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 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.
Read MoreFor the first time in living memory, I was the only passenger in a TSA security line at a major airport — Tucson, noon on a Friday, a time you’d expect Arizonans to be heading for Nome or Juneau for a weekend of darkness, but no. I wended back and forth in the maze of barriers and the guy at the conveyor seemed happy to see me. I zipped on through and counted 15 uniformed men and women defending the country against one octogenarian liberal who’s never owned a gun, hasn’t fired an explosive in fifty years and then only a few bottle rockets, and arrived at my gate two hours early, and celebrated by buying a latte at a coffee stand that offers tables and chairs.
This is a great boon to authors, having a table in an airport to set the laptop on, and few airports offer them for free, not realizing that most Americans over forty are authors or thinking about becoming one. You have to buy a latte or else pay exorbitant fees to join a club and sit among software executives. I leave a $5 tip for the employees who clean the tables. And when people open up a conversation and ask about my line of work, I don’t say I’m an author because they’ll say, “I’ve been thinking about writing a book myself.”
Read MoreI once, in Detroit, discovered I’d left my anti-seizure meds and blood thinner back in New York and needed to step into a drugstore and negotiate with a pharmacist for an emergency refill. He was dubious about emergency meds, wanted to see a prescription or at least an empty bottle, but a lady pharmacist recognized my voice from the radio, having been a fan of my show, and she also was his boss so thanks to a long radio career I was spared a stroke or a heart attack that morning.
Life offers us magical connections, which astonish us and for which we are grateful. I loved that show, did it for forty years, and it was all because my fundamentalist family refused to buy a TV back when everyone was getting one so I was left with a Zenith radio and listened to the last of the old radio shows, Fibber McGee and Gunsmoke and Fred Allen, which I loved, and twenty years later I launched a show with cowboys and a detective and small-town folks in it, and enough time had passed so that it was considered a novelty, not an imitation, and suddenly I had a career, one I never planned on.
Read MoreWhen Chip Carter spoke about his father, Jimmy, at a memorial service in Atlanta and told how, when his dad noticed the boy got a poor mark in Latin, Jimmy studied Latin so that he could teach his son, I recognized a standard of fatherhood a good deal higher than my own and I felt bad for a moment until I recalled that it wasn’t my father’s level of fatherhood either. He was a father of six kids and I recall that when I got a C in math, it was my problem and he didn’t get involved.
That was the advantage of growing up in a big family. An only child was under tremendous pressure, observed closely by mom and dad, expected to excel in scholastics and also deportment and personal charm, whereas I, the invisible middle child, was free to lie in a dark space under the basement stairs reading adventure fiction by flashlight.
Read MoreOne man can do only so much and rather than deal with the prospect of war with Panama or Denmark, I’ve decided to think about winter, seeing as I’m spending a couple weeks down South and feel guilty about it, as I well should. It was bitterly cold when I left New York and when I got in the cab to go to JFK I was wearing no overcoat, no scarf or gloves, and the cabbie looked over his shoulder, wondering if he was going to have to contend with a lunatic. Meanwhile, dear friends of mine in Washington, D.C., employees of the deep state, are dealing with a blizzard, and friends in Alaska are living in darkness, and up in Toronto when Justin Trudeau announced his resignation as prime minister, he was brief; it was freezing, he didn’t want to be seen speaking in a pitiful trembly voice.
I’m 82 and so the prospect of a war of annexation with Canada doesn’t affect me personally, but I’d only point out that Republican states (PA, MI, ND, MT) with thinly defended borders would be easily invaded and if the war extends from January 20 into February and March, the wily Canucks may have some advantages. And when we win and our northern border extends deep into the Arctic, federal officials from Florida may be flying to the far reaches of Manitoba and be unable to play golf for extended periods of time. Just saying.
