Look Around, I Get the Drift

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Two days ago, a profound experience. I found a set of transcripts someone had made of monologues I did years ago on the radio and I read one. Someone had written down word for word what I said and when the audience laughed, they put in the word LAUGHTER. And guess what? I read through it and it wasn’t funny. LAUGHTER. Not even slightly. LAUGHTER. I had said it and back in 1982 a theaterful of people had loved it and in 2023 it was about as funny as a pile of bricks. LAUGHTER. Have you, dear reader, ever gone back to your distinguished past and been depantsed the way I was? LAUGHTER. No, you have not. I wanted to jump out a window. LAUGHTER. Fortunately, the windows in our apartment are childproofed and I can’t open them. LAUGHTER. And also it’s New York and I could hear children’s voices from the street and I don’t want my suicide to accidentally wipe out a bunch of eight-year-olds leashed together on their way to the Museum of Natural History. LAUGHTER. That’s not funny, by the way. LAUGHTER.

So I’m in the wrong line of work. I’ve wasted my life. I earned a good living at it and it was fun while it lasted but it contributed nothing of value to the world and I’d have been better off sticking with my first job, which was dishwashing. I was good at it. I ran racks of dishes through big industrial dishwashers and they came out steaming clean and I scrubbed the pots and pans by hand and I didn’t come back forty years later to learn that the cafeteria had been shut down by the health department on account of dirty dishes.

I notice that you’re not laughing anymore.

But my new guiding principle is “Don’t look back in anger or look forward in fear but look around you in awareness.” (James Thurber) I don’t look back at my decades of bad jokes; I look around and I see my wife walk in with a grocery bag and hand me a 60-ounce filet mignon, in violation of her own principles that eating beef is unhealthy and that cattle ranching is an ecological disaster. Love triumphs over principle.

I do the same for her when I go with her to hear a Brahms symphony. She’ll reciprocate next summer and come with me to see the Rolling Stones. I think of my father who, as a devout Christian, believed that Christmas was unscriptural, a sacrilege, the exploitation of the gospel for commercial gain, but for the sake of my mother, who adored Christmas, the gaudy tree and enormous stockings hung by the fireplace and beautifully wrapped gifts and the feast itself, swallowed principle and went along with the game.

“Since feeling is first, whoever pays attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you,” said E.E. Cummings. In other words, don’t fall in love with a copy editor.

I have friends who’re planning to visit distant relatives for Christmas and they know it’ll mean three nights on a rollaway in a basement and their kids on an inflatable mattress nearby and when they need to pee at 3 a.m. it’ll be a treacherous journey up two flights and past an unfamiliar dog. These relatives are country people who rise early and drink instant coffee, not the exotic beans from the volcanic slopes of Guatemala with their notes of cocoa and cucumber, and instant oatmeal, not the steel-cut Irish oatmeal, and with whom one must at all costs avoid politics lest the conversation sink into the swamp of conspiracy theories, but nonetheless my friends are going to hit the road and do the deed in the spirit of Christmas.

Thanks to my mother, I awoke at 4 a.m. and came downstairs to find my stocking stuffed, the big orange in the toe. The cup of tea I’d left for Santa was empty, my note to him was gone. The chimney was only a pipe, and yet in a corner of my heart, I felt that, even with all the millions of children in the world, the old saint had remembered me.

I still feel loved. I tried to feel abandoned so I could be an important poet but it didn’t work. LAUGHTER. The woman puts a hand on my shoulder. My daughter sits beside me. Christmas is coming. All I need is an orange, a lit candle, and I’ll put a record on the turntable and hear the Rolling Stones sing “O Come All Ye Faithful.” From their very rare “Stoned Noel” album released only in Guatemala.

Garrison Keillor © 12.11.23