Garrison Keillor with his daughter, Maia: “I am even more interested in longevity now that she is 15 and I am 70”© Stormi Greener
All through my twenties and thirties I assumed I’d die young in a car crash like James Dean and thereby become immortal, but then I got too old to die young and anyway I hadn’t done anything to be immortalised for and so forgot about it until, at age 55, I started to get interested in longevity instead. That was the year I begat a little girl, whose arrival in the world gave me a larger stake in the future. She was a cheery little thing. She beamed up at me and laughed when I carried her on my shoulders and twirled her around. Once she wrote “daddy” in enormous letters in green chalk on the driveway and for several weeks, despite a hard rain, I could see it when I backed the car out of the garage. I saw her clear one spring afternoon, swinging high into the air on the neighbour’s rope swing, laughing like a crazy person because her head swung up into the branches of an apple tree—it scared me to death and she laughed and laughed. I was standing in the kitchen door, about to run over and make her stop, as her head disappeared in the blossoms, and then she put her feet down and skidded to a stop and toppled over in the grass, laughing.
I am even more interested in longevity now that she is 15 and I am 70. A man is pained at the thought of abandoning his young to the coyotes and alligators and so I instructed my doctor to make sure I get to see 85 and he is doing his very best. (I had quit cigarettes already and a few years later I got nice and drunk one night and said goodbye to alcohol.) My blood is thinned to ward off strokes, I take a beta blocker to suppress atrial fibrillation, and 12 years ago a surgeon named Michael Orszulak stuck his fingers inside my heart to sew up a mitral valve that was flopping around which would have done me in. I enjoy many advantages that my grandfathers did not, who both succumbed in their early seventies, and so, having recently buried my 97-year-old mum, who outlived my father (88), I allow myself thoughts of 90 and even 95. And now medical science has announced that soon it will be quite ordinary to reach 100. Lovely. I think I am ready.
The hazards of old age we all know about from family reunions and birthday parties. The cousins you used to tear around with are stodgy and they teeter into a room and plop down in a soft place and start to doze off. The repartee is muted and murmury. You try to keep the conversation light-hearted and away from the subject of Unwellness but inevitably someone goes there and unless you drop a china platter on the floor or the dog chokes on a bone, you are going to hear about someone’s prostate.
At 70, I get some twinges of geezerishness myself now and then. If I run across a four-lane street ahead of oncoming traffic, I realise that I no longer have the long loping stride of my twenties when I was right fielder for the Jack’s Auto Repair softball team and loped into the parking lot and snagged a foul ball. I run like a duck now and I cock my head when someone talks to me. I hold onto the railing going down stairs. My brain is old and sometimes the memory circuits don’t snap into place—thank God for Google when you are trying to recall the exact nature of the Gadsden Purchase or the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act or your brain is giving you raft, rapture, rupture, after-shock, shower, shaft, hours, night shift, and you simply pick up your phone and Google “obese president of US” and there it is, William Howard Taft. If this is happening to me at 70, then imagine how doddering and dithery I might be in 20 years, or sooner, like the old farts in the Drones Club. The comedian Jonathan Winters used to do wicked impressions of elderly dither and my high school friends and I used to imitate it—the quavery voice, the trembling hand, the mental lapses on the verge of lunacy—and now the satirist starts to turn into his victim.
It dawns on me then that living past 70, the Biblical allotment, is an unnatural thing. Longevity is not nature’s plan for us. A man is programmed to degenerate. Nature only wanted me to find a female, mount her, impregnate her, raise the offspring until they could fend for themselves and then get out of the way, go die, and let the young take over. Nature is utterly uninterested in my twilight years and whether I have a good retirement plan. Once you’ve raised your kids, nature has no more use for you, and that’s why men over 50 tend to have erectile dysfunction. Nature wants you to have a good hard cock during your mating years and after 50 as your sperm become troubled and cloudy and less ambitious, nature is quite happy to let Mr Johnson hang limp and lifeless. Viagra is not found in nature. The sexual fulfilment of retired males is of no importance in the furtherance of the species. Lavishing money on lengthening the lives of useless people is not natural. Nature knows that past the age of 12, your kids have nothing to learn from you whatsoever. That’s why their hormones kick in so strongly in adolescence and they treat you like dirt: it’s nature saying, “get away from those people, they’re wrong, don’t listen to them, go find a mate.” Living to be 100, or even 80 or 90, is an artificial idea. I know that.
Nonetheless, I say, it is a lovely artificial idea. Like flying, or hip replacement, or non-fat cream for your coffee.
