The latest First Lady Michelle
Rode down to this town on the El
From the South Side
And is quite qualified
To do good and do it quite well.
A tiny gesture at a large historic moment that demanded “Endymion” or “Helen in Egypt,” but time was short and her security detail was eager to get going.
My brother died that winter, at 71, skating on a lake near his home in Madison, Wisconsin. He stepped onto the ice and slipped and fell backward, hitting the back of his head, and was taken to the hospital, unconscious. He seemed to recover and even walked with assistance down the hall, but there was bleeding on the brain stem and he died a few days later. He was a sailor and an engineer, a problem-solver, not cut out for the suit-and-tie corporate life, and found his way to the Sea Grant research program and had a happy career doing environmental projects on the Great Lakes, much of his time spent aboard boats. He was the captain of the twenty-three-foot Brita Grace, and his son, Douglas, was his first mate. Sailing and family and following Christ were the grandeur in his life and also skating. You stride out onto the ice and leave the motorized world behind, gliding in rhythmic strides into the nineteenth century. He needed grandeur to get free of the pietists and the regimentation and paperwork. He was a happy traveler, to the fjords of Norway and Alaska, Paris, London, Berlin, and that square in Cádiz where we sat under the great white awning stretched like a sail over the plaza. There was a statue of a great man, perhaps a king, in the middle. Drunks had pissed on him and passersby ignored him. Great men don’t notice grandeur, they are too busy being admired. My brother lived for grandeur and found it on large bodies of water, and I lived in search of intimacy. He was close to Dad, was Dad’s successor. He learned carpentry from Dad, absorbed the love of cars and machinery, admired competence. The incompetent stood and cursed the problem and kicked it and caused more problems; the engineer studied the problem, devised a solution and when it failed, made intelligent revisions. I imagine that as Philip fell on the ice, his brain had noted how he’d lost his footing and was planning a correction for the future.
At the funeral, his body lay in a closed coffin with a spray of lilies on top. He didn’t want to be embalmed and thereby leach poisons into the earth or be cremated and pollute the air—he intended to decompose and enrich the earth and rise up through the roots into the foliage of the red oak and maples—and so his body, from which many organs had been harvested for donation, was simply refrigerated and put in a spruce box and not exhibited. There was a great deal of singing. My sister Linda spoke about how Philip loved nautical museums and if you went with him, you’d be done after forty-five minutes and he’d still have two hours to go, so bring a good book. My nephew Douglas spoke about what a good teacher his dad was and how he’d taught his children how to skate and especially how to fall without hurting themselves: Doug inherited Philip’s sense of humor. My mother, 93, sat in the front row, weeping for her first child, her mainstay, taken cruelly from her. A Black minister friend of Philip’s sat down to the piano and played “I’ll Fly Away” and “I’m Going to the Kingdom” in jubilant stride-gospel style, the congregation clapping, and I remembered how blessedly happy Philip had been sailing along the coast of Norway and into the narrow Sognefjord, so narrow the ship had little clearance on either side, and he stood in the bow, looking side to side, exhilarated, as if coming home. We took him out to the cemetery in his plain wooden box, sang a few hymns, and then one of the gravediggers walked up and bent over, revealing his butt crack, and cranked the box down into the earth. It was perfect. Praise and reverence, grief, and low comedy, all at once.
And that summer, old age came knocking on my door. I was at a day spa in Minneapolis, as Peruvian flute music was playing, and the Jamaican masseuse was telling me how good her life had been since she turned it over to the Lord Jesus Christ, and suddenly my mouth was numb, my speech slurred, my brain melting. I hoisted up on my elbows and said I had to go now. I dressed. I paid her. A balloon was expanding inside my head. I careened out the door, listing slightly to port, and eased into my car and drove twelve miles to a hospital in St. Paul, walked into the ER waiting room, stood sixth in line at the admissions desk, and when it was my turn, I said in a clear voice, “I believe I am having a stroke.” An orderly brought out a gurney and helped me aboard and took me to a curtained alcove and said to strip down to my shorts and put on a hospital gown. And a nurse asked, “Do you need help?” No, I am fine, I said. A Minnesota reflex. The gown was light cotton, flowery. I lay on the gurney, on my back, hands clasped over my abdomen. If I died on the spot, I would appear composed. I kept calm. In my mind, I was reciting the counties of Minnesota: Aitkin, Anoka, Becker, Beltrami, Benton, Big Stone, Blue Earth, Brown, Carlton, Carver, Cass, Chippewa, Chisago, and so on, to test brain function.
