Garrison Keillor's Blog

I was brought up to make myself useful and for a few years I did that with an early morning radio show, waking people up with jazzy jug band tunes and limericks and Ole and Lena jokes and now, at 83, I’ve become an advance scout, assuring the young that old age has many benefits — there’s no need to be cool anymore, in fact it’s well beyond reach, I don’t know who is famous anymore or why, so I just enjoy life day by day and spend as much time as possible with people who make me happy.

Personal identity becomes a closed book. You know that you know who you are. So you just work with it and don’t think about morphing into a genius or a giant insect or a prophet of doom.

Gender fluidity doesn’t affect people my age. Hydration is important and sometimes urination may be a problem, but I’m a guy. I know this. I’m not a football fan, never was devoted to power tools, never owned a gun, never got in a drunken argument with my best friend and killed him. Eugene Onegin did but he was Russian. I’m Minnesotan. We don’t do that type of thing. I belch and pass gas, I snore, I pick my teeth with a thumbnail, and I can bellow and it’s not an ironic bellow, it’s a heartfelt Beowulf bellow. I don’t do profanity well due to my evangelical upbringing and the big famous forceful obscenity I never use because it sounded fraudulent, effete, effeminate, the four times I tried to use it. But I enjoy cheeseburgers and the blues and I am moved when I stand in a crowd and we sing “My country ’tis of thee” or “It Is Well With My Soul.”

I believe my guyness is recognized by other guys as we stand around together not talking about our feelings and drinking fluids of our choice, which used to be beer or bourbon but one day I noticed other guys drinking sparkling water and I made no comment lest it lead to the subject of masculinity, which is behind a closed door with yellow stripes marked “Hazardous.” But I pondered this remarkable fact and one day a miserable hangover led me to put away the booze and the light dawned: my brain felt youthful and agile and I got off the sauce.

Women have no equivalent for “guy” — “girl” got xed out as an insult, and “babe” and “broad” and “dame” and “gal” don’t pass muster. I’m sorry but women are locked into womanhood unless they prefer to be a tramp or a dumb blonde: there’s not much middle ground. The Prominent Woman syndrome requires queenliness and that’s why Hillary and Kamala lost, they were too pure and high-minded, and that’s why I think a woman should run for president in 2028 who is a chain-smoker and can use bad language freely. It’ll make her more human.

My mother was in favor of feminism for her daughters but she enjoyed letting men be solemn and self-important while she loved her sisters and neighbor ladies and I remember them laughing a lot when men weren’t around whereas my uncles hardly ever laughed, being evangelical and responsible for upholding the Eternal Verities every waking moment. They were men. Guys are not under that obligation.

These are wild times. Journalism has come to accept that men use public office to enrich themselves hugely, same as Saudi princes do. Grandiosity is accepted in D.C. and the use of federal agencies as a personal fiefdom. And that’s why guys like me like to skip reading the news and simply live our guy lives, enjoy our friends and family, delve into the vast riches of American poetry and pop song, hike around great architecture. As I write this, I’m in Colorado, in high ranch country, walking down some classic Main Streets, striking up conversations with amiable strangers. What a great country. The MAGGOT people have no sense of history. They ought to set aside their conspiracies and read up on World War II and the technological miracles of the 20th century.

I am out for a good time and it’s up to people half my age to get the government back on track. I’m in the town of Montrose now and I love the friendliness of people. The waitress in Ray’s Café. I told her the joke about the old man who sat down in the café next to the beautiful woman and said, “Do I come in here often?” and she laughed.

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Old age is the age of gratitude, when I come to appreciate the beautiful details in life such as Lenny our doorman in New York who says, “Taxi?” as I come across the lobby pushing a suitcase and when I say, “Please,” he hustles out into the street and lets fly with a classic two-finger whistle like the shriek of a predator and a taxi makes a swift U-turn and pulls up and Lenny grabs the bag and throws it in the trunk.

It’s a moment you see in classic New York movies but not much in New York except for Lenny who is from Brazil. Other doormen, I think, are history majors who dropped out of Columbia and they just raise an arm to hail a cab which I can do perfectly well myself. It’s the shriek that gives a sense of New York urgency. We had to go to Brazil to find the right man.

“They’re talking about you up and down the West Side,” I tell him. He says, “I can wait.”

I am off to LaGuardia to go on tour for ten days with my solo stand-up show telling stories and not a single word about the Emperor and His Court of Cronies.

