A plate of rigatoni with friends
The Column: 03.29.23
The newspaper sets out to cover the full gamut of experience, from the Personals (Man, 45, seeks younger woman for mutual adventure and comfort) to the 50th anniversary party, George and Francine in their old tux and sparkly suit, and also the Letters of the Lovelorn (“He flirts with old friends of mine and our children’s teachers.”). If the rich and famous wind up in divorce court, the story can get very thick, and if one lover shoots another, the story becomes a novel. What the newspaper can’t cover very well is ordinary happiness because there is much too much of it and for us happy people, that is completely proper. You want to be able to eat your eggs and hash browns and sausage in the Chatterbox Café without a man with a pad and pencil interviewing you as to the cause of your good temper.
One cause is that you look back at your mistakes and know for a fact that you won’t do anything that dumb again.
The world is in constant crisis, the prospects for catastrophe are ever favorable, the cruelty of dictators and the confusions of democracy are well-known, but as one gets older and even older than that, the front page starts to fade and you cherish your moments of ignorance, such as when I sit with Buddy and Carl and the world devolves to just us.
A table of women is thirty feet away and they are shrieking and all talking at once and we men do not shriek. A shriek would indicate a need for CPR. We sit and gently rag on each other and inquire as to each other’s beloved grandchildren, not mentioning the son in rehab or the QAnon sister.
We reminisce about our impecunious youth and the crummy jobs that put us through college and we avoid politics because we’re all wishy-washy liberals so what’s to talk about?
I love these lunches. Wish there were one every day. But life went off in other directions and the old gang is scattered and some came to a sad end. Our classmate Ben was electrocuted fifty years ago while installing a water pump in his basement and Buddy mentions that Ben’s daughter called him to ask about her dad — she was five when he died and hardly remembers him — and Buddy lauded Ben’s good qualities, not mentioning that he died because his little daughter, wanting to help Daddy, had plugged in the power cord to the pump. Life is perilous. All the more reason to take pleasure in what’s left.
True friendship means not feeling obliged to impress each other and so we don’t. We do light sarcasm and gentle mutual deprecation, we’re old Midwestern guys, we see that we’re all in the same boat, the equality of old age prevails. Health is what matters, not money, not prestige.
Carl mentions that his miserable ex-brother-in-law died, a thief and a hustler, a bad father who ran off with another woman years ago and who, in his final illness, returned to the family he’d abandoned and they took him in. Carl says, “I’m tired of crazy people. I grew up with a bunch of them, drunks and sociopaths, narcissists, they were a blight on the lives of others. I hate craziness. If the SOB had come to my door, I would’ve shot him. Accidentally, but cleanly.”
Carl is a Democrat and Democrats aren’t allowed to say “I’m tired of crazy people” or talk approvingly of gun violence but we let him talk. The SOB was a blight on the lives of his children and at the age of 82 he threw himself on their mercy. A moment of silence. And then Buddy says, “So a guy went to his brother-in-law’s house to beg for help and the brother-in-law pulled a gun on him and the guy ran away and the brother-in-law chased him and he was getting closer so the guy reached back and grabbed some and threw it at him.”
I love this joke. “Grabbed what?” I say.
“Oh. It was there. A whole lot of it.”
Friendship is what it’s all about. What it’s always been about. As Mr. Trump awaits indictment on one or more of four different charges, I hope he has at least a couple of close personal friends. Not managers, lawyers, admirers. Friends. They know he’s guilty but they still love him and they’ll have lunch with him and he won’t rant and rave, just reminisce about his wretched father.
The grace in the final paragraph is penetratingly beautiful.
You've disappointed me greatly with this post, mostly in that your title is deceiving. To be clear, you made no mention of Rigatoni, my favorite pasta, in the post outside of the title. Try as they may, other pastas fail to reach the pinnacle that Rigatoni has, though thin spaghetti takes a close second. Ziti is a liar and a phony, he pretends to be something he is not. He tries to pass himself off as a sewer pipe but we all know he's just cheap pex tubing and he has to gather in greater numbers to equal the mass of Rigatoni. Bowtie pasta, well, they're just bowties that mix well with butter and oregano, unlike the ones you wear around your neck. Elbows, not the ones between your shoulder and hands, all know that there only place in the world is not in a thick marinara, but in a bowl surrounded by a lot of cheese. All other pastas are just too fearful to even try to compete with Rigatoni. Rigatoni is king and you failed to mention it in your post. From the title I deduced a lengthy and cleverly written (as you often do) tale of days in your home town as a youth having Rigatoni dinner with garlic bread on a Sunday evening after a day of Church, lying on grassy lakeshore with a girl and later chasing raccoons out of the garage. But no. Instead, we get a comforting image of old friends gathering and giggling at a table in a restaurant. All at the expense of the mundane repetitive daily madness we live through each day with nary a care in the world. Entertaining and pleasant reading but lacking any mention of Rigatoni. <insert huge labored sigh here>.
In other news, maybe it hasn't occurred to you, yet, or may not, but, and you can ask this of any ordinary person at or above retirement age. There comes a point in everyone's life where you just don't give a crap anymore. Though for the statement to be more effective, replace "crap" with your favorite explanative. But, we don't give a crap with a smile because we are happy and we have long realized that all the daily conflict and diatribe we muddle through each and every day is nothing more than pointless and meaningless differences of opinion that are shoved in our faces from every angle and means. And we've grown weary of it and have realized it all means and amounts to nothing. The result is the desire to tell these whiney little brats to shut up and that life is to short to go on about petty little issues. Issues we which we realized long ago are all petty.
So the solution is to sit with friends, who have also reached the same point in life, have a bowl of rigatoni swimming in a thick marinara with parmesan cheese sprinkled on top and a side of garlic bread, chit chat about old times and tell each other silly jokes you've heard a hundred times before and laugh at the whiners who will eventually be doing the same someday. We just all wish everyone would reach that point now.
All this talk of Rigatoni has made me hungry. Damn you.
As always Mr. Keillor, thank you for your entertaining words.