And now I worry, as old people do, about the kids I see who are growing up in the dreadful clutter of American life, the gizmos and social media bullying, and can they find delight as I did in skating on the frozen Mississippi and discovering Liebling and Jenny found listening to Prokofiev and Brahms. I pray for our kids to be lighthearted. The darkness is out there, and Christmas becomes utterly beautiful, the circle of love and friendship, the lighted candles, the anticipation of the child, the radiant beams, the redeeming grace.

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And so you have men on bikes racing through narrow gaps on jammed avenues with a backpack full of shrimp curry and pad thai, meanwhile an elderly man (me) on his way to the drugstore to pick up some Alka-Seltzer stands on the curb, peering into the darkness for some glimmer of light, some sign of motion, some clue as to approaching bicycles. This is the adventure of life in Manhattan, serious bodily injury from bicyclists delivering exotic food at high speed to stay-at-home software programmers.This is why I pay extra to live in a doorman building. Felipe will deal with the guy on the bike, accept the charred wok vegetable medley and the crispy calamari and drunken noodles with peanut sauce and hand the bag to Lenny, who will bring it up to the 12th floor and leave it at our door and the food will still be hot though the restaurant is a mile away. This is a remarkable amenity. It’s not the cold weather that keeps my sweetie and me indoors, it isn’t the fear of stickups, it’s the fear of being run down by bicyclemen delivering food to other people. The fear of lying in the street while covered with garlic sauce.

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Life is good once you master the art of Deletion. Every day my laptop is full of emails asking for money to do worthwhile, even noble, things, which, if I donated to them, I’d soon be living in a cardboard box in a vacant lot, and so I click on “Unsubscribe” and they go away for a while. Instead, I google “What is the prospect of international peace and understanding?” and find that the U.N. thinks it’s inevitable and dalailama.com says it’s based on compassion and foreignpolicy.com thinks the prospects are not good. We didn’t used to have Google, my kiddoes, we used to sit and worry about these things and now at last clear answers are available. Contradictory, but still.

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I was not a good son. A good son is one who visits his mother regularly and I was too busy to do that. I ran around a lot. Sometimes I traveled in fancy company. I was once in a movie directed by Robert Altman and financed, in part, by the Pohlad family. Carl Pohlad, the richest man in Minnesota, sat next to my mother at the premiere, and the two of them carried on an extensive conversation, which didn’t faze her a bit. I was proud of her. My mother was one of thirteen children of William and Miriam on Longfellow Avenue South in Minneapolis and sometimes during the Depression she went door-to-door peddling peanut butter sandwiches she’d made. When Mr. Pohlad said, “You must be very proud of your son,” she replied, “I am very proud of all my children,” which is the correct answer.

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I live in the present. If I were to think about the future, I’d be alarmed about the utter demise of journalism and the self-degradation that many U.S. senators are eager to accept and the use of cryptocurrency to enrich the Chief Executive by tech tycoons kicking back 20% of their federal contracts, but instead I spend the day in my laboratory experimenting to design AI software to let me chat with long-deceased relatives such as my great-great-grandfather William Evans Keillor who says, “I don’t know if this is heaven — it looks like Nebraska — and immortality is not my cup of tea but I’m getting used to it. No calendars, no clocks. The good news is that death dissolves your marriage so I’m free of Sarah and I’ve taken up with an angelic slip of a girl named Celeste who flutters about in water-wings and silk undies and instead of beans and bacon we have rigatoni with zucchini, cannellini, salami Bolognese, prosciutto, radicchio, parmigiano, pepperoni primavera, chorizo crostata, guacamole, guanciale Calabrese, pistachio pesto, and Sangiovese. We never had Italian food in Minnesota in 1880.”

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The lust for world domination does not make for the good life. It’s the life of the male raccoon who battles for preeminence and winds up in a ditch being pecked at by crows. It’s not for sensible people. Be at peace, read books, cherish your friends, take walks, love life until the first coronary walks up and slugs you in the chest. Charisma is pure fiction, and so is brilliance. It’s the dummies who sit on the dais, and it’s the smart people who sit in the dark near the exits.

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I intend to enjoy defeat and go back and read Shakespeare, whom I wrote C-minus term papers about in college using terms like “well-structured,” “complex,” “buttery.” I’m going to travel to Dublin, Stockholm, Rome, where a person can become absorbed in the immediate surroundings, be engrossed in the moment. I want to hear The Marriage of Figaro again and the Fauré Requiem. I want to walk in the park with my sweetie and look at people and their dogs and the jazz musicians who congregate to jam. I want to pay attention to joyful outbursts of little kids astonished by ordinary things.

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I do not understand the neighbors, actually, such as why their summer house has LANDSCAPING and LAWN ORNAMENTS. A summer house is for relaxation, it isn’t to demonstrate craftmanship. You are supposed to sit on the porch and read Proust, you are not supposed to create a home that Proust would’ve envied.And I don’t understand why a copy of Foreign Affairs sits on their kitchen counter. In the den, out of sight, yes. In the kitchen? People are eating in the kitchen. Foreign Affairs is the diplomatic version of the prophet Jeremiah. He said, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” Foreign Affairs says pretty much the same thing except for real. Ukraine and Gaza are sort of covered in the newspapers but terrible things are happening everywhere, so much so that you don’t want to know about it. Let Antony Blinken know about it. This is why foreign policy is a minor footnote in our presidential elections, somewhat less important than bike lanes or prayer in public schools — can students in English be assigned books in which prayer occurs even if the book is clearly labeled Fiction.

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When I was 12, I was a teacher’s pet, so I was a target for playground bullies. A boy told me my teeth were green and rotten and I believed him and stopped smiling. And I believed that the Second Coming was imminent and though I was a Christian I wasn’t sure that God realized that. Brother Frank could preach a sermon that made me feel like a war criminal.But you grow up and experience the generosity of this world. Justice prevails, at least it tries to. I got a good college education on the cheap. The world is full of fascinating individuals who are here for our appreciation. Highly educated people tend to treat you with respect, which is rather stunning. Society will try to do the right thing by you. And this woman will accept my love. So what’s your problem, Mister? Enjoy the day. All of it.

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There is always an excuse for not exercising, a religious prohibition, some hereditary syndrome that makes you feel desperate when you breathe hard, an allergic reaction to your own perspiration, but these can be overcome with help. My excuse is that I hated high school phy-ed with a passion, the chin-ups, the rope climb, the running somersault, the running dive over the horse, the wrestling, the ridicule and the bullying, and I despised walking naked into a shower with other young men. I still do. After I graduated, I made it a point not to join other naked men to take showers. When invited, I have declined. If this is a favorite activity of yours, I do not judge. For some men, this may be the high point of the week. Don’t say this is self-loathing on my part because it isn’t: it’s the other men I loathe, not myself. And it’s not homophobia. I have many gay male friends and they do not undress when they come to my home. I am perfectly okay taking a shower by myself or with my wife on very rare occasions such as my 70th and 80th birthdays, the Feast Day of the Assumption in August and on October 27, the day on which Jack Morris pitched the Minnesota Twins to a 1-0 victory in the 7th game of the 1991 World Series.

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