Happy We in NYC Society

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Ours is a country with a great tradition of eccentrics and wackos from Robert Johnson who sold his soul to the devil and Carry Nation with her tavern-busting hatchet and the man who wrote a book with no punctuation and Hetty Green the Witch of Wall Street and the freak-show man P.T. Barnum down to our Current Occupant fascinated by tariffs and vengeance and putting his name on things and his Secretary of War and his Secretary of Health opposed to vaccination, etcetera and so forth.

What makes this eccentricity possible is the rational order of things that we count on in everyday life, such as last Friday when I rode a train into New York, racing through a tunnel to the underground railyard of Penn Station, which the Leader wants named for himself, and up an escalator, following correct signage, to the massive escalator up to Seventh Avenue to hail a licensed cab and ride uptown, in traffic directed by men and women in yellow vests, to the Weill Cornell medical center where a kind neurologist with diplomas on his office walls explained to me, a writer and citizen, the brain seizure that caused an episode of speaking gibberish a week before and how we shall prevent its recurrence by rational science-based methods, nothing involving reptile ovaries or magnetism or dancing in moonlight.  

For the irrational impulses that seize the Occupant there is as yet no medication, and no explanation for Christians who support his cruelty and vanity and greed, but meanwhile the city maintains itself reasonably well through heat wave and flash flood and smoke from Canadian forest fires and 50,000 people packing onto the Great Lawn one evening to watch the World Cup final on a gigantic screen and the next morning the fences are gone and trash and porta-potties, and Central Park is a peaceful park again. And my love and I go for a walk and eat supper in a sidewalk café as an ambulance pulls up to a seniors’ center and a cat goes by in a baby buggy and a young woman wearing a sticker that says, “Ask About Me” and all around us young people in various stages of mutual attraction carry on conversations that appear to be amiable. I could be wrong but I don’t believe that words like “sleazebag,” “traitor,” or “communist scum” are in play here. People are having a good time.

The first rule in romance is “Don’t be weird.” In the mating rituals of youth, the best advice, particularly for males, is “Show enthusiasm for the finer things of life, the arts, learning, fine dining, travel. Try to avoid bitter complaint about the conspiracies of the powerful to deny you your due. Tread lightly when disparaging and allow that others may have different views.”

Yes, there is news of parasites carried by lettuce and bacteria in exhaust from A.C. units in large buildings and now and then random outbreaks of violence, but these are dealt with by public officials and workers on the basis of strict regulations and long-established customs, not by the whims of tyrannical chieftains in stone huts on distant mountaintops. This rational order allows me, an elderly man, to sit across from the love of my life and enjoy my salad and pasta in proximity to a fascinating variety of twentyish persons anticipating a good life in the land of the free, even though in this morning’s newspaper, the Occupant’s name is in half of the front-page headlines, many of which involve wacko eccentricities such as his withholding of billions of dollars in federal funds from states that did not vote for him in 2024.

Even so, my love and I and the young people around us do not appear to be obsessing about him, his war in Iran, his threat to impose tariffs on Canada for the smoke it has sent and on whatever country has sold us infected lettuce, his campaign to restrict voting in the wake of his 2020 defeat, his troopers rounding up persons who appear alien, his urge to construct a gigantic executive ballroom and triumphal arch — no, we are enjoying this perfect summer evening in New York in the company of friendly strangers, and even if he were to have a brain seizure and declare himself royalty, we would count on the rational system of our enlightened Founders 250 years old to maintain the beauty of this evening onward and onward. Thank you, Lord, for this life. Amen.

Garrison Keillor © 07.26.26