The enemy is isolation. Take a walk.

The Column: 06.09.23

I have said this before and I’ll keep saying it: isolation is dangerous, we need close contact with our fellow humanity to keep us sane, and that was the weird thing about the pandemic and now the yellowish air from Canadian wildfires and the scary bulletins to Stay Indoors, Windows Closed. I live in New York because there always are people around and it’s comforting to know that if you fall down, people will rush to your side. I know, it’s happened. Back home, downtown Minneapolis is so deserted that nobody’d notice except maybe a passenger in a passing car and he’d figure you were drunk and decide not to get involved.

Isolation leads to dread and paranoia and though COVID has abated, people are still choosing to work from home rather than commute to the office, a trend that if it continues will fill our streets with thousands of delivery boys on e-bikes and turn office buildings into vast dormitories and bring an end to proximitous creative collaboration and make America a nation of menial technocrats and your doctor will examine your prostate by Zoom. Personally, I hope not.

Even though I live in New York City, I go back to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota for health care, not only because it’s excellent — I was due to expire twenty years ago and Mayo has extended my life — but also because you get to mingle with interesting people such as farmers and truck drivers whom you’re unlikely to meet in Manhattan and the nurses and technicians are everlastingly amiable.

Ordinarily I’m very cautious striking up a conversation with a woman I don’t know but when she has poked a needle in me and is drawing blood, it feels like we’ve established a relationship. So:

ME: It feels like you’ve done this before.

HER: Once or twice. Where you from?

ME: New York.

HER: You sound like you’re from Minnesota.

ME: Used to be.

HER: What do you do in New York?

ME: Walk in the park, go to plays and concerts, eat in restaurants.

HER: I mean, for work.

ME: I’m a writer. But I don’t live there for that — I live there because my wife loves New York.

HER: Smart man. How long you been married?

ME: Thirty years.

HER: So it worked.

I love this exchange. It’s simple ordinary civility, shared good humor. She’s from the town of Zumbrota not far from Mayo. She’s heard all sorts of guy nonsense, she can give as good as she can get. I drop in on my ophthalmologist and complain of blurred vision (duh, I’m 80) and he does a laser procedure on me and three days later my vision clears up significantly, which is a miracle, and I write him a limerick:

My eye doctor, good Dr. Chen
Did magic recently when
He lasered one eye
Briefly, now I
Who couldn't read signs
Or books or the Times
Can read them clearly again.
And this, for me,
Who am literary
Is a miracle, God bless. Amen.

I go to church in New York and it’s Youth Sunday and teenagers give the homily and lead us in prayer for the sick and the oppressed and for our planet home. I can now read “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee” out of the hymnal and I am joyful all the way home, walking down Columbus Avenue through throngs of young people shopping at Trader Joe’s, sitting in outdoor cafes, hanging out, giving an account of themselves — it’s a great time in my life when everyone I encounter is younger, I’m in a sea of youth and vitality and my vision is good enough to read the sign on the turtle’s tank in the pet shop window, “Do not tap on glass. This turtle is 40 years old and deserves to live in peace.”

I like peace up to a point but I need to get out on the streets and soak up the tumult, the flutter of small talk. You can read about declining test scores in public schools and conclude that the world is sliding into darkness , but get out on the street and you feel the curiosity and enthusiasm and sociability and other qualities that standardized testing doesn’t measure. A person who only gets his views from the news will inevitably want to head for the woods. I’m tapping on your glass now. Don’t leave town. Go out on the street. Join the crowd. You’ll be smarter, probably happier.