The meaning of the freestanding life

The Column: 02.02.24

Aging is a beautiful natural process, the wisdom gained, the growing sense of gratitude, the amusement of seeing young people make your same dumb mistakes, but one thing that bothers me is the difficulty of putting on underpants while standing and not leaning against a doorpost. It’s a graceful moment, left leg held high and poked through the hole, then the right, freestanding, no wobbling, which I’ve done since I was a kid, and now at 81 I can sometimes still perform the trick, but then comes a bad experience — the left foot catches the underpants crotch and you lose your balance and suddenly you’re headed for a tragic accident.

I do not want my obit to read “The author died at home of a concussion, while trying to pull on his briefs. No foul play was suspected.” And so after a near fall, I sit down on the bed and practice safety, but still there is a sense of loss. Trousers are easier but not without risk.

Along the same line, my beloved has behooved me to sit on the toilet while emptying my bladder and I try to comply. There have been occasions when I stood to whiz and didn’t hear urine hitting water — no, for some reason I was pissing sideways into the bathtub, which can be a problem in a marriage: no matter how hard he tries, a man can never clean up wayward urine to the satisfaction of his wife. I try to explain to her that a male animal uses urine to mark his territory but she doesn’t buy that. So I sit. But I feel a diminution of manhood.

In the morning when I shower, if she is not nearby, I allow my bladder to open, a beautiful feeling of freedom, but once she saw me and cried, “What are you doing??” — knowing perfectly well what I was doing, I was exercising a manly right, standing under a waterfall and letting go, which takes me back to Boy Scouts and the camping trip to Lake Vermilion where four of us Scouts stood in a row, barn doors open, to see who could urinate the highest. This is a pleasure denied to women, so far as I know.

These are small setbacks, however, and I don’t dwell on them. The great question remains, now as when I was 17, perhaps even more clearly now: what am I here on earth for? What is my purpose? I did a show in Kansas in January after which I met a man named Barry who is a freelance Christian pastor, nondenominational, an independent, there with his wife and daughters, old fans of mine who suddenly became friends.

I said, “I hope you have an IRA.” He said, “The Lord will provide.” The man was secure in his calling. As Paul wrote to Timothy, “I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.”

I’ve met many people after shows, shaking hands, who seemed to be committed to a purpose, teachers, musicians, physicians, cops, which they didn’t mind telling me, their old radio uncle. It can be hazardous, shaking hands. I did a show in Green Bay and hung out with dozens of people and a few days later got hit by influenza B and got a week of utter misery, but so be it. Paul said, “All things work together for good to them that love God,” and if that’s not true, I don’t know what is.

My purpose in being alive is to create a lightness of spirit with words and my aim is to do this standing in front of an audience for two hours, no text, tossing off the top of my head stories and poems, songs, a murder ballad, hymns, reminiscences of grandma Keillor, Scripture, singing with the audience, a demented old man pulling out impromptu associations from deep memory, which at its best is like putting on underpants freestanding with my eyes closed, but more like skating backward, a skill I picked up on the frozen Mississippi when I was a kid.

You skate forward, like running, then swivel and suddenly you’re dancing, doing a cross-step pattern, and I, never an athlete, suddenly felt astonished by grace. A lonely stretch of river, nobody else around, it wasn’t for show but for the feeling of freedom, like a bird in flight or a fish leaping the rapids. Or a man in a shower.

Read Boom Town, a new(ish) novel by Garrison Keillor where the author returns to his hometown of Lake Wobegon, which is in the midst of a rising economic tide driven by millennial entrepreneurs.

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