The sweet day draws near

I did a Christmas show last week in St. Paul that ended with the audience singing “Silent Night,” three verses, a cappella, the infant tender and mild, the quaking shepherds, the radiant beams, and minutes later who should come backstage but my cousin Phyllis and her family, which made me happy. Her mother was my aunt Jean, who was funny and had a big heart and who, when I was a toddler and Dad went into the Army, took my mother and her three little kids into her big house in St. Paul and I still remember how welcome we were. There was a chair at the table that I guarded and if anyone tried to sit in it, I said “Daddy’s chair” and waved them away.
 
I go back home now and then and people walk up to me in the Hotel St. Paul who remember me as a friendly radio voice and some of them were apparently quite attached to that voice — I met a young woman last week who gasped as if I were a ghost and said, “We listened to you every Saturday at five o’clock. I still miss you.”

It can get really cold in Minnesota

I flew back to Minnesota just in time for a classic hard Minnesota freeze like the ones of my childhood, when you walk out the door and the cold hits you like a board and suddenly you realize you’re wearing the wrong clothes. You chose these clothes for elegance to emphasize your slim figure. The right clothes would make you look like you weigh 300 pounds. You wish you had those clothes on now.

St. Paul is bleak. I walk out of the Hotel St. Paul and wait for my Uber ride to the Midway Saloon. I feel I’m at a concentration camp for political dissidents. The wind blows in off the Mississippi. Nobody is out for a walk, nobody is hanging out, everyone is heading briskly for a car or for a warm building. And there is no complaining. This is the remarkable thing. Nobody says, “My God, it’s cold out, I have no feeling in my face,” because (1) this is not a personal experience, everyone else is cold too and (2) God is aware of the cold and is hoping it will make you a better person, which God knows it should. Nobody says, “I wish I were in Florida,” because (1) you are not in Florida and (2) there is a reason for you to be in Minnesota, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. You’d be in Phoenix with all the retired cops and teachers and ministers.

Moving on to the next thing

A guy whom we Christians think about every Christmas is John the Baptist, who announced, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord,” but when people came from Jerusalem to hear him preach and to be baptized, he called them a “generation of vipers,” not a welcoming thing to say, and because he wore rags, had a long beard, and fed on locusts, he’s not celebrated at Advent. He was too adventurous. We don’t serve locusts for Christmas dinner, not even in a pie or as seasoning on turkey, so poor John is cast aside, even by Baptists, and we focus instead on shepherds and angels, who are kindly and better dressed.

Seeing how much attention irrelevant elves and snowmen and reindeer get at the holidays, you’d think the mystic who announced the forthcoming miracle could at least get an ornament on a tree, but this is how a consumer society deals with mystics. We want them to have nice hair and speak softly and not eat insects.

The perils of pedestrianism explained

It’s been a couple months since the New York City Council legalized jaywalking in town and nobody has noticed this because everybody was doing it anyway. New Yorkers have been jaywalking since before there were stoplights. No New Yorker would stand on the sidewalk, no traffic in sight, and wait for the Walk sign. Nobody, not even Baptists or accountants or people suffering from severe clinical anxiety. Only tourists from the Great Plains would stand and wait for the light to change and this is a clue to pickpockets to lift their wallets.

The main hazard to pedestrians in the city is bicyclists who jayride wildly, flying down the bike lanes, whizzing through red lights, bikes and scooters whipping silently through the winter dark, riders dressed in black, like vampires, riding the wrong way on a one-way street, and especially treacherous are the delivery bikes. New York cops ride around in squad cars and during rush hour a squad car has zero chance of catching a speeding outlaw bicyclist racing through the three-foot gap between parked cars and cars stuck in traffic.

The small holiday of a happy man

The Christmas season is a trial for us Christians who must wend our way down miles of aisles of trashy merch as musical garbage drizzles down from the speakers in the ceiling and try to keep the nativity of Our Lord in mind, no easy thing, and for this I blame Charles Dickens who took a holy occasion and hung tinsel on it. His message of cheerfulness and sharing in the face of selfish greed is all well and good but it’s not the same as the story of God come to Earth to be made man to show His love for us. One is neighborliness and the other is a miracle and a mystery.

