Moving Ahead with a Long Glance Back

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My old pal Suzanne Weil says, “If you’re in a good place, then everything that happened before was the right thing because it led you to the place you are now, so you should be grateful for everything,” which sounds to me like someone has been spending too much time in the sun. It’s the sort of idealism we see in Natalie Harp, the devoted aide who seldom leaves the Chief’s side, reading him idolatrous emails from admirers, meanwhile the national debt hits $40 trillion and a war drags on as the Great Man builds an enormous ballroom as a matter of national defense. Who is minding the store?

I visited St. Paul for a week and was struck by reminders of my many mistakes, which was why I left a decade ago and pitched my tent in Manhattan. A fresh start. I haven’t done many dumb things there. My Minnesota romances ended badly. My one New York romance is in its 32nd year.

“Life must be lived forwards but it can only be understood backwards,” said Kierkegaard, who died of TB at 44, not long enough to get a good view and TB makes for a miserable life so he inflicted a sour Lutheranism on his readers. I am 84 and though I see my mistakes clearly — college was a big one — I lucked my way into a line of work that was no work at all. I did a lighthearted show on public radio where, surrounded by gloomy lectures and discussions of impending crises and hours of 19th-century Teutonic symphonic misery, I made overeducated people feel a little better.

Go where you’re in short supply. Smart civil servant? Head for the Confederacy. Psychotherapist? Forget about Manhattan, go to South Dakota.

I wanted to be a writer and the English Department loved the legend of the Doomed Writer, Dylan Thomas, Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, men who’d gotten their legs caught in the trap of alcohol. Academics had no interest in humor because it didn’t need their explication.

I might’ve gotten a job teaching Creative Writing 101, “Enigmatism For Beginners,” but I wanted my aunts to be proud of me — I had seventeen of them and many of them thought I was brilliant because I was very quiet — now they’d say “high-functioning end of the lower spectrum,” but back then we didn’t use that sort of language because there weren’t so many college graduates around who were fond of abstractions.

College changed the language so we could talk about benchmarks of cognitive comprehension and differentiated evaluation or a framework of accountability and what might be called protocols of intrinsic interpersonal intelligence — terms that enable us to work productively in an institutional context that employs outside consultants to explain the extrinsic purpose of the work we do.

So what work did I wind up doing? A line of work in which there is no language to explain that you are successful — no metric, checkpoint, data, evaluation, rubric, assessment, or taxonomy — the only signal of success is laughter. Impulsive laughter triggered by a humorous story or line.

An 84-year-old woman sat in a rocking chair on her porch, petting her cat Puff, when a fairy appeared and granted her three wishes.

The old woman said, “I wish I were twenty-one years old and beautiful again.” And poof she was!

She said, “I wish I had a million dollars and this old house were a mansion.” And it was so.

And now the beautiful, rich young woman said, “I wish Puff were a handsome young man and deeply in love with me.” POOF!

And the handsome man took the beautiful young woman in his arms and said, “I sure wish you hadn’t had me fixed!”

We are a highly educated people, who walk around with smartphones that give each of us access to all of human knowledge. So who sits down and writes a letter to a friend or relation, instead we text, maybe share.

Except Natalie, the young blonde at the elbow of the man-child Chief, who wrote, “You are all that matters to me. I don’t want to ever let you down. I never want to bring you anything but joy. Thank you for being my Guardian and Protector in this life.”

No wonder the Boss took Natalie with him in the catering container in Turkey and left Marco Rubio behind on Air Force One. Does Marco Rubio want to bring him nothing but joy? Is D.T. all that matters to Marco?
Garrison Keillor © 08.24.26