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 did something last Sunday I’d never done before in my 82 years. I went to a café on the main drag of Keene, New Hampshire, and I could hear my wife say, though she was five hundred miles away, “Wash your hands before you eat, you’ve been shaking hands with a hundred people,” so I walked to the rear of the café and found the men’s room door locked. A waitperson nearby, what we once called a “waitress,” said, “Use the ladies’.” I looked at her aghast. “Go ahead, we do it all the time,” she said. “Yes, but you’re a lady,” I said. She laughed. She said, “Go ahead, it’s no problem.” I waited a minute. She laughed at my timidity. The guy in the men’s must’ve been doing his eye makeup. So I went into the ladies’. (That’s not my term; that was the word on the door.) It was a regular toilet, except with no urinal. I put the seat up, aimed very carefully, then flushed, washed my hands, and emerged. A woman stood there waiting. She was more my age than the waitperson’s. She looked at me somewhat severely. I wanted to explain but didn’t know how. (“I was told to go in there”? It sounds sheepish, even shamefaced.)
I’ve been at the Metropolitan Opera during intermission when women standing in a long line at the Women’s broke out of line and stalked into the Men’s, no waiting, and, I assume, went into a stall and did what needed to be done, and if a man had stared at them afterward, they would’ve said, “What’s your problem?” But I’m not a New Yorker.
Read MoreWhat a world of marvels we live in. I sit with my daughter at night on a terrace under a birch tree looking out at the lights of Manhattan and I take my phone and shoot a video scanning the city lights and text it to a friend facing surgery in Minnesota who is in isolation, her immune system compromised by chemo. She is Catholic so I also send her a joke about the priest and the Baptist sitting together on the plane. The priest orders a glass of wine, the Baptist a 7-Up. The Baptist says , “Christians should not touch alcohol,” and the priest says, “Jesus drank wine.” The Baptist says, “Yes, and I’d have thought better of him if he hadn’t.” All this with a gizmo the size of half a sandwich. No wonder young people love it so much.
I’m of the ancient pen-and-ink-on-stationery era and I like to write limericks to friends such as an Episcopal priest facing surgery:
Read MoreI’ve been on a solid high ever since July 21 when I was sitting in a café on South Wabash in Chicago, the El rumbling overhead, and the word came that Joe Biden had stepped out of the race and that Democrats now could find a candidate who demonstrates energy and acuity and passion and is not simply trying to pronounce all his words clearly. I know this sounds cruel but I am Joe’s age and he makes 81 seem like senescence whereas it can be, given good genes and fine pharmaceuticals and some luck, a beautiful chapter of life.
I read the bulletin on my phone and looked around the café packed with people of many shades, and for all I’ve heard about us living in a Third World country, it didn’t look that way to me at all. Chicago is the city of Oprah and Saul Bellow, John Belushi, Mavis Staples, Studs Terkel, where the Rolling Stones made a pilgrimage to see Muddy Waters, which tells me that America is Great and has been for a very long time and people who don’t know that are in need of assistance.
Read MoreI have been a very happy Democrat for the past week and I am not used to this. I’m used to reading about homelessness, hungry children, the pollution by plastics, the warming of the oceans, various daily examples of injustice and cruelty and suffering, but now, even though I am an old Episcopalian writer, I am in love, I’ve been Kamalized. The nation was sunk in depression over a contest between two old white men, one weird and maniacal, the other murmury, and we were praying for a fresh face to come onstage, but who? And then the news flash: Joe withdrew. Another flash: he endorsed Kamala Harris. And suddenly politics, which had been the same old sameness of similitude glaciating toward November 5, became a fascinating story. There was a good reason to read the paper. A smart articulate friendly woman who laughs and who smiles spontaneously and when Oval Orange came out and called her a lunatic and said she’d destroy the country, it made no sense, not even to his elderly biker fans with the white hair ropes coming out of their skulls. It only made O.O. weirder. It made me feel high. Harris vs. the Harasser starts to look like an unfair contest. She’s got a future, he’s only got a troubled past.
I am not used to feeling this way — my people expecting the worst. When happiness struck, they took this as a sign of imminent catastrophe. But Kamala looks to me like a sunny day after a year of trumpification and when she vows to eliminate child hunger in America, she is striking a chord that reverberates left and right. The right of every child to get a decent healthy start in life, no matter the iniquities or carelessness of the parents. Not even the man Senator Vance called “America’s Hitler” can argue with that. And the visual contrast between her and Herr Trump is stunning. A 16-month-old child can see the difference: Angelina Jolie vs. Thor the Avenger.
Read MoreI turn 82 in a few weeks in the midst of a long tour doing solo shows up Northeast, which is the best way to turn very old, to ride around and entertain beautiful strangers, all of them younger. I do not want to sit at a table of cranks and geezers, each eager to relate his or her own medical history, and then someone wheels in a bonfire of a birthday cake and we sing the old song in our ruined voices and eat melted wax with angel food and someone tells me all about an article they read about carcinoma. I don’t like cake. I’d prefer a pie, rhubarb, with a little tang to it, and two scoops of vanilla. We octogenarians get compliments that sound like eulogies, so go away, stick it in your ear. I’ve had a complicated life with more than my share of wrong turns and incompletes, but I’m in reasonable health, thanks to American medicine, and I have good friends, and I’m married to a smart and funny woman who makes my heart skip when she puts a hand on my shoulder. And I have work to do. God has a purpose for me, yet to be fulfilled, and maybe talking to you, dear reader, is it, so make the best of it. Too bad it’s via internet so you can’t use it afterward for cat litter.
