I grew up with fundamentalists who looked forward to the end of the world and now progressives do too. DeSantis’s anti-woke campaign is stupidity on toast the real problem with MacWoke is its penchant for dismal pessimism, its humorlessness. He wrote because he was good at it and he knew it.Īnd now in my old age I’ve found useful work as a stand-up cheerleader for adult cheerfulness, the basic goodness of life, a counter-voice to the diversity cops and agony aunts who’ve taken over publishing, journalism, public radio and TV, and much of academia. There wasn’t much Russian or Spanish about him. Critics resented him for that and gave him grudging reviews they preferred writers who had suffered, been imprisoned, exiled, or at least had abusive fathers. John Updike told me once that he rather enjoyed reading his early work but then he was a naturally cheerful man, rare for an author. It would only give me remorse that the show wasn’t better than it was. I never listened to the show myself and I have no memorabilia from it. And the Sanctified Brethren boy, brought up on literal interpretation of Scripture, except we did have automobiles and went to doctors and attended public schools along with the unsaved. The recipient of a heart valve procedure to fix a hereditary defect that killed off several relatives in their late 50s. The radio guy who amused himself for two hours every Saturday and was (and is) astonished to encounter people who listened to it. The boy eager to do well and please his grandma and aunts. It’s a powerful articulate letter and I admire her for writing it, which she did out of love.įour artifacts of a long life.
And there is a letter from a beloved aunt in 1995, reproaching me for traveling to Rome with my fiancée, engaging no doubt in premarital sex, embarking on a path of philandering and adultery, for which there would be no forgiveness. There is a letter from a fan of my radio show, “Every Saturday at 5 p.m., everything else ceased and we gathered around the radio.” Also, in a brown envelope, eight color photographs of my innards taken by the surgical team that installed a pig valve in my heart: the valve is pale pink, the innards are dark red.
I am still that eager boy, heavier but anxious to do well. I open a box and here’s a photo of my fifth-grade class, the eager neatly-combed-and-dressed boy with glasses sitting behind John Poate is me. The pleasure of moving is the excavation of the past. I will still fly Delta but I’ll lose 25 pounds to lessen the load. Moving out of an apartment as I’ve been doing recently convinces me at last to resign from American consumer culture and live with only bedding, one towel, two changes of clothing, a pair of shoes, and one suit to wear for shows and also to be buried in.
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