One More Night Down the Drain

theblackurbantimes.com

I’ve been working long days to finish a new book, a memoir of being a contented 84-year-old, rambling around America doing stand-up and last Friday, sitting in an old library on East 79th Street, I started to feel good about my narrative as it dawned on me how lucky I am and decided to celebrate by calling a spa and arranging for a shower, hot tub, and massage, for relaxation, and now it makes no sense to me at all.

I enjoy writing. Actually, I enjoy rewriting. The first draft is a hike through an infested swamp. The third- and fourth-draft fixes are fun, deleting the hemming and hawing and the frilly foofaraw to impress my English teachers long deceased and I scratch the complaints and the last few changes can be almost euphoric. You can honestly feel that you are taking a piece of wreckage and making it something useful — and how often does one get to say that in life? Not often enough. The library is a gracious place and except for the laptops it could be from the age of Emerson and Thorstein Veblen. Sitting surrounded by silent men and women at work, minding business, is definitely salubrious — you tend not to fall into the mindless googling that befalls the elderly who grew up with Britannica encyclopedias and now are thrilled by the ease of doing whimsical research and finding out where Lee Harvey Oswald grew up and who wrote “Ozzie and Harriet” on TV and who is Lake Harriet in Minneapolis named for and do most police carry body cameras and which states have unicameral legislatures, if any. This is a tragedy among elderly authors who still have much to give the world if only they could break the Google addiction to meaningless inquiry.

Friday at 5 p.m., I decided to go to a spa and googled spas and found an expensive one and made a reservation. I grew up in a blue-collar home, we didn’t have money lying around for the taking, the way the rest of you did, so I naturally assume that if something is Expensive, and therefore Unavailable, it must be Wonderful. Get my drift?

Well, it ain’t so. The spa was dark and candlelit with exotic fragrances in the air and employees dressed in black and oriental music playing for no good reason, endless repetitive plinking and flute tooting that sounded like wounded condors, and when it’s dark, you can’t be certain that it isn’t them. I descended into a 90-degree pool up to my neck and right away it didn’t feel good to be this relaxed, and it wasn’t shame — I had swim trunks on and anyway I was alone — it’s that in a dark unknown place, your body wants to be alert, prepared to defend if attacked by a condor, relaxation is the last thing you want. Little candles in cups flickering all around the pool and candles make me think of funerals and the incessant mystical plinking and tooting makes me think of mystics, psychics, healers, and savants, the whole spooky ragbag of wishful religion — give me St. Paul’s epistles any day of the week.

It cost me $245 to learn that spas are not my thing, which is a bargain — think of how much one could spend in Switzerland at the mineral baths with Heidi kneading you like bread dough and speaking spiritually in Deutsch or Dutch. What I need is to do some squats and crunches and stretches, which can be done for no charge anywhere in the United States.

I got dressed and paid up and tipped the help and hiked around the corner to a coffee shop and got a latte and a chocolate croissant and opened my laptop and got back to work. When you’re 84, relaxation is the last thing you want. You can do that after you’re dead.

I miss the old days when we kids hitchhiked and often met old men who wanted to tell their stories. I miss when we went to parties and people danced and we knew the words to the songs and sang Under the Boardwalk and The Sloop John B. and the song about Sue who knew just what to do. There was more cohesion back then. Sitting in warm water in candlelight is no way to spend your life. Relaxation is for the demented. We need to talk and try to figure this thing out before we disappear.

Garrison Keillor © 10.19.26