Waiting for Christmas, wishing for snow

The Column: 12.20.22

I flew from St. Louis to New York City last Friday, had a cup of black coffee before takeoff, which put me right to sleep, and awoke on the descent through heavy overcast, no visible lights below even as our wheels were lowered, and down, down, down we came as the ride got bumpy and then sort of turbulent, lights appearing a few hundred feet below, a river of headlights on a freeway, the plane shaking as the ground came up to meet us, red lights on the tarmac, and the wheels hit and the nose came down and he reversed the engines and braked hard and brought us around to the terminal at LaGuardia.

It was thrilling. For all the times I’ve ridden a plane descending through zero visibility, it still is a pleasure, to contemplate the end of my life and then life continues, I text my love (“Landed”), take my briefcase, thank the captain standing in the cockpit door and walk up the Jetway and past Starbucks and the ATMs and the candy stand and out the door into the dark and drizzle and stand in the taxi line and hop in a cab and into Manhattan we go, down dark streets of brownstones, a few hardy souls walking their dogs, and across the Park to the West Side where my love waits for me to come through the door and puts her arms around me.

I wish it would snow. St. Louis was cold and bleak but Minnesota got a good snowfall and when snow falls in Manhattan, it’s magical, you’re in an O. Henry story about Christmas, and all the kids shut up in apartments come out with sheets of plastic or cardboard and go sliding on whatever slope is available and there’s jubilation for a few hours until it all turns to mud and slush. New York, snowless, is more John O’Hara, even us teetotalers feel sort of hungover.

But life is good, especially after your plane doesn’t crash in the warehouses of Queens and you are not in the news the next morning but are at your computer, writing comedy. It’s a story about a heavy-metal singer named Thistle Missile who sings a lullaby to her children:

“Shut up and close your eyes
Or I am gonna traumatize
You so bad you’re gonna be
Twenty years in therapy.
I’m an outlaw mama, yes.
I don’t promise happiness.
So grow up strong, be a smart aleck,
Because life, believe me, is metallic.”

She is out to revolutionize the metal community by introducing feminism — I love the phrase “metal community,” the story has real possibilities, it’s fun to push it along but I have no ambitions for it whatsoever. This is a beautiful aspect of getting old, you enjoy the work but success is of no particular importance, it’s good enough to be useful. I still do shows and maybe I’ll work Thistle Missile and her band Dire Outcome into one of them.

I keep working because fear of death is not a good enough reason to stick around; a person needs a purpose. Grandparenting is an excellent one, so is learning, but mine is writing. Dr. Dearani and his surgical team worked for six hours six months ago to replace my fluttery mitral valve with one from a pig and what a dreadful waste if all that expertise simply led to another decade or two of watching TV and sitting on a beach in Florida. It’s my duty to make their work mean something.

Among the Inuit people, it was once customary for an old man who couldn’t earn his keep to take the long walk across the ice and not come back. In my youth, when the elderly couldn’t do the yardwork, they were packed off to a little apartment and when they couldn’t climb the stairs they went to Happy Acres to die of boredom. My mother lived to the grand old age of 97, which gave me time to try to make up for all the grief I’d caused her.

My goal now is to do octogenarian stand-up for a few years and when that gets to be a struggle, I’ll come home and serve as a family historian. Most of my younger relations have zero interest in this but some do and my cousins Susie and Elizabeth are ready and willing to tell them about Thomas Keillor’s voyage from Yorkshire in 1774 and the Crandalls who supported the King and had to flee the Revolution and Grandpa who chased Dora Powell who ran away but not so fast that he couldn’t catch her. Ask and you will be told.