What I did Monday, if you want to know

The Column: 08.11.23

I clean up nicely and if I dress up I could pass for an ophthalmologist or at least an ornithologist and I try to walk briskly around New York and maintain a cheerful demeanor but I notice people are holding doors open for me and sometimes they look concerned, watching me descend two flights into the subway station. Evidently I look unsteady.

I’m only being careful. My days of taking a down staircase two stairs at a time no-handed are in the past along with my tennis game, but I am happier than ever and Monday night, my 81^st birthday, I did a two-hour show up in Connecticut with my daughter, 25, sitting in the wings and a niece, profoundly pregnant, in the audience, and it was good. I walked back and forth on stage and Rob the piano player and I did a string of limericks and sonnets (sung) and I told funny stories about funerals and I even ventured into ribaldry.

My daughter is a joker. We meet and she says, “Make me laugh,” which I can do by scratching the bottom of her bare foot with my fingernails or by telling the joke about the two penguins on the ice floe. She didn’t inherit her sense of humor from me. I was brought up Brethren and fed on Old Testament prophets and the Book of Revelation; I had to work to acquire a sense of humor and it didn’t fully bloom until old age.

So I sang a song I would never have sung on the radio in which a man is lying with his dog and a sheep and the dog barks at a magpie in the tree overhead, the magpie shrieks, the sheep bites the man’s privates, and the magpie defecates. A bold artistic decision for a man brought up in a decent home with antimacassars and a plaque over the breakfast table, “Whatsoever things are pure, meditate on these things.” But my parents are gone to their reward, and I did it, and the audience was delighted. (The auditorium was pitch-dark, which permits people to laugh at things they wouldn’t want other people to see that they enjoy.) Delight is delight. I love that explosive laughter. My audience is mature and they don’t explode easily.

My daughter didn’t laugh, she smiled. She was there in an official daughterly capacity, observing, having spent childhood backstage at my shows, and she was professionally pleased at the success of the joke: one more point for Dad. With her, we skipped over the Old Testament prophets and went straight to “Love one another even as I have loved you.” I don’t believe she is aware of everlasting unbearable torment in the flames of hell. Boredom, grief, loneliness, yes; torment, no.

It was two hours of intense stand-up swerving through amusing irrelevancies and improvised digressions into childhood memories off the top of the old man’s head, the subject changing like flashing lights, Grandma Dora, a poem about horses, my adored beloved, sweet corn, whispered secrets, sudden revelations, embarrassments recollected: I do a pretty good impression of an old man thinking aloud, possibly demented, or not, but who cares? It made me so happy to be so lucky to do this.

My father at 81 enjoyed his children and relations more than ever, and my father-in-law Ray Nilsson was still chopping firewood and enjoying listening to Schubert and climbing up on his cabin roof to clean the gutters at 81. My grandfather James Keillor died young at 73, having worked hard at farming, but there’s a picture of him, old and grizzled, bundled up on a bitter cold day, looking very happy to be forking hay down to the livestock. Dora had a bowl of bread dough rising in the kitchen and was busy vacuuming when she dropped unconscious from the stroke at 84. So I carry on an old tradition.

I doubt that delight can be taught. The basic stuff such as Please and Thank you and Taking turns, yes, and Sticking with a job until it’s done and Not staying out too late, that nothing good happens after 1 a.m. So to arrive at this advanced age, after a long busy career and the stress of dreadful mistakes, and look into the wings and see my daughter studying me in a mood of delight makes me wildly lucky. My people cautioned me against wild unrealistic expectations and their caution makes this night sort of fabulous. Thanks, people. And now on we go to 82.

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