A close call is a beautiful thing

I am still working full time at the age of 82, which sometimes gives me pause and I wonder, Why? I’ve had a rich full career. I sang on the Grand Ole Opry once. I played Radio City Music Hall, riding up on the stage elevator accompanied by Chet Atkins and Leo Kottke. I once made a movie in which I was kissed by Meryl Streep. Only on the cheek, but still. A portrait of me once appeared in the Seed Art exhibit at the Minnesota State Fair, my face done with seeds, mostly wheat, some corn. I am one of the best limericists in America (There was an attractive stockbroker who beat everybody at poker. Her dress was revealing and also concealing the ace of hearts and the joker.) How much does a man need before he decides it’s enough?

The truth is that I have nothing else to do, no hobbies, no interest in travel, I have no social life because my friends are all in bed by 9 p.m., so I keep working. I know that a man with time on his hands can easily go wrong, even an Episcopalian like me. I could easily drive up to the drive-up window and tell the teller to empty her cash drawer and take the dough to Memphis and find a gin-soaked honky-tonk woman who’ll take me for a ride across her shoulder or, as an alternative, I can write a novel, which is what I was doing this morning.

Flying out West for a look-see

I flew to Minnesota to have my eyes looked at and coming into TSA territory, approaching the magnetometer, I waited for the agent to point at my shoes and yell, “Are you over seventy-five?” and give me the pleasure of saying, “Thank you very much. I’m eighty-two.” Simple vanity on my part. But she didn’t and it struck me as an insult, the assumption that elderly people are incapable of acts of terrorism using explosive footwear. I’m no engineer but I think that by googling “incendiary soles” I could figure out a way to make my sneakers deadly.

But now it seems TSA has changed its procedures and those of us with medical implants such as my pacemaker/defibrillator must be patted down by an agent, and so I was and it made me feel important again, a potential threat to national security. I’m not a convicted felon like Whatsisname but I like to imagine I have felonious potential and being patted down by a man with a badge came as a distinct honor. A person incapable of causing trouble is ready to be packed off to Shady Acres to sit at a table and do jigsaw puzzles.

It is never too late for a revelation

I was in a flesh-eating mood last Sunday and so I and two other cannibals headed for a steakhouse in Midtown Manhattan –– my beloved, the vegetarian, was up in Connecticut so we were free from moral censure –– and we found a joint on West 52nd with tables out on the sidewalk so we sat there.

The carnivore section of the menu was extensive and the prices were stunning. The Japanese Wagyu steaks cost more than my quarterly tuition at the University of Minnesota back in 1961. I am often shocked by prices these days –– Tootsie Rolls were penny candy when I was a kid and now you pay $72.99 for a box of 36 –– but I stifle my shock at high prices, not wanting to seem out of touch or sound like a cheapskate. So I bit my tongue and ordered the 10 oz. Wagyu medium-rare, meat from highly sensitive cattle who are given emotional therapy and massaged daily and fed kale and arugula and mushrooms and are not slaughtered but anesthetized.

Looking ahead down the road a ways

When Mr. Trump goes down to defeat in November, after he’s done complaining about the rigged election, the unconstitutionality of Biden’s withdrawal, the AI enlargement of Harris’s crowds, the oppression by the Fake News, he will finally turn his attention to the creation of the Trump Library, two words that do not sit comfortably together, and my guess is that he will designate Mar-a-Lago as the site for the government to maintain and for him to have the right of residency. A special wing will be created for the public display of top-secret documents.

He will, of course, want to control the narrative of the Library, choose the historians who will be in residence there, so it will proclaim his Greatness and the Tragedy of his Unjust Defeat and the Meaning of his Martyrdom. There will be a great deal of Capitalization of Key Words at the Library, and in the Portraits of Himself will be no flaws of pigmentation nor strands of hair askew. The Faithful will come to the site and Rededicate themselves to the Great Cause. But eventually they will all die off and one day a young executive will take charge and she will ask herself, “What do I do with this trash heap?”

