rah, rah, rah.” I am scheduled to do some Christmas shows hither and yon and am debating whether I should, as I normally would, invite the audience to sing the song about all being calm and bright. I’ll certainly scratch the song about the figgy pudding but “Silent Night”? All of Christmas is in this lullaby. You could skip the stockings, the cranberries, the tree with the tiny lightbulbs, and if you and your loved ones only sang about the quaking shepherds, you’d have Christmas in your heart, which is where it belongs.

Some of my Danish relatives are crossing the Atlantic to join me for Christmas and we’ve made a solemn compact that it will be modest, and not the gaudy jamboree that the Danes put on. They call it Yule, which they spell “j-u-l,” and thereby leave Jesus out of it, and they cook a goose and hang real candles on the tree and light them and dance around it, singing, and polish off a good deal of mulled wine and by sunset on the 25th, the nation is fairly unconscious. A boatload of Swedes could cross the Storebælt and take over the country, but then they’d need to learn the language, and why bother? There are vowels in Danish that are pronounced low in the throat and can induce gagging.

So we shall light a candle at midnight and sing the song, and I’ll make turkey sandwiches on the Day and we’ll pick up a couple pine boughs from the corner Christmas tree stand, and we’ll sit and converse.

This is one benefit of the pandemic, the rediscovery of conversation. My interest in adding COVID to my list of life experiences is minimal and so we’ve seen few people this year, other than passersby, and we’ve rediscovered Mr. Bell’s telephone, a wondrous gift, especially now that the curly cord is gone and you can carry it everywhere. I was once in the radio business and so telephone conversation comes naturally to me.

I’m a writer and my best work is done before noon, which leaves plenty of time for palaver, and I have a dozen regulars on my list, and another couple dozen occasionals, and this dispels loneliness very nicely. I don’t do FaceTime because I have a forbidding face as a result of growing up fundamentalist. I walk down the street and small children look at me and cling to their mothers. I look like Cotton Mather with a migraine. But on the phone, I can be actually sort of charming.

So I am at home with my love who orders food to be delivered by a masked man and she reads hygienic e-books from the public library while I write a screenplay and we play Scrabble on a board cleaned with antiseptic wipes, same as our phones and our pillowcases. We go for walks but we avoid runners who are breathing hard. We do not talk to unvaccinated persons on the phone. When we receive mail from states with high COVID rates, we boil it for seven minutes.

I notice in my phone conversations that I seldom hear people say, “When we get back to normal” or “When this is all over.” People don’t talk about plans for next year, they talk about next weekend. I worry about our kids and grandkids who have decades ahead of them, on whom uncertainty must weigh heavily. I worry about Minneapolis, my mother’s beloved hometown, where, in her old neighborhood, shootings and stickups are commonplace. I worry about how the Supreme Court might rule if asked to defend the right of high school students to carry a loaded weapon to class. And what is the constitutional basis for compulsory school attendance? Why shouldn’t six-year-olds be free to take factory jobs? Their little hands would be perfect for assembling small parts.

I think about these things but it’s not what we talk about on the phone. I believe in cheerfulness. If the subject of death comes up, I sing: “Ole lay on his deathbed, he knew he was going to die. And then he got a little whiff of Lena’s rhubarb pie. He crept down to the kitchen; there it was, he let out a moan. Lena whacked him upside the head, she said, ‘That’s for the funeral, leave it alone.’” Thank you for your attention and goodbye.

December is here, it is perfectly clear

Minnesota beat Wisconsin Saturday so hope is restored, the heart is lightened, and I am ready to enter the darkness of December unafraid. I got up early Sunday morning, grateful for the sensor in the bathroom that switches on the light when my physical form breaks an invisible beam. “Let there be light,” as the Creator once said, though He Himself has excellent night vision, and it felt good to be recognized as I stepped, half-asleep, over the threshold and all was made clear, the sink and mirror, the shower, the towel rack, and my target below, and I thought of Wisconsin and let fly.

Six a.m. and the city is only faintly enlightened. My early jobs as a dishwasher and parking lot attendant began at 6 a.m. and I remember this dimness well. It changed my life. I stayed home at night and went to bed early and postponed debauchery to my mid-twenties and then, at the age of 27, I got a job on the 5 a.m. shift and postponed it again. A dear friend of mine, whose parents subsidized her fully, went out late one night and fell in with some fascinating strangers who introduced her to hashish and some other substance and she fell into a psychotic state and had to be hospitalized and spent some time in a drug program where she met more fascinating troubled people and it changed her life. She never found a vocation. Instead, she became fascinated by her own disability and made a career of being troubled, married a troubled man who abused her, and today she’s in a nursing home somewhere, a faint replica of the witty woman she once was, and I am waiting for the coffee to brew so I can get back to work on a novel. Early to bed and early to rise makes for a life that, if not wealthy and wise, is at least pleasant and sensible.

The kitchen is dark because our friend Terry is sleeping in the guest room, which is just off the kitchen. She’s in town to play in The Nutcracker ballet, a difficult part that she’s played a thousand times so she has it down cold and can enjoy the comedy of the orchestra pit, the squawks and squeaks of the reeds, the smirks of the strings when the smart-aleck violinist screws up, the grimaces and snickers at the conductor who can’t conduct his way out of a paper sack, and she comes home and gives us a hilarious close-up account. To the audience, it may be pure magic, the Sugar Plum Fairy and all, but in the pit, it’s a human comedy.

