A week back home on the river

I have a soft spot for St. Paul, having found a career there when I was thirty. I loved radio, having grown up in an evangelical family that refused to get a TV, and started a live variety show on Saturday nights, a chance for me, a writer, to be friends with musicians, a low-income aristocracy of warmhearted people. The show started in a storefront and went to a theater and toured the country and other people ran the business and I had the fun.

Downtown St. Paul doesn't seem to know what to do with itself these days. The online retail gargantuas have driven the downtown department stores out of business and the future of the office towers seems shaky with AI on the horizon and you can imagine a day when downtown will be a hockey arena, some homeless shelters, and a concert hall and a couple museums.

On this trip, I went to work in the downtown library — I'm writing a book, it's what we old writers do in our declining years — and it seemed to be a shelter for young unemployed people, a warm place they could sit and watch video on the library's computers. A legitimate social service but not what the librarians were intending to do with their days — direct patrons to good books about the French Revolution or the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton — not watch the clientele to make sure they aren't dealing drugs.

I camped there, and got to work on a chapter about cheerfulness, of which I am now an advocate, seeing as half of our countrymen have a previously unacknowledged longing for a lawless autocracy. So be it, it is what it is, but meanwhile I plan to be upbeat, bad news or what.

I believe more than ever in the importance of good manners and the habits of kindness. When I say, "Thank you," I want the thanked person to say, "You're welcome," rather than "No problem." I live in New York where I'm anonymous but here in old St. Paul I keep running into familiar strangers my age. We each say hello, where you from, what's up, and we find some common ground.

I run into Al and two minutes later we're recalling the day we saw Rod Carew steal third base and then home for the Twins. I meet Joanna who also went to the U and knew the poet James Wright and we remember his poem that begins, "Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, twilight bounds softly forth on the grass" and she knows the rest, about the Indian ponies whose eyes darken with kindness.

This is what I love about St. Paul. It's a community and so it's easy to strike up conversations.

Thursday afternoon, I did a stand-up show at a senior residence as a favor to a friend who lives there. A roomful of people my age, some in wheelchairs or pushing walkers, and I could see old couples, one partner alert, the other with memory issues, one caring for the other, the tenderness of lasting romance.

Maybe I shouldn't have started off by reciting the 87 counties of Minnesota in alphabetical order — they seemed sort of stunned by this show-off nonsense — so I got down to business and was as funny as I could be, which was what they wanted. I said, "I'm so old that when I leave the museum the alarm goes off." I told the joke about the old man who comes into the bar and sits by a young woman and says, "Do I come here often?"

I did forty-five minutes like that. For octogenarians, that's a long enough show. They were appreciative and gave me a sitting and rolling ovation and headed for an early supper. Many people said, "Thank you," and I said, "You're welcome. It was my pleasure." And it truly was.