Where's My Guitar, Darling?

Robert Johnson and his blues guitar

I am an Episcopalian, an American citizen with a college degree, a published author, I have a great many more important concerns than trying to navigate the Delta Air Lines website to purchase a flight to MSP but I have now wasted an hour and a half and worked myself into a crimson rage trying to delete two expired credit cards from the site and put in a new one, and luckily for me I’m a liberal Democrat so I don’t own a gun, otherwise this laptop would be full of holes and cops in camo would be pounding on my door.

I see no reason Delta should treat me this way. I’m not an undocumented criminal migrant from Venezuela or a member of an Iranian sleeper cell — yes, I did dodge the draft but that was in 1971 — yes, I think the current Prez is a mafioso and his remodeled Oval Office looks like a bingo parlor and his use of capital letters reveals a Numbskull Education — and yes, I’m 83, an émigré from the age of the typewriter and the corded telephone — but my money is as good as anyone else’s and here I am grinding my teeth and cursing (dang it!) despite my evangelical upbringing, when a small hand reaches over my shoulder and finds a Delta app and fixes the problem — my wife, a graduate of a music school, a classical violinist — since when did Tchaikovsky become a prerequisite for buying a plane ticket?

This is hard on a guy’s masculinity. I already gave up whiskey, gave up driving, don’t go to hockey games, and I hire other men to come do home maintenance that my dad did all by himself so my testosterone level is likely sinking — next thing, I may be spritzing perfume and powdering my nose — all because Delta decided to rid itself of technowimps.

I associate the name Delta with the Mississippi Delta blues and Robert Johnson who sold his soul to the devil to gain mastery of the blues guitar.

Way down on the Delta is where I need to go
But I cannot get a ticket — why, I do not know.
I cannot work the website though I have paid the dues.
I’m stuck in New York City with the Delta blues.

But the usual basics of the blues, tuberculosis, infidelity, malnutrition, don’t hit me as hard as the ordinary and trivial, like searching for my glasses and not finding them. We live in a two-BR apartment, three baths, LR, DR, Kit, there aren’t many places where a person would’ve left his glasses but I am not “a person,” I am me, and you wouldn’t believe the unlikely spots I’ve left them so I won’t tell you, but the fact is that this dear woman I married has a lens-sensing ability that makes me utterly dependent on her.

I’m a half-blind man looking around for my specs.
Smart people keep them hanging from their necks.
I cannot remember what room I left them in.
Now I need a drink but I cannot find the gin.
My sweet mama has gone up to Connecticut.
I’m lost without her, don’t know what’s what.

I’m a happy man with an easy life, I avoided contact sports so I never got concussed, never was a runner so I haven’t had a knee or hip replaced, was never smart enough to get depressed, am a Minnesotan so I’m polar but not bi-, never got involved with Shakers or Wiccans or weird cults involving turtle worship (though I was for many years a devoted Clutterite believing that we worship God by maintaining chaos on flat surfaces), and I’ve learned to deal with the problems of getting old.

I’m an old man and I know it is absurd
But I absolutely cannot remember the word,
A common ordinary word that I need to use
Which begins with B and it rhymes with “news.”

No, I can sense the approach of dementia and I accept it and other infirmities such as the inability to turn a cartwheel or do calculus or explain the Trinity, and I’ve accepted my helplessness with WordPerfect, that I’m typing and suddenly the font becomes minuscule or turns to Sanskrit and I switch the computer off and back on, and now asterisks appear between the letters, I can deal with that.

My baby’s gone until eleven o’clock
To Carnegie Hall to hear Bruckner and Bach,
I’m sitting here miserable as I can be,
My Delta website is torturing me.
Robert Johnson, he was doing just fine.
He played guitar, he never went online.

Garrison Keillor © 07.06.25