I talk to Him now and then, bargaining about my death. I want to reach 97 as my mother did and be as alert as she and pass from the world in a few days, dozing, listening to gospel music, and He tells me, by way of my wife, that this is my problem, not His, that I need to walk a couple miles briskly every day and eat two meals and cut back on red meat.
Read MoreI have a feeling that the 2024 campaign is effectively over, thanks to a gunman shooting him in the ear and Mr. Trump having the presence of mind, as the Secret Service carried him to safety, to thrust his right fist in the air and shout, “Fight, fight.” The photograph of him doing it, streaks of blood on his face, the flag flying behind him — there is no way for Joe Biden to argue with that photograph. If I were Joe, I’d be thinking of a country to fly to on January 19, the day before treason charges are filed, perhaps Sweden.
Senator J.D. Vance promptly accused Democrats of responsibility, that Biden’s rhetoric “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” Others blamed the Deep State, Antifa, elitists, transgender persons, and a Republican congressman said, “Joe Biden sent the orders.” Democrats failed to put forward a theory of their own, given Vance’s line, that President Trump had attempted to “assassinate” himself by snipping his ear with a fingernail clipper, but they didn’t. Democrats are a bunch of clerks and clerics, no talent for fiction.
Read MoreI was in St. Paul last week, walking around, remembering my glory days there, the basement studio where I did a morning DJ show, my first house on Goodrich Avenue across the street from Scott Fitzgerald’s house where he lived with Zelda and wrote “Winter Dreams,” the Fitzgerald Theater downtown where I did a show for years. When I stuck my head in the door last Wednesday and walked down to the stage I remembered how incredibly lucky I had been in that town.
A few blocks away, is the train depot where my dad rode the westbound North Coast Limited twice a week, in the mail car, a .38 pistol on his hip. My mother, in her late teens, lived in St. Paul and earned pocket money going door to door selling peanut butter cookies in brown lunchbags. I grew up and had no interest in football so went in the opposite direction and tried to be a writer. I wanted to write like Kafka though I’d never been persecuted so it didn’t work but when my wife got pregnant I needed to earn a living and landed a job in radio by virtue of being the only applicant — it was the 6 a.m. shift — and obviously my audience wasn’t looking for existential dread, especially not in winter, they needed King Oliver and the Golden Gate Quartet and the Red Clay Ramblers. I come from serious people but I needed to learn to do comedy, so I did. A person can learn these things: brevity, word choice, timing, a wild streak. And cheerfulness is good.
Read MoreI felt the world turn Monday when my wife walked up to a tree, snapped a picture of it with her phone, googled the picture, and said, “It’s a Japanese maple.” Then she did the same to a Siberian pine. I’d never seen anyone do this before. I thought of all the Boy Scouts who earned merit badges by learning to identify trees and this gave them the self-confidence to go on to important careers in government and finance. I thought of people who majored in botany and impressed their friends at parties by saying, “That’s not an ordinary maple. It’s Japanese.” Now a fourth-grader can do it. Maybe even a second.
I don’t mind being married to someone smarter than I. I’ve come to depend on it. It means I don’t need to read about the heat wave or the elections in France and the U.K.; she handles all that for me.
Read MoreIn church Sunday we sang “All people who on earth do dwell” with the beautiful line about serving God with mirth, the only hymn that calls us to comedy, and it made me feel good after this dreadful past week in which mirth has been hard to find.
Suddenly I miss Jonathan Winters, the comic who worked in fragments — I wish he were here, he’d handle today’s news to perfection. Elderly dither was his specialty so he’d have done the Debate in 25 seconds: Biden’s breathless tremolo, the stricken eyes, the dazed solemnity, and Trump in nonsense Deutsch, the pump of a shotgun, baritone chortling, a sidelong snarl, the snap of a whip. Today’s comics are writers and they work in whole sentences and paragraphs but Winters was all phrases and feeling, lunacy, terror, smug confidence, profound stupidity. You can find an abundance of him on YouTube and while you’re there you can check out other varnished geniuses, the dignity of Buster Keaton in his triumphant defeats, the sweetness of Laurel & Hardy — once in a while when I feel gloomy, I google their three-minute dance in “Way Out West,” the fatso and the man-child doing an innocent buck-and-wing to the Avalon Boys singing “At the Ball, That’s All” on a busy street, oblivious to and ignored by the busy world around them.
Read MoreThe age of 81 has come under close scrutiny recently and, as an occupant, I should say a few words in its behalf. Most people are younger than 81, some much younger, and when they see me come onstage, they’re impressed that I’m upright and mobile. I walk to the microphone and speak entire sentences into it that apparently make sense. I don’t doubt that some maybe wonder, if I drop dead, will their ticket be refunded at the box office or will they need to go through a complicated procedure online. But what I say makes sense as do my various hand gestures — Magnanimity (Open Hands), Profundity (Index Finger), Thoughtfulness (Hands Pressed In A Steeple), Thumbs Up — and they relax and attend to what I have to say.
A man of 81 has quite a bit to say. It’s too late to try to be hip; back in my twenties I was hip and wrote bad poems about the fascination of unreality, the beauty of cloudiness and mystery and longing for meaning that I thought were beautiful. Now I know that honesty and compassion and kindness are beautiful and there’s no mystery about that.
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