30

Ingenuity! Art! Good Luck! Goodbye!

I FOUND MY WAY TO the Episcopal church after I married Jenny at St. Michael’s and went to 10 a.m. Sunday Mass when I was in New York and knelt in the cramped pew, sometimes thought of the tall girl in the VW, sometimes thought of my old college classmate Denis Wad-ley, a staunch liberal and devout Catholic. I had some anti-Catholic prejudices from reading about thin-lipped celibate priests denying birth control to impoverished Irish families, but he and I became friends. He earned a doctorate from Oxford and taught high school English in Minneapolis, and he died of cancer in his mid-fifties. He wrote about his approaching death, saying that Christians “have the presence of mind to consecrate inevitable suffering as part of the mystery of the cross, and by allowing that to remain a mystery, everything else is clarified. Dismiss it, and everything becomes mysterious, because nothing is fully answered. The church provides structure in the form of sacraments and defense of this revelation; and no one is more free and content than one committed to an outlook that holds that, contrary to all appearances, the spirit is the substance and the material is transitory.”

The cradle Episcopalians go down on one knee and genuflect shoulder to shoulder, spectacles to testicles, but I grew up evangelical and we don’t do ballet. Still, it’s good to be here, removed from the weight of ambition, the dread of old age, at peace with my life and grateful to God for His steadfast love. We rise and sing praise to the Creator, we hear from Isaiah and David and St. Paul and we sing Blest be the tie that binds as the priest and a deacon and the acolytes process down the aisle, the teenagers so tall and solemn as they hold the candles high, I am moved by the solemnity of teenagers, and we hear the Word of Our Lord. The homily loses me, too literary, so I write a limerick in the bulletin instead.

The book that we call Revelations

Is full of tremendous sensations

Of fear and trembling

And legions assembling

And the devastation of nations.

It was written by John

In a hot marathon,

Who was on some strong medications.

We stand to recite the Creed and kneel to say the prayers together and I think prayerfully of friends and family, my elderly classmates passing from the world, and I give thanks for eagerness and avidity in my old age and for my lively wife who is sleeping late this morning, and then it’s time to shake hands with all in my vicinity and declare the peace of the Lord, and then the offering. I go forward for Communion as we sing I will raise them up on the last day and I can’t sing, I’m crying. I grew up among Tightly Closed Brethren and now in my old age I am accepted at the Lord’s Table at last and this moves me. I listen to the benediction and the rackety postlude and then the priest in the back of the sanctuary calls out the charge to go forth and do that which we’ve been put here to do. I was put here to write. And I head home to do that.

It felt more urgent, what with my seventieth birthday ahead. I thought about the boy whose mother towed him up to me in the Minneapolis airport where I was waiting to board a plane to Seattle. I was waiting at the end of the line so my fellow Minnesotans wouldn’t see that I was sitting in first class. The boy’s name was Jared, he was eleven. His mother said, “He loves your poetry. He’s memorized a lot of them.” When she said “poetry,” I thought she meant sonnets, but no—she poked him and Jared said in a bright clear voice:

A young fellow from Pocatello

Said, “Why is my urine bright yellow?

Was it something I ate

Or maybe it’s Kate

Who I dated on Saturday—hello!”

And he knew:

A young Baptist lady of Aspen

Fell down groanin’ and gaspin’.

She thought she’d been bit

By a snake on her tit

But it was her Sunday School class pin.

And:

The young fellow answered an ad

And was hired and cried, “I’m so glad

To be given this chance

I could pee in my pants”

And we looked and saw that he had.

An alarming moment. Suddenly, waiting to board a plane, you’ve been informed what your legacy will be. You were hoping for better, but the Jared generation will decide. You will have no say in the matter. You hoped to be a journalist and actually you are a urinologist.

My aunts and uncles were gone, my friends were dying. Tony Judge and I went to see Studs Terkel in Chicago in 2008 as he was dying, and he wasn’t eager for visitors but he was defenseless, 96, sunk in a deep chair, his walker nearby, a bottle of J&B within reach, smoking a cigar and nibbling blueberries, newspapers strewn on the floor. Born 1912, shortly after the Titanic sank. Studs used to say, “The Titanic went down and I came up.” But now he said, “Ninety-six is enough. I’ve had my share. I’d like to check out. Let me tell you, kid, ninety-six is no picnic.”