The American people are in favour of longevity. By a 69 to 22 margin, they are opposed to cutbacks in Medicare benefits. That’s what delivered Florida, a Republican state, to Obama and sank Romney’s canoe, the keen interest of septuagenarians in forging ahead into the land of Octo and even, Lord willing, the kingdom of Nona and Cente. Medicare was responsible for giving my mother her eighties and nineties: it ushered in a revolutionary idea in America—just because you’re old doesn’t mean you need to accept feeling crappy. Mother did not hesitate going to the doctor and so her colon cancer got caught early and she opted for major surgery and it turned out well. My dad was wary of doctors and as he got deafer and deafer he retreated into a private world. He dreaded hospitals. Once, in a hospital, a feeding tube was put down his throat, and that was the last straw for dad. Never again, he said, no matter what. And he was put on home hospice care and allowed to pass gently into the night. Mother went sailing on. Doctors saw to her eyes and her mental well-being—her late-life panic attacks were eased by Ativan, a physical therapist coaxed the old lady to follow a daily workout and up to the very end, when a nurse delivered us a bottle of morphine to squirt in mother’s mouth as she lay dying, the healthcare system was eager to be of service. And if medical science says that 100 will soon be the new 80, I am willing to believe it.
The beauty of old age is the freedom to live according to your body rhythms without regard to the needs of an organisation or, in the case of authors like me, the ruthless quest for wealth and prominence. You can wake up in the morning whenever you wake up and put on ratty clothes, or go around in your underwear, put out the cat, toast a frozen waffle, read the paper, go online and visit your old heroes preserved on YouTube, Ike and Tina Turner, the lads from Liverpool, Chuck Berry, Janis Joplin, and slide gracefully toward noon and then make the big decision of the day—a brisk walk first, then a nap, or vice versa. Your wife is around but the war between you is over and she doesn’t yell at you anymore. She doesn’t say, “why don’t you ever talk to me anymore?” You have been uncommunicative for so long that she now accepts it. You have the right to remain silent and now, in your old age, that right has been secured and also the right to own a corner of the home and keep your stuff there and not think about tidiness. The two of you rattle around in your domicile, puttering, working on projects for which there is no logical explanation, she sorts through old letters and photographs, you go through coffee cans full of nuts and bolts, pairing them up, and you open a can of beans and spoon some off the top and squirt some ketchup and a dollop of horseradish on and eat the beans cold, and she does not comment on this. Years ago, she would’ve said, “let me heat those beans up for you.” And then, for a number of years, she said, “how in God’s name can you eat cold beans right out of the can?” But now it is unremarkable. So is your personal hygiene. For years you’ve had a theory that regular bathing kills off the body’s natural bacteria and leaves one vulnerable to infection and pestilence, but social pressures prevented you from testing that theory. Now you can. And by God, thanks to your refusal to bathe, you haven’t had a cold in the past six years. She has learned to live with the unwashed you. Your old pals at the Five Spot Bar envy your freedom. You arrive around 4pm and Jimmy brings you a glass of beer and a bump of whiskey and now you may speak freely if you like. You may support the president on a particular issue or not, you may be a loyal Episcopalian today or a militant atheist, you may be pro-gun or anti-gun, it’s up to you. You are not inhibited by the need to fit in among your fellow employees at the Federation of Amalgamated Organisations, nor are you driven by the fear of your wife’s sarcasm. Your pals are younger, still operating on strict schedules, but you are 80 and nobody is going to burn your butt if you don’t come home by six o’clock. Nobody is going to rant and rave if you have beer on your breath. Moral opprobrium is not a big factor in your life. You are freer than you have ever been before. And now you look Jimmy in the eye, who is worried about his prostate, and you say, “man, when I had my prostate removed eight years ago, I thought it was the end of life as we know it, and now I wish I’d had it done long before. Why? I’ll tell you why. I don’t think about sex anymore. I’ve got no urge whatsoever. None. What a relief. All that nonsense behind you.” Material goods don’t interest you, or personal appearance, or sexual appeal—at 80 you have become a saint. That’s the up side of longevity.