I also blame Irving Berlin and the composers of “Jingle Bells” and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and all the other standards that become termites in the brain. I hear them in the grocery store and I ask myself, “Are there no workhouses? As Scrooge said, “Are there no prisons? Are they still operating? If I had my way, everyone who goes around humming ‘White Christmas’ should be baked with his own pudding until he turns brown and be buried with a sprig of holly through his heart.”

Walking to church on a cold day

We had a couple of summery days in November in New York but now, thank goodness, summer is over and we can get back to business. Thanksgiving is done and we spent it with talkative friends and since I was brought up to believe it’s impolite to interrupt, I sat through a two-hour dinner saying nothing but “Uh-huh” and “Oh, really.” And on Sunday I stepped out into a bitter cold wind and walked to church. It felt good.

Summer is too perfect, the dreaminess of it, like an all-Debussy festival, you long for some interesting weather, possibly a tornado. It makes me question the idea of heaven as eternal bliss, which comes from desert tribes who didn’t know about ice and snow.

So what are we to do now?

The great George Will has passed the fifty-mile mark as a newspaper columnist, and all the rest of us in the trade admire the fact that he still enjoys doing it. It’s palpable in his work. Anybody can throw spitballs but Mr. Will loves the American language and the construction of sentences and paragraphs. This, rather than his correctitude, is what makes him worth reading. It’s a pleasure.

I enjoy the New York Times and I love it all the more now that I see it has practically no power at all. When I took Professor Hage’s Journalism 101 course, back when Kennedy was president and I was a parking lot attendant and a fan of Pete Seeger, I imagined that the great and mighty picked up the Times with fear and foreboding, and I went into journalism for the thrill of being a nerd in horn-rimmed glasses who could bring down the powerful. I got a job writing obituaries at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and after six months on the burial detail, I left quietly.

Walking home from Sunday church

My mother, Grace, and her sister Elsie were lifelong best friends, two adjacent younger girls in a family of 13, and our two families had Thanksgiving together every year, usually at Elsie’s house because she was the better cook, a perfectionist, whereas Mother had six kids, four of us boys, which didn’t encourage perfection. Mostly, she served chow.

We were quiet devout people, the women exemplified mannerliness and motherhood, the men were taciturn and could quote Scripture, nobody smoked or drank or swore, the baby napped on a bed among the coats, and the afternoon proceeded along two tracks, heading for a collision: the dinner on one track, Packers-Lions game on the other.

What’s on my mind, sitting here

It’s the hunting season and also the mating season for deer, a cruel combination — you’re excited by the scent of a female, she turns her beautiful brown eyes your way and your heart pounds and you paw the ground and snort and wave your antlers and then you smell beer and turn and a guy in a red plaid jacket blows your brains out. I never hunted because my dad and uncles weren’t hunters so there was nobody to show me how to do it.

Hunting is hereditary and I’m astonished that a half-million hunting licenses are issued annually in Minnesota and I don’t know any hunters: it means that I’m an outsider, an oddball.

Thank you for reading this

Man has almost unlimited power to do damage and cause suffering, as we have been learning lately, and some slight power to do good, but as we grow up and pay attention to our surroundings, we see that we are beneficiaries of great gifts for which we can claim no credit, and so we have a day of thanksgiving in November, just as we’re bracing for winter. My aunt Eleanor was the patron saint of Thanksgiving and rented a nearby Legion hall and organized a dinner for a hundred or more Keillors back when I was a kid, before cellphones, so instead of taking selfies we had conversation.

My aunts told stories about the farm and how Grandpa drove a horse-drawn mower to cut hay with the reins in one hand and a book in the other and the day the house burned down and he raked through the ashes looking for photographs and how he drove home with his first Model T Ford and lost control of the car and pulled back on the wheel yelling “Whoa!” as the car slid into the ditch and he sat in it laughing at himself.