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I am very fond of my current age, the age at which I no longer recognize the names of famous celebrities and when I go to YouTube to hear the songs of my youth I see commercials for walkers and stool softeners — and of the classmates who stood in our blue gowns on the football field that June day and were urged to go make the world a better place, a majority have slipped away into the hereafter.
And yet certain glories are more glorious than ever. A summer day, for one. I took summer for granted in my casual youth and now, grinding away at work all morning at my desk, I step outside into a Manhattan heaven, festive cliff dwellers stream through Central Park, the city is golden, and an old achy man feels it in his soul because today he skipped the newspaper, which is a catalog of decline, despair, and dereliction, and he is getting bulletins from the passing crowd that Americans are as free and brave as ever.
My beloved has told me this for years when I feel blue: "Maybe you just need to take a good long walk."
She and I went to the Met last Thursday night to see an opera about the hereafter and it was phenomenal. And though I understood very little of it, I enjoyed the energy tremendously. It was El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego by Gabriela Lena Frank, her first opera, its premiere at the Met, and from the first downbeat you knew this ain't Puccini, the chorus is yipping and shrieking, skeletal beings emerge from below in clouds of steam, the Diego longs for his dead lover Frida, and we set aside expectations and simply experience the evening as it's given to us, the maestro drawing the music to its long whispery spectral close and silence, and then the audience explodes in applause and people are standing and shouting and there I am, a small-town guy from Minnesota, shouting along with them. Roars of approval for the lead singers, the dancers, the orchestra and a frenzy of approval for the Met chorus.
When I was your age, kiddo, I wanted to be smart and have insights and come to a reasoned judgment that I can defend as principled and now I just let the experience have its way with me.
I go to the opera because my love cares for opera. I put myself in her hands. We get in a cab and head for Lincoln Center. We pass the Dakota on West 72nd Street and I think of John Lennon and others whose lives were cut short, grandson Freddy, cousin Roger, cousin Lynne, my pal Barry Halper who gave me my first job in radio and was driving east of St. Paul when he took his eyes off the road to light a smoke and crashed into the rear of a school bus, and then, at the opera, I feel them crying out to me. In Spanish. I don't understand Spanish but I understand them. Life is a gift, it's a miracle that we exist and have each other, and when it's gone, our understanding is complete.
Diego's grief, his pleading to La Catrina the Keeper of the Dead to allow Frida to return to life so that he can hold her in his arms, moves me more than Gabriela Frank may have intended to embrace the woman sitting next to me, her shoulder brushing mine, this beautiful shoulder that has passed me in hallways and lies next to me at night for all these years.
Life is a gift. It's a miracle that we exist, that the microscopic tadpole goes headfirst into the enormous ovum and even as the two humans are dizzy with ecstasy, science is proceeding to give them YOU whether it's what they were hoping for or not.
Tennis game is gone, haven't gone to a movie all year, don't read fiction anymore, life shrinks to the basics: Eat light, devote yourself to friendship, look after the children, go back to the classics you grew up loving, watch people be astonishing on stage, and if you are joined to another warm body bestow the best of yourself on that person. The Lord is good, His mercy endureth forever. This is the day He has made and we will rejoice and be glad. So a grizzly bear was chasing the Baptist through the woods and the Baptist cried out, "Dear G od, please convert this bear to the Christian faith." And the bear grabbed the Baptist and looked up and said, "G od is great, G od is good, and I thank Him for my food."
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.