I am not a civics instructor, people. You want to know about him, read the Times. My parents, John and Grace, fell in love in 1932, a farm boy and a city girl, and she loved FDR and Eleanor and he did not and it wasn’t a problem. I want to walk out on stage and do ninety minutes, maybe more, during which the Emperor will never be mentioned nor hinted at. The closest I come is when I recite the Gettysburg Address, which we memorized in Mrs. Moehlenbrock’s fourth-grade class. Abraham Lincoln was the Emperor’s opposite, articulate, humble, principled, devoted to public service, devoted to a great cause and not out to advance himself and his pals.

Poor Edward Everett, the former president of Harvard, the main speaker at the dedication. He spoke for two hours and nobody remembered a word he said except “the” and “us” and maybe “behoove,” and Lincoln spoke for two minutes and the grace and beauty of the words endure to this day. Let it be a lesson to us all. Less can be more. The saving grace of the laptop computer is the Delete key.

I want my show to be remembered by the audience so I tell stories. I grew up with storytellers. The relatives I love to talk to are the ones who like to talk about Grandma Keillor and the aunts and uncles and not analytically but in stories. Like the time Dad was driving Grandma to Jo’s and the road was icy and the car spun around two or three times and came to a stop and Grandma said, “John, are we still heading north?”

Or Grandma and her twin sister Dell who learned Morse code as kids so they could give each other answers in school while taking tests.

Dad’s sister Ruth and his uncle Lew Powell visited us on Saturday nights and they reminisced while we passed around a plate of peanut brittle and sugar wafers. Ruth’s husband, Ray, and Lew’s wife, Ada, sat quietly, Ray stepping out for a smoke now and then, we kids silent, as the two storytellers ranged across family history from the Twenties and Thirties all the way back to the 18th century and the voyage of Thomas Keillor from Yorkshire, a hard trip that surely contributed to his death two years later, but his son James survived and thrived and we intermingled with the Crandalls, including Prudence who committed racial integration before Connecticut was ready for it and was banished to Kansas. A woman we’re proud to be connected to, and so was Katherine Hepburn, not that I’m claiming connection to her, I’m not, but it’s okay with me if you’re impressed anyway.

I lay by Uncle Lew’s two-tone brogans and kept very very still. I did not want the grown-ups to be aware of me and think about bedtime, didn’t want this evening to come to an end. I loved the stories, loved those two voices, Ruth’s more melodic, Lew’s with various throat clearings and clickings, nobody interrupting, no irrelevant footnotes or exegesis.

Theory can be interesting but stories are real. America is not an authoritarian culture and those who want to make it so will become a very memorable story. In my lifetime, please, dear Lord.

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I don’t like to read about new medical discoveries for fear I may learn the wrong things, such as the news that childhood virus may be a factor in old-age dementia, which strikes me as brutally unfair, my having grown up one of six kids who passed viruses around like we shared beds and towels and hardly ever covered our mouths when we coughed. Mother said, “You’re going to get sick anyway, might as well hurry up and get it over with.” Little did she know it would lead to becoming a moron and nincompoop at the age of 83.

Not saying I am one, understand, only that I’m running a risk I didn’t know was there. I am still pursuing my goal of becoming the Country’s Oldest Successful Stand-Up Comic.

“Which country, pray tell?” you ask. That remains to be seen. My grandfather James was Canadian, so I have freedom of choice. Canada would give me the freedom to be provincial.

I caught a bug two weeks ago that produced no fever, no cough, no aches and chills, but it laid me low, I slept all night and half the day, was logy and dull, forgetful, had no appetite, so that it made my true love anxious. She was playing viola in a Mozart opera out West, enjoying herself, amusing her relatives, looking at great art, attending lectures, and when she phoned me to report on her hithering and spiritual furthering, I sensed that I didn’t cause her pulse the usual excitation. She loved me faithfully but not wantonly and with abandon.

“What is the cause of this heavy torpor?” I asked myself. “Could it be the fact that I am 83? Heaven forfend. ’Tis but a late bloom of youth. Could it be that I’ve abandoned any semblance of exercise and probably couldn’t do ten pushups in a row if a dagger were held to my throat? Prithee, unhand that thought!”

No, it is the gathering dark of autumn, the baring of the trees, the onset of winter, traces of snow already, the season of regrets for all I failed to accomplish in spring and summer. And regret that I did a benefit show in October.