I studied Studs because I’m thinking about hitting 96 myself and not stop along the way. It appeared that cigars and Scotch might be critical to success. His legs were gone, his bowels didn’t work right, his old friends were in the ground, but he was still lively and he did most of the talking because he was nearly deaf. He recalled the days of con men like Kid Pharaoh and Titanic Thompson who in 1928 lifted a half-million bucks off the gambler Arnold Rothstein in a rigged card game at the Park Central Hotel, back when Capone and Bugs Moran ran the town and if you handed a cop a ten he wouldn’t bother you. Back when Smith & Wesson was standard apparel. A poke in the snoot was the modus operandi. The old man loved to say “modus operandi.” “Titanic Thompson was the leading card mechanic of his day,” the old man said. “He knew how to shuffle a deck and change the weave.” Rothstein was the guy who put the “organized” in organized crime and fixed the 1919 World Series. He was no novice. He realized he’d been snookered and refused to pay up, which was not sporting of him, so they shot him, and on his death bed he refused to rat on the killer. He told the cops, “My Mudder did it.” Meeting the old man, I was shaking the hand that shook hands with the man who knew the man who beat Arnold Rothstein at cards. There is grandeur to that.

Studs was dying and he was worried about his hero Barack Obama. The election was approaching. Was America capable of electing a Black president? He doubted it. I told him Obama was a cinch, but Studs was wary of cinches. He got his education in the lobby of his mother’s hotel where he listened to the unemployed railroad men and alcoholic typesetters and old Wobblies argue about capitalism after the Depression crashed down. He got a law degree, became a radio actor, and in 1948 went into TV, then in its infancy. He was the host of Studs’ Place on NBC and was headed for New York and maybe stardom when an American Legion guy named Ed Clamage accused him of being a commie. He’d signed petitions against lynching, poll taxes, Jim Crow, and Studs was asked to sign a loyalty oath and on principle he declined and New York canceled him, and so, in his mid-thirties he was saved from premature success and found his long happy career as a populist historian (Working, The Good War, Hard Times) and radio talker on WFMT. As with me, failure had served to close the door to rooms he shouldn’t have gone in anyway. Now death was closing in, he was puffing on his Roi-Tan, worrying about the election. But he declined sympathy. He had canned beef and biscuits in the cupboard and some bottles of 1938 Margaux plus a case of Scotch and a hundred-year-old cognac. He totters to the door and bids farewell to the search party and gives his benediction:

Every night when the sun goes down

I say a blessing on this town:

“Whether we last the night or no,

Life has always been touch and go.

So stick with your modus operandi.

Ingenuity! Art! Good luck. Goodbye.”

We did the Rhubarb Tour in August 2008, seventeen shows in twenty days. Studs wanted to live long enough to see Obama win, but he didn’t want to see him defeated. He died on Halloween, five days before Election Day. He was born as the Titanic went down and he went out as Obama was coming in. He died hoping, which was a good way to go. Had he lived five more days, Obama’s election would’ve made Studs feel obligated to stick around and postpone the dying, and Obama in the White House would’ve made Studs question his own agnosticism and perhaps come to the Lord and at his age it would’ve been too much, having to learn Scripture and all. God in His mercy allowed him to die in unbelief. His ashes were mixed with those of his wife, Ida, and deposited in Bughouse Square, where the cranks and Wobblies and soapbox preachers held forth back in his youth. Peace to them all.

It was a beautiful Election Night the vast crowd waiting in Grant Park in Chicago, and the young couple walking out on the big stage with the two little girls holding hands alongside. Your heart went out to them, the two young strivers from the South Side who took the high road and somehow knew exactly what to do in every situation. In February, I went to Washington and spoke at the annual luncheon of the US Senate wives and there, sitting at my table, was the wife of the former junior senator from Illinois, Michelle Obama, now the First Lady. I’d been asked to tell stories about Lake Wobegon, and it was hard to make the leap from the Little Town That Time Forgot to the astonishing historic event before our eyes but I tried. I told about Miss LaVona Person standing in the aisle smiling as the fourteen-year-old me climbed up on the stage and said that we each have an angel smiling at us from our past. I recited the unrhyming limerick and they laughed. I remember how gracefully Mrs. Obama endured everyone’s awkwardness, I remember her warmth when she put an arm around me for a picture. She asked me for a limerick, and I wrote her one on a napkin:

The latest First Lady Michelle

Rode down to this town on the El

From the South Side

And is quite qualified

To do good and do it quite well.

