Read the news, then count your blessings
Democracy is almost all the entertainment a person can stand, no need to go to the opera or comedy clubs, and now the thought that a senator from West Virginia, which is to clean energy what California is to cauliflower or Virginia to virginity, will be writing the legislation aimed at curtailing greenhouse gases is a story that should be taken up in high school civics classes, to let young people, who will live in the country this old gent is legislating, know what a precarious business government is. The man who drives the car is sitting backward looking out the rear window. Is this what the Founders had in mind when they invented the U.S. Senate? Evidently.
Anybody who thinks too hard about this will wind up in the loony bin, so I don’t. I enumerate my blessings instead and remind myself that I am a lucky man. Luck is not the same thing as privilege. Privilege is having a chauffeur and luck is when the train comes just as you go through the turnstile and walk across the subway platform just as the train stops and the doors open, which makes your entire day up to that point feel fortuitous, perfectly timed, and you feel blessedness. Having a chauffeur makes you feel sheepish.
I felt lucky when I read a tell-all backstage memoir by a dancer in New York City Ballet, lucky that I never took that road. I never tried to be a swan or a prince, gallivanting across a stage on my tippy-toes, leaping with legs extended. For a teenager in Anoka, Minnesota, putting on tights and ballet slippers would’ve made me unique, and I wanted to be normal. So I went into the writing business instead. No editor yet has told me my thighs were too big. Starvation was never part of my regimen, nor was psychological abuse. My old editor Roger Angell wrote gentle rejection letters along the line of “Probably we are all wrong about this but your story about Mazumbo the elephant strikes us as lacking your usual felicity and depth.”
Writing has its own hazards. Hemingway fell into deep depression and early one morning, he blew his head off, an old man of 62. Virginia Woolf walked into the river with rocks in her pockets at 59. The poet John Berryman jumped off the bridge in Minneapolis at age 57. Anne Sexton was 45, Sylvia Plath, 30. I had two friends who suffered from depression, a grim darkness for which they had no words, and they killed themselves. To be spared this leaden affliction is a matter of luck.
I am grateful not to be afflicted with an enormous talent, be an opera composer, for example, driven to endure poverty and self-doubt, sitting in a garret revising the score 57 times, begging for foundation grants, wrangling with opera management, kissing the feet of wealthy patrons, warring with the librettist and director, standing in the alley during the premiere and watching audience members leave during the intermission, and then the vicious reviews in the morning. Thank you, dear Lord, for mediocrity. Middleness suits me very well.
This is the privilege of growing old, looking back and recognizing one’s good fortune. Close calls, car crashes narrowly averted that would’ve obliged my friends to speak at the memorial service about my promising career tragically cut short and instead of that we meet for lunch and talk about hearing loss and ocular degeneration.
And I’m lucky to be old and not have to think about supply-side economics, the unique theory that prosperity is created by giving big tax breaks to the rich, which then trickle down to the rest of us, a theory that enabled Reagan and the Bushes and Mr. Trump to vastly increase the national debt, which would have horrified Nixon, Eisenhower, and all the Republicans previous.
If you think long and hard about Republican economics, you will need to go to the cocktail lounge and sit in a dark corner and keep ordering double martinis until you feel no pain, which I choose not to do, having discovered at last the secret of happiness, which is Delete and Unsubscribe. Less is more. I google “Camping in Canaan’s Land” on YouTube and get a video of large fundamentalist men jumping up and down in their religious ecstasy and three minutes of it clears the darkness away. I imagine Senator Manchin and George W. and Alan Greenspan hopping up and down and it makes me feel better.
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The Back Room this weekend will include a re-writing of “Frankie and Johnny” an audio download of a monologue from September 1980.
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This week's classic feature show is from The Fitzgerald Theater in September 2015. Sierra Hull plays "Queen of Hearts" and "After You've Gone," and Heather Masse sings "High Heeled Woman" and "September Song." Plus: Heather joins Garrison on "Columbia, Gem of the Ocean" and "When We're Gone, Long Gone"; Guy Noir heads to Earl's Barber Shop for a trim; and a message from our sponsor, the Manitoba Chamber of Commerce. Join us via our Facebook page at 5PM on Saturday or check it out now.
I think your “middleness” makes you miraculous. What you do on stage and what you write will be talked about for many years after you’re done. It is the freshness and kindness of your writing and actions on stage that makes you unique. I mean who but you could get away with the down home act and singing anthems and hymns to a multitude of people who sing with you is practically a miracle these days.
I wonder if you thought you were destined to be another Hemingway or Salinger. Their writing had more acclaim but I believe your writing will be more loved. You write about American Life in the great middle states of this great country. You depict it spot on. Mark Twain was a good writer and actor on stage but I would bet if he could have seen one of your shows he would have been impressed.
You are a lucky man to have lived such a wonderful life and to be the source of so much happiness. Thank you for your writings.
That picture of the dog looking backwards reminds me of a story my Dad used to share with his cousin, Louis William. Dad's father and an uncle decided to spend their summer vacation driving around together in the West. Louis William, riding in his fathers Model T Ford, had a harrowing experience when they got close to Yosemite National Park. "During most of the T's production run, its 10 US gal (38 l; 8 imp gal) fuel tank was mounted to the frame beneath the front seat. Because Ford relied on gravity to feed fuel to the carburetor rather than a fuel pump, a Model T could not climb a steep hill when the fuel level was low." (Wikipedia) Louis William's father "solved" that problem by backing, 12 miles on a steep mountain road with hardly a straight section except one bridge, up to the entrance to Yosemite. Dad's family followed closely behind, probably as frightened by the sight as Louis William was.
I drove that road once, just to see how bad it was. It was Horrendous! I can hardly back into my garage in a straight line! I can't imagine Louis WIlliam's father getting his family up to the park alive!
In a way, that tale is an example of the way we go through life making gradual improvements. Motor vehicles must have seemed like "A Dream Come True" to folks who had previously had to rely on horses, donkeys, sled dogs , elephants, caribou or oxen to supply additional power for long journeys. In driving around Detroit, for example, the location of the gas tank probably wasn't too much of a problem. It was only when enthusiasts began tackling more challenging routes, that the need for a fuel pump was recognized. On the basis of that experience, Dad and Louis William really understood the meaning of "Necessity is the mother of invention!" I'm sure everyone in that travelling party was relieved that they were all still alive at the end of that day!