Read MoreI know something about elitism, having grown up in the exclusive Sanctified Brethren — we refused to commune with 99.85% of Christendom, we looked down on Baptists, Anglicans, you name it, we found fault with them all, and if a Lutheran guy made off with one of our young women, we forced ourselves to attend the wedding though it was actually a funeral. And then I got a job in public radio where I got to see elitism from below. I was a mere entertainer in the midst of serious journalists and scholars, and I was seriously looked down upon by many people whom income from my show was supporting. But then parents of teenagers have gone through the same thing and survived and I did too.
I sort of regret that I didn’t become truly elite when Minnesota almost became part of New France, this territory having been “discovered” by French explorers, and France battled the English for dominance here but then Louis XV was more interested in sugar from the Caribbean than fur from the North and so he withdrew and Voltaire said, “All we lost was a few acres of snow.” This remark still stings, centuries later. We could’ve grown up speaking French and saying “Joie de vivre” with real élan and “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” and “C’est la vie” instead of saying “Well, that’s life,” which doesn’t have anything like the savoir faire of “C’est la vie.” And with “C’est la vie,” you don’t need to stick the “well” in front of it to sound casual.
Read MoreSomebody has to be the worst president in U.S. history, they can’t all be No. 14 as Joe Biden was in a survey of American historians or No. 8 like Ike or No. 35 like Nixon, and isn’t it only fair that the worst (No. 45) should be given the opportunity to improve his ranking? Of course it is. Meanwhile, I don’t need to follow his second term day by day; I can better occupy my time with the crossword puzzle and the book reviews and skip the funny pages. I don’t check my IRA every morning or my blood pressure or the WNBA standings or the air quality index, so why should I upset myself at the thought of Kash Patel running the FBI or Tulsi Gabbard as head of national intelligence or an anti-vaxxer as Secretary of Health? If I want to study lunacy, why not become a therapist and get paid for it?
So I am focused on the positive aspects of life. I’ve just succeeded at taking a lazy one-week vacation with my family at a resort in California at which I slept late and hung out beside a pool under an umbrella and sipped lavender lemonade. My work ethic relaxed severely, I was very agreeable the entire time, I even started to sort of like myself.
Read MoreI flew down to Texas last week to get out of my tiny bubble on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and see that this is a big country that includes people who don’t think as I do nor even wish to. And from Texas I took my family to California to be among people who think as I did when I was younger but with uninhibited extravagance. It was quite a trip.
On Election Day, I expected Wonder Woman to win who fights for justice, peace, and equality, and she did not. It goes against what Miss Mortenson taught us in tenth-grade civics class so I went to Texas to try to make sense of it. Miss Mortenson believed in newspapers that tell the truth, the American ideal of the intrepid reporter who can’t be bought, and when I landed in Houston, I saw we’d arrived in the land of Fox — it was on giant screens in airport waiting areas and cafés — the network that coagulated entertainment and news by telling its audience what they wanted to believe and thanks to the Australian Rupert Murdoch, 70% of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen and Biden was illegitimate, and there is the heart of the illness in this country, the willingness to believe what you know is not true in order to think more of yourself and less of other people.
Read MoreTime magazine naming Trump “Person of the Year” is an interesting idea, sort of like naming a mortician to be your heir, but there it is. Life has its oddities. These days I’m walking around with a chorus of “Halle, Hallelujah” echoing in my head, from a Christmas song, “Light in the Stable,” I sang with some women the other day. I just sang a bass line, which is like inviting a mortician to your birthday party, but it felt good to me and now the refrain will not — simply refuses to — go away. I need my mind. I use it for various things. I can’t donate it to praising a child in a manger. He’s got cathedrals galore, choirs, gigantic organs, Bible classes.
I have just poured some coffee an inch to the left of my coffee cup and I hold the Hallelujah chorus responsible. Poured it on the kitchen table and it spread under the laptop I am writing on. Thank goodness my beloved was not witness to this. She has noted gaps in my thinking, moments of global aphasia (such as the inability to remember exactly what global aphasia is), a fondness for irrelevance, a tendency to repeat myself, and also. Global aphasia.
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