I went to an Old Folks’ Home and did my stand-up act. It was a home for elderly musicians, The Dotted Rest, in the old Victor warehouse where phonographs were kept, the Victor turntables that put thousands of musicians on the dole, and now poor old broken-down pianists and songwriters sleep in rows of cots with flypaper hanging down from the ceiling, their cruel keepers herding them off to their pitiful repasts.

“Please keep your show to forty-five minutes or less and please do not ask them to sing along, it will break your heart,” I was told.

It was sad to see them, former ballet stars pushing walkers, great guitar-pickers who published instruction manuals and now their fingers were too torn up to hold a fork and spoon, singer-songwriters who once were household names and now nobody came to visit them — their children had gone to Yale and Harvard on the royalties, their grandchildren flew to Paris on a whim, but here were the neglected stars of yesterday wandering confused and forgotten in second-hand clothing and squalor, subsisting on freeze-dried hotdish and listening to themselves on tape cassettes of A Prairie Home Companion, the once-popular radio variety show. Chet and Butch and Bill, Sean and Don and Phil, once young people worshipped them and now the young are old themselves but they are not in old folks’ homes, no, they are in “senior living facilities,” and what is the difference twixt the two? A corporate executive’s salary, that’s what. When you subsist on the pittance from the A.F. of M. you get stuck in a cell with a stool at the window. Your only therapy is if you can’t pee, then they give you a diaper. And if you get hyper, pop in a pill. What a thrill.

Hear me now, youngsters. Save the piles of money you gain from AI, hoard the riches you harvest through robotics and the replacement of peasants by circuitry. Put your offspring on meager allowances and let them know: that much and no more and don’t ask.

Then gather your ill-gotten gains and join me at Paradise Point. The rooms are sunny, the food is good enough, and the staff is worshipful. When was the last time you felt truly adored? Tell the truth now. How long since your ring has been kissed?

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Watching Zohran Mamdani campaigning before Election Day, smiling, full front teeth visible continuously with only a momentary closure of lips for long periods of time, the friendly expression looking genuine while walking through crowds shaking one hand after another, turning up the charm, offsetting the word “Socialist” around his neck, maintaining his nonstop grin, a physical feat as amazing as the Dodger outfielder who leaped against the wall and snagged the Blue Jay triple and broke the hearts of millions of Canadians. As amazing as when my friend Bob Douglas would set down the mandolin and pick up a pair of spoons and play them against the outstretched fingers of his left hand, playing snazzy ragtime percussion, like your church choir dropping their gowns and becoming the Rockettes.

The wonders of this world never cease to amaze. I took the 8th Avenue subway to midtown Manhattan a couple weeks ago in the heaviest downpour in memory — the train stopped at Columbus Circle, the track flooded ahead, so I climbed up to catch a cab and waded in a river where Columbus’s statue stands and got drenched in the typhoon. Even in the mass metropolis, Nature exercising command when it chose, office workers ducking down into the subway, soaking wet.

The world keeps moving on. I board a plane to Minneapolis and the preflight announcement that tampering with the smoke detectors in the lavatory is illegal recalls the long-ago era of smokers who might’ve tampered but they’re long gone, dead, and cigarette smokers today are lonely outlaws lurking in back alleys. I attended college in smoke-filled classrooms, it felt sophisticated, people in French movies smoked, but eventually the light dawned. Now the preflight warning is like a sign forbidding the trapping of beavers or polar bears.

We live in fascinating times. History is being made daily. The president, asked on “Meet the Press” if it’s his duty to uphold the Constitution, says, “I don’t know.” Other presidents wouldn’t have been stumped by the question. I imagine that a gentleman walked the Titanic’s deck that cold night as the ship, seeing the field of icebergs, cut its engines and drifted, and he thought, “Someday there will be great books written explaining how this came to be and I feel I have a right to know but I won’t live to read them.”

My Crandall ancestors in the Colonies stayed loyal to George III and found the Revolution revolting so when Jefferson and Madison and their Virginian pals got the best of Cornwallis, my people escaped north and my wife’s ancestors, the Griswolds and Spencers, got the silverware and the livestock. In Nova Scotia, a Crandall married a Keillor who’d just arrived from Yorkshire and from that line I am sprung. My grandpa James came down from Canada to help his sister, whose husband died of TB, and James, a skilled carpenter, took over a miserable farm and got stuck in the life of an impoverished farmer with eight children. Two became well-to-do, four middle-class, two remained struggling.

