Sick in a hotel room, thinking back

The Column: 12.07.22

I spent the weekend in Fort Lauderdale in a low-rent hotel with many families with small children and numerous college kids who seemed confused, even alarmed, when I got on an elevator and said, “Good morning” to them, as I was brought up to do but that was back in the 20th century. Every time I crossed through the lobby I heard Christmas songs like “it’s lovely weather for a sleigh ride together with you,” which strikes a Minnesotan as peculiar and then on Sunday I tested positive for COVID so I had other things to think about.

I have the good fortune to be related to a doctor. His father, my uncle, was a doctor, and ordinarily you’d expect a doctor’s son to pursue a radical new course, perhaps as a thrash-metal guitarist, but his upbringing was not traumatic enough to drive him in that direction and instead he devoted himself to caring for the unwell, of which, Sunday, I was one. I called, he answered, he phoned in an order for Paxlovid to a Fort Lauderdale pharmacy, and spared me a long miserable wait in an ER while doctors attend to serious injury.

I was scheduled to do a show Sunday night and I wanted to do it though I felt wretchedly ill. I was sure that hearing the audience laugh would make me feel better, but the venue has a No-Co policy in place, and I wouldn’t want others to catch my virus, so suddenly I was unemployed and far from home.

I was planning to tell the audience about winter in my childhood, when I rode a sleigh through blinding snow to get to school and the driver avoided the swamp where gangsters hung out hoping to kidnap children and hold them for ransom but nobody paid ransom because families back then were so large, ten or fifteen kids, because there was nothing else to do for six months so they bred for amusement. I was born an Olson but one day the sleigh was attacked by masked men and the driver whipped the horses and they bolted and they wouldn’t stop and I was dropped off at the Keillors instead, many miles away, and they already had eleven kids and I slipped into the family unnoticed because I was a very polite child and no trouble to anybody, and I was glad to become one of them. The Olsons were a shifty lot who talked nonsense and the Keillors were honest as the day is long.

This would’ve been a good story for the college kids to hear but of course they have no interest in listening to an old man talk about the 20th. To them, 1964 is next door to 1864 and the Civil War whereas to me it’s the year the Beatles arrived and after the bitterness of the assassination of President Kennedy the previous November and the rise of the old hack LBJ, the utter cheerfulness of the Liverpool skiffle band was so delightful, it caused euphoria among teenage girls, songs that said I want to hold your hand ’cause when you touch me I feel happy inside, it’s such a feeling that my love can’t hide, which I still feel about my sweet woman.

In my shows, if I sing “There are places I remember,” the audience joins in and sings all of “In My Life,” word perfect, and the same with “Who knows how long I’ve loved you” and “Well, she was just seventeen if you know what I mean,” the whole songs, with great pleasure, and though I don’t fancy myself a singer, I do it because it makes the crowd so happy. Amid the violence and political dysfunction and eco-crises of the 21st, the whole wretched legacy we leave to the grandkids, we recall a moment of light-heartedness before Vietnam descended on us.

I’ve had dark times in my life, mostly of my own making but I don’t recall them with any clarity, unlike the moment in 1997 I stood in the delivery room of the hospital and held a naked infant daughter in my hands and all the times I sang duets with my friend Heather, a tall woman, and we stood eye to eye, and she made me briefly sound almost like a singer, and the day in August I spent with my wife Jenny, just the two of us on the front porch of a little house on the bank of the Connecticut river, observing my 80th birthday. We drank our coffee, watching a family of foxes playing tag in the yard, talking a little, we held hands and so forth, but it was a beautiful day. I wish you kids the same.

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