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I did a show Saturday night singing duets with a tall woman and was so fascinated by the perfect harmonies on the Everlys' "Let It Be Me" that I forgot to take an intermission until almost two hours had passed and I saw elderly people my age dashing in panic up the aisle to empty their bladders, a weird feeling, to create something so wonderful you wind up torturing people, sort of like painting a mural so beautiful people gaze at it and don't notice the stairs and fall and break an arm.
I was a writer for years but dreamed of being a singer and now here I was singing good tenor to a fabulous soprano, meanwhile hundreds of people were hoping not to wet their pants. An out-of-body experience for me, a physical reality for them.
It's a night I'll remember for the rest of my life (I'm 83) whereas vast acres of my middle and elder years are a blank to me, which worries my beloved. "You remember that September in Paris, the little café on the square with the fountain, the strolling gypsy guitarist," she says, but I don't. "The nymph in the fountain, the pigeons on her shoulders?" Don't remember them either.
I remember when I was a kid, our family driving home from Sunday night gospel meeting and stopping at A&W for root beer floats, how beautiful they were after an hour of contemplating eternal damnation. I remember being sent to Aunt Jo's house when my mother was having babies, a house with a wood-burning stove and outhouse like in Little House on the Prairie. I remember my first time on skis, skidding down a steep hill and thinking, "I will never do this again," a promise I have kept.
The show with Heather Masse, the tall woman, was at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, where I had done hundreds of shows back in a former life, and people asked, "Doesn't it feel wonderful to be back here?" and the answer was No. Way too much went on there for anyone to remember. Clutter preventing nostalgia.
But I remember doing shows at Radio City Music Hall with Don and Phil Everly thirty-some years ago. The two in shiny green suits rising on the stage elevator, strumming, singing "I bless the day I found you, I want to stay around you," the beautiful sigh of the crowd. I grew up listening to them, my favorite pop stars — I come from polite well-behaved people so the Stones and the Dead were not available to me; I liked Simon and Garfunkel and Don and Phil.
Backstage I noticed that the brothers never kidded each other and hardly ever looked each other in the eye. Thirty years of close harmony singing the same hit songs night after night, year after year, handcuffed in stardom, had created a brotherhood that threatened to devour them so they were very formal around each other. Chet Atkins and Leo Kottke were on that show along with my Shoe Band and all of them joked around more or less continually, trying to make everyone laugh. Every guitarist's secret wish, to put down the Martin and pick up a mic and do a stand-up comedy.
After the show Saturday, in bed at the hotel, lying next to my beloved reading Jane Eyre, I asked, "How's that book you're reading?" She said, "It's great." In other words, "Don't talk to me." And I wondered if she'd read some of my books. I wrote quite a few. If you slept with an author, wouldn't you think you might? Or no? Maybe romance requires mystery, and intimacy is about intimations. Not many therapists marry their patients. And perhaps my deletions of recall are a way of staying young. I had my regrets about the show last night and now it's a new day and a fresh start. And believe it or not, I'm working on a musical about longevity. People dread getting old but they don't want to die: that's the hook.
Dinner waited on the table
Each hour, each day, each step you take
Life is good, people. Especially if you use the Delete key
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.
The secret is not a calm disposition.
It isn't a deep inner strength
Or a good physician.
The secret of longevity is length.
And Mrs. Melville paced the floor
As Herman worked his little fable
Slowly into something more.
Creeps slowly like a crustacean,
Until the candles on your cake
Become a conflagration.