I grew up in the country, a hardscrabble life, a quiet kid with glasses, a misfit, and I recall vividly the fly ball that flew toward me in right field that I dashed in for, glove raised, only to have the ball bounce off my head, to the shrieks and scorn of my teammates. It was painful. I skipped recess and gave up ball and sat in the library instead. This is how you become an author, by the traumatic road of ridicule. I seized the illusion of giftedness, and set out to be an author while hosting a radio show and made a name for myself by the age of 32.

I scrambled through a series of rocky romances and found true love at 50 and hung on for dear life and got snookered in old age but survived somehow and stayed productive and happy, stood upright, maintained a comic balance and kept busy doing solo dates, stepping out onstage and singing, “Here I am, O Lord, and here is my prayer: Please be there. Don’t want to ask too much, miracles and such. Just whisper in the air: please be there.” And I swear, He is there. And so is she. It’s a remarkable life, to be truly loved in old age. And to think that when I was a teenager, my school bus went right by her house but I had to go all the way to New York to find her. And in ten days it’ll be thirty years. Happy anniversary, Jenny.

Garrison Keillor © 11.10.25

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Poor Canada, losing the Series the way they did, two straight losses in front of 40,000 rabid fans — and who knew Canadians could be rabid? Canadians, for heaven’s sake, but there they were, putting their Canadianness aside and screaming, praying, demanding justice be done, the Blue Jays ahead three games to two, all they needed was One Win, but no.

Before our eyes, one rally after another was snuffed out and then that tremendous triple in Game 7 and the impossible leap of the Dodger center fielder, his glove stabbing high in the air even while colliding with a teammate to snatch the ball and then the DP in the 12th and thirty Dodgers jumped up and down hugging each other while the 40,000 sat stunned in silence at the cruelty of it — the crappiest Prez in U.S. history had slapped a tariff on Canada out of pure spite at a TV commercial, God in Heaven owed the Series to the North, but no. And I sat stunned at midnight in New York, realizing that baseball is not about justice. That’s why it’s called a Game. And I guess life is a game too.

I had a restless sleep and woke Sunday and went to church. Sunny skies with a chill in the air, perfect weather for clear thinking, and the church was full for All Saints’ Day, and there in the pew ahead of me, a family dressed in white, with a tiny girl, Xaviera, in her white bonnet, to be baptized.

She was in her grandma’s arms, her head on her grandma’s shoulder, looking at me with clear eyes that said, You know what the right thing is, so go and do it. A toddler put here on Earth to change the world, and suddenly the Series was gone. The family gathered around the font and a crowd of children came to watch, a festive moment, Mother Julie holding the little girl led us in the recitation of the faith and the prayers for the child, that she be filled with the Spirit.

And when we promised to renounce the evil powers of the world that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God, I believe that we all knew to whom this referred. A gaggle of powerful men and pretty women is seeking to impose an alien culture on America, a cruel humorless and arrogant blowhard culture that is a perversion of our history. And we sang “I Am the Bread of Life” and were blessed and the postlude poured down on us like spring rain, Bach’s magnificent D minor Toccata and Fugue, and out into the world we went.

I hiked down to 84th Street to cast my ballot early and stood in line for forty minutes, New Yorkers turning out in droves to vote for a young man for mayor they know little about except that the Current Occupant detests him and in this city, that’s a great endorsement. I marked my ballot, slipped it in the slot of the reading machine. What is a Democratic Socialist? Who knows? But let’s find out. What Mr. Mamdani talked about was doing right by the young, the new arrivals, people living on the edge, of whom there seem to be more than ever. More people on food stamps, more living week to week, fearful of AI wiping out entry-level jobs.

It was bachelor week for me, my love was back in St. Paul playing Mozart, and I keenly felt her absence. She is the heart and soul of this marriage. I’m an old plowhorse leaning into the harness pulling the mower, cutting and baling the hay. It’s what I know how to do. I’ve been doing it steadily my entire adult life. I don’t know what else to be, so I whinny and eat my oats and keep mowing whereas she is curious and delights in hiking, looking at great art, attending the theater, opera, music hall.

