It’s never too late to be normal

I 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.

My plan for the next four years

Somebody 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.

Texas is a real education

I 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.

Man of the moment thinks back

Time 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.

A quiet night in Manhattan

My wife and I like to sit in the same room at night, doing our separate things, she in a chair reading a book, I at a table addressing Christmas cards. The book is by a mentally ill mountain climber worried that in an avalanche he might lose his meds for bipolarity. It’s a snowy Christmas card, I’m signing our names under a poem that ends “Onward we go, faithfully, into the dark and are there angels hovering overhead? Hark.” She is sleepy but it’s a good book and the bipolar guy is at a Buddhist camp where you meditate ten hours a day and his job is to sweep the floor with a broom made from branches. I’ve done a mountain of cards and I’m still in the K’s, Katherine, Ken, Kristina, and I’m not thinking about angels, I’m thinking what if Elon Musk sells himself the U.S. Postal Service for $125 million, half of what he paid for the Republican Party, and of course it goes online and merges with X and you’ll speak the inscription to be written cursively in your distinctive style. The p.o. is gone and polio and smallpox return and the F.B.I.J. investigates journalists and it all happens without anybody commenting on it and a second-grader calls 911 to report an active shooter in the next classroom of a Christian school.

It’s at times like this I think maybe I should see a neurologist. Then remember I saw Dr. Fink two weeks ago and he said my eyes are focused somewhat apart, not together, and the cardiologist said arrhythmia might be causing the dizziness, and the eyelid guy said he didn’t think surgery would help. He was the first left-handed physician I’ve seen in ages and I was fascinated by it. My handwriting is big and bold, using a black Sharpie, and I write “Blessings!” under the “Hark” to indicate that I mean it, it is a blessing despite the cash flowing into Bezos’s coffers, people crave Christmas. Normal folks, crazy ones, kooks, awake in the night and hear spooks, and look for a light, a star shining bright, a family in the Gospel of Luke’s.

The sweet day draws near

I did a Christmas show last week in St. Paul that ended with the audience singing “Silent Night,” three verses, a cappella, the infant tender and mild, the quaking shepherds, the radiant beams, and minutes later who should come backstage but my cousin Phyllis and her family, which made me happy. Her mother was my aunt Jean, who was funny and had a big heart and who, when I was a toddler and Dad went into the Army, took my mother and her three little kids into her big house in St. Paul and I still remember how welcome we were. There was a chair at the table that I guarded and if anyone tried to sit in it, I said “Daddy’s chair” and waved them away.
 
I go back home now and then and people walk up to me in the Hotel St. Paul who remember me as a friendly radio voice and some of them were apparently quite attached to that voice — I met a young woman last week who gasped as if I were a ghost and said, “We listened to you every Saturday at five o’clock. I still miss you.”

It can get really cold in Minnesota

I flew back to Minnesota just in time for a classic hard Minnesota freeze like the ones of my childhood, when you walk out the door and the cold hits you like a board and suddenly you realize you’re wearing the wrong clothes. You chose these clothes for elegance to emphasize your slim figure. The right clothes would make you look like you weigh 300 pounds. You wish you had those clothes on now.

St. Paul is bleak. I walk out of the Hotel St. Paul and wait for my Uber ride to the Midway Saloon. I feel I’m at a concentration camp for political dissidents. The wind blows in off the Mississippi. Nobody is out for a walk, nobody is hanging out, everyone is heading briskly for a car or for a warm building. And there is no complaining. This is the remarkable thing. Nobody says, “My God, it’s cold out, I have no feeling in my face,” because (1) this is not a personal experience, everyone else is cold too and (2) God is aware of the cold and is hoping it will make you a better person, which God knows it should. Nobody says, “I wish I were in Florida,” because (1) you are not in Florida and (2) there is a reason for you to be in Minnesota, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. You’d be in Phoenix with all the retired cops and teachers and ministers.

Moving on to the next thing

A guy whom we Christians think about every Christmas is John the Baptist, who announced, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord,” but when people came from Jerusalem to hear him preach and to be baptized, he called them a “generation of vipers,” not a welcoming thing to say, and because he wore rags, had a long beard, and fed on locusts, he’s not celebrated at Advent. He was too adventurous. We don’t serve locusts for Christmas dinner, not even in a pie or as seasoning on turkey, so poor John is cast aside, even by Baptists, and we focus instead on shepherds and angels, who are kindly and better dressed.

Seeing how much attention irrelevant elves and snowmen and reindeer get at the holidays, you’d think the mystic who announced the forthcoming miracle could at least get an ornament on a tree, but this is how a consumer society deals with mystics. We want them to have nice hair and speak softly and not eat insects.

The perils of pedestrianism explained

It’s been a couple months since the New York City Council legalized jaywalking in town and nobody has noticed this because everybody was doing it anyway. New Yorkers have been jaywalking since before there were stoplights. No New Yorker would stand on the sidewalk, no traffic in sight, and wait for the Walk sign. Nobody, not even Baptists or accountants or people suffering from severe clinical anxiety. Only tourists from the Great Plains would stand and wait for the light to change and this is a clue to pickpockets to lift their wallets.

The main hazard to pedestrians in the city is bicyclists who jayride wildly, flying down the bike lanes, whizzing through red lights, bikes and scooters whipping silently through the winter dark, riders dressed in black, like vampires, riding the wrong way on a one-way street, and especially treacherous are the delivery bikes. New York cops ride around in squad cars and during rush hour a squad car has zero chance of catching a speeding outlaw bicyclist racing through the three-foot gap between parked cars and cars stuck in traffic.

The small holiday of a happy man

The Christmas season is a trial for us Christians who must wend our way down miles of aisles of trashy merch as musical garbage drizzles down from the speakers in the ceiling and try to keep the nativity of Our Lord in mind, no easy thing, and for this I blame Charles Dickens who took a holy occasion and hung tinsel on it. His message of cheerfulness and sharing in the face of selfish greed is all well and good but it’s not the same as the story of God come to Earth to be made man to show His love for us. One is neighborliness and the other is a miracle and a mystery.

I also blame Irving Berlin and the composers of “Jingle Bells” and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and all the other standards that become termites in the brain. I hear them in the grocery store and I ask myself, “Are there no workhouses? As Scrooge said, “Are there no prisons? Are they still operating? If I had my way, everyone who goes around humming ‘White Christmas’ should be baked with his own pudding until he turns brown and be buried with a sprig of holly through his heart.”