The nurse announced my numbers—Blood pressure: 139/72. Pulse: 59—as a young Chinese neurologist walked in, shook my hand, and examined me. She tapped me with her little silver hammer and scratched the sole of my foot and told me to watch her index finger as she moved it out there and up here and down there. She said that she listened to my show when she was in medical school. She wrote on a form in her clipboard, “Very pleasant 67 y.o. male, tall, well-developed, well-nourished, flat affect, awake, alert and appropriate.” I’ve always had a flat affect: I’m a Minnesotan, I thought it was the appropriate way to be. Other people aim for excellence, I am comfortable with wakefulness.
She shipped me off to the MRI Space-Time Cyclotron, where they ran me up a rail and into the maw of the beast for fifty minutes of banging and whanging, buzzing and dinging, and claustrophobia on the verge of panic, the nurse’s voice in the speaker by my ear saying, “How are we doing?” I said, “I’m perishing.” She said, “You’re doing great. We’re almost finished.”
It was a simple thromboembolic stroke likely due to atrial fibrillation. I stayed in the hospital for four days. I walked the Stroke Ward, towing my IV tower, passed a thirtyish woman with a pronounced limp, slip-sliding along, gripping a walker, her mother at her side. Heartbreaking to see a young woman so stricken, but the mother had a brisk, let’s-get-it-done air about her, and what else can you do? Take the blow and get up and go. I tried not to peep through open doorways but couldn’t not and did and saw elderly persons lying speechless, crumpled, like lobsters trying to claw their way out of the tank at the restaurant, or slumped in a chair, anguished, unspeaking, and what if rehab can’t restore the eminence you once were and you get shunted into a warehouse like a turtle in a gravel box with a couple leaves of lettuce? I, a rotgut sinner, had escaped serious damage and was still ambulatory, like a veteran of Pickett’s Last Charge who suffered a sprained ankle. The doctor showed me a map of my brain and pointed to a dark spot: “That’s where your stroke hit.” What she called a “silent” part of the brain. Sort of the Wyoming of the brain. And if it had hit the Chicago Loop, a couple millimeters away, I would’ve had significant motor and speech losses. Maybe become a cabbage or an artichoke. She had put me on a powerful blood thinner. I who had disdained chemistry in eleventh grade. (How many chemists had been saved by reading a novel?)
It did occur to me, lying in bed, that had I exercised strenuously every day as a person should do, my heart would’ve been stronger and it would’ve fired the blood clots harder and they’d have flown over Wyoming and landed in Chicago and today I’d be a gimp, a feeb, a crip, a wacko with big X’s for eyeballs. Thanks to my sedentary habits, the bomb landed out on the lonesome prairie, no big deal, so be grateful for what you have. I did not share this thought with Jenny, who was terribly anxious about me. She brought Maia to visit, and she and I sang, “I want to hold your hand,” and she checked my nose for boogers and I told her the one about the two penguins on the ice floe—“You look like you’re wearing a tuxedo.”—“What makes you think I’m not?” An old favorite. She’d heard it dozens of times. It’s one of those rare jokes that improves with repetition until all y
ou need is the first line: These two penguins sat on an ice floe.
A reporter called from the local paper to update my obituary, and she was very nice. “We just want to make sure everything’s accurate,” she said. “You’re on your third marriage—is that correct?” Yes, ma’am. “Three children?” Including my stepdaughter, correct. “Are there any honors or awards we may not be aware of?” None. “How are you feeling, if you don’t mind my asking?” Never better. “Do you plan to resume your show?” I do, yes, indeed. Of course.
I am fond of my brain, the elaborate dreams it stages at night, sometimes a nightmare in which I’m proofreading a manuscript and nothing makes sense. I’m grateful for the ideas it offers on a silver plate in the morning. I once lived in a little house beside a waterfall in Marine on St. Croix and lay in bed listening to the low rumble of the creek falling over the stone ledge and twenty feet down to a pool and racing down the hill to the St. Croix River, and after three minutes fell asleep and awoke at 4 a.m. with a whole morning’s work in my head. I miss that waterfall.