And now the weekend of wonders makes me wonder if I should loosen the traces and venture out of the hayfield. Fate, like the Dodger outfielder, is prepared to leap and snag our long shot and turn it into a big zero. The evil powers of this world are at work and the eyes of Xaviera are upon me. I walked out of church with Bach reverberant in my head and stood in the long long line of hopeful voters and I believed, as God said after creating Adam, “We can do better than this.”

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I spent last week in St. Paul, seven days, five of them gorgeous and sunny with bright fall colors preceded by two wretched cold rainy days, serving as contrast, just as Muzak makes you appreciate Mozart, and it put me into a mood of wild unreasonable optimism, the very thing our country was founded on, if you ask me. Conceived in hope and dedicated to the proposition that tomorrow may bring something truly astonishing.

The Midwest I grew up in didn’t encourage wild hopes. “Ikke tro at du er noen,” said the Norwegians and you could tell from the tone of voice what it meant: don’t think you’re somebody, mister. Don’t get your hopes up. Look out you don’t trip on your shoelaces.

So if people compliment me, I fend it off. Change the subject. Bad luck.

But my people didn’t encourage whining or whimpering, griping or grousing either. You didn’t talk about how happy you were, lest it be taken as bragging. You needed to maintain a balance. “It could be worse” was the rule. Grown-ups might recall the Great Depression when people went hungry and families moved in with relatives. They said, “Plenty of people would feel lucky to have what you have.” This still holds true. The only real complaints I heard all week were about hearing-aid malfunction (due to earwax buildup, it turns out) and the tendency of young people, when you say, “Thank you,” to reply, “No problem” rather than “You’re welcome.”

Growing up, I absorbed ideas of propriety from my parents. My father grew up on a farm and was a man of dignity. He never boasted and he never belittled others. My parents raised six kids on a slim income and never complained about it. They loved each other. I recall other women making fun of their husbands but she never did. He was gentle, not judgmental, and sought to be helpful to friends and family.

They were devout Christians who contemplated eternity but ignored government and politics. Family and the fellowship of other believers was their world.

My generation, the one that came of age in the Sixties, latched into some great causes — civil rights, anti-war, gay rights, Women’s Movement, Earth Day — and we became helplessly addicted to righteousness, and as the causes became widely accepted and written into law we founded new and more specialized causes such as disabled anti-paternalistic Chicano feminists or non-gender Native American nonagenarians, and inevitably Middle America got weary of the dissent and disputatious demonstrations denouncing injustice and inequality and all of the bumps on the highway of life and they found a real-estate tycoon running for office and they elected him to the White House for one reason, the fact that he drove the rest of us nuts, and now the single lasting political accomplishment of my generation is this 79-year-old troll who gave a speech to the troops aboard the aircraft carrier George Washington in Japan about America being the most respected country in the world, the hottest country in the world, which can go in and blast the hell out of other countries because we got a great Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, incredible guy, doing a fabulous job, and now there’s no Navy even close to ours, not even close, and no military like ours, not even close, the most powerful military in the history of the world because nobody’s got weapons like ours — the best ships, the best airplanes, the best submarines — the best people, good-looking people, and that’s why we had to win the election big, too big to rig, and we won on November 5th and we went from being a country that wasn’t respected to the greatest economy in the history of our country.

What was I talking about?

Minnesota. Greatest state in the Union, no other is even close. Not even close. Now that I’ve moved to New York I’m free to say so. Incredibly modest people. Fabulously modest. Greatest winters. Most beautiful autumns. The Mississippi River comes out of Minnesota. Maybe you weren’t aware of that. Lake Superior is the greatest Great Lake of them all. Iowa is an eyesore, Wisconsin is a waste of time, the Dakotas are decadent and disgusting. Illinois is an annoyance. Back when Republicans were running things, we were on the verge of collapse, but now that liberals are in charge, we can beat the hell out of every other state. If you don’t think so, nuts to you. I got nothing more to say to you. Beat it.

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The jewel heist at the Louvre proves what I’ve long felt, that going to an art museum induces stupor and you don’t notice what’s right in front of you clearer than day. Two men going to work on a Sunday in Paris, cutting a hole in a glass case, escaping out a second-story window on a hoist, as museumgoers strolled by — I’ve felt this same stupor looking at Degas. Two masked men in tutus could’ve tippy-toed past carrying a guard in handcuffs and I wouldn’t have noticed. Apparently, looking at jewels produces an even greater stupor. The burglars could’ve taken their time and made off with a wheelbarrow of crowns and gone out the front door.