A tiny gesture at a large historic moment that demanded “Endymion” or “Helen in Egypt,” but time was short and her security detail was eager to get going.

My brother died that winter, at 71, skating on a lake near his home in Madison, Wisconsin. He stepped onto the ice and slipped and fell backward, hitting the back of his head, and was taken to the hospital, unconscious. He seemed to recover and even walked with assistance down the hall, but there was bleeding on the brain stem and he died a few days later. He was a sailor and an engineer, a problem-solver, not cut out for the suit-and-tie corporate life, and found his way to the Sea Grant research program and had a happy career doing environmental projects on the Great Lakes, much of his time spent aboard boats. He was the captain of the twenty-three-foot Brita Grace, and his son, Douglas, was his first mate. Sailing and family and following Christ were the grandeur in his life and also skating. You stride out onto the ice and leave the motorized world behind, gliding in rhythmic strides into the nineteenth century. He needed grandeur to get free of the pietists and the regimentation and paperwork. He was a happy traveler, to the fjords of Norway and Alaska, Paris, London, Berlin, and that square in Cádiz where we sat under the great white awning stretched like a sail over the plaza. There was a statue of a great man, perhaps a king, in the middle. Drunks had pissed on him and passersby ignored him. Great men don’t notice grandeur, they are too busy being admired. My brother lived for grandeur and found it on large bodies of water, and I lived in search of intimacy. He was close to Dad, was Dad’s successor. He learned carpentry from Dad, absorbed the love of cars and machinery, admired competence. The incompetent stood and cursed the problem and kicked it and caused more problems; the engineer studied the problem, devised a solution and when it failed, made intelligent revisions. I imagine that as Philip fell on the ice, his brain had noted how he’d lost his footing and was planning a correction for the future.

At the funeral, his body lay in a closed coffin with a spray of lilies on top. He didn’t want to be embalmed and thereby leach poisons into the earth or be cremated and pollute the air—he intended to decompose and enrich the earth and rise up through the roots into the foliage of the red oak and maples—and so his body, from which many organs had been harvested for donation, was simply refrigerated and put in a spruce box and not exhibited. There was a great deal of singing. My sister Linda spoke about how Philip loved nautical museums and if you went with him, you’d be done after forty-five minutes and he’d still have two hours to go, so bring a good book. My nephew Douglas spoke about what a good teacher his dad was and how he’d taught his children how to skate and especially how to fall without hurting themselves: Doug inherited Philip’s sense of humor. My mother, 93, sat in the front row, weeping for her first child, her mainstay, taken cruelly from her. A Black minister friend of Philip’s sat down to the piano and played “I’ll Fly Away” and “I’m Going to the Kingdom” in jubilant stride-gospel style, the congregation clapping, and I remembered how blessedly happy Philip had been sailing along the coast of Norway and into the narrow Sognefjord, so narrow the ship had little clearance on either side, and he stood in the bow, looking side to side, exhilarated, as if coming home. We took him out to the cemetery in his plain wooden box, sang a few hymns, and then one of the gravediggers walked up and bent over, revealing his butt crack, and cranked the box down into the earth. It was perfect. Praise and reverence, grief, and low comedy, all at once.

And that summer, old age came knocking on my door. I was at a day spa in Minneapolis, as Peruvian flute music was playing, and the Jamaican masseuse was telling me how good her life had been since she turned it over to the Lord Jesus Christ, and suddenly my mouth was numb, my speech slurred, my brain melting. I hoisted up on my elbows and said I had to go now. I dressed. I paid her. A balloon was expanding inside my head. I careened out the door, listing slightly to port, and eased into my car and drove twelve miles to a hospital in St. Paul, walked into the ER waiting room, stood sixth in line at the admissions desk, and when it was my turn, I said in a clear voice, “I believe I am having a stroke.” An orderly brought out a gurney and helped me aboard and took me to a curtained alcove and said to strip down to my shorts and put on a hospital gown. And a nurse asked, “Do you need help?” No, I am fine, I said. A Minnesota reflex. The gown was light cotton, flowery. I lay on the gurney, on my back, hands clasped over my abdomen. If I died on the spot, I would appear composed. I kept calm. In my mind, I was reciting the counties of Minnesota: Aitkin, Anoka, Becker, Beltrami, Benton, Big Stone, Blue Earth, Brown, Carlton, Carver, Cass, Chippewa, Chisago, and so on, to test brain function.

