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
I seldom invite friends to come to church with me and, after Sunday’s morning service that was so deeply moving, I don’t know why. If you knew a great bakery, you’d tell people. If you read a great book, you wouldn’t keep it a secret. But off I truck to the West Side of Manhattan and in the big door past the greeters, drop my two cents in the offering plate, head altarward, stop at my pew, genuflect and bow, and take my seat.
The genuflection disturbs my fundamentalist ancestors. I can hear them mutter, “Oh please, not that again.” Genuflection they regard as Catholic, papist, alien to the pure faith, and my Anglican church they consider decaffeinated Catholicism, and though I love my ancestors, I tell them to shove off. I know my own heart. This is my home.
Read MoreI wound up my southern tour in Key West, stayed at an 1836 manse on Truman Street, awoke at 4 a.m. for the flight to Atlanta, then to New York. Stood out on the porch and heard a rooster crowing. The plane, a 737, took off at 7 a.m. The pilot locked the brakes tight, revved up the engine to full power, released the brakes, and we rocketed down the runway and got liftoff with about 90 feet of runway to spare. Exciting. I forgot my belt at TSA security in Key West and hiking through the vast Atlanta airport, trying to manage two bags while keeping my pants from falling down, I probably looked helpless because a young woman pushing a wheelchair stopped and asked if I was okay. I said, “Yes, but I lost my belt and my pants are falling down.”
She was delighted. “I’ve seen that type of thing before,” she said. She hung one bag on the back of the chair, I sat in the seat and held the briefcase, and she got me on the “plane train” to the T Concourse and a men’s store and I bought a belt, then back on the train to Concourse B to catch my flight to LaGuardia. This was my first time ever being pushed in an airport wheelchair; walking in airports is my main exercise. The woman’s name was Zsa Zsa and she was a delight, she called out “Hello, sweetheart” to other wheelchair pushers, she sang out “Chair coming through!” to clear a path onto and off of trains, she called me “Darling,” she said “How’s your day going?” to anyone who looked downcast and suddenly their day improved. She was joy on wheels, and it was illuminating to see how a joyful demeanor and radical courtesy can be a weapon to triumph over the passive aggressions and bad attitudes in public places — you simply couldn’t help but love the woman. She left you no other choice.
Read MoreI’ve just finished a ten-day solo tour down South as the World’s Oldest Stand-Up and it was a major adventure for an old guy with memory issues who keeps forgetting the word “cognitive” and other words of a similar sort, walking onstage every night to do ninety minutes or more freestyle in front of a big crowd, most of whom probably voted the wrong way last November, and make them laugh a lot.
A person forgets things at 82. One night I forgot the story about the Butt Grip Contest in Lake Wobegon and it’s not easy to find your way back to a logical point where you can have old Norwegian men drop their trousers and attempt to pick up a 50-cent piece with their bare cheeks. I got this story from Alan Simpson, a Republican senator from Wyoming who was a fan of the show, and it works beautifully and I hate to lose it.
Read MoreI never cared for Valentine’s Day as a kid, when we had to address a valentine to everyone in the classroom, Miss Moehlenbrock’s rule, so that every child would feel equally important — she was a true liberal, but the idea of universal fondness didn’t ring true for me, and clearly some valentines were more equal than others. Some valentines have integrity and the others are torn on dotted lines from a sheet of eight. I got a lot of those.
I was fond of Corinne and Christine because they were big readers and had been to New York City, which I had not. But the Valentine message –— “I love you, please be mine” –— wasn’t the right one. Possession wasn’t my aim.
Read MoreI sympathized with our President’s proposing that we run all the Palestinians out of Gaza and take ownership and turn it into a luxury resort. I’ve had crazy ideas myself but thank goodness I’ve kept them to myself. I do think a neurologist should be brought in — this sounds like global amnesia to me. Golf can be a dangerous game and you wonder if he might’ve taken a hit. The press doesn’t cover his rounds closely.
So of course everyone in the world denounced the idea, and poor Karoline Leavitt had to stand up in the White House press room and say he hadn’t meant what he said. And then, walking through a crowd of reporters shouting questions at him, the man himself did not stop to respond.
