A Fallen Man Picks Himself Up

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Stupidity is a revelatory experience for an old man, his own stupidity, not the lives of the rich and famous but his very own, a man who’s earned a living by his wits who one day does something phenomenally foolish and brings life crashing down. I ignore the news stories about our Leader’s son-in-law’s billions in slush funds from Middle East potentates for favors rendered, the pardons sold, the cryptocurrency profits, the steep decline in Washington ethics that America has come to calmly accept as normal, thievery that would’ve astonished Warren Harding, Boss Tweed, and Ferdinand Marcos, but I do not ignore my own stumbles, screwups and walking into walls.

I was in Fort Pierce, Florida, on a tour doing stand-up comedy with a brilliant young comic named Erica Rhodes. I do reminiscence and she does keen observation and dark irony. I tell stories, she does jokes. The audience is fond of me and amazed by her. She talks about her father who, as he was dying, said, “I hope you get some good material out of this,” and indeed she does. We’re a good pair.

I’m 84, my balance is poor because I’m a writer and spend my waking hours sitting down focused on small type, and last Friday I noticed my right shoe was untied and I put my right foot up on a soft sofa to tie my laces. I knew this was not a good move and then I felt myself falling backward, an odd sensation, and landed hard on my back and banged my head and lay for a moment in surprise and then got to my feet. My back hurt. I felt stiff. I also felt like a fool.

Erica and I and our road manager Sam the Man headed for Clearwater. A couple hours later we stopped for gas and I got out and found myself in excruciating pain hardly able to walk. I headed for the Men’s room and Erica took my arm, no longer brilliant, just very kind. We canceled the Clearwater show — you can’t do stand-up comedy when you’re in excruciating pain, it just doesn’t work — and they dropped me off at the hospital to get a CAT scan and X-ray and make sure there was nothing broken, no brain bleed. Which indeed was the case. And so the rest of the tour was canceled and I headed home to New York.

I let other people agonize over the front page. I love daily life: it corresponds to common sense. You’re kind to the hospital workers, and they are friendly in return. You sit in the waiting room and start up a conversation with the stranger next to you, ask a few questions and get a glimpse of her life. Most people don’t mind talking about themselves. She just got out of drug treatment. Opiates. Her husband kicked her out. She is soon to see her two little kids for the first time in four months. She says she is scared. I pray for a happy reunion. Let there be laughter, dear Lord.

Humans are susceptible to delusion and for decades I accepted that alcohol is essential to the literary life — Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dylan Thomas, Thomas Wolfe, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, the evidence was quite clear, and then in 2002 I was moved to put the bottle aside and was astonished by the result: a clear head in the mornings, cheerful ambition instead of sullen stupor. I loved whiskey but I loved English more.

I punished myself with regret for a long time, brooding over some dumb financial moves, creative blunders, a long-ago marriage like a bad movie, and then it dawned on me what modern medicine had done to give me a bonus quarter-century of life, and I entered the age of gratitude. I love arising in the morning, love my work, love the woman who puts her feet in my lap, love the Lord whose eye is on the sparrow. “Life is a gift, I am a happy man,” said Ludwig Wittgenstein, and if a closeted gay man could say that, a man who fought in the trenches on the losing side of the most miserable meaningless war that ever was, WW1, millions of men died for no purpose except to serve the egos of autocrats, then why should I regret falling flat on my back. Over-the-counter medications help, I’m walking with a cane, I’m finishing a book, and in a couple weeks I’ll go back on the road in Texas and amuse a roomful of strangers. Thank you for this good life.

Garrison Keillor © 10.26.26