Against Sourness

And for cheerfulness, Garrison Keillor, and the power of the dog

Welcome to 2022. It’s a new year, so they tell me. And during it, I’ll be Virgil to your Dante, your guide through the underworld. Though Hell, Purgatory, the Divided States of America……..who can tell the difference between them anymore? It’s all pain, no pleasure. Everyone has a hangover, without having had the drunken fun. You’ll forgive me for not kicking off the year on a more sanguine note. But I’m tired, and I’m not alone.

The last Omicron-riddled month has felt like a year, and the last two pandemic years, like a decade. Our politics are as broken as our supply chain. Our institutions seem to be buckling. Our media is decadent and callow, straight out of Mike Judge’s Idiocracy imaginings.  I just read a piece on a “fartepreneur” – a reality show star who’d taken to bottling her flatulence and selling it to fetishists. It grossed her fifty grand a week, though she had to quit when her gassy diet caused respiratory problems, what she worried was a “fart attack.”

Finding once easily had items like rapid antigen tests at Walgreens, or a cheap pack of ground beef, or gas for under three bucks a gallon, now feels like winning the Powerball jackpot, or scoring an eighteen-pack of Cottonelle during the Great Toiler Paper Scare of 2020.  Even the 2021 retrospectives striving to accentuate good-news stories had a kiss-your-sister quality. (There’s now more lab-grown meat than ever!  While the world was busy dying of COVID, fewer people died of Ebola! ) And as we slog into the January 6th coup-attempt anniversary, commemorating a new national lowlight in our politics and history - one in which roughly a third of the country seems incapable of admitting what happened right before our eyes -  nobody seems to know how to fix what ails us. But a nap might be a good place to start. (Did I mention that I’m tired?)

Allow me an indulgent rewind on the personal front. As the Christmas season dawned at the beginning of last month, I was prepared to strap on my best fake smile, and be festive. I ironed and starched my Christmas corduroys. I went to a Christmas boat parade.  I watched the Hallmark Channel with my wife without even tossing my Christmas cookies.  (That Candace Cameron Bure, who seems to star in roughly two-thirds of their movies, has a lot of Christmas spirit. Too much, arguably.)

Then Christmas season came crashing down.  After a Sunday extended-family dinner, four of us were laid low by the plague that we’d successfully averted for nearly two years. My wife and I holed up in our room for a week, nursing low-grade fevers and chesty coughs. We were bored out of our skulls. We played with our oximeter to ward off any psychosomatic lung problems (we are vaccinated). We tried not to infect our kids, who came home from college in just enough time to consign us to our cages, instead of letting us have the run of our own house.

While under room arrest, I watched Louis C.K.’s new comedy special, Sorry. Spoiler alert:  Fresh from a few years of #MeToo shaming after some buttering-his-own-corn indiscretions in front of female colleagues, he’s not sorry. But he was philosophical: “What I thought was really interesting about COVID, and still is, is it’s the first thing I’ve seen where everyone on earth had the same problem. We never had that before, that’s why we don’t give a shit about each other.”  It’s a nice enough sentiment, though the jury is still out on whether anything’s changed in the caring-for-each-other department.  I spent my COVID incarceration like I’ve spent much of the pandemic, sparring with email combatants and COVID-skeptic friends over masks and vaccines and whether 830,000 of our countrymen dying is just a bad case of the flu. For us purportedly being all in this together, we sure do seem to spend a lot of time apart - and not just physically.

By the time we were sprung from our COVID cells, Christmas had been cancelled. Both sides of our family postponed festivities. Then the make-up dinner with my folks was scratched, too, after all five members of my sister’s family turned up COVID-positive.  If my parents were planning on giving me the pony that I asked for, here’s hoping they nurture and feed it until we can exchange gifts, probably some time around Memorial Day. In case we had any big ideas about New Year’s, seven of the eleven invited guests at the party we were slotted to attend turned up last-minute positive for the plague as well.  There are surely more depressing ways to “celebrate” New Year’s than getting plastered with TV’s Don Lemon while being stapled to your own couch, though I can’t think of any.

After achieving COVID parole, and feeling rather stir-crazy, I needed to stretch my legs and lungs, so I disappeared for two days, heading for the mountains, or our low-slung version of them near Frederick, MD, where I fish for native brook trout in Satan’s Creek.  (Not its real name, I just call it that due to all the Fredneck deposits of trash, and animal carcasses, and children’s panties  – don’t ask, I have no idea how they got there, though I did alert the authorities – that I have found streamside over the years.  But if you want to be a fisherman, you have to fish where the fish live.)

