Enough about them, this is about me

The Column: 07.28.23

I’ve heard enough about Barbie and Oppenheimer and Ron DeSantis, so let’s talk about me for a minute. I’m barefoot, wearing tan pants and black T, sitting under a potted maple on a terrace in Manhattan in a perfect summer twilight, an old man with a teenage heart, and I’ve been duly humble long enough but now I’d like a little attention and I’m sorry that the Florida Orange gave narcissism a bad name. In Minnesota, when I was a kid, we considered selfishness unseemly but what did I get for all my selflessness? Well, today is a new day and as of today I am a New Yorker. Today I bought a knish dog and a cream soda at a sidewalk stand. In Minnesota, we call it a pig in a blanket, but I’m a New Yorker now and I use the word knish. Okay? Got a problem with that?

When I moved out of Minneapolis, I sorted through personal papers and it struck me that, in hundreds of pictures of me, I am not smiling in a single one. I look like a mortician with a migraine. Partly this is due to the cold. Winter is brutal and you keep your mouth shut so you won’t frost your lungs. Teachers told me that. Plus which, in Minnesota there never were many people around so what was the point of exercising personal charm? Plus which, there are strong Lutheran tendencies there, people consider humor frivolous, maybe sacrilegious. Jesus wept; He didn’t laugh.

I feel much freer in New York. I sometimes talk to myself when walking in the park, assuming I have something interesting to say. If you did this in Minnesota, there would be an intervention, you’d go into rehab for self-consciousness training. In New York, people enjoy this. It’s a looser culture. Crosswalks are ignored and “Do Not Walk” signs are considered only a suggestion.

I feel much freer of guilt in New York. In Minnesota, guilt is a civic duty, and shaming is a popular sport. I’ve never been in a group of Minnesotans for ten minutes without someone bringing up racism, sexism, injustice, the oppression of someone or other, our shameful treatment of 80-year-olds, the unfairness of this, that or the other thing, and everyone is obliged to be solemn and nod and feel contrition. Ten minutes! Knee-jerk contrition. I’m done with it.

I turn 81 in a few days and I intend to spend my remaining time looking at beautiful things, starting with my wife, and enjoying music and comedy and theater and the writing of writers who make me happy. It isn’t what they taught me at the University of Minnesota. They hung T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” around my neck and other grim classics that taught us that the greatest literature is the suicide note.

The U also taught me that America is in ten different crises, probably insoluble, but one must fight for what’s right, however hopeless it be. Well, I do what I can. I save gallons of water every day by peeing in the shower. I recycle with a passion. I wrote a novel, Lake Wobegon Virus, that nobody liked so I sent my 200 copies off to be recycled — what other author has done such a thing? Name one. I squeeze the last toothpaste out of the tube with a pair of needle-nose pliers. I buy milk and OJ in paper cartons.

But now that I’m in New York, I plan to avoid activists and hang out with funny people. The 80s are the homestretch. Mortality makes each day a fine treasure, meant to be savored, so that’s my project now, and New York is the right place: in Minnesota thousands of Swedes worry about diversity and inclusivity, and in New York it’s all around you and you’re part of it. I paid my dues, I was a liberal Democrat, and now I plan to liberate myself from liberalism and be a happy bystander at the parade and cheer for the drummers, the dames in the glittery capes, the guy playing the calliope.

Wake up, America. We have the great privilege of speaking English, a language with so many words for hogwash, such as hokum and hooey and horse hockey, plus bilge and balloon juice, also piffle and pomposity, with which we can fend off claptrap and twaddle. Come up and see me sometime and we’ll have a heart-to-heart.

Cheerfulness is Garrison Keillor’s new book about keeping your spirits up in tough times.

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