A word from an old WASP, awaiting winter

The gorgeous October days go parading by and you know they will end and then there's one more, warm and golden, the Van Gogh trees, the Renoir sky: it's beautiful but I'm an old white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male, the demographic responsible for the mess we're in and all the messes before it.

So I prefer to stay indoors. I wear a mask, the largest one I can find. Social distancing comes naturally to me — I've been emotionally distant since childhood. My parents weren't huggers, they patted the dog and I guess we were supposed to extrapolate from that.

I'm 78. I'm heading into the Why Am I Here years, when you walk into a room and try to remember what you came for.

It's a strange world. I remember when only carnival workers had tattoos and now I see nice young people with spiderwebs on their necks, or faces on their forearms. I grew up with four channels of TV, and now there are hundreds.

You could watch twenty-four hours a day and barely scrape the surface. And what sort of life would it be? So I don't watch anything and thus I don't know who celebrities are anymore. Pop music is childish, standup is vulgar, movies are about explosives. Any recent teenage immigrant is more in tune with the culture than I am.

I don't read books. The fiction is all by young people, heavily introspective, and if there's an old white guy in a novel, he is sleazy but not smart enough to be a threat. The memoirs are by people under 40 who grew up dyslexic, anorexic, trisexual, and Missouri Synod in Texas.

The world belongs to the young and they gather in big crowds, unmasked, arms draped around each other, as the vodka is passed around along with the virus, which is just plain wrong, but then so is a great deal else. Like drive-thru liquor stores. When you buy a gallon of hooch, you ought to show you can walk in a straight line. But young people prefer the drive-thru, so there you are.

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The world is changing. I'm basically okay with that. People of color, Black people, Latinos, dominate baseball now, not because of affirmative action but because they're better ballplayers. Many of them have tattoos. Guys who grew up in South America had a much longer season. There are no great Canadian shortstops because it's still winter in April. My team, the Minnesota Twins, has one player I can personally identify with: Max Kepler in right field. A slim white guy with a Germanic name. I don't need nine white guys, just one. A token white male.

I was planning to be a comfy old grandpa who tells little kids stories about the olden days, but little kids today all have wires in their ears so storytelling is pointless. And my stories are about waiting for a school bus on a 50-below morning in the dark with feral coyotes watching from the ditch, a bus on which several bullies were waiting to beat me up, but global warming has ameliorated those Minnesota winters. I

t used to be, people asked where were you from, you said Minnesota, they said, "Oh. It gets cold there." Now they say, "That's in the Midwest, right?" Knowledge of geography is sketchy now; thanks to Google, nobody looks at maps.

I come from a bygone era when we all belonged to a culture, respected the president, knew the same songs. I stood in front of a crowd a year ago and sang those songs, about working on the railroad and Dinah in the kitchen, the E-ri-e a-rising and the gin a-getting low, the grasshopper picking his teeth with a carpet tack, and a few old codgers sang along and everyone else was looking for the lyrics on their smartphones.

When you need Google to tell you this is the land of the pilgrims' pride where your fathers died, freedom ringing from the mountainside, then I have to wonder, Where am I and why am I here?

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Garrison Keillor is an author and radio personality. His latest book is "The Lake Wobegon Virus: A Novel". Buy it at a 33% discount! by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR.