We are lucky to have been born when we were. The young people in the streets are aware that a time of suffering lies ahead. Science is pretty clear about the ecological impact of industrial agriculture and the rapacious destruction of forests and overfishing of the seas and the virtual disappearance of many insect species, but none of this has enough political impact to turn the ship of state.
Or if Yellowstone blew up and ushered in a year of darkness. That could be the Pearl Harbor that moves our country to action. Children have great power to shame the rest of us, as every parent knows, and this cause is worth their effort. Everything we love is in the balance, language, art, music, history, the art of story, dance, Eros, baseball, bird-watching, and the effect of apocalypse on the bond market would not be good.
The last Good War was won by boys who rushed to sign up, after seeing newsreels of sunken battleships in Hawaii. One of the two major American political parties is in denial that global warming exists because it is devoted to an illiterate leader. That party appears likely to take over Congress in and two years later No. If he does, we may have a constitutional convention at which the presidency is made a lifetime term.
Meanwhile, we have a Supreme Court with a solid majority of Ayn Rand justices who deny that the state has the right to govern individual behavior. Gun control will be dead, conservation will be an individual responsibility. Bezos and Mr. Musk can move to the moon but the rest of us are earthlings. I put my faith in scientific enterprise.
Someone will come up with a way to turn plankton into something that looks like and tastes like ground beef. Someone else will figure out how to make linguine from dead leaves. Get busy and invent a car that runs on urine. So much gas is wasted by people driving around looking for a lavatory.
This will come as a great relief. I feel resurrected, but what to do with it? Did I win this privilege unfairly? Did I jump the line? I was dragging my feet, ready to enter retirement, dementia, and the nap in the dirt, but now apparently I am supposed to do something worthy of this amazing blessing. But what? Maybe writing these dinky essays about the buzzing of the bees in the cigarette trees is no longer good enough.
Thanks to scientific wizardry, I am now, in effect, walking on water. What I also come away from it with is an appreciation for professional kindness. So she checked and the wound looked good. I was dazzled by her kindness. She pulled the sheet back up and then she took her hand and brushed the hair out of my eyes. The kindness of this gesture was deeply moving. I feel tears in my eyes as I write about it.
I insisted that my dear wife go to Florida with her sister as planned and not fuss over me. She went and is having a fine time, which makes me happy. When two guys have gone up your vein to your heart and fixed the flutter, you should put aside your mournful mortality and enjoy the gift. My friend brushed the hair out of my eyes and a moment later she brought me a small plastic container of applesauce. And now let us turn to No.
Thirty years ago, winter arrived on Halloween and Duluth got 37 inches of snow and the next day men were out shoveling their sidewalks. It was a beautiful day. And a few months later I met my wife to whom I am still married and vice versa. To me, the blizzard and the romance are closely connected: having faced death, I was ready for love and she took me in her arms and there was a powerful mammalian attraction.
She gave off heat, I loved her conversation, I could imagine spending winter with her. The subject of Florida has arisen recently, now that she has family down there, and I have reminded her of the Florida condo building that collapsed. But she worries about me walking on icy sidewalks. Pluperfect is our home. I have nothing against the idea of warm weather, except as it may indicate global warming that will trigger apocalyptic events that will cause great suffering to our great-grandchildren and their children.
Where is the stunned wonderment, why am I not writing a psalm or a rhapsody? It brings memories of college years when I imagined I was brilliant and now I am old and dull and the high ambitions of my youth are long vanished in the dust. But when blizzards come along and hazardous driving warnings are issued, a man comes to life. A switch clicks deep in the brain. Now we have something serious to deal with. Nature is trying to depopulate us. We put aside Christianity and go back to our pagan origins — the Bible takes place in a warm climate, Jesus went around in sandals and light raiment.
A pack of wolves threatens our tiny arctic village and we must fight them off with clubs. A vicious pterodactyl has emerged from the forest and we must find large rocks and aim the catapult. We the Keepers of Civilization are under attack and all our qualms disappear in a flash. What they say is that life is made up of a richness of small things and you need to keep them all in perspective. Read the Bible but don't forget to cover your strawberry beds or change your oil.
Go places, see things. Don't get carried away. Don't get mad. Don't make things more complicated than they are. If you're too busy to stand around and talk, you're not living right. Some of us veered away from their example and galloped into the stone canyons of careerism, which has warped us somewhat. We are expected to give up our lives for work. We have a tendency to obsess and orate and that is something the driveway philosophers didn't go in for. They were a chorus, not an audience, and they spoke softly and contrapuntally of the wonders of the world, the benefits of pruning and mulching, the qualities of apples, the science of forecasting winter by observing woolly caterpillars, the plans for flooding the backyard to make a hockey rink, the difficulties of growing roses, the trials and tribulations of plumbing.
The driveway philosophers are still with us. Whenever I escape from my stone canyon, I find them here and there, talking uncle talk. They constitute a large invisible bloc that looks at candidates for public office and gets an intuitive sense of who is real and who is not.
They know that politicians live in stone canyons and hire smart designers to create their personas, but they check out Hillary and Obama and Giuliani and Romney and they wonder who knows about gas mileage, who has a normal relationship with children, who can truly appreciate a really good apple.
Running for president is your last bid for the respect of Manhattan. If you were to win election, they couldn't ridicule you anymore. They could be horrified, but there is nothing ridiculous about being Leader of the Free World.
You have B bombers at your command. When you go places, a battalion of security guys comb the environs. You attract really really good speechwriters who give you Churchillian cadences and toss in quotes from Emerson and Aeschylus and Ecclesiastes.
Labor Day and it is not going well. You had a very bad month. You tossed out those wisecracks on Twitter and the Earth shook and your ratings among white suburban women with French cookware declined. The teleprompter is not your friend. You are in the old tradition of locker room ranting and big honkers in the steam room, sitting naked, talking man talk, griping about the goons and ginks and lousy workmanship and the uppity broads and the great lays and how you vanquished your enemies at the bank.
Profanity is your natural language and vulgar words so as not to offend the Christers but the fans can still hear it and that's something they love about you. You are their guy. You are losing and so are they but they love you for it. So what do you do this winter? Hang around one of your mansions? Hit some golf balls?
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