As I wrote in a column a few months ago, it had become apparent to me that my 14-year fishing streak of catching at least 1,000 fish on a fly rod each year was going down in flames after I’d suffered a bout with Ehrlichiosis, brought on by a tick bite, that put me in the hospital for a week and kept me from fishing for nearly a month as I regained strength (smack in the middle of August, which is fishing prime time). And indeed, my prediction came true:  I finished 2021 with 920 fish, despite a hard rally in the fall. Still, I needed to hold one of God’s most majestic creatures (with their speckled reds and yellow and blues, brookies look like opals with gills) just to make a peace with this turbulent year.

But in keeping with the 2021 motif, I was skunked. Not only at Satan’s Creek (a place that frequently produces ten or so brookies per outing) but at two other creeks I hit just to avoid scoring a donut.  In a two-day fishing trip, I only saw one fish – in a hole so booby-trapped with overhanging branches, I couldn’t even cast to it. And back at my sleazy no-tell motel, things didn’t go much better. When I needed to extend another night to avoid the skunk – and to avoid being imprisoned by my own usual four walls - nobody was at the front desk, and a sign said they wouldn’t be back until 3 pm. (It was presently 9 a.m.) I asked a maintenance guy in a camo hat what gives. But he couldn’t understand my question. He was hard of hearing, so I had to drop my mask, hammock-style under my chin, like the Frednecks do when they bother to wear one at all.  “Oh, sorry, nobody’s there,” he said. “The guy who mans the desk had to go to his other job, and the owner doesn’t wanna pay for extra help. If you can’t get into your room, just come knock on Room 111. I live here, too. I’ll either be in there, or outside smoking a cigarette.”

I know it was just at a crappy motel in the wilds of Maryland, so I don’t want to over-extrapolate, but I  was beginning to think Tablet magazine’s Alana Newhouse was right: everything is broken. The poor motel desk clerk had to report to his other job in the middle of his current job? What is America becoming?  When did we gig-economy ourselves out of being civilized? 

On the last day of 2021, I had to catch a fish. It’s bad luck to go out on a skunk. So now back home, I headed to a nearby bass pond to right some wrongs.  The temps were moderate, but still too cold for typical bass feeding. The water was off-color. I was running out of time, needing to get home to fix New Year’s dinner – my mom’s braciole that she typically makes on Christmas Eve, which we couldn’t have this year.  I cast and cast to no avail. I was beginning to suspect God hated me, as I tend to read more into fishing than I should.  (There is some New Testament justification for this – at least five of Christ’s disciples were fishermen, including his two favorites, Peter and John.)

On my very last cast, I said a testy prayer, “If you care at all about me salvaging this horrible year, let me catch something to end it.” Just then, a lethargic largemouth hit my Pistol Pete, an expensive trick fly (basically a woolly bugger with a propeller on it) that I thought I’d run out of, before finding one last straggler in the cup-holder of my car. I got the fish up, and could see his gaping maw, but then the fly rubberbanded out of his lip and into a high branch, and I lost both the fly and the fish. I didn’t know how to interpret this. God love/hated me, I decided.  Like the rest of 2021, it’s all a wash.

To cap my winter break off, Mother Nature, who has been mighty surly lately, dropped 15 inches of snow on us. My driveway is a tenth of a mile long, and pitched on a hill, but my nearly new snowblower refused to start. (With me and my two sons shoveling, it’s an eight-hour job by hand, and I was still COVID coughing.)  About six of my neighbor’s border trees went down, three of them into his house, and one of them into mine.  Oh well, I said, at least our electricity didn’t go out, like it has for 40,000 or so other locals. And then it did, right as I started this piece. I know plenty have it much, much worse.  Just the other day, at least 600 people had their homes and life possessions reduced to piles of ash in the wildfires in Boulder County, Colorado. But 2021 has made me a little gun-shy about counting my comparative blessings. Dame Fortune giveth. But she ain’t shy about Indian-giving, either.  The enduring lesson of 2021 is that we’re never quite in the clear.

