Columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
In homage to my ancestor David Powell, I rode a train across Kansas heading for Colorado, his goal in 1859 when he left Martha Ann and the children behind in Missouri and headed for the gold rush. Kansas is a state of vastness, some of it seems undisturbed since David rode across it. Here is a little farm near the tracks with no neighbor for several miles. A good place for an introvert like me. I could tow a trailer out on the treeless prairie and pull the shades and sit there and slowly go insane, buy a couple rifles with scopes, and yell at the TV about government oppression.
David was an extrovert. He was a leader of his wagon train and organized the lashing of wagons together to cross the rivers. He hunted antelope with the Arapaho and traded with them. He arrived in Colorado too late to get rich and instead sat in the territorial legislature and helped draft a state constitution. At age 62, an old man in those times, he settled in Kansas and wrote to his children: “I built a house 21r x 24r, one-story of pickets, shingle roof, 6 windows and 2 doors, divided and will be when finished one like my house in MO. Dug a well 20 feet deep, plenty of water, and put up a stable for 10 head of stock, covered with hay. We have done very well with oats and I have 25 tons of timothy hay, not yet sold. I am very comfortable, the times are fair here in Kansas, we are all well except for a touch of influenza. Our love and best wishes to all, yours affectionately.”
Read MoreI am delighted by the court ruling in Montana that the state, by encouraging the use of fossil fuels, violated the constitutional right of young people to “a clean and healthful environment,” something no court has ever proclaimed before. “Clean and healthful environment” is in the Montana state constitution. The legislature had forbidden state agencies to consider climate change when considering fossil fuel projects, and this decision would change that, but the state will appeal and likely the decision will be tossed away like used tissue, but still it’s an interesting idea: that we have legal obligations to our kids beyond feeding and clothing them and not putting them to work in shoe factories before they’re 12.
Nobody suggested back in the Fifties that we kids had a constitutional right to a “natural and healthful attitude toward sex” nor did I consider asking a court to reverse the deep sense of shame instilled in me, which has messed up my life to the extent that I dare not see a therapist for fear I’d discover things nobody should ever know about himself.
Read MoreOne good reason to travel around America is to meet American people, all the more so if you’re one of them yourself. I went out West for ten days and rediscovered what I always knew, that our people don’t mind talking about themselves. You call a cab at 5 a.m. in Flagstaff and a cheerful guy pulls up at your hotel and you ask him how his day is going — “Fine,” he says, “I’m on the midnight shift and I love to see the sun come up.”
“You from here?” No, he’s from Boston, he came out here to help his son who owns the cab company, and he loves Arizona, the climate relieves his arthritis. “So what did you do back in Boston?”
Read MoreMoving out of Minnesota and moving some of the furniture to a New York apartment has given my love and me a fine appreciation of movers, and we believe we got the best but who knows, maybe they’re all this good. Sinewy young men with strong backs and good manners and a keen eye who can angle an upright bedstead to fit in a freight elevator with inches to spare and coax it through a doorway — “Got it?” one says, “Got it” says the other — and into a short hall and then maneuver it partway into one bedroom so as to get the angle into the destination bedroom, and afterward they stand and admire their work. “I didn’t think we’d get that sucker in here,” says one and the other agrees.
I am no part of this. I’m sitting in the kitchen because no furniture is coming in here. I’m staring at my laptop. They can see that I am of the dilettante class and they are of the class that gets the job done. Also I am old and teeter so they don’t want my help, thanks very much. You’re bringing in a sofa and suddenly you’ve got a cardiac situation on your hands.
Read MoreThe beauty of this blessed summer is our chance to escape the news and devote ourselves to real life. I sat with my love on a hotel balcony overlooking a marina and we renewed our vow to never own a boat. I got up at 5 a.m. to send a niece to the airport and I gave her several coherent sentences of advice, drawing on my own mistakes. My love and I sat in the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station and devoured a dozen Malpeques and a lobster roll and scrod, the lights in the domed ceiling unchanged from when I saw it with my dad in 1953. In the subway heading home, she showed me snapshots of another niece holding her baby boy to her breast, minutes after delivery. The mother looked exhilarated, the babe surprised, the papa stunned. We couldn’t stop studying the pictures, the delight of them, which obliterated so much nonsense, the naked lie about the stolen election, the “weaponization” of law enforcement, the banning of books. We were back in the real America.
I wish they’d ban my book Cheerfulness so that more people would read it. I wrote it because the America I know and love is upbeat, enterprising, amiable to a fault, partial to jokes, and the mood of fracture and trauma seems fictitious to me, a far cry from the country that attracted our immigrant forebears. They didn’t cross the border in the hopes of taking vengeance.
