The astonishment of mornings on the river last week

The Column: 06.24.24

I spent my mornings last week at a little white house with a porch overlooking the Connecticut River, astonished by the early morning light, the devout silence except for the twittering of exhilarated birds, and the longer I sat there without opening my phone or laptop, I felt the prospects of the day getting better and better. This is the benefit of going to bed early. It causes concern among others — Is he sick? Was he offended? — but I rise at five and tiptoe downstairs and am dazed by wonder, which is a good thing for a man in the business of humoristicism. Comedy is about incongruity and dissonance and irony but morning light makes a person grateful for the natural world, for quiet and coffee and for the love and friendship of the slumberers upstairs.

It’s a revelation of delight, of our Creator’s delight in His creation, and though we’re brought up to be skeptical, wary of big hopes, prepared to deal with the injustices of life, still the dawn light argues with stoicism and you see the beauty of the ordinary. And then a distant leaf blower starts up, an angry drone like an air raid siren and we’re back in comedy. What was wrong with the old-fashioned hand-operated rake? Why does anyone need this monster that puts you in mind of the German Luftwaffe, the electric chair, the cruel dentistry of my youth?

But eventually it goes away. This is true of most aggravations. The ones that don’t go away we can escape by coming to a little white house on the river. My wife’s ancestors came here from New Jersey to escape the summer heat, but now, with air-conditioning, we come to escape noise

Being a professional entertainer means I am obliged to amuse my family. Someone reads the front page of the paper and is incredulous about some Prominent Person and says, “I just cannot believe that — blah blah blah” and I say, “So —.” (I’m from Minnesota so I begin every joke with “So.”) “So a Unitarian lifesaver was on duty at the lake where Jesus walked on water to rescue a ship and the lifeguard told his friends, ‘Can you believe it? The guy says he’s the Son of God and he can’t even swim.’” When they ask for a joke, I try to have one ready. For little kids: “Why do gorillas have big fingers? Because they have big nostrils.” Or “What is the problem with living on M Street? You have to go three blocks to P.” I love dumb jokes, the profundity of them. “Did you hear about the dyslexic man who walked into a bra?” There is a wealth of Man Walked Into A Bar jokes, all of them good, plus Dog Walked Into A Bar, and Pickle Walked Into A Bar. The bartender said, “What are you doing here? You’re only a pickle.” The pickle said, “I’m celebrating the fact that I can walk. Give me a drink.” So the bartender made him a Manhattan with a little leaf in the middle. The pickle said, “What’s that?” The bartender said, “Central Park.”

I tell jokes because I remember a time in my life when I crowded into a booth at a bar with eight other guys and some guys leaning over us and we told jokes and now I don’t see people doing that anymore. It’s a guy responsibility — women are worriers, men are kidders — and I remember one afternoon, over rounds of beer and bumps, that we told 75 different How Many Whatsis Does It Take To Change A Light Bulb jokes — we kept a list (Irishmen, therapists, optimists, agnostics, Russians, English majors) and all of them were reasonably funny. No more.

So naturally I wonder if AA and rehab and treatment centers are responsible for the disappearance of the joke circle, and instead of pickles walking into a bar, we have a circle of men on folding chairs talking about their emotionally distant fathers who failed to validate them. So a man talked about his father who was a magician who cut people in half. “Did he work in a carnival or circus?” “No, he worked from home. I have a half-brother and a half-sister.”

But it was my abandonment of alcohol twenty years ago that made early morning beautiful again. So it takes just one therapist to change a light bulb but the light bulb has to really want to change. And the difference between an Irish wedding and an Irish funeral is that at the funeral there’s one less drunk. That’s me. Have a nice day.

Garrison Keillor helps you maintain a sense of humor and hope in this uplifting ode to graceful aging: Serenity at 70, Gaiety at 80: Why you should keep on getting older.

CLICK HERE to buy the audio version, read by the author himself.