Even prisoners need a vacation now and then

The Column: 07.22.24

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I turn 82 in a few weeks in the midst of a long tour doing solo shows up Northeast, which is the best way to turn very old, to ride around and entertain beautiful strangers, all of them younger. I do not want to sit at a table of cranks and geezers, each eager to relate his or her own medical history, and then someone wheels in a bonfire of a birthday cake and we sing the old song in our ruined voices and eat melted wax with angel food and someone tells me all about an article they read about carcinoma. I don’t like cake. I’d prefer a pie, rhubarb, with a little tang to it, and two scoops of vanilla. We octogenarians get compliments that sound like eulogies, so go away, stick it in your ear. I’ve had a complicated life with more than my share of wrong turns and incompletes, but I’m in reasonable health, thanks to American medicine, and I have good friends, and I’m married to a smart and funny woman who makes my heart skip when she puts a hand on my shoulder. And I have work to do. God has a purpose for me, yet to be fulfilled, and maybe talking to you, dear reader, is it, so make the best of it. Too bad it’s via internet so you can’t use it afterward for cat litter.

I talk to Him now and then, bargaining about my death. I want to reach 97 as my mother did and be as alert as she and pass from the world in a few days, dozing, listening to gospel music, and He tells me, by way of my wife, that this is my problem, not His, that I need to walk a couple miles briskly every day and eat two meals and cut back on red meat.

The show is educational. I do 90 minutes from memory and some of it is true and I let the audience decide. I also recite limericks. This is a limerick:

The beauty of octogenarianism is freedom. Your career is over. You’re done. You look out at the crowd and see people googling your name to figure out who you are. It doesn’t matter. Your job is to cheer up the people who are depressed seeing that trailer trash from Queens is headed back to the White House. White Castle is more his taste. The man lies like a cheap carpet. If you saw him a few years ago attempt to comically impersonate the reporter who has cerebral palsy, that is all you need to know about the man. He is not 78, he is 13. The American people are exercising their perfect right to irony and electing a delinquent to be the leader of the Free World. My job this summer and fall is to stay on the sunny side of the street and avoid words such as grump, slump, dump, hump, rump, and sump pump.

I might recite: “All of the lovers and the love they made — nothing between them was a mistake — all that we did for love’s sake was not wasted and will never fade,” and I almost believe this, the forgiving of my own mistakes. I do my poem about sperm. Sometimes I come across an audience that wants to sing and we sing “America” or the “Battle Hymn.” And if it feels right, I hum “When peace like a river attendeth my way” and they’re right there with me and we do “It Is Well with My Soul.” Some audiences tolerate this and others are actually moved. I started performing in my thirties for the usual reason, to be the center of attention, but now I hope to be useful. The country is in peril. Most people know this and don’t need me to tell them. I want to give them ninety minutes during which they won’t think about the peril whatsoever and then, driving home, it will dawn on them all the harder. Prisoners need a vacation, just like everyone else. That’s my advice, sweetheart. Take time off. Go camping, hike up a river canyon, look at the stars at night, play games with children, practice the art of seduction on your spouse, go for days without reading the paper, and when you come back to it, you will be properly alarmed.

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Stay on the sunny side with Garrison Keillor’s book Cheerfulness, which reflects on a simple virtue that can help us in this stressful and sometimes gloomy era.

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