What the silent man thinks

The Column: 03.26.25

I’ve had an easy life, like canoeing down a river, one mile leads to the next, Tuesday follows Monday, obey the rules, portage around dams, don’t approach alligators unless their eyes are closed, and don’t argue with men with large eyebrows carrying shotguns.

I am a writer, it’s as simple as that. I wake up in the morning with an urge to use English rather than learn a new one and to do as Mrs. Moehlenbrock said: check for mistakes and read it aloud to hear if it makes sense. I was only ten at the time and she made me feel important as if I had something to say. I retain this confidence, despite having written plenty of dumb stuff. J.D. Salinger knew how to stop; I don’t. Being a writer by habit means that I spend time thinking to myself, which disturbs many women, who think I’m embittered, depressed, bored, or wishing someone would amuse me with anecdotes from the country club, but I’m not: I’m thinking. I’ve loved several women who didn’t understand that thinking would stop if I started talking. This happened on many occasions. Brilliant ideas one moment, small talk the next. But now I’ve found a woman who is up to the job: she is a Reader. She likes to be quiet for long periods of time without my engaging her in book club-type conversation about Themes and Interpretations nor the phone ringing and our offspring asking if we will stay at the hotel in Bethesda, Maryland, for two nights or three and will she have her own room. I can accommodate having a reader in the same room I’m thinking in, and my only qualm is simply this: why do I never see her reading one of her husband’s books and chuckling melodiously?

If you slept nightly with a thinly clad man over a period of thirty years, would you not want to know what’s on his mind, especially those intimate secrets that can only be revealed in humorous fiction? Wouldn’t you?

And the answer is: No, probably not. Romance requires a certain mystery, dim light, faint music, suggestive fragrances. Intimacy is about intimations, it’s not about flash photography. Very few people marry their proctologist, it’s a fact. Look it up. (Or rather, don’t.)

I hope this makes you feel special, dear reader. There is something going on between us that is not shared by the slim elegant woman reclining fifteen feet from my right elbow. I asked her, “How’s that book you’re reading?” She said, “Interesting.” In other words, “Don’t talk to me.”

As it says in Mark’s Gospel, she and I “are no longer two, but one flesh.” But what different fleshes the two are: she is a bird, I am a bull. Does this give me the power of flight? I don’t believe so.

As a friend of hers told her thirty years ago, “If you marry an older man, someday you’ll be married to an old man.” And here she is. But the old man is a happy old man, thanks be to heaven. He sits at his loom and enjoys making sentences into paragraphs and then remaking them, an occupation that has preoccupied him since puberty. I’m not bragging, just remarking on the unusualness of it and feeling grateful. I had my chances to take up drugs that make you stupid. I quit drinking because I could feel the clarity that resulted.

In my youth, I saw Albert Woolson, the last living veteran of the Union Army, riding in a parade in Minneapolis, an ancient man waving a flag in his tiny translucent hand. It was good of him, who’d been a drummer boy in the Army and had seen Lincoln in the flesh, to agree to ride around and symbolize history, but I decline to be the last of my kind. I loved my predecessors, Benchley and Perelman and Thurber and Woody Allen, but I cheer for the up-and-comers. We need to keep comedy flying, all the more so as we observe a successful fascist movement led by an aging playboy from Queens who has turned the Republican Party, whose cause Albert Woolson was loyal to back when it had ideals, into a cult. Donald McDonald has never told a joke so it was funny. Pompous nincompoops seldom do. But enough about that. Do me a favor and make someone you love laugh out loud. Start with the little ones and move up to the tall ones. They’re the hardest.

Spend a perfect summer evening at Tanglewood as A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor takes the stage at the Koussevitzky Music Shed in Lenox, Massachusetts, on June 21 at 7 p.m.

CLICK HERE for tickets!