The art of writing, Lesson One

I don’t listen to the radio or watch TV except for baseball and even then I turn the sound off because the aging mind is so susceptible to irritability and who needs to go around in a state of irk. My favorite medium is the telephone and the comedy routine of talking with old friends. As the body falls apart, people get funnier and funnier. I also like the scraps of phone talk overheard on walks, the woman walking into Walgreens who said, “Jesus, where are you?” and the woman who said, “I know what you said, I’m not deaf.” I cherish these things. “Jesus, where are you?” has become a part of my life.

But on New Year’s Eve, I walked by a party and I heard the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” and days later I rode in an Uber and heard Barry Manilow’s “I Write the Songs” and they’re up in my head, and I can disperse them with a Chopin étude or a Bach chorale, but they come back, and for some reason, so does “I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener,” and this is very irritating when a man is trying to write a novel.

A close call and then the Creation

I walked into the neighborhood bank the other day and there in the lobby, loading the ATM machines, were two guys with fistfuls of money, bricks of $100s, $50s $20s, a sight I’d never seen before, perhaps a signal from alternative reality that my chance at bank robbery was here, but then I saw the third man, his hand on the pistol in his holster, and so instead I walked up to the cashier’s window and asked for a couple grand so I can make New Year’s gifts to doormen at our building and Mitch the plumber and our cleaning lady and also to some deserving children.

I know it’s pitifully small-minded of me but I enjoy walking around with a $100 bill in my pocket. It’s a token of good luck. A silver dollar used to be a token but luck has undergone inflation. I’m old enough to remember when I picked radishes at Schreiber’s truck farm for a nickel a bunch, I remember it whenever I eat a radish. I was a dishwasher for $1.35/hour and a parking lot attendant for slightly more. In 1969, I sold a small humorous piece of writing to a magazine and got $500 for it and that settled me on a writing career. It wasn’t a matter of talent; it was about money. I chose radio because I could write for it and it paid better than radishes.

O what a beautiful evening

You never know when happiness will strike or what form it may take but I believe we who come from a strict religious upbringing are at an advantage over you heathens because even slight pleasure makes us dizzy and actual joy blows our minds. A coal miner appreciates a field of tulips more than a florist does. I get a thrill every time my wife of 28 years casually puts her hand on my shoulder in wordless affection. This is due to the fact that I didn’t kiss a girl until I was 22 years old. I was Brethren. I stared, I fantasized, I sat near some girls, but our lips never met. And when they did, I burst into verse.

I get pleasure from words, which is surely due to coming from taciturn people, so when I happen upon a seed catalogue and look through the beans (Scarlet Runner, Provider, Contender, Gold Rush, Blue Lake, Tenderette Green) and the corn (Bodacious, Ambrosia Hybrid, Sugar Buns, Abundance) and the tomatoes (Early Girl, Better Boy, Beefsteak, Sweetie, Big Boy, Sunset’s Red Horizon, Jubilee, Juliet, Moneymaker, Aunt Ruby’s, Boy Oh Boy, Nebraska Wedding, Calypso, Abe Lincoln) it’s a garden of poetry.

From the South Atlantic, blessings

We took a cruise ship out of New York to the Caribbean over the holidays, which was a good education. Twelve days among elderly people tells you what sort of elder you wish to be when you get there — mobile, standing up straight, cheerful, and conversing intelligently with others, not just to yourself. These elderly folks were carelessly frittering away their children’s inheritance, money that might’ve put a young person through Malarkey State for a degree in communications and a career as an influencer, but it was sweet to see the affection between the lengthily married, the exchange of glances, holding hands, the impulsive kiss. To stay in love, that’s a good way to maintain compos mentis.

Let the kids deal with AI, let’s U and I perch on the stern deck and watch the sun rise over Barbados and I’ll talk about my Yorkshire ancestors back in the 18th century and what if they’d immigrated here and started a plantation and enslaved the locals to cut the cane while the Keillors lounged on the veranda sipping rum and reading Jane Austen, but of course they were northern stoics like me and pleasure made them feel queasy so they wound up in Minnesota and got into dairying, no slaves available except your own children.

Once again, the star, the shepherds

Old Man Christmas (moi) has been out shopping and found a shop that sells hiking shoes so, being married to a hiker, I went in and saw beautiful alligator boots, also a pair of sharkskin, and wouldn’t this be perfect for my beloved venturing into ungenteel neighborhoods, boots made from man-eating creatures, better than pepper spray or a Smith & Wesson, but the pricetag was staggering –– I’m the son of a postal clerk –– so I moved on. I went to Macy’s on 34thStreet just to ride the wooden escalator and hear it clunking and I roamed past perfume counters but was distracted by the stunning beauties behind the counters, women who’d come to the city to become fashion models but were only 5”11” and were overweight at 117 lbs. and so were relegated to retail sales and now at 22 they’re over the hill.

