It is never too late to learn a lesson

The Column: 08.12.24

A dear friend once said to me out of the blue, “Today it will have been forty years since the last time I vomited,” and I said to her, “How do you celebrate an anniversary like that?” It was a witty moment, one of many in our friendship, and if we’d only collected them all, we could sit down and write a Cole Porter musical, but we didn’t and anyway Cole Porter isn’t so hip anymore and we’re busy doing other things.

I, for one, have been on a tour doing a one-man show and having a great time until last week in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, after a dinner of six oysters on the half shell, clam chowder, and a lobster roll, I awoke at 4 a.m. feeling sick to my stomach and headed for the bathroom.

You can continue reading; there was no regurgitation, just a strong impulse in that direction, but I stilled the impulse by (1) remaining very still, (2) thinking of other things, and (3) finding the packet of Alka-Seltzer I’ve had in my briefcase for at least a decade waiting for just this occasion. The other things I thought of were Kamala Harris and how steadily she would deal with this sort of situation, and the show I’d do that evening and whether I should mention vomiting in a humorous way, and my wife, who’d flown the night before to Lisbon to attend a great-nephew’s baptism at his grandparents’ farm where a hundred villagers would gather for a huge pig roast. Roast pig is something my beloved would not ingest or venture near lest she should suddenly need to be alone for a while.

What I conclude from this is a profound truth: each of us has his or her limitations and it is noble to venture beyond them but in the end — I say this as a newly minted 82-year-old: Be Who You Are And Not Who You Ain’t. I am a Minnesotan. I grew up in a home with a half-acre garden; we ate fresh vegetables. Now and then, Dad bought a few chickens from a farmer and we slaughtered them in the yard. We ate the flesh of critters who walked on legs and fish that swam in the lakes. We also ate Chicken of the Sea tuna. But we didn’t eat critters who crawl along the bottom. We were not bottom-feeders.

I have many bottom-feeding friends. I also have a friend who supports RFK Jr. for president, which to me is like eating earthworms. We just don’t talk about it. I have atheist friends though they don’t announce the fact for fear I’d say, “The problem with atheism is who do you cry out to when you’re having orgasm?” and they’ve heard that joke before. And I have several friends who think that ripping a lobster apart and gouging its flesh out with a fork is one of life’s great delights, one reserved for sophisticates like themselves, a higher order than the hamburger crowd.

I like hamburgers. I went into a McDonald’s the other day and ordered a Double Quarter Pounder and thought it was good. At McDonald’s you do not have the carcass of the cow on a spit by the drive-up window, the eyes glazed, the tail hanging down, and the workers don’t gouge the meat from the cow’s rib cage. The hamburger is handed to you wrapped in paper. So after my night in Maine, I believe I will stop my quest for sophistication and be myself, an old man of the prairie. If I hadn’t read A.J. Liebling in the eighth grade and set out to write like him, I could’ve become a small-town teacher and coach like Tim Walz and been quite satisfied with my life.

Governor Walz is a straight shooter. A mob of armed right-wingers gathered at the governor’s mansion once in 2020 and Mr. Walz called up President Trump at the White House and asked him to talk to the governor’s daughter who was frightened and Mr. Trump, to his credit, did. When Mr. Walz takes office in Washington and the Walz family moves into the mansion at the Naval Observatory, I believe that even as he sits in meetings regarding national security and Ukraine and Gaza and the warming of the planet, he will remember his days as a high school teacher when he had to supervise the lunchroom. Speaking of which, I recommend a tuna salad sandwich and a tomato and cucumber salad and a Fudgsicle for dessert. It’s good.

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