If you’re the sort of hardy soul that has managed to endure this marathon vinegar session, I realize that I’m being whiny and sour.  But part of curing an illness is acknowledging that you have one. And I do have two remedies for what ails me, which I will now share with you.

The first, simply enough, is my dog.  I love my dog, and love all dogs.  There has always been something about them that speaks to me. We understand each other without words, which is the best kind of understanding.  There’s no language to misinterpret, no secret motives to decode. They are pure appetite and affection. There is no guile or subterfuge or passive aggressiveness. You always know where you stand with dogs. Unlike their best friends (humans), they are incapable of dishonesty.

My own dog, Solomon, and I, have a lot in common. Though he is a stately Great Pyrenees, and I am a less-stately middle-aged whiner, we both like peeing on things. We both like sleeping a lot. We both like being given salty treats for not-very-impressive accomplishments, like sitting. Unlike Solomon, I am physically incapable of licking my own nethers. But if I ever figure it out, it could be a real game-changer.

I tell you all this to say that in the middle of my snowpocalypse travails, we let the dog out in the yard. He didn’t care about the downed trees, or outed electricity, or whatever else was ailing us. He just thought: “Snow, fun!  I want at it.” And he went at it. His people – the Great Pyrenees  – were bred to guard sheep by their lonesome in the Pyrenees Mountains that bisect the Iberian peninsula from the rest of Europe. They are gentle-giant mellow fellows, and yet, they spring into guardian action when action is called for. Many is the night Solomon will walk the perimeter of our property (my wife calls him “Perimeter Pete”), as he barks for hours at white-tailed deer and squirrels and owls and whatever else might be in the woods, which as far as he knows, are potential threats to us.  He is the best kind of friend –  vocally loyal.

Watching him play without hesitation in the snow is an act of vicarious happiness.  He plays the way my once-young children and I did when the driveway wasn’t something to shovel for eight hours, but to sled.  Solomon makes snow angels, and hops like an Arctic fox. He barks at falling flakes, and turns his nose into a snow plow, digging for careless voles. The tired old world he’s known suddenly takes on all kinds of new possibilities.  Here’s a small taste:

He’s best described by a good friend of mine, who loves dogs as well. (Most of my good friends do – I don’t quite trust people who don’t.)  I’d sent him a video of Solomon checking out his Christmas stocking, hung over the fireplace,  and even though it wasn’t filled yet, Solomon remembered the goodness it once contained, and was waiting expectantly for more of the same. As should we all. After I sent my friend this……..

…….he wrote the following:  “That dog’s spirit shines right through. Wonderful. A dog’s like a five-year-old who never ages. Yesterday doesn’t exist, tomorrow’s always Christmas, and whatever we’re doing right now is the best thing we’ve ever done. Just perpetual joy.”

My second methadone hit – my step-down drug from despair – comes in another unlikely form, that of Garrison Keillor.  It’s popular to disparage him in conservative circles, even though he is perhaps the very best satirist of the public-radio culture they tend to despise (whatever world you truly know, you are always most capable of inflicting injury upon).  He has increasingly been dismissed by libs, too, both as an anachronistic relic, and because he had a minor #MeToo dust-up which didn’t amount to much, but cost him just about everything, reputation-wise.  It seemed Mickey-Mouse to me. But whatever his personal tendencies, I tend to judge artists on the art they make, and Garrison Keillor has long made perfect sentences. Which is hard to do if you’re with sin, and just as hard to do if you’re without.

If you only know him from his old radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, which had fine monologues and music (even if I could’ve done without Guy Noir sketches and Rutabaga Council of America commercial parodies)  his writing – his novels and columns – are top-shelf. So top-shelf, in fact, that a New Yorker  friend of mine (Keillor was once a staff writer for them, and in fact, hatched the idea for his radio show after doing a piece on the Grand Ole Opry for The New Yorker  in the seventies)  told me that the legendary New Yorker writer/editor Roger Angell, who probably has more institutional memory than anyone alive, once said of Keillor that he “was the best natural writer The New Yorker had published since Thurber.” 

The essay of his I regularly flip to when life presses in was an original work for his 2014 collection of otherwise already-published pieces, The Keillor Reader. It is titled “Cheerfulness,” and I return to it like I do the Psalms or Proverbs.  “Cheerfulness,” Keillor writes, “is a choice, like choosing what color socks to wear, the black or the red. Happiness is something that occurs, or it doesn’t, and don’t hold your breath. Joy is a theological idea, pretty rare among us mortals and what many people refer to as joy is what I would call bragging. Bliss is brief, about five seconds for the male, fifteen for the female. Contentment is something that belongs to older cultures: Americans are a hungry, restless people, ever in search of the rainbow, the true source, the big secret. Euphoria is a drug.”
 
