I come from the heartland, I live in New York

The Column: 03.04.22

Now that we know the State of the Union is good and we’re into Lent, one should examine the State of the Soul, I suppose, but all I can think of are the dumb things I’ve done in my life, for which I hold an all-time record, hands down, shoes laced together. That is why I never looked for a shrink: they don’t deal with cluelessness; it is beyond them. I come from a family of capable people but I’ve ingested the wrong animal fats or maybe my pillow is too hard. I don’t know. Literally, I don’t.

I remember soul-searching when I was a boy, sitting under ferocious preaching in our evangelical church (we called it a Meeting to distinguish ourselves from the Papists), and the sermons were about imminent death and I imagined dying in a car crash, bomb explosion, sinking ship, and being ushered into Eternity and I wanted to accept Jesus as my Savior, but I felt it should be a tumultuous emotional moment with weeping in a prostrate heap, and not simply checking the “Yes” box, and I didn’t know how to make myself sincerely tumultuous so I doubted my own salvation. Now I’m old and never think about death and feel gratitude for God’s grace though I don’t claim to understand it. My weeping is due to nostalgia at old hymns such as “Standing On The Promises,” which we Episcopalians don’t sing but we sing songs that remind me of it.

I live in New York as an accommodation of my wife who likes it here, and I recently came across a gospel preacher in Times Square, a Black man holding a big Bible the size of a bread loaf with a voice like a bass trombone and I appreciated his dedication to his lonely calling. And then I attended to my calling, which was to sit in a big reading room of the public library and write, surrounded by students at laptops, many of whom I guess are children of immigrants, an archetypal American scene. I love being in their midst.

Mostly, however, I write at home so I can read my stuff aloud to my wife who’s reading about Putin’s criminal aggression against Ukraine. If I can make her laugh, when she has him on her mind, then I know it’s good. (Does Vlad know that “poot” is an American child’s word for farting? Does it mean the same in Russian? And why is it the middle syllable of “computer”?) But I digress.

I passed a café the other day with a sign in the window, “No Laptops,” which I tried not to take personally but of course I can understand that cafés want good eaters, not struggling writers who’d come in and order a cup of hot water and bring their own tea bag and occupy space for two hours to work on their mournful memoir about growing up with an unmarried Mennonite mom in Menomonie. Nonetheless, why welcome customers with a warning? The no-laptop rule suggests that maybe newspaper reading is off the table or checking the phone for email. It also suggests that if you misuse a nonrestrictive clause, the waiter may step over and correct you.

I was cured of writing mournful memoirs by meeting readers of mine, one advantage of having a tiny audience, and many of them are teaching third grade, which is exhausting work, or they’re therapists listening all day to depressed patients, which is depressing, or they work for executive vice presidents and resist the temptation to spit in his coffee, and so I set aside my memoir, This Strange Persistent Pain In My Lower Back, and I put the poot in Putin and this amused her. She had just returned from a long walk in Central Park where, she reported, a bird had pooped on her black jacket and she went to wash it. New York is a major flyway and the Park attracts birdwatchers from all over, you hear Arabic and Slavic and French and German, and inevitably a bird flies over and makes its mark on us. Accept it as a blessing.

My Ukrainian friend Peter Ostroushko didn’t live to see this moment of history, but I think of him often, and if you have a few minutes you could Google Pete playing “Heart of the Heartland” on YouTube and think of Russian tanks closing in on that mandolin player, and it will break your heart in two. As for the other stuff, history, culture, politics, economics, you’ll have to ask someone else.

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