Let’s get together, people, what do you say?

It was rousing, even riveting, to watch the glorious art of public speaking come bursting out alive at the Democratic convention in Chicago, never mind your political persuasion — to hear the English language crackle like fireworks in the cadence of great gospel preaching — and here in the age of social media, influencers, memes, to see one speaker after another light a fire under that enormous crowd and bring them to their feet, roaring, arms upraised. Churchill would’ve been cheering, Teddy Roosevelt raising a ruckus, William Jennings Bryan shouting Bravo.

The Democrats could’ve called off the convention; they’d already phoned in the roll call and given Kamala the nomination. But this one was worth the trouble.

The beautiful winding road of August

I went up the coast of Maine last week and came across a wonderful little café and it was so good I pulled out my pad and pen and sat writing for a couple hours. I like to write with people nearby but not involved with me personally. The waitress was all business, she greeted me by saying, “Yeah?”

I asked if they served lunch. She said, “Yeah. Take a seat.”

What an awesome August this has been

Mon Dieu! Mille Félicitations to you French for the merveilleux et excitant Paris Olympics, and many thanks to YouTube (or Toi Tube) for the nightly highlights (points forts). An old man doesn’t have hours to spend whilst commentators kill time and runners warm up for the 1,500-meter, just shoot me the juice, Bruce, and show me the Olympic break-dancing gold medal taken by a Canadian — a Canadian ! — and, okay, he’s a Korean-Canadian, Philip Kim, but Olympic break-dancing? B-boys and B-girls spinning and twisting and doing impossible physical feats. And the USA’s Suni Lee doing the twisting vault routine that needs to be seen in slow motion several times to be believed.

I am 82 and, for me, trotting around the block would be an Olympic event. So to see the Swedish pole-vaulter Duplantis perform the ridiculous feat of lofting himself feet-first with the rubbery pole and squiggle over the crossbar is like watching a man climb up a brick wall — it’s surreal, it has no relevance to life on this planet today.

Marine on St. Croix’s Ralph Malmberg, the inspiration for Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery

Obiturary: Malmberg was an ‘amazing and interesting character for being, you know, a quiet Swede,’

It is never too late to learn a lesson

A dear friend once said to me out of the blue, “Today it will have been forty years since the last time I vomited,” and I said to her, “How do you celebrate an anniversary like that?” It was a witty moment, one of many in our friendship, and if we’d only collected them all, we could sit down and write a Cole Porter musical, but we didn’t and anyway Cole Porter isn’t so hip anymore and we’re busy doing other things.

I, for one, have been on a tour doing a one-man show and having a great time until last week in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, after a dinner of six oysters on the half shell, clam chowder, and a lobster roll, I awoke at 4 a.m. feeling sick to my stomach and headed for the bathroom.

Riding around the country in August

Ten blissful days driving around New England doing a one-man show in small towns and it’s not easy to write about bliss but one should try, especially since I write so kvetchingly about misery and annoyance.

What makes it blissful is that I’m not in charge. My wife took away the car keys long ago and it turns out to be a pleasure. In a few months, Joe Biden will experience this. He’ll go back to Rehoboth Beach and play Scrabble and finally have time to read Dickens. I was a boss for years and I still remember the dimwit things I did, but now, with my road manager Janis Kaiser at the wheel and making all the decisions, I am in the blessed position of passenger, just like when I was ten, looking out the window, watching the world go by. She drives through Connecticut into Massachusetts, four-lane highways lacing through deep forests, and suddenly we’re in torrential rain, the wipers slapping, we’re passing giant semitrailers, blasting through puddles, and it’s all a travelogue movie to me: she keeps us on schedule, I sit and take it all in and my mind wanders. We slow down and motor through a town of brick storefronts right out of the late 19th century, we pass a herd of Holsteins, we come into a traffic jam caused by a flock of geese casually crossing the highway, it’s one lovely moment after another.