I start to feel this Letting Go now, a significant change for me. The goals of my sixties—to learn the tango, to master the backhand volley, to hike the Himalayas, to write the Great American Novel—have faded like last week’s roses, and I have given up on my lifetime goal—laugh if you must, I don’t care—of winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The Swedes have made it clear that American writers are not welcome in the club—none of us has won it since 1993. They prefer unknown writers from tiny countries, such as the Ishtar poet Waha Mahnoosh who wrote in the Pindar dialect little epigrams known as wihi (“The bruised cicada sings for an afternoon and dies under the heel of the beggar with the enormous eyebrows”), and if you are John Updike or Philip Roth, go sit on your thumb. Letting the Swedes give out the Nobel Prize for Literature is like letting the Swiss decide who goes into the Baseball Hall of Fame and I was angry about it for a while and refused to listen to Abba songs or buy a Volvo, but I am now over it. I literally do not care. I give the Nobel no thought whatsoever. All the air is out of that particular balloon. It is of no moment to me at all. I spend more time thinking about North Dakota than I do about the Nobel Prize.
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So with the Nobel gone, goodbye, farewell, adieu (or, as the Swedes would say in their interesting little language, avsked) worldly acclaim matters not to me one whit, jot or tittle. If you can’t win an Oscar, why would you want a Bob? Honorary degrees, the Pulitzer Prize, the poet laureateship of Minnesota, a plaque for Outstanding Achievement, 10,000 frequent flier miles, bleaughhhhh—give it to someone else. This is a sea change in a man’s life, the lust for recognition gone. Poof. The Man Booker Prize? I would rather have a kiss on the cheek from the Booker Woman.
When I gaze out on the misty uplands of old age, I get intimations of what it could be like (barring, God forbid, some crippling disaster). My friends Mona at 79 and Suzanne at 76 are excellent models, both bopping around, working out at the gym, lunching with cronies, taking brisk walks, gadding about to plays and concerts, maintaining a kindly and humorous and stoical persona. But 100?? What would one do with the bonus years? The medical care that delivers you to your centenary does not guarantee that the package arrives intact. Marbles might be lost. Silence and darkness might envelop you. You might look like an old turtle. Or a tree stump.
Nonetheless a man must have a mission and longevity carries an important responsibility. You are a living artefact and you must accept this odd role gracefully, without apology, and play the part. When I was a boy, attending parades in Minnesota, I saw, riding in the backseat of a convertible, slumped down, wearing a blue campaign hat, Albert Woolson of Duluth, the last living veteran of the civil war, who rode in many parades until he died age 109 in 1956. He had been a drummer boy in the First Minnesota Regiment and now he was a gaunt relic who lifted his little hand and fluttered it to the cheering crowd, our last connection to Abraham Lincoln and General Grant and Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, still respirating in the age of Elvis and drive-ins and the H-bomb. I was ten years old when I beheld Woolson and it was a revelatory experience: the civil war, the horse-drawn caissons, the ladies in crinoline gowns, the steam locomotives, the tender songs about moonlight and sad farewells, the Ojibway encampments outside the little town of Minneapolis—that world was not so far from our own; it was within the memory of this old man in the convertible, all teeming and colourful inside his head. It was not a story: it was real. He had been there.
I am not so archaic and fascinating as the Last Living but as a historic artefact I am not without interest. I rode a haywagon with my Uncle Jim when he was still farming with a team of Belgian horses, and sometimes I rode on their backs, hanging on to their manes, the harness jingling as they trotted up the road to the hayfield. I saw New York City in 1953 and slept on a fire escape in a heat wave. I heard it on the radio when Buddy Holly died in the plane crash. I sang gospel songs on a street corner as a preacher hollered at passers-by to give their lives to the Lord. I typed my first stories on an Underwood upright typewriter using carbon paper. I saw the Rolling Stones play at a hockey rink on their first American tour. I was edited by the late William Shawn of the New Yorker. I hosted a live radio variety show. I refused induction into the army during the Vietnam war. I am not the Last Living by any means but as I venture, Lord willing, into my eighties and teeter into 90 and 91, these experiences will be more and more interesting to the young. I will sit in the backyard of my house in St Paul, in a black suit and a baseball cap, and regale young people with stories of the mid-20th century whenever any of them wish to be regaled.
I will sit in the sun and sing them “The Frozen Logger” or “Frankie and Johnny” or “Old Paint” and lend some breadth and majesty to the world and in my spare time I may write a sonnet or doze over a volume of Horace or AJ Liebling or Norman Mailer. If I am ushered out of the world sooner, so be it, but if medical science wishes me to persevere, then I shall do my best. All I ask is that other 100-year-olds keep their distance. Give me room. No reunions, please. I prefer to hang out with folks in their twenties and thirties, for whom 100 is truly astonishing. If 100 becomes common and ordinary, then I may as well just shoot myself. I didn’t live 100 years just to be ordinary.