Lying in the stroke ward among the stricken, it seemed like a good idea to think about a funeral and spare Jenny the guesswork, so I scribbled a few notes (Episcopal Low Mass, no eulogies, none—hire a choir— “Abide with Me” and “O Love That Will Not Let Me Go,” and Mozart’s Ave Verum and “The Blind Man Stood in the Road and Cried” ), and thinking about a funeral made me think about sex, of course—what else?—and I remembered making love upstairs in the farmhouse in Freeport, the Valentine’s Night tryst of 1976, the apartment on Jagtvej in Copenhagen, the waist-deep water off Oahu, the hanging bed in the log cabin in Wisconsin, the Ritz in Boston. I remember the lodge at the national park and Jenny and I stepping out on a balcony and there, in the moonlight, the vastness of the Grand Canyon. Memories of sensual delight, the bag of blood thinner attached to the needle in my forearm.
I revisited Anoka, Minnesota, in 1954, the swanky window of Colburn-Hilliard men’s clothiers and the gray wool sportcoat I coveted, Shadick’s soda fountain, the front window of the Anoka Herald where I typed my sports stories, Anoka Dairy across the street. I remembered how it felt to ride a bike no-handed. I remembered Mrs. Moehlenbrock, who gave our fourth-grade class the essay topic “What would you do if you had one day left to live?” We had just read an inspiring story about the rich, full life Helen Keller led despite being blind, deaf, speechless, and rather homely, and Mrs. Moehlenbrock suggested we write something inspiring about appreciating the ordinary things of life, but I wrote that I wanted to fly to Paris. She pointed out that it would take a day just to get to Paris. I thought that maybe I could get a good tailwind and glimpse it for an hour before I died. Maybe the prospect of seeing Paris would be good enough.
A tall dark-haired nurse named Sarah brought me a hypodermic to coach me on self-administered shots of heparin, and without hesitation I plunged it into my belly fat. No man is a coward in the presence of a young woman. I shuffled around in a faded cotton gown like Granma in Grapes of Wrath and peed into a plastic container under the supervision of Sarah, who made sure I didn’t get dizzy and fall and bang my noggin. A social worker asked if I wished to see a counselor. I said, “My wife is the only counselor I need.” “What about a chaplain?” she said. I said, “God forbid.”
Doctors came to consult. An important neurologist arrived, judging by the retinue of disciples in his wake who observed as he tapped me and had me stand on one foot, arms extended, in my little gown, like Clara awaiting the Nutcracker. The disciples observed in silence. I imagined that, out in the hall, he had said, “This is the guy with the finicula of the esplanade, complicated by deviated nobiscus linguini in the odessa.” They looked at me solemnly, folks who had aced all those math and science courses I avoided so that I could read the transcendentalists. And what had Henry Thoreau done for me anyway? “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Thanks a lot. Exactly what I don’t need to hear. Thoreau had to transcend lousy medicine, whereas science was offering me a productive old age. I was grateful and I told them so.
The nurses were cheerful women who strode into my room, noted the urine flow chart, asked the questions, prepped me on upcoming events, took my blood pressure. Women with the caring gene that men don’t get (or don’t dare exhibit). To the male orderly, I was a body, but the nurses knew me as a brother. They drew blood gently with some small talk to ease the little blip of puncture, and I felt our common humanity, a great gift to one struck by a stroke. Injury and illness and death are all so ordinary, they come too soon and we’re all in the same boat and your fine intellect does not prevail against it, but in the way she takes your blood pressure—a simple mechanical procedure, a robot could do it— she conveys by touch and the tone of her voice her recognition of your humanity.
And then she leaves and I do the crossword, pondering 24 Across, “Could turn into the next story” (spiralstaircase), and the phone rang, someone said, “So how are you doing?” and I said, “Doing great. Never felt better.” Which is what you should say, unless your eyeballs have popped out of your head. There was an old airline clerk in Minneapolis who, whenever I asked, “How are you?” he said, “Living the dream.” Me, too. My brain had dark blotches in it, but I could still write a limerick.
An old man suffered a stroke
And, grateful that he didn’t croak,
He flew to Oaxaca
And a yellow mocca-
Sin bit him. He died. That’s no joke.
