A Little Talk About Close Neighbors

I swear I never thought the day would come when I would arrive for a summer weekend at a rural paradise and suddenly be in a panic that I may have left the charger for my hearing aids at home in the city. I never thought I’d see that day but now I have. I once was young and gay, not gay in today’s sense but what we meant back in 1962, and I could hear a pin drop and now I couldn’t hear a bowling pin if it dropped on my head. I suffered this plague for you, my beloved radio listeners. In your service, I turned the headphones up high because, being young and gay, I felt that music needed to be LOUD to be a full emotional experience, that the body itself needed to vibrate vigorously. I was wrong. I know that now and now is much too late.

At any rate, I did not leave the charger at home, it was simply in a secret compartment of my briefcase, the sort of place one might keep nuclear secrets if there were such a thing, so I wore my hearing aids to dinner at the neighbors’ and so I could understand them to the extent that language is part of understanding. Otherwise, it would’ve been like an evening among the Sanskrit-fluent and I would’ve had to maintain a facial expression of comprehension and curiosity and this is no easy matter. My facial muscle memory is a scowl learned in my fundamentalist youth. It’s hard to overcome the influence of Jeremiah at the age of 82.

I do not understand the neighbors, actually, such as why their summer house has LANDSCAPING and LAWN ORNAMENTS. A summer house is for relaxation, it isn’t to demonstrate craftmanship. You are supposed to sit on the porch and read Proust, you are not supposed to create a home that Proust would’ve envied.

And I don’t understand why a copy of Foreign Affairs sits on their kitchen counter. In the den, out of sight, yes. In the kitchen? People are eating in the kitchen. Foreign Affairs is the diplomatic version of the prophet Jeremiah. He said, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” Foreign Affairs says pretty much the same thing except for real. Ukraine and Gaza are sort of covered in the newspapers but terrible things are happening everywhere, so much so that you don’t want to know about it. Let Antony Blinken know about it. This is why foreign policy is a minor footnote in our presidential elections, somewhat less important than bike lanes or prayer in public schools — can students in English be assigned books in which prayer occurs even if the book is clearly labeled Fiction.

The reason the candidates don’t discuss foreign policy is that they don’t want to scare you. And what would really scare you is how little one of them is even curious about foreign policy and the very good chance that he might be elected president of the most powerful nation on the planet. If you knew, you would want to form your own nation, just as the Danes and Finns have done.

So I made the mistake of asking the woman of the house why the Foreign Affairs, expecting her to say, “Oh, that’s his mishegoss” — she’s Catholic but we all love Yiddish, it really brightens up a sentence — but no, she reads it, she’s in the investment business (I thought women were more noble than that, busy curing cancer and starvation, not hiding income in offshore shelters.) So she starts telling me what she’s recently read in Foreign Affairs and in twenty minutes she cast a dark shadow over the entire evening, which had been all gaiety right up to that exact point.

There were humorous hosts, excellent pasta, fine wine, a lively salad, a beautiful one-year-old boy who really pays attention to people and I swear he is grasping the emotional richness of language and he is eager and ambitious to talk, the child’s proud parents, my own dear wife and daughter, plus me, a published author, and yet in twenty minutes of international trouble spots — she did not leave out many areas, maybe Monaco, maybe Lichtenstein — the effect was to put us all in a blue funk. I tried to lighten the mood with a harmless joke and it wasn’t harmless. It made fun of third-grade teachers, most of whom are probably female, an oppressed lot. So we went home.

Don’t listen to anything about foreign affairs. If someone tries to tell you, take off your hearing aids.

Garrison Keillor © 09.09.24