What's on my mind, sitting here

The Column: 11.22.24

It’s the hunting season and also the mating season for deer, a cruel combination — you’re excited by the scent of a female, she turns her beautiful brown eyes your way and your heart pounds and you paw the ground and snort and wave your antlers and then you smell beer and turn and a guy in a red plaid jacket blows your brains out. I never hunted because my dad and uncles weren’t hunters so there was nobody to show me how to do it.

Hunting is hereditary and I’m astonished that a half-million hunting licenses are issued annually in Minnesota and I don’t know any hunters: it means that I’m an outsider, an oddball.

Men hunt for the same reason they fish, in order to escape the company of women. Minnesota is a state of thousands of lakes and each one gives men an opportunity for refuge, sitting in a rowboat or a fishing shack out on the ice where nobody will say, “When are you going to clean out the garage?” Or “You keep talking about going to teacher conferences at the kids’ school but when is this going to happen if ever?” or “Why do you insist on dribbling coffee down the front of the kitchen cabinet and not wiping it up?”

Not many women fish because they know they can buy excellent salmon, tuna, or halibut for a tiny fraction of the cost of a boat and motor and trailer and a pickup to tow it. Ever compare salmon and northern pike? God created pike for cat food.

I’ve been a member of various minorities in my life, having grown up fundamentalist among people who didn’t drink or dance or go to movies or use the Lord’s name in vain, and in college I joined a microscopic minority of people who write limericks.

Minneapolis is great. Have you seen it?
The streets go from Aldrich to Zenith.
It’s the birthplace of Prince,
Than whom no one since
Has been any hipper, I mean it.
The city is good for the sickly.
The streets are numerical, strictly,
And alphabetical
All so that medical
Teams can get to you quickly. 

I am in the minority of Americans who read newspapers that subscribe to a code of objectivity. Our number is shrinking, and I can imagine the day when readers give up curiosity in favor of self-affirmation. I don’t wish to see that day and so I’m grateful to be in the minority of octogenarian Americans. We are out of touch and don’t know who the contemporary celebrities are, which one discovers is a loss one can easily live with. It gives you more room to focus on the natural world, birds, trees, little kids, the sun and stars.

I am one of the million-and-a-half Episcopalians in America, whose membership has been declining for years. We don’t know why but we don’t spend much time worrying about it either.

I don’t go to church because I’m a good person. I’m not, and I know that because I don’t hunt or fish so I spend more time around women and women are quite aware of human failings and when they give you a righteous glance, you can feel it. No, I only know how to imitate goodness, and when I sit in church and say the prayers and sing the hymns and listen to Scripture, it takes me out of the world and into the universe. And I feel united to the people around me, young, old, men, women, Black, white, all of us fragile, mortal, heading in the same direction.

My friends assembled to carry
Me to the town cemetery,
A gust of wind blew,
And the ashes all flew,
Leaving nothing of Gary to bury.
My memory was kept
By the sexton who swept
Up the dust. God heal
My soul. He is real
And now I am imaginary.

I wrote it in church during the sermon, which, God forgive me, lost me on a sharp turn, but when I look to my right, I see the chapel where, 29 years ago this week, I held my lover Jenny’s hands and we made our vows. I’m an old man in love and, independent though we be, we are a happy couple. I pray for you and yours. Be kind to others. Don’t be like the fellow of Bellingham so stubborn that there was no telling him. His wife said, “My dear, I wish you weren’t here.” He ignored her and she wound up selling him.

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