Read MoreI clean up nicely and if I dress up I could pass for an ophthalmologist or at least an ornithologist and I try to walk briskly around New York and maintain a cheerful demeanor but I notice people are holding doors open for me and sometimes they look concerned, watching me descend two flights into the subway station. Evidently I look unsteady.
I’m only being careful. My days of taking a down staircase two stairs at a time no-handed are in the past along with my tennis game, but I am happier than ever and Monday night, my 81st birthday, I did a two-hour show up in Connecticut with my daughter, 25, sitting in the wings and a niece, profoundly pregnant, in the audience, and it was good. I walked back and forth on stage and Rob the piano player and I did a string of limericks and sonnets (sung) and I told funny stories about funerals and I even ventured into ribaldry.
Read MoreI took a ferry out of New London to the far end of Long Island, the end that is not Brooklyn, this week, which is a big deal for a Midwesterner, the ocean breeze, the big bass honk of the ship’s horn, the expanse of the Sound. It was an easy choice between that and four hours on the Long Island Expressway. I am done with freeways insofar as possible.
My late brother Philip grew up in Minnesota, same as I, but he came to love the sea by reading Horatio Hornblower novels, and after he took a wrong turn into corporate life in a suit and tie, he got straightened out and took a job studying shoreline erosion and thermal pollution on Lake Michigan, much of the time aboard a boat, wearing a windbreaker. He never regretted leaving the office cubicle.
Read MoreI am obligated to be an optimist because I’ve had a lucky life — I had a big career in a field for which I had no aptitude, my heart got surgically repaired, I married well on the third try — so it’d be dishonest to sing about the water tasting like turpentine and wanting to lay my head on the railroad line so the 4:19 can ease my troubled mind, so I don’t, I sing Van Morrison’s “These Are the Days of the Endless Summer,” but I respect skeptics and I’m glad that investigative journalism is at work shedding light on dark corners.
Take the recent piece in the Times about the NRA’s transformation from an organization of sportsmen to a powerhouse lobby that ruled Congress and expanded the Second Amendment so that we now have 400 million guns in the country and mass killings are a routine matter that has poisoned urban life. You read the piece with disgust at the machinations of politicians, and then you set it aside and enjoy the day. I got to ride the Keystone Express out to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and do a show at which I sang, with my friends Heather and Christine, Jerry Garcia’s “Attics of My Life” and Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl” and the audience joined in on the “Sha la la la la la la la la la la la de da,” which we repeated several times until we got the correct number of las. You cannot allow the existence of evil to overshadow the beauty of life in this splendiferous world we walk around in.
Read MoreA team of four men and one woman is on a mission to fix the 21st century and bring it more in line with the 18th and who can argue with the Supremes and who knows what the Ghost of Originalism may tell them to do next? At the moment, federal law prohibits destroying or tampering with restroom smoke detectors on airliners, a curtailment of individual liberty we’ve all come to accept but do the Supremes, riding around as they do aboard private jets owned by wealthy chums? We don’t know. Will small children’s right to work 12-hour days in factories be restored to them? Will the right of Lutherans to carry concealed weapons to the 11 a.m. service be upheld? You tell me.
I do believe that there is a Higher Law than what the Supremes declare and that a person is obliged to think Highly rather than Supremely, and one could argue that the right to Survival trumps (pardon my language) the Mind of Justice Alito, and as we look around and see petroleum and plastics degrading the planet, we might decide that the supremely wealthy who placed the five on the Court and who profit from pollution are thereby outlaws and the crime is giving their fortunes preeminence over humanity. What to do?
Read MoreI’ve heard enough about Barbie and Oppenheimer and Ron DeSantis, so let’s talk about me for a minute. I’m barefoot, wearing tan pants and black T, sitting under a potted maple on a terrace in Manhattan in a perfect summer twilight, an old man with a teenage heart, and I’ve been duly humble long enough but now I’d like a little attention and I’m sorry that the Florida Orange gave narcissism a bad name. In Minnesota, when I was a kid, we considered selfishness unseemly but what did I get for all my selflessness? Well, today is a new day and as of today I am a New Yorker. Today I bought a knish dog and a cream soda at a sidewalk stand. In Minnesota, we call it a pig in a blanket, but I’m a New Yorker now and I use the word knish. Okay? Got a problem with that?
When I moved out of Minneapolis, I sorted through personal papers and it struck me that, in hundreds of pictures of me, I am not smiling in a single one. I look like a mortician with a migraine. Partly this is due to the cold. Winter is brutal and you keep your mouth shut so you won’t frost your lungs. Teachers told me that. Plus which, in Minnesota there never were many people around so what was the point of exercising personal charm? Plus which, there are strong Lutheran tendencies there, people consider humor frivolous, maybe sacrilegious. Jesus wept; He didn’t laugh.
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