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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