Canada is burning but we're doing okay
The Column: 07.09.23
I missed the Fourth of July parade with Uncle Sam striding along on stilts and a wagon drawn by Percherons with a band playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever” in double time, but maybe they don’t do that anymore, maybe they ran out of men who could walk on stilts with confidence and who fit the Uncle Sam suit. It was a slim fit.
I’m not nostalgic about olden times. I love these passwords and PINs that give me the sense of foreign agents trying to get into my email, steal my prescription for metoprolol. I am fond of the GPS woman who gives us directions in such a sympathetic tone, not condescending at all. I adore my laptop and have no warm memories of my Underwood typewriter. Someday I believe the GPS woman may become a therapist and tell me to put regrets behind and prescribe a memory-loss drug that will do exactly that.
I do feel that young people are overloaded with electronic stimulation. I worry about the environment and economics. I sat in the Oyster Bar and ate a cheeseburger and overheard two smart guys talking about the banking system in a way that made me queasy and I said to them, “But it’s not as bad as it looks, right?” and one of them said, “No, it’s worse.” I heard about a college history teacher who was asked by a student, “You talked about World War Two, does that mean there was a First?” This was not high school, this was c-o-l-l-i-t-c-h.
I avoid the apprehension of imminent disaster. My theory of economics is called Gratitudemy, as found in Psalm 23: “My cup runneth over.” I’m a cockeyed optimist. I picked it up during the pandemic. Yes, it was rough, people died, but it had its bright side too. Millions escaped their cubicles and got to work at home in their pajamas and there (guess what?) they discovered that their 40-hour workweek as Creative Inclusivity Outreach Director was easily done in 20 or 25 and they found an additional job as Corporate Mission Influencer and now they’re earning a decent wage. It was a huge gift to us introverts. Dinner parties disappeared because you can’t eat while masked. My calendar was wiped clean. Suddenly life became more like it used to be than it ever was before.
And so I set aside the past and retreat into the present and take pleasure in the morning coffee, the granola with berries, the appearance of She Whom I Love, the conversational path over familiar ground, then on to the morning’s work, and in this routine there is serenity to be found and freedom from the vast treasury of available anxiety.
She Whom I Love asks, “Don’t you miss Minnesota? Are you sure you can be happy in New York?” I do and I can. In Minnesota are people I’ve known almost my entire life and when we converse it is deeply satisfying, like hearing Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade for Strings” for the 50th or 60th time, but there’s so much of my past in Minnesota that I don’t care to relive, namely pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth, if you want to know the truth, but with old age and decrepitude your sins become less deadly. Pride vanishes, your greed is satisfied by any ATM and sleep becomes the object of your lust. You envy the young until you hear them talk about how overstressed they are. Gluttony is the occasional bacon cheeseburger. Wrath is behind you, thanks to sloth, of which you have a good steady supply, so what’s there to be angry about? As they say in Denmark, “Shut up and be beautiful.”
I know I’m an old man because I don’t know who Ryan Seacrest is and everyone else does. I grew up in a city where I rode my bike past a lumbermill, a huge clothing factory, a slaughterhouse, many printing plants — I could feel the ground vibrate from the mighty presses rolling in them — and now these buildings have become colonies of condos, artists’ studios, chic restaurants, office buildings where people with liberal arts degrees sit squinting at computers, people whose job titles (Creative Governance Modeling, Digital Experience Director) make no sense to me, and the ground doesn’t vibrate anymore.
But yes, there was a World War I, it was a horror, google “Battle of Verdun” sometime and it’ll make you feel fortunate to have not known anything about it.
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I mainly credit Walter Cronkite’s late Sunday afternoon broadcast, ‘The Twentieth Century’ for my awareness of World War I and its sequel. Of course, as a child I knew veterans of the first, but they never spoke of the experience, so my impressions were of soldiers, horses and artillery all moving in the stuttery and strangely accelerated manner of early film, all narrated by Walter Cronkite. Unfortunately, professional football completely filled Sunday afternoons by the mid-60s, eventually spilling over to Sunday nights, Mondays and even occasionally Thursdays.
To this day, I have this feeling of being a contemporary to those who experienced those wars, even though I was born more than seven years after the last one.
I hope my grandkids are finding a little time to learn about this horrible history, but video games and social media may be depriving them of that sense of being connected to the times and people who came before.
Thank you. Both my grandfathers, Alfred Granzen and Alexander Lawson, fought in WWI, and would never talk about it. Except Alfred once said, their commanding officer ordered them to charge across a death zone. When no one went, he responded, “What, do you want to live forever?”