Cheerfulness, he continues, “is a habit you assume in the morning and hang on to as best you can for the rest of the day. It fails at times and then it recovers. It’s a job.”  When Keillor started in radio at the University of Minnesota, he did a 15-minute noontime newscast, edited with care from the AP teletype, delivered in an Edward R. Murrow voice. He came to find out that the college’s transmitter had been out of commission all along. “I had been reading the news to myself and the studio walls and nobody else. Somehow this did not discourage me.”  Instead, he celebrated small graces, sometimes the only ones on offer:  the campus literary magazine publishing his poem, his hiring by a YMCA camp north of Duluth, which yielded a blessed  summer of tennis doubles and canoe trips down the Saint Louis River. “The key to cheerfulness,” he discovered that summer, “was forward movement. For me, the calm contemplative life equals melancholy. Keep knocking. If the door doesn’t open, move on. Somewhere there is a place for you and you will know it when you get there.”

And so, he celebrates things other people hate, like winter: “Winter is a chastening time in the north. It scours the soul. Your natural meanness, the urge to bash your enemies and steal their meat, dissipates. I pour honey on my pancakes, the sweetness of life. I write a check to Episcopal Relief, not even knowing what relief Episcopalians need (laxatives? Bicarbonate of soda?)…..” 

In four decades of doing a radio show, he had learned to live with his own failures: “I suffer for my screw-ups…..the monologue that wanders off into the ditch and collapses, the laborious song, the wimpy sketch, the guest out in left field: I go home and hang my head and relive the low points over and over and wish I could anesthetize myself with a good stiff drink. I do know how to suffer. I learned some from the {Sanctified} Brethren and some from other writers. I do a good job of it. Suffering is the ground from which cheerfulness springs. I wrote that sentence to see how it looks and then I didn’t delete it, so there it is.”

He has likewise learned to put the bad news in its place, to live with it, but to not be overcome by it:

I pour a cup of coffee, open the paper. While I slept, men and women compiled some of what is known about yesterday, and today there is nothing important. That’s the beauty of the newspaper. Radio and TV are so ponderous, they make the weather forecast sound like the Magna Carta. The Internet can suck you in and you wind up watching YouTube videos of cats sitting on toilets. But with a newspaper one glance tells you: nothing new – negotiations continue, experts disagree, prospects remain uncertain, the rich get richer – so file yesterday away and let’s deal with today. The coffee is dark and suggestive, my skin is clean, the obituary page is about other people. In good spirits, I go to church to hear the Scripture, chant the psalm, join the prayers, and recite the creed whether today I believe most of it or only some. I arrive late, just in time for the prayer of contrition, and there’s not room in the pew for a tall man to kneel comfortably. I have to twist into position, which reminds me of trying to make love in the backseat of an old VW.  Her name was Sarah; she was tall too……The homily this morning is on the Prodigal Son, his callow faithlessness, the joyful love of his father, the bitterness of the righteous brother. Like the P.S., I’ve wasted my inheritance in far countries, tried to buy friendship, been disloyal as most of us narcissists tend to be, but have not been reduced to eating pig food. Not yet, thank you. Nor have I bilked elderly widows of their life savings. Nor have I asked a lover to help me kill a spouse, as Clytemnestra did when her husband, Agamemnon, returned from the Trojan War. Perfectly nice people are capable of heinous deeds. That’s what so much of great literature is about. Innocence is not what God expects of us. I used to think He expects us to find a way to self-mortification, perhaps martyrdom. Now I think he wants us to be grateful: in other words, cheerful. Lighten up.

If my dog could talk, he wouldn’t have said it any better.

Bonus dog porn:  From Orvis’s “Moment of Chill” series, here are some Bernese Mountain pups – the supermodels of dogs - running through their first snow. (I am partial to the breed, as I used to have one.)

That Christmas cash your grandmother sent you is burning a hole in your pocket, and nothing good will come of it. Knowing you, it’ll probably go straight up your nose. Why not put it to better use, and subscribe to Slack Tide before the paywall goes up next week?