A Quiet Night in Manhattan

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My wife and I like to sit in the same room at night, doing our separate things, she in a chair reading a book, I at a table addressing Christmas cards. The book is by a mentally ill mountain climber worried that in an avalanche he might lose his meds for bipolarity. It’s a snowy Christmas card, I’m signing our names under a poem that ends “Onward we go, faithfully, into the dark and are there angels hovering overhead? Hark.” She is sleepy but it’s a good book and the bipolar guy is at a Buddhist camp where you meditate ten hours a day and his job is to sweep the floor with a broom made from branches. I’ve done a mountain of cards and I’m still in the K’s, Katherine, Ken, Kristina, and I’m not thinking about angels, I’m thinking what if Elon Musk sells himself the U.S. Postal Service for $125 million, half of what he paid for the Republican Party, and of course it goes online and merges with X and you’ll speak the inscription to be written cursively in your distinctive style. The p.o. is gone and polio and smallpox return and the F.B.I.J. investigates journalists and it all happens without anybody commenting on it and a second-grader calls 911 to report an active shooter in the next classroom of a Christian school.

It’s at times like this I think maybe I should see a neurologist. Then remember I saw Dr. Fink two weeks ago and he said my eyes are focused somewhat apart, not together, and the cardiologist said arrhythmia might be causing the dizziness, and the eyelid guy said he didn’t think surgery would help. He was the first left-handed physician I’ve seen in ages and I was fascinated by it. My handwriting is big and bold, using a black Sharpie, and I write “Blessings!” under the “Hark” to indicate that I mean it, it is a blessing despite the cash flowing into Bezos’s coffers, people crave Christmas. Normal folks, crazy ones, kooks, awake in the night and hear spooks, and look for a light, a star shining bright, a family in the Gospel of Luke’s.

I was in a big crowd a week ago in St. Paul, not in a church, a big crowd of people in off the street and someone started singing Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright, and they all sang. No piano, just a crowd singing. Three verses, the holy Infant, the quaking shepherds, the whole megillah. I’ll bet you most of them hadn’t darkened a pew in years. But in this crazy culture of ours in which your phone blinks and you get the latest details on the school shooting (“President calls incident “unconscionable”) and you google Wisconsin to remind yourself where it is and for some reason Bing Crosby is singing and the fact you know it’s him tells you that you’re Old so you click on Back and here are very nice people lined up to buy McWaffles and become joyful and again Back and Stan and Ollie dressed as cowboys are dancing in each other’s arms. In the midst of all this, plus the return of locker-room talk to government (“absurd,” “stupid,” “worst president in history”), people do long for beauty, for reverence, the sacred. I felt it in that big room in St. Paul. Enough with the catcalls and the spitballs, let’s try bowing our heads and all singing in the same key.

My love was sleepy but she was somewhere in Nepal with the guy climbing Everest without oxygen and I was doing Pamela, Patricia, Peter, writing Blessings! And Blessings! And Blessings! I love this quiet night together, reading and writing. We live in a building that went up the year of the Great Crash. The lobby is grand but plenty of the folks who moved in could barely pay the rent. Some of these cards will go to elderly friends, some in Rehab though how much Rehabbing is possible in your mid-80s, I don’t know. Maybe the dizziness is part of the game, the result of a lifelong aversion to exercise. I chose this life and at the end I must pay the bill: that’s what we puritans believe. I prefer the term “lightheadedness,” a head filled with light. I go to bed next to the woman I love, I scratch her back, I remember that crowd in St. Paul. I feel calm if not too bright.

Garrison Keillor © 12.22.24