The nurse announced my numbers—Blood pressure: 139/72. Pulse: 59—as a young Chinese neurologist walked in, shook my hand, and examined me. She tapped me with her little silver hammer and scratched the sole of my foot and told me to watch her index finger as she moved it out there and up here and down there. She said that she listened to my show when she was in medical school. She wrote on a form in her clipboard, “Very pleasant 67 y.o. male, tall, well-developed, well-nourished, flat affect, awake, alert and appropriate.” I’ve always had a flat affect: I’m a Minnesotan, I thought it was the appropriate way to be. Other people aim for excellence, I am comfortable with wakefulness.

She shipped me off to the MRI Space-Time Cyclotron, where they ran me up a rail and into the maw of the beast for fifty minutes of banging and whanging, buzzing and dinging, and claustrophobia on the verge of panic, the nurse’s voice in the speaker by my ear saying, “How are we doing?” I said, “I’m perishing.” She said, “You’re doing great. We’re almost finished.”

It was a simple thromboembolic stroke likely due to atrial fibrillation. I stayed in the hospital for four days. I walked the Stroke Ward, towing my IV tower, passed a thirtyish woman with a pronounced limp, slip-sliding along, gripping a walker, her mother at her side. Heartbreaking to see a young woman so stricken, but the mother had a brisk, let’s-get-it-done air about her, and what else can you do? Take the blow and get up and go. I tried not to peep through open doorways but couldn’t not and did and saw elderly persons lying speechless, crumpled, like lobsters trying to claw their way out of the tank at the restaurant, or slumped in a chair, anguished, unspeaking, and what if rehab can’t restore the eminence you once were and you get shunted into a warehouse like a turtle in a gravel box with a couple leaves of lettuce? I, a rotgut sinner, had escaped serious damage and was still ambulatory, like a veteran of Pickett’s Last Charge who suffered a sprained ankle. The doctor showed me a map of my brain and pointed to a dark spot: “That’s where your stroke hit.” What she called a “silent” part of the brain. Sort of the Wyoming of the brain. And if it had hit the Chicago Loop, a couple millimeters away, I would’ve had significant motor and speech losses. Maybe become a cabbage or an artichoke. She had put me on a powerful blood thinner. I who had disdained chemistry in eleventh grade. (How many chemists had been saved by reading a novel?)

It did occur to me, lying in bed, that had I exercised strenuously every day as a person should do, my heart would’ve been stronger and it would’ve fired the blood clots harder and they’d have flown over Wyoming and landed in Chicago and today I’d be a gimp, a feeb, a crip, a wacko with big X’s for eyeballs. Thanks to my sedentary habits, the bomb landed out on the lonesome prairie, no big deal, so be grateful for what you have. I did not share this thought with Jenny, who was terribly anxious about me. She brought Maia to visit, and she and I sang, “I want to hold your hand,” and she checked my nose for boogers and I told her the one about the two penguins on the ice floe—“You look like you’re wearing a tuxedo.”—“What makes you think I’m not?” An old favorite. She’d heard it dozens of times. It’s one of those rare jokes that improves with repetition until all you need is the first line: These two penguins sat on an ice floe.

A reporter called from the local paper to update my obituary, and she was very nice. “We just want to make sure everything’s accurate,” she said. “You’re on your third marriage—is that correct?” Yes, ma’am. “Three children?” Including my stepdaughter, correct. “Are there any honors or awards we may not be aware of?” None. “How are you feeling, if you don’t mind my asking?” Never better. “Do you plan to resume your show?” I do, yes, indeed. Of course.

I am fond of my brain, the elaborate dreams it stages at night, sometimes a nightmare in which I’m proofreading a manuscript and nothing makes sense. I’m grateful for the ideas it offers on a silver plate in the morning. I once lived in a little house beside a waterfall in Marine on St. Croix and lay in bed listening to the low rumble of the creek falling over the stone ledge and twenty feet down to a pool and racing down the hill to the St. Croix River, and after three minutes fell asleep and awoke at 4 a.m. with a whole morning’s work in my head. I miss that waterfall.

