G. KEILLOR: Walking a Crowded Street in Gratitude

•    
• Garrison Keillor. (photo: The Birchmere)

 

Garrison Keillor / Garrison Keillor's Website 

26 November 22

I t surprises me, a man of pen and paper, that Twitter requires regular maintenance and without the attention of veteran software engineers could easily crash leaving millions of twitterers to write notes on paper, and would they be able to write with a pen or would they need to cut words out of a book and paste them on paper to make sentences, the way kidnappers do in the movies? You’d expect the Head Twit, the world’s richest man, to be smarter than to drive his new acquisition into a bridge abutment, but who knows?

The crises of the extremely rich are entertaining to the rest of us, such as the billionaire addicted to inhaling nitrous oxide, which inspired him to think he was crystallizing. And Mr. Amazon who wants to go to the moon. And the ex-president guy who has been there for years. This gives us in the back of the bus some reassurance that vast wealth isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In so many critical ways, it’s good to be normal.

I know nothing about software. I use a laptop but nine-tenths of its capability is foreign to me; I use it as an educated typewriter. I love that it makes a squiggly blue line under misspelled words, even exotic ones.

I imagined Twitter was run by robotechnicians, no need for a company cafeteria, just a lube station, but apparently not so. There are human beings there and they have feelings, which is what the rich guy is inexperienced at dealing with. He knows about circuitry but he’s bought a circus and now hundreds of acrobats have quit.

You come to appreciate humanity, living in New York as I do. I walk down upper Broadway and it’s very amiable, like the Minnesota State Fair, throngs of people, the smell of pizza and hot pretzels in the air, bursts of music in passing, a general civility, all that’s missing are the farm implements and barns of giant swine. I’m a Midwesterner, wary of strangers, but walking in New York inspires a feeling that people are good at heart. Of course we’re all Democrats in this neighborhood. That’s all we have. You couldn’t find a Republican if your life depended on it. Thank goodness, the need for one has seldom arisen.

Last week I flew to Detroit and spent a couple days in a suburban landscape of strip malls, a church next to a used-car lot next to a Walmart and hotel overlooking a cemetery, vast acreage of asphalt parking, a landscape that if I hiked a few miles along the main road, I’d feel isolated, threatened, and after dark, it’d be terrifying.

I descend into the New York subway, an institution that is often grieved over but still packed with people taking great care not to bump each other or maintain eye contact for more than a few seconds. I’d rather be on the subway than drive my car through suburbia trying to find a shopping center; I’d slow down to try to get my bearings and the car behind me would honk with real fury. I’ve never encountered fury in the subway. It’d be too scary so people avoid it.

We’ve all experienced a strong centrifugal urge to find loneliness in the woods, a cabin, a beach house, a tent on an island, and I’ve been there and done that and found that silence makes me uneasy and that the presence of birds and small mammals does not constitute company. Hermitude was not appealing and in the fall I heard gunfire and imagined a headline: Writer Slain in Cabin, Sheriff Asks Public for Clues.

So now I am pleased to be in a subway car jammed with people. There’s no other city where you can see so much of America at once as here. The sheer variety is fascinating. The woman with the three small children opposite me: the sight of them speaks to my heart. The tall young woman in the black leggings whose stone-faced expression says she’s tired of people admiring her classic beauty, which, face it, is stunning, but I respect her need to be ignored, I look away, but the image of her is memorable.

New Yorkers feign indifference, but if you should fall down, people will come to your assistance. If Mr. Musk tripped on a curb, people would stop and bend over and ask, “Are you okay?” They wouldn’t say, “I closed my Twitter account you idiot and you know something? I don’t miss it!” He’s human and if he’s injured himself, we’d help him up and call 911, same as we would for you.