What if It Does and They Don't?

Sea levels are rising as the polar ice caps melt and now it’s clear why Republicans are in favor of global warming, it’s a form of gerrymandering. It destroys the Democratic coasts and drives disheartened Manhattanites westward to wander lost and confused in Ohio, their sophistication shredded, their street smarts useless. The Obamas will lose their place on Cape Cod and move to Omaha. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez will wind up in Topeka and go back to bartending. The fashion industry will move to Des Moines and polyester plaids will make a big comeback. Broadway will, of course, settle in Oklahoma –– where else?

My love and I live on the 12th floor of a building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, which won’t be so upper much longer and so we’re thinking of buying a kayak so we can still make it to Zabar’s when the streets are flooded. We’ll paddle around the little islands that used to be Central Park and the Belvedere Castle to look in the Guggenheim, which will be turned into a water slide, and when Zabar’s closes with its fabulous cheese section where a shopper gains weight simply by inhaling, then we’ll order a chopper to lift us off the roof and wave goodbye to the old life and be flown to Pittsburgh to fly back to Minnesota. One chapter ends, another begins.

As you can see (to your horror) I am rather benign about the Union of Righteous Republican States (URRS) that the rising seas will create. I face the prospect with equanimity, same as I face the prospect of a monsoon or a ban on Pearson’s Salted Nut Rolls or my laptop computer being crushed under the wheels of a truck, because I am newly out of the OR with a beautiful scar on my chest, I’m walking with a cane, and to me everything is miraculous, walking, conversation, meatloaf, oatmeal, sunshine, prune juice, my daughter’s voice on the phone, even the voice of Tri my physical therapist telling me to stand on one foot with my eyes closed for fifteen seconds. It’s all good.

It helps to be eighty, with a treasury of interesting regrets I can examine if I choose. It also helps to know that a pig saved my life, the donor of a mitral valve, mine having sprung a leak. I dreamed of her last night, singing to me from hog heaven:

I gave you a new lease on life
Gave you a brand-new start
Other people are on your mind
But I am there in your heart

I gave you a piece of my heart, baby
Enjoy the sweet sunshine
Roll in the mud, it’s there in your blood,
The part of your heart that’s mine.

This mitral valve is working very well, according to the Mayo Clinic, and when a pig part is what keeps you going, it is an everyday miracle you never forget.

It also helps to be married to my wife. I’m not a New Yorker, she is, though she was born in the same dinky hospital in Minnesota that I emerged from, but I grew up in a basement, which I took to mean abasement, and she grew up in a home with classics on the shelves and she played violin and listened to Sibelius and Brahms, all of which turned her head eastward. I only went there for the money: The New Yorker was a magazine that paid real dough. In 1974 they paid me $6,000 for a piece about the Grand Ole Opry and I took up a life of self-amusement. Meanwhile, she, a true artist, lived in poverty in tiny fifth-floor walk-ups with three roommates and two cats and heroin addicts sleeping in the entry so that she could play great music. She went for Bach, I went for the bucks. We are opposites who pair up well.

And now, thinking of the life of Elizabeth II, a life of devotion to inherited duty, we see the merits of fidelity and soldiering on. The British Commonwealth shrank severely during her long reign and she remained the same gracious lady, riding in the carriage, waving. Brits of fiercely opposing views could look on her with affection and respect.

And so if the oceans rise and mountains fall and we have mandatory prayer in schools and election of the president by state legislatures and there is a life-size portrait of Himself in every post office, I shall still pledge allegiance to the flag and to the Republicans for whom it stands.