The art of leaving home

Moving out of an apartment as I’ve been doing recently convinces me at last to resign from American consumer culture and live with only bedding, one towel, two changes of clothing, a pair of shoes, and one suit to wear for shows and also to be buried in. Stationery, stamps, and a couple pens. I own 21 coffee cups; I only need one. Nothing plastic, thank you. I will still fly Delta but I’ll lose 25 pounds to lessen the load.

The pleasure of moving is the excavation of the past. I open a box and here’s a photo of my fifth-grade class, the eager neatly-combed-and-dressed boy with glasses sitting behind John Poate is me. I am still that eager boy, heavier but anxious to do well. There is a letter from a fan of my radio show, “Every Saturday at 5 p.m., everything else ceased and we gathered around the radio.” Also, in a brown envelope, eight color photographs of my innards taken by the surgical team that installed a pig valve in my heart: the valve is pale pink, the innards are dark red. And there is a letter from a beloved aunt in 1995, reproaching me for traveling to Rome with my fiancée, engaging no doubt in premarital sex, embarking on a path of philandering and adultery, for which there would be no forgiveness. It’s a powerful articulate letter and I admire her for writing it, which she did out of love.

An old man disposing of possessions

Clearing out an apartment a man sees what a work of art domestic life is, and clearance demands an iron will, no shilly-shallying, no regrets. Hundreds of books must go. The painting of the blizzard must go; I bought it long ago because it reminded me of Minnesota mornings and walking to school, and now she informs me that it gives her the heebie-jeebies, and because I am in love with this woman I offer it up as a sacrifice. This impresses her and so she allows me to keep the stone busts of Mark Twain and Erato the Muse of lyrical poetry. Horse-trading. I keep the bust of Lincoln because it reminds me of my father.

I keep mementos of family and teachers. Now and then young progressive Democrats have said to me, when I expressed an opinion, “Well, you’re a privileged white male,” and of course they’re right. In first grade, Mrs. Estelle Shaver kept me after school to read aloud to her and one day the janitor walked in and she said, “Listen to him, Bill. Doesn’t he have a wonderful voice. I love to listen to him while I grade lessons.” It was remedial reading, of course, but she made me believe I’d been chosen for this privilege and she changed my life. In fourth grade I was leery of playground bullies, and Mrs. Fern Moehlenbrock let me spend recess in the library. She knew I loved to read. To know at the age of 10 what you love is a privilege.

The show goes on in the Shenandoah Valley

People sometimes inquire why a man of 80 keeps doing shows and I got the answer last week in the hills of Virginia, an outdoor show near Lexington, a perfect summer night after a morning downpour, an amiable crowd, Robin and Linda Williams came over from Staunton to sing with me, I talked about Lake Wobegon where there’s now a veterinary aromatherapist and people are selling artisanal ice from Lake Superior. I talked about it as a museum-quality guy who saw most of the previous century and remembers cursive writing and lightbulb jokes, and the audience stood during intermission and sang “Going to the Chapel” and “In My Life” and “America” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” — in Virginia! they knew the words about the watchfires in the circling camps, the evening dews and damps, the dim and flaring lamps. A crowd singing in harmony after sunset: it was gorgeous.

I hung out with the customers before and after (there’s no backstage at this amphitheater so I entered and exited through the audience) and it’s startling to hear middle-aged people tell me they listened to “Prairie Home” as kids, grew up with Guy Noir and Dusty and Lefty, I was sort of a distant uncle to them. I was very busy those years, hosting the show, writing it, touring around, and I was an ambitious author. My hard drive is full of the rusted wreckage of unfinished novels and stories and screenplays. I was not paying attention to the radio audience, it was only a statistic and I didn’t really believe it. And now here were the statistics shaking my hand. I stood next to them while they took a picture of the two of us.

Canada is burning but we’re doing okay

I missed the Fourth of July parade with Uncle Sam striding along on stilts and a wagon drawn by Percherons with a band playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever” in double time, but maybe they don’t do that anymore, maybe they ran out of men who could walk on stilts with confidence and who fit the Uncle Sam suit. It was a slim fit.

I’m not nostalgic about olden times. I love these passwords and PINs that give me the sense of foreign agents trying to get into my email, steal my prescription for metoprolol. I am fond of the GPS woman who gives us directions in such a sympathetic tone, not condescending at all. I adore my laptop and have no warm memories of my Underwood typewriter. Someday I believe the GPS woman may become a therapist and tell me to put regrets behind and prescribe a memory-loss drug that will do exactly that.