Lying in the stroke ward among the stricken, it seemed like a good idea to think about a funeral and spare Jenny the guesswork, so I scribbled a few notes (Episcopal Low Mass, no eulogies, none—hire a choir— “Abide with Me” and “O Love That Will Not Let Me Go,” and Mozart’s Ave Verum and “The Blind Man Stood in the Road and Cried” ), and thinking about a funeral made me think about sex, of course—what else?—and I remembered making love upstairs in the farmhouse in Freeport, the Valentine’s Night tryst of 1976, the apartment on Jagtvej in Copenhagen, the waist-deep water off Oahu, the hanging bed in the log cabin in Wisconsin, the Ritz in Boston. I remember the lodge at the national park and Jenny and I stepping out on a balcony and there, in the moonlight, the vastness of the Grand Canyon. Memories of sensual delight, the bag of blood thinner attached to the needle in my forearm.

I revisited Anoka, Minnesota, in 1954, the swanky window of Colburn-Hilliard men’s clothiers and the gray wool sportcoat I coveted, Shadick’s soda fountain, the front window of the Anoka Herald where I typed my sports stories, Anoka Dairy across the street. I remembered how it felt to ride a bike no-handed. I remembered Mrs. Moehlenbrock, who gave our fourth-grade class the essay topic “What would you do if you had one day left to live?” We had just read an inspiring story about the rich, full life Helen Keller led despite being blind, deaf, speechless, and rather homely, and Mrs. Moehlenbrock suggested we write something inspiring about appreciating the ordinary things of life, but I wrote that I wanted to fly to Paris. She pointed out that it would take a day just to get to Paris. I thought that maybe I could get a good tailwind and glimpse it for an hour before I died. Maybe the prospect of seeing Paris would be good enough.

A tall dark-haired nurse named Sarah brought me a hypodermic to coach me on self-administered shots of heparin, and without hesitation I plunged it into my belly fat. No man is a coward in the presence of a young woman. I shuffled around in a faded cotton gown like Granma in Grapes of Wrath and peed into a plastic container under the supervision of Sarah, who made sure I didn’t get dizzy and fall and bang my noggin. A social worker asked if I wished to see a counselor. I said, “My wife is the only counselor I need.” “What about a chaplain?” she said. I said, “God forbid.”

Doctors came to consult. An important neurologist arrived, judging by the retinue of disciples in his wake who observed as he tapped me and had me stand on one foot, arms extended, in my little gown, like Clara awaiting the Nutcracker. The disciples observed in silence. I imagined that, out in the hall, he had said, “This is the guy with the finicula of the esplanade, complicated by deviated nobiscus linguini in the odessa.” They looked at me solemnly, folks who had aced all those math and science courses I avoided so that I could read the transcendentalists. And what had Henry Thoreau done for me anyway? “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Thanks a lot. Exactly what I don’t need to hear. Thoreau had to transcend lousy medicine, whereas science was offering me a productive old age. I was grateful and I told them so.

The nurses were cheerful women who strode into my room, noted the urine flow chart, asked the questions, prepped me on upcoming events, took my blood pressure. Women with the caring gene that men don’t get (or don’t dare exhibit). To the male orderly, I was a body, but the nurses knew me as a brother. They drew blood gently with some small talk to ease the little blip of puncture, and I felt our common humanity, a great gift to one struck by a stroke. Injury and illness and death are all so ordinary, they come too soon and we’re all in the same boat and your fine intellect does not prevail against it, but in the way she takes your blood pressure—a simple mechanical procedure, a robot could do it— she conveys by touch and the tone of her voice her recognition of your humanity.

And then she leaves and I do the crossword, pondering 24 Across, “Could turn into the next story” (spiralstaircase), and the phone rang, someone said, “So how are you doing?” and I said, “Doing great. Never felt better.” Which is what you should say, unless your eyeballs have popped out of your head. There was an old airline clerk in Minneapolis who, whenever I asked, “How are you?” he said, “Living the dream.” Me, too. My brain had dark blotches in it, but I could still write a limerick.

An old man suffered a stroke

And, grateful that he didn’t croak,

He flew to Oaxaca

And a yellow mocca-

Sin bit him. He died. That’s no joke.

