Balcony at Night, Looking at Manhattan

I don’t keep track of my stock portfolio for the simple reason I am utterly ignorant, having skipped Econ in college–– too boring –– so in the world of finance I am a mountain climber with no lantern or map and I hear woofing up ahead and hope to find a hut and a hermit who will offer me lodging. To me, it makes as much sense as Friday night bingo at Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy except not as sociable.

It does seem though that even with the national deficit rising and unemployment too and consumer pessimism and nobody has any idea where our Leader’s mood on tariffs is heading, Wall Street sees a candle in the window and is following the rainbow. The investment bank sends me a summary on the first of the month, and it keeps climbing and climbing, even for me without a map.

I was brought up by Christian pessimists who had seen the Dirty Thirties so I am trying to prepare myself for a crash and big black headlines, BANK STOCKS SKID, FED HEAD QUITS, MARKETS CLOSE AT NOON in which event I guess we’d sell the apartment at a big loss and pack our bags and move back to Minnesota and buy a house with a garden so we don’t have to fight people for food at the supermarket. But no black headlines appeared today, only small ones about our Leader’s bosom buddy Jeffrey Epstein so my darling and I go around the corner to Piatto Grande and she has two glasses of the Sicilian wine, not the Montana one, and we each have our own salad and don’t split one, and I have the linguini with meatballs.

My needs are modest. I don’t own a car because I have double vision. I travel in my line of work, show business, and otherwise am a homebody. I spent my middle years working terribly hard to make up for a lack of talent due to an evangelical background that told me, “Don’t show off” so I struggled to shed modesty, and I had no time for TV so I lost track of popular culture –– I look at the gossip columns and don’t know who the celebrities are anymore –– I may as well be Amish. But this life suits me. If you’re a writer and have a few friends and you marry well and have a humorous daughter, you hardly need anything else.  And I went to church Sunday so my sins are forgiven.

People come to New York with a dream in mind and mine was to be an important writer and win a Pullet Surprise or the National Booger Wart, but for those prizes, you have to dress up and sit at a banquet for three hours and listen to some blowhard talk about the role of imaginative literature in a democratic society and I’d rather take a walk in Central Park and listen to the pick-up jazz band playing Ellington’s “Take The A-Train” by the reservoir as the ground shakes from the A train underground,  a runner pushing his little daughter in a cart, dog walkers, Frisbee players playing pickle in the middle, and the kindergarteners leashed together like sled dogs, heading for a grassy slope to be unleashed and go dashing around, yelling, laughing, apartment kids accustomed to hours of imprisonment with irritable parents and now, whoopee!  thrilled by freedom of movement, competitive leaping, somersaulting, hopscotching, jitterbugging.  So much public happiness.

It’s a beautiful fall and the city feels optimistic, let people in Wichita imagine it as a brutal battleground and rat-infested garbage dump, the residents know different. Yes, rents are high and that’s for the simple reason that so many people want to live here. Last night, sitting on the balcony under the starry sky, arm around my sweetheart, gazing at the landscape of lights, she holds up her cellphone with the app that identifies the planes in the sky on their approach to LaGuardia, coming in from Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Rochester, Miami. She came here from Minnesota as a teenager to be a classical violinist and had fifteen good years before she hitched up with me. I came here because my 8th grade teacher showed me a copy of The New Yorker and I wanted to write funny stuff in among cartoons and fancy ads for ritzy hotels and snazzy jewelry, in the same type font as A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell. Now we have each other. Who could ask for more?

Garrison Keillor © 09.15.25