I wrote a letter to Jim Harrison, who’d gotten his own close-up looks at mortality:
I went to church this a.m. and found myself on the prayer list. It was nice to be there though my faith is rather faint. But the church preaches gratitude and what else can one feel after one’s brain took a shot without too much damage. Back at the hospital I left twenty or thirty people collapsed in wheelchairs and here I am walking to church and singing praise to the Lord and walking home (a little wearily). I feel like the amnesiac who got Alzheimer’s and forgot he didn’t know who he was.
I went back to work and my main guy, Dr. Rodysill, didn’t tell me to find a sunny corner to sit in so I didn’t. The show started up in the fall and I went gadding about as a speaker—graduations, lecture series, college convocations, book club luncheons, sometimes for money, often not. One week: Walnut Creek, CA, Austin, TX, Opelika, AL, Madisonville, KY; landed in Hot Springs, AR, on a Friday, did the broadcast Saturday, on Sunday flew to Greenville, NC, then DC for the Poetry Out Loud finals, then Albuquerque for an orchestra benefit, Milwaukee to do APHC, Boston Pops the next week, a speech at the Harvard Lampoon. No wonder I never got to know my neighbors. When the Lampoon invites you, you say yes, knowing that one day soon you’ll be a nobody like everybody else.
Back in those days, I was in demand as a graduation speaker, and on numerous June afternoons found myself in a procession of the Board of Trustees, the faculty and me, the speaker, the noose around my neck, as the crowd looks eagerly beyond us for the graduates themselves and cameras flash, then a vague invocation is offered, retiring faculty are applauded (gratitude? relief?), and then I, the guest of honor, am given a big booming introduction as if I had brought the serum to a snowbound village by dogsled and en route rescued small children from the path of a speeding locomotive. I rise to tepid applause and realize that 89 percent of the crowd hopes I will speak for three minutes or less; I have 3,000 words in front of me and the crowd only wants 150 of them. So I skip the introductory self-mortification and launch in and after two paragraphs about the importance of rising to challenges, the audience is gone-gonegone. Everyone is focused on a particular graduate, Madison, Hannah, Joshua, Jacob, their shining star, and I am merely a clothing rack. The honor of speaking turns out to be public shame.
I dressed up in a long black gown and gave the baccalaureate address at Princeton, climbing a long flight of stairs to the pulpit high on the chapel wall, so my speech began with labored breathing. The speech was funny, theoretically, but nobody laughed for
the first few minutes because my voice was ricocheting around in the magnificence of the Gothic arches—I kept hearing what I’d said five seconds before, a distraction that slowed me down, which made it all worse. I finished the speech in fifteen minutes by cutting out pages four, five, and six, and descended from the mountaintop to grateful applause and went to the reception, where nobody mentioned the speech in specific terms. They said, “Good job,” as you’d say to a child who’d delivered a large bowel movement.
St. Olaf College invited me to come speak at a convocation, assuming I would poke fun at them, but when I stood up in Boe Chapel I put the speech away. The title was “I Regret, You Regret, We Rejoice,” and it was about the power of community and when I saw the chapel was packed to the rafters, the speech suddenly wasn’t good enough, I needed something better so I punted. They were in the midst of midterm exams and needed to feel communal, so I walked down the aisle and sang, “My country ’tis of thee” and the whole room joined in “sweet land of liberty,” and by the time we came to “where my fathers died” we were in spontaneous four-part harmony. No piano, no organ. It was powerful. And then “O beautiful for spacious skies” and “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound” and “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord” and “She was just seventeen if you know what I mean”—some students had to google that one on their phones. We sang “Children of the heavenly Father safely in His bosom gather,” and we got tears in our eyes from the promise that God will not forsake us and also the harmony that promises we will not forsake each other. And then “O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder consider all the worlds Thy hands have made.” The sweet chariot swung low, we worked on the railroad, Old Man River rolled, there was a sweet hour of prayer in the amber waves of grain over the rainbow, and we sang good night to the ladies and the sweet acquaintance that should not be forgot and the Amen chorus. A solid hour of a cappella singing, and off they went to class. I declined the check and headed home feeling uplifted by youthful melodious fervor. Lutherans can break your heart with their singing. It was a genuine service, unlike the crappy speech I’d written. I guess St. Olaf saw it otherwise, though, because they never invited me back.
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