I wrote a letter to Jim Harrison, who’d gotten his own close-up looks at mortality:

I went to church this a.m. and found myself on the prayer list. It was nice to be there though my faith is rather faint. But the church preaches gratitude and what else can one feel after one’s brain took a shot without too much damage. Back at the hospital I left twenty or thirty people collapsed in wheelchairs and here I am walking to church and singing praise to the Lord and walking home (a little wearily). I feel like the amnesiac who got Alzheimer’s and forgot he didn’t know who he was.

I went back to work and my main guy, Dr. Rodysill, didn’t tell me to find a sunny corner to sit in so I didn’t. The show started up in the fall and I went gadding about as a speaker—graduations, lecture series, college convocations, book club luncheons, sometimes for money, often not. One week: Walnut Creek, CA, Austin, TX, Opelika, AL, Madisonville, KY; landed in Hot Springs, AR, on a Friday, did the broadcast Saturday, on Sunday flew to Greenville, NC, then DC for the Poetry Out Loud finals, then Albuquerque for an orchestra benefit, Milwaukee to do APHC, Boston Pops the next week, a speech at the Harvard Lampoon. No wonder I never got to know my neighbors. When the Lampoon invites you, you say yes, knowing that one day soon you’ll be a nobody like everybody else.

Back in those days, I was in demand as a graduation speaker, and on numerous June afternoons found myself in a procession of the Board of Trustees, the faculty and me, the speaker, the noose around my neck, as the crowd looks eagerly beyond us for the graduates themselves and cameras flash, then a vague invocation is offered, retiring faculty are applauded (gratitude? relief?), and then I, the guest of honor, am given a big booming introduction as if I had brought the serum to a snowbound village by dogsled and en route rescued small children from the path of a speeding locomotive. I rise to tepid applause and realize that 89 percent of the crowd hopes I will speak for three minutes or less; I have 3,000 words in front of me and the crowd only wants 150 of them. So I skip the introductory self-mortification and launch in and after two paragraphs about the importance of rising to challenges, the audience is gone-gonegone. Everyone is focused on a particular graduate, Madison, Hannah, Joshua, Jacob, their shining star, and I am merely a clothing rack. The honor of speaking turns out to be public shame.

I dressed up in a long black gown and gave the baccalaureate address at Princeton, climbing a long flight of stairs to the pulpit high on the chapel wall, so my speech began with labored breathing. The speech was funny, theoretically, but nobody laughed for the first few minutes because my voice was ricocheting around in the magnificence of the Gothic arches—I kept hearing what I’d said five seconds before, a distraction that slowed me down, which made it all worse. I finished the speech in fifteen minutes by cutting out pages four, five, and six, and descended from the mountaintop to grateful applause and went to the reception, where nobody mentioned the speech in specific terms. They said, “Good job,” as you’d say to a child who’d delivered a large bowel movement.

St. Olaf College invited me to come speak at a convocation, assuming I would poke fun at them, but when I stood up in Boe Chapel I put the speech away. The title was “I Regret, You Regret, We Rejoice,” and it was about the power of community and when I saw the chapel was packed to the rafters, the speech suddenly wasn’t good enough, I needed something better so I punted. They were in the midst of midterm exams and needed to feel communal, so I walked down the aisle and sang, “My country ’tis of thee” and the whole room joined in “sweet land of liberty,” and by the time we came to “where my fathers died” we were in spontaneous four-part harmony. No piano, no organ. It was powerful. And then “O beautiful for spacious skies” and “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound” and “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord” and “She was just seventeen if you know what I mean”—some students had to google that one on their phones. We sang “Children of the heavenly Father safely in His bosom gather,” and we got tears in our eyes from the promise that God will not forsake us and also the harmony that promises we will not forsake each other. And then “O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder consider all the worlds Thy hands have made.” The sweet chariot swung low, we worked on the railroad, Old Man River rolled, there was a sweet hour of prayer in the amber waves of grain over the rainbow, and we sang good night to the ladies and the sweet acquaintance that should not be forgot and the Amen chorus. A solid hour of a cappella singing, and off they went to class. I declined the check and headed home feeling uplifted by youthful melodious fervor. Lutherans can break your heart with their singing. It was a genuine service, unlike the crappy speech I’d written. I guess St. Olaf saw it otherwise, though, because they never invited me back.

