REGRETS

WORKED LIKE A PLOW HORSE for about fifteen years, doing two radio shows, hauling them up one row and turning at the ditch and coming back the other way, and all that time not much happened to me that wasn’t part of work, which made me sad one night in September when my wife and I left Copenhagen for New York. Five minutes after take-off, we felt a whump, the plane lurched, and a nearby steward turned pale green and disappeared into the galley. The plane was still climbing. I touched my wife’s arm, she took my hand, and two or three thoughtful minutes passed, and then she took out a piece of paper and began writing a letter to her eldest son. The pilot came on the horn and said, in a dry Swedish voice, that we had experienced an explosion in the No. 3 engine, the fire was out now, and we would return to Copenhagen as soon as we dumped our fuel. “Let me assure you that everything is normal for a situation of this type,” he said.

We cruised around spraying jet fuel into the night sky over the Baltic Ocean, and I remembered those years in the broadcast trade and thought that, if our wheels touched ground again and we walked out into the wet salt air of Denmark, I would devote more time to ambling around and having fun. In Denmark, by national law, everyone gets five weeks of paid vacation per year, even if you’re unemployed. Five weeks times fifteen years is seventy-five weeks of vacation, of which I had used about twenty, wasting an entire year. I regretted that lost year very deeply. My life had been entirely too sober and determined. We had left three teen-agers back home in Minnesota, all leading full rich lives, and breakfast with them was a high point of the day, from which I descended into the dark radio mine, carrying my canary in a tin cage, who usually died before 2:00 in the afternoon. I regretted not lingering longer over breakfast.

A DC-10 carries a major load of fuel and there was plenty of time to regret a number of things.

I regretted the narcissism that goes with being a writer. We assume that the world is anxious to hear what we think, a useful assumption if you’re going to spend your sunny mornings at a typewriter, but do we have to be this self-centered?

I regretted that “A Prairie Home Companion” was lured into television. Radio was so sensual and delicious and it injured the show and insulted the audience to allow cameras to tromp around in it. Once, during a rehearsal, a cameraman told Kate MacKenzie, “Move the microphone down, it’s obscuring your face,” and she said, sweetly, “It’s the camera that obscures. The microphone reveals.” Television has no patience and little curiosity, and so the picture jumps constantly. A guitarist can sit and pick the most stunning simple version of “Wild-wood Flower” and achieve a moment of transcendent grace but television is deaf, it can’t sit still, it circles the guitarist, shoots his hands, his face, jumps in back of him, crouches, circles, until the viewer is completely separated from the performance. You don’t need this if you want Leo Kottke, whose appeal is through his music. What you want television for is a celebrity guitarist who is more interesting for who he is than for what he sounds like. For example, if a Doberman pinscher played “Go Tell Aunt Rhody” on the guitar, you wouldn’t be satisfied to listen to him on the radio and hear the announcer say, “That was Rex playing. Good job, Rex.” You’d want to see it for yourself.

I regretted that I hadn’t done more. Not good works, necessarily: I did my part for the homeless, the alkies, public radio, various losing liberals, an open school, the Save the Spiders Foundation, the Home for the Moody, the lower-spine association, the Suspicion Center, some others. I regretted never having played the accordion, seen New Mexico or Maine, learned to dance the fox-trot, met Victor Borge, read Moby Dick or Don Quixote, eaten supper in the Oak Room at the Algonquin, fished Rainy Lake, known a little physics, talked to my dad about his father.

I regretted some bad shows I did.

I regretted having hurt some people.

We landed smoothly and deplaned and were met by a dozen reporters from the Copenhagen dailies and Danish radio and TV, who played the story big the next day although the captain insisted that the emergency was simple and the ship was never in danger. The flight was rescheduled for the next afternoon. All the hotels in Copenhagen were full, so the airline would take us to Malmö, Sweden, and put us up there for the night. My wife and I decided to strike out on our own, and wound up at a friend’s apartment in Holte, where we slept on the floor. I woke up six or seven times in the night, and the next day’s flight was scrubbed for some other reason, and we spent a night in a cheap loud hotel downtown, and the following evening packed into the economy section with hundreds of other bitter travelers. When we landed at Kennedy, I had hardly a regret left. Just wanted to get on with life in America and that’s what I’ve done.