Man of the moment thinks back

The Column: 12.27.24

Time magazine naming Trump “Person of the Year” is an interesting idea, sort of like naming a mortician to be your heir, but there it is. Life has its oddities. These days I’m walking around with a chorus of “Halle, Hallelujah” echoing in my head, from a Christmas song, “Light in the Stable,” I sang with some women the other day. I just sang a bass line, which is like inviting a mortician to your birthday party, but it felt good to me and now the refrain will not — simply refuses to — go away. I need my mind. I use it for various things. I can’t donate it to praising a child in a manger. He’s got cathedrals galore, choirs, gigantic organs, Bible classes.

I have just poured some coffee an inch to the left of my coffee cup and I hold the Hallelujah chorus responsible. Poured it on the kitchen table and it spread under the laptop I am writing on. Thank goodness my beloved was not witness to this. She has noted gaps in my thinking, moments of global aphasia (such as the inability to remember exactly what global aphasia is), a fondness for irrelevance, a tendency to repeat myself, and also. Global aphasia.

People who are employed by me notice that I go up and down stairs very deliberately, holding onto the railing — some might say “clutching” it — and I see them scanning the want ads for employment opportunities in the parking-lot attendant field.

I was a parking-lot attendant when I was 19 and 20 and I remember it well, a five-acre University gravel lot on the west bluff of the Mississippi in Minneapolis, about a hundred yards from the bridge the poet John Berryman jumped off to die in the coal yard below. I remember bitter cold mornings, the wind whistling down the valley from Manitoba, and I, lightly dressed in order to be cool, directing cars to the correct spot, lining them up in double rows.

It was the first time in my life I exercised true authority. I encountered the stubborn independence of the intellectual elite and I bent them to my will with the use of precise hand signals, a commanding shout, and turning a deaf ear to their protests. It worked. My parking lot was commended for its straight even rows. I got a certificate of appreciation but I’ve forgotten where I put it.

I remembered those days last week riding in a cab down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, the city packed with shoppers, the street from 72^nd down was a glacier of cars. The subway would’ve taken a few minutes, a taxi took an hour. No New Yorker would’ve made this choice, the cabs were full of yahoos like me. Traffic guys with yellow gloves waved at cars jammed in solid.

And then, walking west on 43^rd Street to find Town Hall, I remembered when I was in my mid-twenties and submitted stories to The New Yorker magazine, which was just east of Sixth Avenue. Every young writer in America knew the address by heart: 25 West 43^rd. In 1969, a Barnard grad named Mary D. Kierstead was in charge of the “slush pile,” the unsolicited submissions, and from this mountain she chose a story of mine and sent it up to an editor and told him to read it and he did and accepted it and ever since I have believed in angels.

With the prestigious name of The New Yorker to drop, I snuck into public radio though I was no journalist and knew nothing about classical music and I launched a Saturday night show completely unfitted for public radio, which lasted forty years and thank you, Lord, for your mercy. It gave me more fun than an old evangelical could expect, hanging around musicians, a very congenial lot, and also earned some money.

Angels perform acts of kindness that turn out to have enormous consequences. I’ve looked at the story she picked off the slush pile and don’t see anything remarkable about it, perhaps she was just having a good day. She died four years ago at the age of 96. I think I met her once at a party at the Angells’, speaking of angels. She was wearing red glasses. Life is beautiful, the precariousness of it. What if she’d called in sick that day and her place was taken by some old grumblebutt has-been named Bob and I’d be a retired parker of cars parked in a rest home, reminiscing about notable blizzards and downpours.

Garrison Keillor is starting the year with a full schedule, and he hopes you’ll come say hello during one of his many stops. Don’t miss your chance to see a live show in 2025!

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