It made me sad, the abandoned dreams –– you see it everywhere –– and I left the store and went to the public library on 42nd and sat in the Rose Reading Room and came back to my senses. My beloved and I have merged two. Domiciles into one and we are still in a deaccessionizing process and don’t need a pile of gifts under a tree. I’ll put some cash in envelopes for our building’s doormen and super and send some to little kids I know and a $100 bill to a few friends so they can buy a good bottle of champagne, not a chintzy one.

A small life has its own distinct moments

I walked down Columbus Avenue the other day and passed a young woman talking on the phone just as she said, loud and clear, “There is a reason for everything,” and it sticks with me, rationalism proclaimed publicly. I wish I’d stopped and asked her for some context; she seemed to be one of those bold women you could engage in a colloquy, unlike other women who shrink at a “Good morning” as you hold the elevator door for them. New York women tend to be bold, Minnesota women faint of heart and a man would do well to avoid eye contact, although in situations of mutual suffering — e.g., the long line at airport security at 6 a.m. — some sweet conversations with strangers do occur.

I lead a small life and think small thoughts. I read a long essay by a former colleague explaining how comedy works and was awestruck. I study the workings of a coffeemaker. I take my meds from a handy container with two little compartments for each day, one for morning, one for evening. Someone thought of this. An older person on a regimen of pills. Perhaps a postal clerk like my dad, who sorted mail into racks of little boxes, and what if he had invented the Med-O-Rack? We’d maybe have moved from north Minneapolis to a horse farm called Meadowcroft and I’d have competed in equestrian events instead of reading novels by flashlight and gained great confidence to go into venture capitalism and become a king of crypto and wind up doing time for fraud.

Our plan for Christmas and why

I love Christmas, coming as I do from fundamentalists, a bunch who don’t score high on the Festivity Scale. My mother hugged me only once, to keep me from falling out of a moving vehicle. I don’t recall my father ever telling a joke. So Christmas was a brief episode of flamboyant frivolity in an otherwise solemn life in which we looked forward to End Times and our flight up out of Minnesota into paradise, just us, not the Catholics.

This year my little family is taking a vacation from the holiday and on December 25 we’ll be on a ship out on the Atlantic. It’s our gift to us. No tree with a pile of gifts under it. We’ve done that and we need a reset. I used to roam through little shops buying Slovakian soufflé pans or Peruvian porcelain trivets and presenting them to folks who were not trivet-type people and whose annual soufflé output was approximately zero so the gifts wound up in storage, and when the recipients went off to Happydale, teenagers snapped up the soufflé pans for 15¢ and used them to heat up frozen pizzas and the trivets wound up as doorstops.

A Prairie Home Companion 50th Anniversary Program

A Prairie Home Companion 50th Anniversary Tour Program – Nashville, TN and Manhattan, KS

How did we get into this mess?

The ice hasn’t yet frozen solid on the lakes of Minnesota due to a warm November and the ice-fishing shacks are waiting to be towed out on the ice so men can sit in them and pretend to fish. Their real purpose is to get away from women so they can speak frankly and express improprieties that, on shore, would get them citations from the Woke P.D.

Women don’t go ice-fishing because where would they pee? Men do it on the ice, just as fish pee in the lake and deer in the underbrush. Women scorn this sort of behavior (“Where were you brought up? In a barn?”) and women’s scorn is powerful, a man shrinks in the face of it. Even I do. I feel small just mentioning it.

Looking around, I get the drift

Two days ago, a profound experience. I found a set of transcripts someone had made of monologues I did years ago on the radio and I read one. Someone had written down word for word what I said and when the audience laughed, they put in the word LAUGHTER. And guess what? I read through it and it wasn’t funny. LAUGHTER. Not even slightly. LAUGHTER. I had said it and back in 1982 a theaterful of people had loved it and in 2023 it was about as funny as a pile of bricks. LAUGHTER. Have you, dear reader, ever gone back to your distinguished past and been depantsed the way I was? LAUGHTER. No, you have not. I wanted to jump out a window. LAUGHTER. Fortunately, the windows in our apartment are childproofed and I can’t open them. LAUGHTER. And also it’s New York and I could hear children’s voices from the street and I don’t want my suicide to accidentally wipe out a bunch of eight-year-olds leashed together on their way to the Museum of Natural History. LAUGHTER. That’s not funny, by the way. LAUGHTER.

So I’m in the wrong line of work. I’ve wasted my life. I earned a good living at it and it was fun while it lasted but it contributed nothing of value to the world and I’d have been better off sticking with my first job, which was dishwashing. I was good at it. I ran racks of dishes through big industrial dishwashers and they came out steaming clean and I scrubbed the pots and pans by hand and I didn’t come back forty years later to learn that the cafeteria had been shut down by the health department on account of dirty dishes.