Sweet corn is ahead, life resumes

The Column: 05.23.25

I buy my groceries at a gigantic market a few blocks away, owned by some billionaire, don’t know which one or his views on Palestine or if he was at the inauguration or how good a seat he got, I just buy his potatoes and 2% and granola, but the other day I was at my doctor’s a mile away and stopped at another market in the chain and it was quite a different scene. My market is on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and the doctor is on the Upper East. The UE is a young neighborhood of mothers with strollers, the UWS is the domain of grandmas with walkers.

The East branch has things I haven’t seen in the West, such as glass jugs of milk from pasture-grazed cows bottled on the farm and eggs from homing pigeons who get at least an hour of vigorous exercise per day. Vegetables grown in non-pesticided soil fertilized by B.S. collected at Ivy League graduate schools.

What surprised me was the checkout section. At the West market, 26 checkout persons wait by their registers and a herdsman aims you toward the next available. At the East, there are a dozen self-checkout stands and two checkout persons for us elderly and mentally arrested. Thinking that surely a U of M college grad could meet this challenge, I stepped up to the plate and set my three potatoes on the scale and something about the instructions for pricing made me hesitate and an employee nearby yelled, “You need help?” in a tone of voice I would describe as accusatory, not helpful, and I stepped over to the handicapped area and was checked out by a nice person. And in that moment I entered the category of Persons of Special Needs.

I heard a ding in my phone. A digital woman named Priscilla told me to pick up my bags and go to the door. She alerted me to cracks in the sidewalk, the approaching curb, an available cab. She said, “His name is Frank and his last traffic violation was for an illegal U-turn in 2006.”

The world is changing and advanced medical care is going to keep us old honkers around to the point where the world will be weird and we’ll wander around in it like pigeons in a plaza. The English language will flatten under the ministrations of AI and robot buses will transport us and driverless cabs, security cameras will watch us all day and on the first of the month we’ll get a bill for $545 for jaywalking, which we’d done all our lives and are too old to change. At the dentist’s, two mechanical arms guided by laser vision will clean the teeth and fill the cavities and if you doze off and an arm accidentally removes your left nostril, well, you signed the release form. AI surgery can repair the heart, remove tumors, do chestectomies and clototomies, eyelid lifts, butt tucks, shoulder shaping, lap lightening, and automation will lower the price so you’ll meet your cousin Bob six months from now and he’ll look like a new piece of work, the seams visible but nobody will comment.

I brought my groceries back home and put them away. The billionaire had sold me two cucumbers that’d gone soft in the course of shipment from Mexico: Priscilla told me it was my responsibility to check produce for freshness. But the two ears of sweet corn looked good, wrapped in plastic, so I put a pot of water on to boil.

“It’ll boil faster if you put a cover on the pot,” said Priscilla.

I didn’t know how to turn her off so I put her in the medicine chest and closed the four doors between her and the kitchen, and meanwhile the water came to a boil and I put in the corn.

Two minutes later I took it out. It was good. It had no taste except for the butter and salt but it brought back the memory of sweet corn fresh from a field. Evidently ICE had held up the shipment at the border to search for explosive ears. But it brought back the memory of sweet corn and that’s good enough for now. I’ll be in Minnesota in August. Get an Uber driver to take me down 52 to the closest sweet corn stand, take two ears back to the hotel. Microwave them with the husks on, ask Room Service to send up butter and salt. I’ll be a happy guy.

That Time of Year is Garrison Keillor’s memoir of life after “A Prairie Home Companion.” In this revised edition, he offers a candid, often wry look at memory, mortality and the enduring pull of home.

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