Read MoreLong ago, when I bought a Manhattan apartment, my mother, Grace, gave me a clay coffee cup with “Minnesota” painted on it and our state bird, the loon, so I’d remember where I come from, though at age 44, it was pretty well embedded in me. In college, announcing on a classical music radio station, I managed to refit my Minnesota accent to sound educated, but I still have a keen sense of insignificance, which comes with the territory. Scott Fitzgerald and Bob Dylan are our big claims to success and Scott died young and alcoholic and Bob is famous for obscurity and Walter Mondale was the politest candidate for president in American history and the biggest loser and Bronko Nagurski was actually Canadian.
She was a good mother. She told stories about me, how when Dad went off to join the Army in World War Two, I wouldn’t let anyone sit in his chair at the head of the table. “Daddy’s chair!” I said and could be quite forceful about it. She worried about me, how I enjoyed lighting fires and how I loved to play on the Mississippi shore though I’d been told not to. She worried about drowning and about tornadoes and in the summer if a storm came up we always went to the southwest corner of the basement as authorities said to do. All except me. I liked to stand in the yard and watch the storm arrive and the branches of trees shake, hoping for the sight of the funnel cloud.
Read MoreMost aphorisms are self-evident, such as “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” and the one about glass houses and throwing stones and the mice playing when the cat is away and “As you sow, so shall you harvest” and as I get older, the ones about living in the moment and seizing the day and not crying over spilt milk feel very profound.
I remember a day fifty years ago when I had lunch with my hero S.J. Perelman in Minneapolis when he was to give a reading and I was to introduce him. I was stunned by admiration for his writing, such as: I guess I’m just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation’s laws.
Read MoreI just spent a few days in Texas and had a great time — me, an old Diversity-Elitist-Iniquity Democrat, enjoying the state that gave us Ted Cruz. But it’s true. It was very congenial. I am on a new career as America’s Oldest Still-Standing Comedian and I didn’t talk politics and neither did the people I talked to. It’s easy not to, especially for us on the losing side. I’m a northerner and I believe in government because it plows the roads when it snows, and up north we don’t cancel school just because snow is forecast, which they do in Florida. This is one reason more mathematicians come from the Upper Mississippi than from Tallahassee. I also feel that when all the undocumented migrants are deported, our young college grads who majored in English aren’t going to like working in slaughterhouses or cleaning hotel rooms and we’ll find bone chips in the chicken and we’ll sleep in beds other people slept in and we’ll just have to get used to it.
I met a good many Baptists in Lubbock and Arlington and the lovely city of New Braunfels and didn’t talk politics except that I got the audience to sing “America” about freedom ringing from every mountainside. I didn’t see signs of decline in Texas nor people rejoicing at the beginning of a new golden age, but maybe I was looking in the wrong places.
Read MoreI got to spend last week in California, seeing people, doing things, from Irvine up to Sacramento, and people kept trying to get me to go with them to vineyards, though I no longer imbibe. I used to and then about 25 years ago I stopped. I am capable of idiocy on my own without adding intoxication to it. And I had a two-year-old daughter and I didn’t want her to see me drunk. She and I love silliness, which is a whole other matter.
I went to Modesto, home of Ernest and Julio Gallo wine, the wine I drank in my college days, the cheap wine in the gallon glass jug. You poured it into an ordinary drinking glass and drank it with dinner and either you liked it or you didn’t drink it but you didn’t sit and discuss it. Now I have friends, bless their hearts, who are connoisseurs of wine and who employ terms like “well-structured,” “buttery,” “complex,” “nicely restrained,” “autumnal,” “jam-flavored,” and “rangy,” which strikes me as complex well-structured hogwash. I am an alien in their midst. The only wine I taste now is from the Sunday morning communion cup, and I suppose it’s complex but I simply think of it as the blood of salvation.
Read MoreWhen you celebrate the 50th anniversary of something in your own life, it tells you that you’re older than you thought and that career change is no longer an option, much as you wish you’d gone into software design so you wouldn’t have to ask children how to reformat a page on your laptop, but okay, longevity is what we were going for, right? It’s why I stopped smoking. I was a chain-smoker because I thought that’s what writers do and then I saw them dying off in their forties and fifties. I wrote mostly about existential grief, but when I married and had a kid, I had to get a job and I got one in radio because it was the 6 a.m. shift and there were no other applicants.
It took me about five minutes to figure out that listeners didn’t need to hear about grief at 6 a.m., they had their own, so I got into comedy. I grew up evangelical, which is a solemn thing so I seldom smile and therefore TV was not an option but I wanted to be useful so I did radio and fifty years later, strangers come up and say, “I listened to you during a hard time in my life so thank you,” and to me, this is endlessly amazing. And that’s the story of my life.
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