One more reason for you and me to not invest in emeralds and to keep a hand on our wallet when in a museum.

Another factor in the success is the stupefying effect of the obvious. You expect thieves to work under cover, not in broad daylight. Which also explains the creation of the Donald J. Trump Ballroom, a glittery behemoth bigger than the White House itself. Every week the commander in chief commits sacrilege and does lawless deeds in plain view, sends masked agents to seize whomever they wish, ignores Ukraine while sending an aircraft carrier to battle small boats off Venezuela, accepts billions for his family from Arab sheikhs, sues the Department of Justice now in the hands of his former defense attorneys, and the citizenry is so benumbed by the spectacle, we turn the page and say, “Well, it’s just the president being himself.”

Surely the preservationists will speak up when he announces the erection of an Executive Tower and cranes with wrecking balls start knocking down the House itself because the Oval Office is too small and America’s greatness demands a 5,000-square-foot suite with a fabulous view from the 40th floor. Will the generals speak up if he appoints Trump Corporation vice presidents to be Joint Chiefs of Staff? Does the U.S. Constitution still reside in its glass case at the National Archives or has he removed it to bring it up to date?

Our population is aging and retirees are a powerful voting bloc and I’m sure they enjoy seeing an elderly man having a hell of a good time. Why not build a gigantic arch like the Arc de Triomphe and name it the Arc de Trump? Turn the Ellipse into a 52-acre amusement park and make some of the federal office buildings into luxury hotels. Update the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials and replace the statuary with 3-D holograph projections of Cabinet members.

Americans under 65 are too young to remember Watergate, how a piddly little break-in at Democratic headquarters, the theft of some papers, led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon at the urging of his fellow Republicans. The country has come to accept insults twenty times more gigantic than ever before. Watergate was a slap in the face and the past nine months have been a dozen truckloads of horse manure dumped on your front yard. But after the second truckload, you don’t really notice. You pull your shades and use a lot of air freshener and go out the back door and hope for a good heavy rainstorm.

One of those Republicans who urged Nixon to step down was my friend Alan K. Simpson of Wyoming who was in Congress at the time and who died back in March at 93. He was a classic conservative, wary of bureaucracy and various idealisms, a champion of self-reliance, a libertarian who believed in “live and let live” and “the right to be left alone,” which made him accepting of gays and of abortion. He had been a delinquent in his youth and so he was not self-righteous and he had a sense of humor about himself as a powerful U.S. senator for almost twenty years. He once came to a show I did in Washington and told me a true story about Wyoming cowboys he’d known in his younger days who liked to compete to see who could pick up a fifty-cent piece off a wooden bench using only their bare buttocks.

He said he’d seen cowboys pick up half-dollars and quarters and try to pick up nickels but without success. He didn’t say he’d competed but I guessed that he had. I miss him. The country needs more people like him.

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I flew to St. Paul last week as it took a turn toward winter with a cold rain and me without a warm coat but then thought better of it and the sun came out and the fall colors brightened. My sweetie was starting rehearsal for Mozart’s Così fan tutte, playing viola, a good enough excuse to come back to my old hometown. The Mississippi still flows by, magnificent as ever, and the downtown sits on a high bluff and the trains still run through Union Depot, one to Chicago, one to Seattle, each daily.

I have a soft spot for St. Paul, having found a career there when I was thirty. I loved radio, having grown up in an evangelical family that refused to get a TV, and started a live variety show on Saturday nights, a chance for me, a writer, to be friends with musicians, a low-income aristocracy of warmhearted people. The show started in a storefront and went to a theater and toured the country and other people ran the business and I had the fun.

Downtown St. Paul doesn’t seem to know what to do with itself these days. The online retail gargantuas have driven the downtown department stores out of business and the future of the office towers seems shaky with AI on the horizon and you can imagine a day when downtown will be a hockey arena, some homeless shelters, and a concert hall and a couple museums.

On this trip, I went to work in the downtown library — I’m writing a book, it’s what we old writers do in our declining years — and it seemed to be a shelter for young unemployed people, a warm place they could sit and watch video on the library’s computers. A legitimate social service but not what the librarians were intending to do with their days — direct patrons to good books about the French Revolution or the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton — not watch the clientele to make sure they aren’t dealing drugs.

