The News From Manhattan: Friday, April 24, 2020

By Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website

24 April 20

t is drizzly today and today I shall take a deep breath and click Send and 125,000 words of memoir go off to my agent. A large day, the end of months of obsession, and now I’ve promised myself that I shall resume the agility exercises I’ve abandoned, and keep myself from sliding into utter decrepitude. I’ll also put the novel on the fast track and hope to finish by the end of May.

I seem to have most of my marbles and so I’d better use them. Half of all people are below average and after a month of isolation I am pretty sure I’m below the line and in the red zone but for 77 I’m okay. I’m not complaining, I agree with Solomon that knowledge tends to bring unhappiness. Look at the scientists in the White House, they’re miserable, but the Big Guy is perfectly happy winging it and the other day he suggested maybe we could try injecting bleach directly into the body, see what happens with that. Meanwhile, I am content, self-isolating in New York. People come to the city for the excitement but it’s good to take a break, not go out to dinner and then the opera or a play, but stay home with Jenny and Maia and play Uno. Others are doing likewise. The city that never sleeps is now rather drowsy, or so I hear. Young men are drag-racing on the West Side highway, there being no traffic in their way. Theaters are dark for the foreseeable future and I imagine the 20-year-olds who were majoring in theater or music are maybe switching to real estate or social work. I saw a virtual comedy show, three comics in their own apartments performing to a laptop or a cellphone, and it was very good, not the same as going to a club, but the chips and dip were free and we were barefoot. It was a good evening. We had scallops and beans for supper and as we were putting dishes in the dishwasher, I emitted a very long fart that had intonation and inflection and was on the verge of articulate speech and it was followed by a punctuation fart. Jenny laughed like crazy, even harder than at the comics.

When you marry someone, you should think of the possibility that the two of you might be quarantined someday and make sure you marry someone with a good sense of humor.

I miss the people, of course. The street face of New York women that is the facial equivalent of a wall. The New Yorkers who go around with imaginary friends who they’re not getting along with. The dogs dragging their owners along. But that will all come back someday. Restaurants probably won’t. Showbiz? Hard to tell. The horses who appear every year in “Aida” may be looking for other work. As I sometimes say to my wife, I’m glad I lived when I did. The Eighties! The Nineties! The Aughts! I’m a lucky guy, I have no ambition and I love to work. It’s like the Big Guy, he has no idea what he’s doing but he loves the briefings, the mansion, the limo, the big plane, all the men with curly wires in their ears. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, as Solomon said, but here in 12B we have no complaints. Bless you all.