The week I got what I wanted

The Column: 10.17.24

It was a good week. It began with a night I lay awake for hours listening to my daughter’s hacking cough in the next room like an inmate in the county tubercular farm. We were both weary the next day until we remembered a ride at the Minnesota State Fair from 12 years before, the River Run ride, the two of us on a raft racing around a sluiceway, that I’d shot a video of with my phone. Last week I got a new iPhone but she found the video on it, two solid minutes of her hysterical laughter as she watched water splashing on her father’s lap so that it appeared he had wet his pants. I pretended to be horrified but I kept recording her crazy beautiful laughter.

We ate soup for supper and she, with no trouble at all, texted the Pee Ride video to her aunt Kay and our friend Heather, each of whom texted back within minutes their delight at this video. To me, this alone justifies the invention of the phone that can text, though I, along with every other elderly person, have said caustic things about texting in the past. So? I changed my mind. Now I can see the good it can accomplish in our troubled world. Kay had been watching her favorite basketball team get drubbed and Heather had been teaching first grade. Two minutes of my girl delighted by the apparent urinary tract problems of her elderly father was exactly what they needed.

The video turned the week around. She pulled out of the respiratory troubles that had her mother and me and our girl in mutual misery and two days later I flew to Dublin and the next night made a crowd happy at Liberty Hall Theatre. I’ve played theaters but don’t remember playing a theatre and of course for a man my age, liberty is a beautiful thing and worth flying to Ireland to find. They didn’t laugh the way my daughter laughed at the Fair but that’s because I hadn’t drunk enough liquid.

I love making people laugh; it’s better than pity. I’m 82, people see me shuffling down the street, they think, “O my God, someday I’ll be like that too,” so they take up elliptical machines so as to avoid my fate, a member of the generation that screwed up the country and now our kids are wondering what to do with us, if they should stick us in some Nazi nursing home or should they wax our floors and put some loose rugs around so we can trip and fall and break our necks.

Elliptical machines may age you faster. Nursing homes are full of elliptical exercisers who got distracted and twisted their backs so they can’t drink orange pop anymore because it hurts to hiccup. And you can go for years without a sip of orange pop but it’s when you can’t have any that you desperately need it. That’s just how it is.

Life is precarious. You can’t always get what you want. Mick Jagger said so and now that he’s 81 he knows it’s true. I grew up in Minnesota where there are more Scandinavians than anyone needs, people whose idea of delight is “not that bad.” Trump complains about Hispanics crossing the southern border, I say we need more of them and more people disappearing over the northern border.

The Norwegian couple was celebrating their 25^thanniversary and she kicked him under the table hard and said, “That’s for twenty-five years of bad sex.” He kicked her back harder and said, “That’s for knowing the difference.” I don’t tell that joke in Minnesota because people might think I’m making fun of them.

I grew up Sanctified Brethren, which is like Norwegian except they think it’s redemption. Their idea of ministry was gathering to read the obituaries and sending gospel tracts about eternal damnation to the survivors of the deceased. I got out as quickly as I could.

What I tried to convey to the Dublin crowd is the fabulous joke that you don’t truly appreciate the beauty of life until you come close to the end, which should make you sad but doesn’t because it’s incredibly beautiful. My daughter’s wild laughter delights me but in her absence, Dubliners’ will do. A glass of water was provided onstage and I was tempted to spill on myself but it was an older audience and they might not’ve seen it as a joke.

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