I camped there, and got to work on a chapter about cheerfulness, of which I am now an advocate, seeing as half of our countrymen have a previously unacknowledged longing for a lawless autocracy. So be it, it is what it is, but meanwhile I plan to be upbeat, bad news or what.

I believe more than ever in the importance of good manners and the habits of kindness. When I say, “Thank you,” I want the thanked person to say, “You’re welcome,” rather than “No problem.” I live in New York where I’m anonymous but here in old St. Paul I keep running into familiar strangers my age. We each say hello, where you from, what’s up, and we find some common ground. I run into Al and two minutes later we’re recalling the day we saw Rod Carew steal third base and then home for the Twins. I meet Joanna who also went to the U and knew the poet James Wright and we remember his poem that begins, “Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, twilight bounds softly forth on the grass” and she knows the rest, about the Indian ponies whose eyes darken with kindness.

This is what I love about St. Paul. It’s a community and so it’s easy to strike up conversations.

Thursday afternoon, I did a stand-up show at a senior residence as a favor to a friend who lives there. A roomful of people my age, some in wheelchairs or pushing walkers, and I could see old couples, one partner alert, the other with memory issues, one caring for the other, the tenderness of lasting romance.

Maybe I shouldn’t have started off by reciting the 87 counties of Minnesota in alphabetical order — they seemed sort of stunned by this show-off nonsense — so I got down to business and was as funny as I could be, which was what they wanted. I said, “I’m so old that when I leave the museum the alarm goes off.” I told the joke about the old man who comes into the bar and sits by a young woman and says, “Do I come here often?”

I did forty-five minutes like that. For octogenarians, that’s a long enough show. They were appreciative and gave me a sitting and rolling ovation and headed for an early supper. Many people said, “Thank you,” and I said, “You’re welcome. It was my pleasure.” And it truly was.

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Wherever you go in the world, if people ask you where you’re from and you say Minnesota, they say, “It gets cold there, doesn’t it.” When New Yorkers travel to Minneapolis, we don’t say, “That’s a really big city, isn’t it.” That would be dumb. But somehow we haven’t created a brand personality for ourselves other than weather. We wanted to be an arts mecca and a tech center and we had our chances but didn’t make it. What we’re left with is our status as America’s Number One producer of turkeys, which doesn’t have the same allure.

With global warming, Minnesota’s status as the Boy It Gets Cold There State is not even accurate, and what’s worse, it’s taken away we Minnesota males’ chance to demonstrate competence. After fourteen inches of snow, you go out the door and hear tires screaming and smell burning rubber and see Nadine the neighbor lady at the wheel of her Buick stuck in a snowbank and you walk over and tap on her window. She opens it. She looks crazed, in a rage, foaming at the mouth, and you say, calmly, “Let me help you.” And she gets out and you get in and you rock the car gently back and forth, and expertly rock it over the hump and out of the snowbank. She offers you money. You say, “No no no no. My pleasure.” You walk away.

You are a sensitive caring well-read progressive male with an interest in the arts but with no handyman skills whatsoever. This heroic rescue is the testosterone highlight of your year, the urban equivalent of rescuing a child from a grizzly. You also have a pair of jumper cables in your trunk so you can start a car with a dead battery, but a balmy winter such as those we’ve been having denies you these manly opportunities. Your only remaining guy skills are reaching things on high shelves or using a plunger to open a clogged toilet. Not nearly so impressive.

But there’s always the chance you could get lucky. Nadine could call you one evening and say, “The furnace is out and I can’t get a repairman and my husband is having a self-loathing episode.” So you go next door. You smell gas fumes and hear children weeping and go down to the basement and see tools scattered in the furnace room, screwdrivers, wrenches, a sledgehammer, a revolver, and you hear him, he’s in the laundry room on the phone with his therapist, saying, “I am utterly inadequate. My life is a total failure. I need to be put into some sort of institution.”

You check the shutoff switch and clear the intake vent and relight the pilot and the furnace roars to life and you go in and comfort the husband. “This is a very weird old furnace manufactured in Slovakia, the Hromkoviç, and I was an exchange student in Slovakia twenty years ago and lived with a family who owned one. You’re a good person. Go take a pill and do some deep breathing.” He knows it’s a lie but he appreciates it.

