A good snowfall can change everything almost

The Column: 02.16.24

A splendiferous snow fell on Manhattan a few days ago, seven inches, a new bright world, school was canceled and soon neighborhood children were hauling their sleds and saucers into Central Park to go sliding.

Sliding is something an old man avoids but I remember the pleasure of lubricity — tobogganing down a steep slope and out onto the Mississippi ice where we could skate upwind and then open our jackets for a sail and go flying home. We flooded a rink in a vacant lot and played hockey and somebody’s dad hauled an old chicken coop over with a woodstove in it for a warming house. And I may be idealizing now but I do remember a spirit of chumminess and good cheer in that warm house on bitter cold days. Bad kids chose to suppress their malevolent tendencies; subzero weather made them sort of sensible.

I miss sliding and skating, the aimlessness of it. I’ve been awfully industrious for a long time and could stand to have more fun. I spend too much time in airports being yelled at by TSA kids and boarding a plane to somewhere, which is just a school bus with snacks.

This is a male urge, I do believe. The women I know tend to business and worry about family finances and the future of the planet. Men never completely get over adolescence; strains of it remain, a need to blow things up or to throw a rotten tomato at someone or hold a lit match to another man’s rear end as he flatulates. Years ago, when I lived in Copenhagen, American friends came to visit now and then and the women wanted to see castles and the men wanted to see beaches where people lie around naked. They couldn’t come right out and say so, lest women roll their eyes and say, “Oh, grow up.” Probably women told Rubens and Botticelli and Michelangelo to grow up, but they went ahead and created great art based on their fascination with nakedness. I grew up among people who associated nudity with moral laxity, so it has appeal for me.

We are a gender that likes to mess around. I miss shooting baskets. Solitaire. I miss sitting around drinking coffee, which we did back in the Office Era but now everyone works at home.

I’m in the mood to take a long aimless car trip and write a book about the people I meet. Writing would make this a deductible business expense. I still enjoy writing, thanks to the fact that no serious critic ever thought I was an important writer. I know writers who were once hailed as heavyweights and now struggle to write a whole paragraph. Nobody ever described my stuff as “provocative and profound,” the most I ever got was “amusing yet often poignant,” which is not a pedestal, it’s a low curb.

My title for the book is “The Old Man in the Blue Dodge Pickup” and so I need to find a blue Dodge pickup and then I’m ready to go. I’m going to head out of New York and make my way southwest on two-lane highways into deep red America and I’ll carry boxes of my book “Guy Poems” and stop along the way and put up a sign — “Guy Poems, $5” — and see who stops to have a look.

I have a poem about urination — “Women are more circumspect but men can piss with great effect, with terrible hydraulic force, can make a stream or change its course, put out fires and cigarettes, and sometime laying down our bets, late at night outside the bars, we like to aim up at the stars” — and a poem about sperm — “The sperm is no boob, when he smells the fallopian tube, he goes into some crazy figure eights about a thousand times as those female enzymes keep egging him on to penetrate” — and other subjects of a guyistic nature, and I hope to have friendly encounters with guys about guy things.

I believe that once you cross over into 80, you need to set the newspaper aside when possible and get off your high horse and find simple plain pleasure in your declining years. Cousin Dan flies his glider, cousin Joyce studies Scripture and researches family history, cousin Richard makes stained-glass windows, brother Stan files appeals for prison inmates, and I write poems about the unpoetic. I’ve never owned a blue Dodge pickup. We were Ford people. I am looking around at the want ads.

Make your next road trip more enjoyable with the audio version of Garrison Keillor’s Serenity at 70, Gaiety at 80: Why you should keep on getting older.

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