What I do for the sake of love

The Column: 05.02.25

I board the plane at LaGuardia where everything goes well until I reach TSA and a uniformed woman asks if I have any metal implants in my body and I say that I do. “What do you have?” she asks. I want to say, “German shell fragments from the Battle of Ypres. General Haig sent us across muddy fields directly into point-blank Austrian artillery. A horse collapsed on me and saved my life and I alone am left to tell the tale.” But I say, “Pacemaker” and she directs me to a gentleman who gives me a full-body pat-down the same as if I were being deported to El Salvador, and I am cleared to go to MSP instead.

Delta Air Lines signs along the passage tell me I am soon to get the “Me Time” that I deserve and meet the flight crew that will Feel Like Friends and receive Nourishment for the Soul, but coming from the Midwest I doubt this. An airliner is not a recovery center.

I take my seat, 3A, and please don’t tell me I have no right to a wide ride, I admit that I am privileged. No doubt a worthier person sits in back but there’s no time for sworn testimony and cross-examination. It’s only a two-hour-thirty-minute flight so suck it up, worthier person, and take out your resentment in a fine work of fiction that might put your kids through college.

A click on the P.A. and a calm manly voice: “This is your captain up in the cockpit. Welcome ––” and so forth. It is brief, has a factual ring, we’ll be flying 505 miles per hour at 34,000 feet, nothing about his feelings of awe at taking responsibility for all of our lives or the state of his spiritual journey, and absolutely no attempt at friendship. He sounds like a Midwesterner to me, steady hand, keen eye, someone who can fly into haze without trepidation, well-trained, no outsize ego. That is who I want at the controls, not the son of a wealthy developer from Queens who buys him a draft deferment.

I do not like it when the flight attendant reminds us that 2025 is Delta’s centennial and says, “I hope we’ll be around to serve you for another hundred years.” I doubt it. I’m 82. Why would my descendants be shipping my ashes around? Say it ain’t so.

I especially don’t like her saying, “Flight attendants, arm the doors for departure.” Have things come to such a pass that we need machine guns to fly over American territory? Is there a revolving turret on the roof? Why have I boarded this plane?

I have boarded it in order to spend a week with my beloved who is engaged as a violist in an opera orchestra in downtown St. Paul, performing Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” at a hall across the street from the park with the statue of Fitzgerald. Downtown St. Paul is in sad shape, like so many downtowns these days. Dayton’s Department Store is gone. My mother loved Dayton’s, run by a good Presbyterian family, and clothed her six kids in clothing with the Dayton’s label, following Paul’s admonition to the Philippians: “Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are of good report; think on these things.” But Dayton’s was supplanted by Amazon as prophesied in Revelation, that “a great red dragon with seven horns and ten heads will come among you,” and downtown is a mirage but I believe that great art can change the world and that it isn’t Required that Novelists be Drunks and I intend to sit in the hall and look down on the stage as Figaro sings “Largo al factotum” and see my lady in the pit, viola under her chin, making music.

I love the woman and I will take any risk to fly to Minnesota and see her and when the Count falls in love with young Rosina whose elderly guardian Dr. Bartolo intends to marry her himself and his man Figaro conspires to bring Rosina and the Count together and the old goat is frustrated and true love triumphs, then I swear there will be hope for downtown again.

We need downtowns; a website is not a center. You can’t build your life around drive-up windows. There is delight in Rossini not found in a mall. Fitzgerald didn’t need to act like a writer: he was one so push the gin away. Art is good enough. Find yourself a good barber like Figaro and tell him what you want and prepare to be very fortunate.

After a national tour celebrating 50 years of A Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor returns with the show for an unforgettable evening of music, stories, and silly sound effects with Rich Dworsky, the Royal Academy of Radio Actors, and special guests — live in Bethesda, Maryland!

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