You turn down her thanks, and the next day you thaw out another neighbor’s frozen pipes with a hair dryer — and that night you find an unconscious woman in a snowbank and warm her with your own body as you learned in Scouts, but these things are possible only when it’s 30 below, not in the autumnal winters we’ve been having. Face it, guys, the days of home repair are almost over. Electronics can’t be fixed by ordinary men. Parenting demands sainthood, but appliances are a mystery. Our manhood is threatened.

And that’s why some of us are going hunting for terrorist turkeys that’ve been reported in the suburbs. Rogue turkeys from turkey ranches who observed the fall Thanksgiving roundup and flew the coop and went on the attack in supermarket parking lots. Shoppers looking for their cars in the dark and suddenly there’s a shriek and flapping of wings and a giant bird tries to peck a hole in your chest. They can peck the lock on your door and hide in the back seat and come after you as you’re driving home and you swerve into oncoming traffic. Suicide turkeys. We patrol parking lots with a baseball bat in hand, listening for gobbles, and we don’t do it for money. It’s our duty as men. Enjoy your holidays.

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It’s good to see Zohran Mamdani meeting with New Yorkers who opposed him in his run for mayor, including a closed-door meeting with a bunch of rank-and-file cops. Earlier in his career Mr. Mamdani uttered the words “defund” and “police” close together in one sentence, which is dumb, and he’s not saying it anymore. It’s what you’re supposed to do after you win a primary and become the Democratic candidate, meet with people who disagree and say fewer dumb things.

There are dedicated cops and some not so much but when you need the police you need the police, you don’t need a pollster, a nail polisher, or a politician. My lasting memory of New York cops goes back to when I landed at JFK and headed for the cabstand, heard shouting, saw people waving their hands and a young woman lying on the sidewalk apparently unconscious. A guy in an orange jacket got on his walkie-talkie, and two cops came running, one of them got on the phone and the other one lay down beside the woman and talked to her and put an arm around her.

It’s fine that Mr. Mamdani has gotten East Asians and Africans excited and first-generation Americans and young lefties, this is Diversity City and Complexityville, and millions of people need to move around town every day and live their lives and scrape together a living free from fear, and the mayor’s job is to secure that freedom and be reasonably honest. Palestine is not his assignment. I know young people who took a big chance to come live here and did so because they had a dream. I married one. So Mr. Mamdani is carrying the high hopes of a great many people and I hope he knows that he — being an outsider and a Muslim — will be held to a high standard. The city has known some corrupt mayors who invited pals to partake of the pork but when you call yourself a socialist, it signals that you’re not in it to do favors for your backers. A socialist is in it for the common good.

I’d be okay living in Kansas City but I love New York because my wife does. She comes back from her long walks exhilarated and that makes me happy. She takes me to the Met for Puccini and Strauss and Verdi and I enjoy her pleasure. She is utterly alive here. She reads the Times sitting across the breakfast table, doesn’t spend too much time on the front page, skips the opinion stuff, which is mostly dismay, and jumps to the odd and unique and human stories deep inside and the riveting facts. There is a love of facts in old-fashioned journalism, an odd pleasure in being proved wrong, that is missing in the propaganda press, and a mature grown-up appreciates one and avoids the other.

This is why the guy with the red tie — who is fortunate his father was born before he was — moved to Florida. New Yorkers saw through him a long time ago. He bought Marjorie Merriwether Post’s palace in Palm Beach where people respect narcissism more than Manhattan does and there he made contact with Martian children who elected him leader of the free world for their own amusement and have been loving his wackiness ever since. In New York, he is simply a traffic hazard. Red lights flash, avenues close, people ride the subway and curse him as they pass below. Someday he’ll be honored by the city naming a storm sewer after him, meanwhile he doesn’t really exist except as a warning to children: when you promise to make America great and instead you make it a joke, history will not be kind.

The Democrats’ problem is simple: they loved high school debate, making your point, rebutting the opponent’s, but were flummoxed by Trump, a stream-of-consciousness orator uninhibited by factuality or relevance, uninterested in actual government policy. They were playing tennis and he was a pro wrestler. Biden prepared to debate him by memorizing statistics, then got confused when Trump said that Biden’s administration was the worst in American history. Biden should’ve said, “You are a werewolf and you drink the blood of aborted infants.” Big mistake. Democrats running for Congress next year shouldn’t waste time on economics. Declare that the Prez is a woman in transition and promise to depants him and confiscate the six billion he’s earned since January. End of the story. Election’s over.

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