A private word from me to Joe

Joe Biden came to our apartment building for a fundraiser last week and the lobby was full of men in dark suits and sunglasses and I never got the chance to tell him that he needs to find a good recreational activity that will endear him to the millions of Americans who get their news from pictures rather than reading text. Standing at a lectern reading a speech is not enough. A candidate for president needs to look good while having fun, preferably in the great outdoors.

John F. Kennedy was a sailor and that image of him, at the helm of a boat steering into the Atlantic waves, was our first and lasting impression of him. He looked great with the wind in his face. Ronald Reagan looked terrific on horseback, thanks to his acting experience. He easily defeated Jimmy Carter who, against the advice of advisors, ran in a six-mile race and collapsed and the Secret Service had to carry him away, looking pale and sweaty and semi-conscious, not a good look for the Leader of the Free World.

Love that well which won’t last long

I’m an octogenarian from the days of the party-line telephone, back when we loved singing murder ballads in the third grade and were proud of our cursive writing but I come back to reality by reading Elizabeth Kolbert who writes scary nonfiction about the future.

She’s an excellent writer — The Sixth Extinction, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future — and her current piece in The New Yorker, “How Plastics Are Poisoning Us,” is one that Exxon and Shell and Coca-Cola and Nestlé are praying you won’t read and doing their best to extinguish any meaningful measures in Congress, meanwhile science is trying to send us a message: plastic is everywhere, the sea is full of it, it’s found in human placentas, Americans go through some 500 pounds of it per person per year, it is not really recyclable, some of it is known to be carcinogenic, according to objective scholarly peer-reviewed data assembled by those nerdy kids who sat in the front of the chemistry classroom and did all the assignments.

A few minute on a hilltop in Concord

I made a trip last week I’ve been meaning to take for decades and finally got to Concord, Mass., and found Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, which is vast — I’d hesitate to live in a town with so much mortality — and climbed the hill to Henry Thoreau’s grave marked with a stone the size of a pencil box that simply says “Henry” and thanked him for his work and also expressed my regret that he never got entangled in romance with a woman, which would’ve made his writing livelier, had there been a double bed in his cabin at Walden Pond and someone to disagree with him when he wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” The desperation could’ve been relieved by someone putting her hands on his shoulders and kissing the back of his neck.

In photographs, Thoreau is as ugly as a mud fence but that’s because he hated cameras. My grandma did too. She scowled when someone got out a Brownie and so her descendants who never met her think of her as severe, which she was not. She was a teacher, as Henry tried to be, and she had high expectations of people.

Molly Malone

Why I won’t be playing golf in Oman

I had blurry vision for a couple years and found it hard to read the newspaper and then an ophthalmologist at Mayo did a three-minute painless laser procedure and a few days later I could read the paper, no problem, clear as day, and also watch a ball game on TV and keep track of the triple as it caromed off the right field wall. Literacy does have its drawbacks, of course. You get more tangled up in the details of malfeasance and depravity than you would like to be. I come from evangelical people who read Scripture and didn’t linger on Cain’s murder of Abel or David seeing the naked Bathsheba and sending her husband off to war. So the thump-thump-thump of the Donald is tiring, though it’s also impressive to read about how the other 1/1000ths of one percent do business, such as the story about the multibillion-dollar golf course and hotel development on the coast of Oman where migrant workers are laboring in 103-degree heat for $340/month on a project where villas will sell for up to $13 million, a project financed by Saudi and Omani money, in which a managing sweetheart partner who put no money down will be the guy who’s the victim of the biggest and most vicious witch hunt in the history of the United States.

The ethics issues are dizzying. The guy was once Leader of the Free World and intends to resume the position, which is his by right. As such, he deals in foreign policy in behalf of the people of the United States. Their interests are not identical to those of oil trillionaires. Clearly, the gentleman is steering us into uncharted waters, as he has so assiduously done for many years. He occupies a realm previously belonging to fiction.

The speech I wrote and didn’t get to give

I was eager to deliver a commencement address this spring and had one prepared but nobody invited me, which is a shame, because mine is more practical than 78% of the ones the Class of 2023 had to sit still for. It is a speech in favor of not rushing ahead to confront injustice and correct wrongs but to encourage other people to do it and then see what happens to them.

Everyone is in favor of courage and standing up to authority but there are advantages to cowardice too and a person should consider all options before picking up your bright sword and charging forth into the breach. I’m thinking of my classmates who went out for football and got dinged for the glory of the Maroon and Gray and now they’re unable to multiply fractions or recite “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, the droghte of March hath perced to the roote,” or tell the difference between a subjunctive mood and an introspective one, and when they shake their head No, I hear dinging. I’m thinking of idealistic friends who went to work for the Federated Organization of Associations thinking they’d reform it and they became executive vice presidents of artificial intelligence and lost their ability to speak genuine English.