Standing on the sidewalk shaking hands

The Column: 08.04.24

I did something last Sunday I’d never done before in my 82 years. I went to a café on the main drag of Keene, New Hampshire, and I could hear my wife say, though she was five hundred miles away, “Wash your hands before you eat, you’ve been shaking hands with a hundred people,” so I walked to the rear of the café and found the men’s room door locked. A waitperson nearby, what we once called a “waitress,” said, “Use the ladies’.” I looked at her aghast. “Go ahead, we do it all the time,” she said. “Yes, but you’re a lady,” I said. She laughed. She said, “Go ahead, it’s no problem.” I waited a minute. She laughed at my timidity. The guy in the men’s must’ve been doing his eye makeup. So I went into the ladies’. (That’s not my term; that was the word on the door.) It was a regular toilet, except with no urinal. I put the seat up, aimed very carefully, then flushed, washed my hands, and emerged. A woman stood there waiting. She was more my age than the waitperson’s. She looked at me somewhat severely. I wanted to explain but didn’t know how. (“I was told to go in there”? It sounds sheepish, even shamefaced.)

I’ve been at the Metropolitan Opera during intermission when women standing in a long line at the Women’s broke out of line and stalked into the Men’s, no waiting, and, I assume, went into a stall and did what needed to be done, and if a man had stared at them afterward, they would’ve said, “What’s your problem?” But I’m not a New Yorker.

I’d shaken hands on the sidewalk outside the opera house in Bellows Falls, Vermont, not far away, where I did a show. It was just me and the stage was so big, I decided to stand down among the customers, which the lighting guy didn’t like, having arranged the stage lighting, but I made my career in radio for a reason — I look like a security guy who wandered out by mistake — and when you are 82, nobody argues with you for fear of causing a seizure. It was pleasant being in their midst, especially when I got them to sing. I told them, “This is an ugly election year when half of the people believe the other half is crazy, so let’s stand and sing together in the dark, no matter what you think,” and they sang about the land where our fathers died and the spacious skies and the fateful lightning and the terrible swift sword, and it was rather thrilling.

I’m an old Democrat, a member of the party of childless cat ladies who are miserable about their own lives and want to make other people miserable too, but I do not like that schools have removed “America” and the pledge of allegiance from the classroom, I am in favor of strict standards of behavior in school, a dress code, and I believe that good manners are essential to a civil society. I could go on.

The world I grew up in is fading fast. Thanks to the internet, parents don’t hold sway over their children’s minds. Curiosity is a powerful natural urge and censorship died when Wi-Fi came in. You can burn books; you can’t burn radio waves. So everything has suddenly come under question.

What remains powerful is love. My parents loved each other dearly and I witnessed this and it remains large in my life. When I was six, I was a slow reader — when you’ve grown up trying to read Hezekiah and Jeremiah, it does crimp your style — and my teacher Estelle Shaver noticed and kept me after school to read aloud to her from Dick and Jane. When Bill the janitor came in to empty the wastebaskets, she said, “Listen to this boy, Bill. Doesn’t he have a wonderful voice? He’s entertaining me while I’m correcting workbooks.” It was remedial reading but she made it feel like a privilege and this act of kindness sticks with me. Call me naïve but I think marvelous feats can be accomplished by small acts of kindness.

The country is moving toward electing a woman president and I am touched by how presidential she looks, her warmth, her gracefulness, how she can converse with a crowd, how she ignores the insults and the bellowing of walruses, and speaks in clipped sentences about the future of the country. This will be a first in my life and I’m looking forward.

Garrison Keillor's book Cheerfulness is now available as a convenient audiobook! Download, unzip, and dive into his reflections on how to maintain a sunny disposition.

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