I don’t turn the light on. I can hear the coffee dripping. I deliberate whether I shall go to church at 10 a.m. and it seems that I shall not; I am not in a proper frame of mind, being still exultant over beating Wisconsin. We were down 10-3 at halftime but the defense held and we won 23-13. Wisconsin has been kicking us around for years, thanks to their Teutonic culture, so this victory means a lot, sort of like D-Day or the Battle of the Bulge. I shouldn’t walk into church with this baggage. My sins are selfishness and ingratitude and animosity, and in the early morning, I’m very aware of my loved ones asleep in other rooms and am thankful for the cardiologist who implanted the defibrillator in my upper left chest, but I’m not ready to give up animosity.

I have two enemies, one in Fargo and one in Minneapolis, and I intend to forgive them someday but the defibrillator is postponing that day, and so I hope for them to have wagered their homes and retirement accounts on the Badgers of Wisconsin, a sure bet, and watched Minnesota march to victory, and heard the debt collectors pull up in the driveway, and hours later found themselves sleeping off a bad drunk in the bus depot with no place to go but their great aunt Flossie’s in Wausau, the one with the German shepherd Rolf and the picture of Joe McCarthy on the bedroom wall and the Victrola with the 78 of Wagner’s The Ride of the Valkyries.

And then I pour my coffee and turn on a light and pick up a pen and write, “Minnesota beat Wisconsin Saturday so hope is restored, the heart is lightened, and I am ready to enter the darkness of December unafraid.” And the rest is easy as pumpkin pie.

Where I was last night and what I saw

Midnight and one a.m. and two, and the mind is racing around the track with lights flashing, me at the wheel but the wheel doesn’t respond, it’s a whirl of thoughts in chain reaction and I know I should turn on a light and read for a while, maybe a math book or Egyptian history, but I lie in the dark and excavate old episodes of my life, and not the happy ones. Playground bullies emerge who, if they’re alive, are ancient old men like me, but in my mind they’re fresh and eager, tormenting sensitive me, daring me to respond. I ignore them, as I tend to do still. Then Hitler appears. The war isn’t over. The Third Reich is in London, my Danish daughter is in danger, the Nazis have the A-bomb, so I drag myself back to the torments of the playground, a sweet slender boy with nicely combed hair and wire-rimmed glasses. And the thought leaps out at me: I was so nice, am I gay? Gay men are terribly nice, you know. By the age of 79, a man should know the answer, but my mind rolls it around. I decide I’m not, having had many girlfriends and no boyfriends. Also, I spill and I have no fashion sense. I could pass for a homeless person.

Now it’s three a.m. I had evacuated the marital bed out of simple courtesy, lest Hitler awaken my wife, and now I return, silently, like a thief, and the silence awakens her. “Can I go back to sleep?” she says. She is the designated worrier in the family. She listens to the radio at night, to drive worry away, but it’s the BBC so she lies awake worrying about codfishermen and Lebanon and Prince Harry and Meghan. I’ve always been a good sleeper but am quite awake at three and so is she, I can tell by the way she sighs. I wonder if insomnia is contagious. I wonder if in her mind it’s 1992 and she’s walking into that restaurant to meet me for the first time and spots me, tall, unkempt and yet pretentious, and thinks, “Oh no. Get me out of here. Not this.”

It’s a wild night, like the bumper cars at the state fair, memories crashing around, I walk down the Mall of the U of M campus and I skip my Milton class and decide to major in folk music instead, the CEO who fired me and was himself dismissed is hitchhiking in the rain and my right front wheel hits the mud puddle exactly right and turns him dark brown from toes to crown, I am offered the Nobel Prize, which I decline with a very noble speech about equality in the arts.

I guess I slept some. I awoke at nine. It’s ten-thirty now. I’ve had breakfast with my wife who is extremely funny describing her niece’s two children, a smart boy and a popular girl, fighting a guerilla war, and then she leaves for Boston where I’ll join her tomorrow. On her way out, she gives me detailed instructions, which I should write down but do not, choosing to live dangerously. And it dawns on me that since nine o’clock, I have been deliriously happy. Insomnia is supposed to leave you exhausted and depressed. I hear my mother saying, “You work too hard, you need your sleep.” She lay awake many a night, worrying about us six kids, she told me so when she was old. Then added, “But you were worth it.”

I think the mind needs now and then to be released from a lifetime of harness and who needs LSD when hallucinations come to you naturally? It was a wild night and as I write it down I’m aware that I’m remembering only a few slivers of it. It makes me wonder about the little defibrillator that the cardiologist installed in my chest a couple weeks ago: is there a secret feature of it that twice a month like clockwork stimulates the brain to take free flight in the universe. If so, I guess I am in favor, though I’d rather the brain did this of its own accord.

It’s good to get off the racetrack and resume normal life. Hitler was defeated. Life is good. The sun shines and we rise from our tangled beds and resume our purposes in the world. The blessed America will survive the festivals of dismay and rise to the challenge of the century, which is to save the planet from ourselves. Thank you, Irving Berlin, for writing that great song.

Garrison Keillor © 11.26.21

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/where-i-was-last-night-and-what-i-saw