LIfe Goes On, We Watch the Lampposts Passing

I am a hard worker and last week I put in a string of 12-hour shifts bent over a laptop and found it exhilarating even though it’s hard on your legs. You get up and walk into the next room and feel off-balance, so you do a few squats but come right back to your work. Two surgeons repaired my defective heart and gave me a couple bonus decades and I don’t wish to spend this astonishing gift recumbent in Boca Raton sipping rum fizzes. I intend to finish this book and then hike up Columbus Avenue to morning Mass at St. Michael’s.

I was brought up Brethren but I escaped into Episcopalian. Brethren believe that if you study Scripture you will find the truth and graduate into redemption but your grammar needs to be correct and punctuation proper. Anglicans believe it’s a miracle. The candles, the smoke, the Black lady deacon who reads the Gospel in a powerful voice.

We kneel and make our confession
As the Gospel commands,
Are forgiven of our transgressions,
Then we stand and turn around and shake hands.

We sing “Nearer My God to Thee” and I look around and see high-priced lawyers weeping and investment executives, and this old man is moved.

On the way home I shop at Trader Joe’s where the clientele is a fraction of my age and I stand with my cart in a long line at checkout and overhear snatches of buoyant conversation about the ordinary challenge of living in Manhattan, whereas people my age worry about the fate of democracy, economic collapse, environmental holocaust. There are 24 cashiers at Joe’s so the line moves steadily; it’s exciting, with college kids and mothers of tiny children, and I listen to phone conversations about the weekend and boss problems and school issues and a musical someone hears is very good and I never hear the name that rhymes with Dump, the guy who sends masked armed men into the streets in the middle of the night and who all by himself announces 100% tariffs on China. He is quite irrelevant here. Lawlessness in Washington is a problem for the courts, not for the young people in line; they are occupied with living their lives.

I look at the cashiers and wonder which of them are actors, which writers. You can see who the dancers are, they look starved, I worry about them. Maybe they’ve discovered that they have the wrong body for dance: they have thighs and a butt. I was young and eager once, aware of the risks of pursuing an independent life, but it was simply something a young person did. I knew others on the same path, we solidified each other. I knew aspiring songwriters with big ideas who also were able to do home repair and fix a car.

New York is a tolerant place and if you went to Trader Joe’s in your pajamas, people would figure there’s a reason — maybe you’re a brilliant physicist and were puzzling a new theorem and didn’t notice — maybe you’re under indictment and going for the insanity defense. The conspiracy-minded who are children from another galaxy sent to Earth to show that the CIA was responsible for 9/11 and that the Deep State is using vaccines to alter our genetic structure do not do well here. They belong on the Great Plains. But I grieve for my old friend Alison Rose who died this month in her tiny apartment on the East Side, author of a couple of very personal books and a string of funny Talk of the Town pieces in The New Yorker, who chose to isolate herself in the big city. She resisted attempts to help her. She lived her own story and I respect her secrets.

And I come home to my darling who walks five or six miles through the city daily and thrives on the sights and sounds and who stands behind me and puts her hands on my shoulders and with this slight gesture my world is complete. I am launched on a career as an octogenarian stand-up and finishing a book. I cannot be a New Yorker because my mother brought me up not to interrupt when others are talking and not to complain, and if you observe those prohibitions in this city, (1) you will be silent in social situations and (2) people will suspect dementia. But so long as I am loved by a New Yorker, I am a happy man.

Garrison Keillor © 10.13.25