Spring: we're going where we need to go

The Column: 5-5-21

It is springtime in Minnesota and viva sweet spring, the tulips are opening and people are thinking about setting their tomato plants outside though of course we’re aware that it’s Minnesota and we’ve gotten snow as late as early June. But everyone we know is immunized so we’ve gone to people’s houses for dinner who aren’t in our bubble. We go outdoors without masks and can recognize other people even if we don’t know for sure what pronouns they use. I’ve been to two ball games. We visited relatives and did an exciting reenactment of a fairy tale with a five-year-old girl as Cinderella, her grandpa as the prince, and her grandma and my wife as the evil sisters. It’s a start.

I’ve been happier since I started to accept being uninformed. I read the newspaper headlines upside down as my wife sits across the table reading right side up and it’s too much trouble to follow Florida’s attempts to discourage voting and the romantic life of Matt Gaetz. But I do feel bad about Rudy Giuliani, the federal investigators banging on his door at 6 a.m. and executing a search warrant for his computer and phones. He was probably still in his pajamas, hadn’t even had coffee, couldn’t find his glasses, and he’s looking at the warrant, thinking, “Why me, of all people?”

It was a steep drop for the former mayor hailed as a hero after 9/11 who turned it into a lucrative career, giving speeches for a hundred grand per pop, and then hooked up with a New York tycoon with elaborate hair and became his mouthpiece, claiming election fraud where none existed, losing every claim in court, and in January his client refused to pay Rudy’s $20,000 per day fee. His big feral smile, like a shark with no gills, became the stuff of cartoons. He was photographed with hair dye running down his right cheek. The man is now a joke.

New York goes for big operatic dramas like his. It’s a town of big ambitions. I live some of the time there and walk in Central Park where the dogs are designer dogs, well-bred, coifed at a spa, accessorized, and the roads are packed with serious runners, lean women MBA vice presidents out to take over corporations and get a $3 million book deal, visionary thinkers conceiving new technologies that will turn our culture upside down, novelists writing 600-page books critics will describe as “penetrating, nuanced, mordant, cool,” and each of them uses plural pronouns (we, our) because each contains a multitude. In my little Minneapolis park, the dogs are normal scruffy dogs, as God intended dogs to be, and the people stroll or amble, they don’t race, and they’re simply feeling gratitude. I know I do. I think of the poet Roethke (A lively understandable spirit once entertained you. It will come again. Be still. Wait.) who died at 55 for lack of a drug I take twice daily. Thank you, God, for science.

After the raid, Rudy claimed political persecution, a weak defense in what may turn out to be a criminal case. The man is not getting good advice. He should come to Minneapolis and get an apartment near my park and write a book, admitting the hoax of the Stolen Election. Come out with the truth. Go on talk shows and say it loud and clear: “I was wrong. I was a fool. I was blinded by greed and I can’t believe I sank so low. I am a former D.A. who took on a crook for a client and believed him.” Accept that the days of the twenty-grand daily fee are over. You don’t need that kind of dough to be content in Minneapolis. That’s New York dough.

There is no redemption for Rudy in New York but he could find it here. Put aside the suits and ties and take up red flannel shirts, jeans, a denim jacket, and a Twins cap. Maybe take the last name Johnson. Shed the feral grin and the street fighter persona and take up fishing. Get a dog. Set about finding Ms. Right and marry her. Sit across the breakfast table from her and read the headlines upside down, stories about a man named Pmurt who is on trial for tax duarf or something. Don’t bother with it. It’s an old old story. You’ll learn more from Roethke: “God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there, and learn by going where I have to go.”

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Two favorite singers of mine who I never got to sing on Prairie Home because I was scared to meet them, I admired them so much, were Waylon Jennings and Marty Robbins. Marty Robbins was a great performer — I saw him a few times do the late show after the Grand Ole Opry at the Ryman Auditorium and he knew how to make you keep your eyes on him. He could sing beautifully even as he was doing a parody of himself.

Waylon was too cool to be a performer — but that whiskey baritone of his singing about Luckenbach, Texas, and Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys and She’s A Good-hearted Woman In Love With A Good-timin’ Man …

They both died young, Waylon of diabetes at 64, Marty of a heart attack at 57, and whenever I hear them, I get sentimental thinking back to how much I admired them. Something in those voices really hit me. You’re at a certain age, trying to figure out who you are, and then you hear a voice and that’s who you want to be.