What an awesome August this has been

The Column: 08.15.24

Mon Dieu! Mille Félicitations to you French for the merveilleux et excitant Paris Olympics, and many thanks to YouTube (or Toi Tube) for the nightly highlights (points forts). An old man doesn’t have hours to spend whilst commentators kill time and runners warm up for the 1,500-meter, just shoot me the juice, Bruce, and show me the Olympic break-dancing gold medal taken by a Canadian — a Canadian ! — and, okay, he’s a Korean-Canadian, Philip Kim, but Olympic break-dancing? B-boys and B-girls spinning and twisting and doing impossible physical feats. And the USA’s Suni Lee doing the twisting vault routine that needs to be seen in slow motion several times to be believed.

I am 82 and, for me, trotting around the block would be an Olympic event. So to see the Swedish pole-vaulter Duplantis perform the ridiculous feat of lofting himself feet-first with the rubbery pole and squiggle over the crossbar is like watching a man climb up a brick wall — it’s surreal, it has no relevance to life on this planet today.

Much more relevant is the 4x100 women’s relay. Back in my day we looked down on fast women but these women are unbelievably swift and the art of handing the baton at full speed to your galloping teammate is a wonder to behold. And what about the 1,500-meter men’s and the two leaders jawing at each other almost to the end when the USA’s Cole Hocker suddenly came racing from back in the pack to win by a couple feet?

Thank goodness the Americans won men’s basketball over the French. It’s our game, Americans invented it. To lose would be like English Sauvignon Blanc beating out French. Some English wines have beaten out French in blind tests but who says vision-impaired persons are experts on wine?

My event is the old man’s 90-minute stand-up storytelling with some poems tossed in and my routine had an intelligent dog, a girl challenging a boy to wrestle, Babe Ruth, a funeral, and the audience singing “America,” “In My Life,” and “My Girl.” It kept the crowd’s attention pretty well.

It was a good week. I did my show every night and all day I sat working on a novel and loved doing it. I have writer friends who’re unable to write so much as a thank-you note because they once wrote a book hailed by heavyweight critics as heralding a new era in American literature. Nobody ever said that sort of thing about me. The most I’ve gotten was “amusing yet often poignant.” That’s not a pedestal; it’s a low curb.

I traveled around doing my show, feeling free as a bird. I grew up the middle child in a big family and so I could ride away on my bike and not be missed and that’s when I discovered freedom. I was ten when I rode into downtown Minneapolis alone past factories and through the red-light district to the downtown library and sat reading books my evangelical parents disapproved of, Hemingway and Mencken and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and nobody tried to stop me.

And now I walked out onstage and sang:

I’ve had many wonderful teachers,
I’ve had more than my share of good breaks,
And thanks to modern medical procedures,
I’ve outlived all my worse mistakes. 
I’m not one of the Olympic winners; 
I just do what I need to do.
But thanks to surgeons and blood thinners,
I’ve reached the age of 82. 

One story I decided not to tell in my show was about the helicopter ride I took with a famous New York model who had dated Donald Trump and it ran into instrument failure over New Jersey and had to make an emergency landing in a swamp, a very dramatic near-death moment, both of us thinking the end was near, and during this emotional moment she told me that Trump eats with his fingers and spills food on himself and is functionally illiterate and has a poor grasp of multiplication and division and she told me other things about him such as the fact that he has a vocal resonator implanted in his neck to make his voice boomy, and without it he has a voice like that of a ten-year-old girl, but who am I to judge? We each have our own limitations. I couldn’t do a pole vault if you put a gun to my head. So don’t.

In Cheerfulness, Garrison Keillor shares how staying positive can help us through tough times. With personal stories and wise advice, he shows that a good attitude can make all the difference.

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