I hear the drumming of somebody coming

The Column: 05.14.26

Every morning when I swing my legs out of bed and stand erect and think a clear thought, which is: Thank you, dear Lord, for this day, and I insert my hearing aids and switch them on using an app on my phone and thus gain access to spoken English, this magnificent language of my people that emerged from our defeat in 1066 to the Normans, which then enriched our blunt Teutonic tongue with words such as literature and music and passion and coffee, all of which are part of my day, and I think, “I am 83 and truly this is the happiest time of my life, it simply is so, and so don’t deny it,” but then I try to find something worrisome such as the dog I saw in Central Park with a thing in its mouth like what babies suck on, which I racked my brain trying to think of the name for and had to google on my phone to find it — pacifier — which led to thinking about Cognitive Decline Due To Aging and the billion-dollar industry in beverages and supplements that claim to delay decline and Decline, my dears, is an idea that once planted in the brain is not easily dispelled, it stays with you as you amble to the kitchen and take your meds and pour a cup of coffee and you have to sit down and get a grip on yourself and get your head on straight.

I left St. Paul ten years ago and moved to New York. I was a big shot in St. Paul and in New York I am squeezed into the C train along with everyone else. My wife loves New York and is happy here, and living with a happy woman is much much more important than being a big shot. I’ve started a new career as a stand-up comic and it’s great fun to amuse people, most of whom, due to their taking citizenship seriously, lack goofiness in their lives.

This is not the career I was trained for. I decided to become a writer when I was 14 and so went to a liberal arts college and studied Humanities, which was a tragic mistake. My cousins went into medicine, architecture, psychology, engineering, education — cheerful occupations intent on making the world better — and my most successful cousin, Wayne, went into raising flowers and vegetables and built enormous greenhouses and did good on a massive scale, carrying on in the tradition of my aunt Josephine who was a passionate gardener, whereas I got trapped in the sorrows of the 19^th century, which dominated humanities in the 20^th, gloomy philosophers like Kafka, Kierkegaard, Thoreau.

As an English major, I learned how to write impressively about books I hadn’t read and I knew I could always improve my grade by quoting Kafka, who believed the purpose of great literature is to cause pain. Franz and Søren and Henry led solitary lives, accepted alienation as the norm, and each of them tried to turn his own private misery and social awkwardness into a philosophy of life. Each of them died in his forties, an incomplete life. And together, they gave the 20^th century a whole truckload of grievous philosophy, which now, a quarter into the 21^st, we need to finally dispel.

The Three Noodges didn’t have the analgesics we have today or the neurology know-how or the dental care. The tuberculosis that killed two of them can be cured. And what is most significant, none of them had a lasting loving relationship with a woman. Thoreau said, “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.” The poor man was missing a necessity of life as important as oxygen, namely someone to say, “Darling, let’s go out tonight and have fun. Enough sitting on your butt. Let’s go dancing.”

That wedding I attended last week was a big deal for me — especially when the DJ cranked up his engines and an earthquake of rhythm shook the room making conversation impossible. No more lamentation about the demise of democracy. We were seized by a primitive pounding beat from before written language and were no longer college graduates but members of a secret tribe joined in sensual jubilation at the fact of belonging in this crowd, not alone in the woods, but here I am at 83, dancing queen got hold of me, yesterday is a memory, don’t need Kafka or H.T., shake your shoulders, swing and sway, that’s the message for today.

In Cheerfulness, veteran radio host and author Garrison Keillor reflects on a simple virtue that can help us in this stressful and sometimes gloomy era.

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