A beautiful Sunday in September

The Column: 09.26.24

I am a morning person, it is when I do my best work, and it took me until I was 40 to realize this plain fact, which is a shame, I being 82 now, which is why I intend to live to be 97 as my mother did, so I won’t have wasted half my life, only two/fifths. I spent twenty years trying to be an evening person by downing a glass of Scotch and then a glass of wine or two or three so as to be charming and witty, but for Christians glamor and wittiness is a steep and rocky path, we are meant to be productive, but the hangover from the Scotch and wine clouded my mornings and made my writing dark and ironic like Kafka’s, stories of hopeless struggle against a mysterious fate, which I don’t believe, I believe in redemption.

I quit drinking by quitting it. I didn’t want to spend a couple weeks in treatment at Alky Camp dealing with my underlying problems, I just wanted to ditch the Scotch so I did. I drank ginger ale instead. I also stopped smoking one day. I’d been a chain-smoker because I thought that’s what writers do, but all I really enjoyed was lighting the cigarette and exhaling, the inhaling part made me feel bad, so I stopped. I kept a pencil in my pocket and if I needed to, I stuck it in my mouth.

Every morning I remember how bad I used to feel and how good I feel now. It’s a good way to begin the day. Sunday was glorious in Manhattan and I had my coffee, avoiding the Times, which would only scare me badly, and after looking around for my glasses, which, as it turned out, were parked on my head, I hiked to church for the 10 a.m. service, scootched into the pew, prayed for Kamala who carries our hope for decency in America, and then heard the organist Brother John strike up “Just A Closer Walk With Thee,” odd for an Episcopal service, in a very danceable tempo.

I love this about my church, we often come to the verge of euphoria but being Anglican we resist, we suppress wild euphoria to produce a quiet joy, not like the charismatic sects who raise their arms in the air and dance around and speak in tongues, but some people speak better in tongues than others, French people for example and Chinese, so it turns show-offy and makes the less euphoric and monolingual feel inferior, whereas we Episcopalians remain seated and simply feel giddy and very very happy. We confess our sins, such as failing to RSVP promptly to invitations and not attending a seminal play by an important playwright though we know seminal things are good for us, and then we shake hands and wish each other Peace, and we sing “Leaning On The Everlasting Arms,” which makes me think of my aunts, and I shake hands with the minister and walk down Amsterdam past the Hispanic Catholic church just letting out.

I stop at Trader Joe’s and buy salad makings and coffee and cereal, bread and cheese, frozen mac and cheese, and get in line with couples with kids in strollers and old guys and young women with witty T-shirts, and head for home past lunchers in sidewalk cafés and fruit vendors and bikes whizzing past.

I love New York City. I’m a Minnesotan, I’m an alien here, but after this year I know that America is not my country anymore. There is no argument about this. Any country in which Donald J. Trump is a serious candidate for Chief Magistrate is not my country. So no matter the result of the election, I plan to stop reading the news and live in my immediate surroundings, my neighbors, my church, the folks on the subway, the kids studying in the library, the walkers in the park. Mr. Trump is an old joke in New York. He couldn’t get elected garbage inspector. Only in the Midwest and South is he a power. So it’s their country and they can do with it what they will. I’m 82 and I plan to enjoy the rest of my life and if he uses the Army to deport ten million people and lets Putin reassemble the Soviet Union and jails Joe Biden and cuts billions in funding of public schools, that is for the New York Times to worry about, not me.

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