I was on the road, week after week, thirty-three Prairie Home shows, standing at the middle microphone in the path of powerful talents, The Iowa poet Greg Brown, the king of the bass sax Vince Giordano, the twelve-string guitar master John Koerner, big talents leaping upstream over the rapids. Vince stood in with the band, and the big honk of the bass sax was the engine that drove the bus, the piano steering, and John’s twelve was a one-man threshing machine. The DiGiallonardo Sisters’ three-part jazz vocals were right out of the Forties, an old b&w photograph come to life in full color.

Then Sunday at home and a week on the road, theaters in Buffalo, Kansas City, and Seattle, a Lutheran convention in Omaha, a college in Indiana, two-hour shows with a standing singing intermission, sometimes three hours, which is too long, but they didn’t want to leave so I stayed. I loved the pontoon boat story with its interlocking parts, Aunt Evelyn, the disgusting Bruno the Fishing Dog, the canceled wedding of Debbie Detmer the successful veterinary aromatherapist, Evelyn’s boyfriend Raoul, the visit of the twenty-four agnostic Danish Lutheran pastors, and Kyle’s attempt to fly his parasail over the lake and drop Evelyn’s ashes in—the parts all fit like a fine clockwork, and each could be extended if the audience wished—and it was all told in a rush and ended with Bruno sticking his nose up Kyle’s butt and the line, “But as we say in Lake Wobegon, it could’ve been worse,” whereupon the audience fell apart. A person never wearies of telling a story that good. I certainly didn’t. I was living in a tunnel, waking up some mornings not sure what city I was in. Arise and step into the bathroom, but actually it’s the hotel hallway, and the door clicks shut. It’s 3 a.m. The hall is empty, just me in my underwear. I pick up a house phone and a pleasant security man comes along to unlock my door. He doesn’t ask for identification, only my last name. He wishes me a good night. It’s Dallas, dummy. I flew to Austin to speak at something and the columnist Molly Ivins picked me up at the airport in her pickup truck, and we stopped at a café for chili and everybody there knew her and I basked in virtue by association.

I taught a course at the U, “The Composition of Comedy,” which was mostly about economy. A man walked into the bar with a handful of dog turds and said, “Look what I almost stepped in.”—add one word to it, and you smother the joke. I had a hundred students, and the best of them got to stand up for five minutes and make the class laugh. Men and women who’d never done this before stood up and killed. I never let anyone stand up and die, I worked with them until they were good and homicidal. Comedy sets out to gain the crowd’s attention and confidence in the first half-minute, to win over the sleepy and cynical, make it worthwhile for them and surprise them into laughter, a success shared by speaker and hearer equally. Most of what’s said in this world goes unheard and is a waste of time. Comedy is the beautiful exception.

And in the midst of teaching it I flew to Las Vegas to speak at a breakfast at the tire dealers’ convention, which I did as a favor to a cousin. Seven a.m. in Hangoverland and they want joke jokes, ripsnorters, not humorous recollections of small-town life, and after five minutes of me, they’d heard enough. I did six more minutes, got a faint trickle of laughter, cried, “You’ve been great!” and ran out through the kitchen, tore up the check, and went to the airport. It was the Worst Show of My Life and I was glad to get it out of the way and not have to wait for it anymore. It was done.

I arose at 5 a.m., worked hard, gave up reading novels and going to movies. I wrote on yellow legal pads, on planes, in hotel rooms. I got no exercise except for walking rapidly through airports, and my daily water intake was less than that of a garter snake. I was the lone writer of the show, though the credits listed Warren Peace, Xavier Onassis, Ben Dover, Rhoda Dendron, Ida Dunmore, Hugh Mungus, Barbara Seville, and sometimes John Calvin. I sat at the laptop on the long desk looking up at the big photograph of Grandma’s schoolhouse where Grandpa had followed her around, cleaning blackboards, and finally kissing her, and it was clear to me: nature cares not about our golden years, nature wants turnover, so keep going while you can, your time won’t last long. I wrote quiet weeks in Lake Wobegon, and I sent the cowboys in search of Lefty’s love Evelyn Beebalo, and every week there was A dark night in a city that knows how to keep its secrets but one man is still trying to find the answers to life’s persistent questions. Me. Guy Noir. Every episode began with a line about the weather. It was a gorgeous September, bright blue skies, warm sun—the weather that makes a man want to buy an easel and a beret and paint landscapes that will sell for $12 million after you’re dead for fifty years.

