A whole new opportunity for me

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For the first time in living memory, I was the only passenger in a TSA security line at a major airport — Tucson, noon on a Friday, a time you'd expect Arizonans to be heading for Nome or Juneau for a weekend of darkness, but no. I wended back and forth in the maze of barriers and the guy at the conveyor seemed happy to see me.

I zipped on through and counted 15 uniformed men and women defending the country against one octogenarian liberal who's never owned a gun, hasn't fired an explosive in fifty years and then only a few bottle rockets, and arrived at my gate two hours early, and celebrated by buying a latte at a coffee stand that offers tables and chairs.

This is a great boon to authors, having a table in an airport to set the laptop on, and few airports offer them for free, not realizing that most Americans over forty are authors or thinking about becoming one. You have to buy a latte or else pay exorbitant fees to join a club and sit among software executives. I leave a $5 tip for the employees who clean the tables. And when people open up a conversation and ask about my line of work, I don't say I'm an author because they'll say, "I've been thinking about writing a book myself."

First, they ask, "Where you from?" and I've learned not to say, "New York City" because it obliges them to talk about horrible criminal acts committed in broad daylight by homeless illegal migrants from Nicaragua, so I say, "Lincoln, Nebraska," and that's the end of it. Once someone mentioned their admiration of Abraham Lincoln, but mostly they say, "What's it like there?" and I say, "Fabulous. I'd never live anywhere else." And then they ask what I do for a living.

I'm an author of fiction so there are various ways I can go with this. Sometimes I'm an Anglican priest but I can also be an English lit professor or a proctologist and usually I'm safe from further questioning. If they happen to be Episcopalian, then I'm a member of a secret priestly order that lives in a monastery in Montana. If they happen to be an English teacher, I talk about J.F. Powers.

I used to know Jim Powers and I admire his work, Morte D'Urban and Prince of Darkness, but I invent a whole series of baseball novels he wrote about Babe Ruth touring with an exhibition team, the Sorbitol All-Stars during the winter, traveling around South America. I've never set foot in South America so it's fun. I have never run into a South American, thank G od.

Nobody ever shows the slightest interest in proctology. They just avoid shaking hands.

Other people who travel for a living complain about it but I love it especially now that I've become unknown. I used to be a semi-celeb back in the Eighties but my audience has mostly drifted into dementia and they travel only with caregivers and under sedation, so it's a whole new opportunity for me.

The people I meet ask, "So what did you think of the election?" and maybe I say, "I was in China the whole time and I'd like to talk about it but I can't because I'm wearing a heart monitor that a State Department computer has control of and there's a list of 47 words that if I utter any one of them, my heart stops and I fall unconscious into your arms." But in the Tucson airport, nobody said hello so I had to be simply who I am, no relief, just one more aging has-been who once played the Hollywood Bowl, Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, and now I'm playing senior centers and rehab facilities, singing some, telling old jokes, but also doing blood pressure and neck massages and upping people's liquid intake. You do what you can for people. Once dementia has set in, there's not much demand for fiction: life itself becomes fiction.

Which makes me wonder about what I've been telling you. Which is true, which is false. I leave it to you, I gotta plane to catch.

See you later, alligator.

Garrison Keillor is an author and radio personality. His latest book is "Cheerfulness". Buy it at a 38% discount! by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR.