My goal for 2024, as I see it now

The Column: 12.28.23

The smarts in this household are mostly on the other side of the table and I’m okay with that. She’s younger, more venturesome, socially connected, and in the morning when she reads the paper she issues succinct summary comments, which I then adopt as my worldview. I see no point to being a protofascist, however entertaining that would be, when I’m married to a caring, sharing, tax-and-spend woman. This accommodation works well for me. I leave international affairs entirely in her hands and I concentrate on philosophy and philodendrons.

I come from Minnesota and so does she but she moved to New York when she was 17 to be a classical violinist and the city educates dreamers like her swiftly and thoroughly, whereas I pursued my vocation in the comforts of the familiar and so I retain a childish naivete that she discarded except for when she listens to great music or looks at great art. Her home teams are the Metropolitan Ops and the New York Phils. She has the anxieties of a New Yorker; I am phlegmatic. Tranquilizers would be wasted on me. Weather doesn’t affect me much, being an indoorsman. A gorgeous day can make her deliriously happy.

My accomplishment is longevity: I am still doing a show I started in 1974, which is like winding a ball of twine until it gets to be 50 feet in diameter and your hometown puts up a sign, “Home of Wilmer Sneed, Creator of World’s Largest Ball of Twine,” and there it is, under a glass dome, and people take pictures of it. I started the show for the usual reason: I craved attention, having been a dweeb and dork in school, and in radio I could create a handsomer version of myself. Talent was not a factor in my vocational choice, though of course after you’ve worked at something for decades you do sort of get the hang of it.

What I didn’t know in 1974 is that in my old age I’d be running into friends I’d never met before, such as on the uptown C train a few weeks ago when a young woman asked me if I am who I am. “Trying to be,” I said. She took a picture of the two of us, a young writer from Kansas and a tall graying eminence and a few minutes later a guy with shoulder-length hair in his twenties introduces himself. He’s visiting his sister in the city, he’s from Wyoming, studying for his commercial pilot’s license. I tell him gently that the American flying public wants their airline pilots to look like ex-Marines with combat experience. He laughs.

In college I imagined that I was entering into the literary arts to join Liebling, Updike, Thurber, McPhee, and other heroes, but it turns out I’m in an odd subdivision of the hospitality business, offering familiarity to strangers, same as a maître d’ or a clerk at a hotel. I once stood out on West End Avenue at 3 a.m. waiting for a cab with a fellow writer who’d crashed a party at my apartment, both of us feeling good from finishing off my Scotch, and he said, “Friendship is what it’s all about. It’s what it’s always been all about.” He died a few years later. I quit drinking 20 years ago and I’m still trying to figure out what he meant.

I was brought up by Christian separatists, not the chummiest bunch on the planet, they embraced a doctrine of righteous snottiness and I am heir to it, but it’s never too late to be gracious. So I’m preparing a solo show in which I portray an old man talking his head off, stream of consciousness at flood tide, snatches of poetry, song, nonsense, disconnected reminiscence delivered with the enthusiasm of dementia. It’s very exciting for me, a taciturn painfully self-conscious man, to let go of decorum and do this. I tried it out once in Tennessee and once in Kentucky and I felt a bond with the audiences. They were sort of amazed. I leave politics to the woman across the table. My ambition is to be a friendly lunatic uncle.

I’m on a cruise ship in the Caribbean as I write this and what I learn from it is to avoid retirement at all costs. It’s a shipload of purposelessness. When nobody will book me into theaters, I’ll take my lunatic persona into lobbies and cafeterias and bus depots, wandering around reciting limericks and telling the one about the priest and the rabbi. It’s better to be a fool in the world than to have no occupation at all.

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