Guy told his girlfriend, Sugar, “Of course I love you. If I didn’t love you, why would I have been dating you for the past thirteen years? It ain’t for your fabulous gams, sweetheart.” He fought off the criminal element and was drawn to interesting women. She was tall, her hair was like melted caramel. Her jeans were so tight you could read the embroidery on her underwear. It said, Tuesday. And the T-shirt with a picture of Mount Rushmore on the front. Take it from me, Lincoln and Jefferson never looked so good.

I wrote the sound-effects scripts with the singing caribou and rancid bagpipes and whooping cranes and helicopters dropping chimpanzees on parachutes. I wrote the story about the anonymous economist from Menomonie, Wisconsin, who drove a semi-load of salami to Miami for Naomi who danced Salome in a steamy pajama drama called “Mamarama” and a minute later Guy Noir was scoping out a Girl Scout cookie-scalping scam run by scantily clad schoolteachers from Schenectady. The childish concatenation of alliteration. It amuses people.

I worked all the time because I was running away from death. It had knocked on my back door and I went out the front. Comedy is God’s work. You see it in Ecclesiastes. The thing that has been is the thing that shall be; and the thing that is done is that which shall be done: there is nothing new under the sun. That’s the essence of comedy. The Resurrection was a joke. The disciples came to the tomb and saw the tomb was empty. Jesus walks up and says, “Who you looking for?” You do God’s work and He will grant you a little extra time. Studs was gone, my brother, Chet Atkins, who said, “Now that I am on the back nine, my passion for the guitar is slowly dying and it makes me sad. I never thought my love for the guitar would fade. There are a lot of reasons: as we get older the high frequencies go, music doesn’t sound so good. And for some damn reason after hearing so many great players, I lose the competitive desire.” The old Icelander Bill Holm died, collapsed in the Sioux Falls airport, having just visited Jim Harrison, who died a year later. My friend Carol Bly was gone, who loved a good contentious conversation, and I was brought up to defer to a woman and didn’t stand up to her and provide the adversary she wanted. My classmate Margaret Keenan, who became a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. She didn’t claim to heal people but to lead them toward some sort of understanding. I never heard her speak with contempt or derision about anyone, not even Death, whom she saw coming a long way off and met with serenity. She contracted a cancer that stumped the specialists and finally accepted that the end was near. She called me one last time, to say that she’d been to a Hopi healing ceremony and didn’t understand one bit of it but was moved and felt wonder, a highly educated woman transformed by religious mystery. She now felt at peace and asked me to sing a song for her on the show, one her father had loved, so I did, a duet with Sarah Jarosz: When all is sad and dark within, and hope seems only born to die, He steals within the shadows dim and wipes the tear from every eye. My cousin Olive Darby died, clear of mind at 104, the last living person to have known my grandfather James, and for years I meant to go visit her in Iowa and never did.

Tom Keith died in October 2011. He was 64. He had worked the show a week before, spent a quiet week at home, felt ill on a Sunday, collapsed in the evening, was put in an ambulance, regained consciousness briefly, and died of a pulmonary embolism. His friends put on a show at the Fitz in his memory with bagpipers and a magician, tango dancers, jokes, a video of Tom in a kilt singing “A Wee Deoch an Doris,” and twice I came out on stage with paper in hand as if to give a eulogy and Vern Sutton came out of the wings and pied me. Banana cream pie. He did it well, you don’t throw the pie, you push it. People loved it, both times. It was a eulogy I was incapable of delivering due to the fact that I owed so much to someone I barely knew. I met him in 1972 at KSJN in St. Paul, where he was a studio engineer assigned to my morning show. I wanted to be my own engineer, so I made him a sportscaster and a laconic sidekick and then found out he was happy to do sound effects, animals, engines, explosions, gunshots, dramatic stuff, and that was what led me down the path of radio comedy. Otherwise I would’ve jumped ship, gotten a job in an MFA program teaching decorative writing, and lived a quiet bungalow life going to movies and playing golf in the low 90s. My mentor was this polite ex-Marine and former right fielder who had a secret ambition to personify chickens and follow in the footsteps of his parents Jim and Betty, who played Ma and Pa Wiggins on KSTP’s Sunset Valley Barn Dance. The man changed my life, sent me down the comedy path, was a loyal colleague, did what needed to be done, stood on stage and did sound effects, and we never really knew each other.