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The pandemic is a beautiful thing for an old guy like me. Young people do all the complaining so I don't have to, I'm free to be cheerful. I detest physical exercise and now I have an excuse: heavy breathing spreads the virus.
I also have a cover for not wanting to travel: Europe doesn't want us. Even the Canadians don't want us. As for restaurants, I never liked eating out; I haven't hung out in bars since I was in college. I'm an introvert and social distancing comes naturally to me.
Down deep, I have an aversion to people who subscribe to complicated conspiracy theories or who think the virus is a hoax or who like to use the word "systemic" and now I can block them on my phone.
I love to watch baseball without spectators in the stands, no video close-ups of couples kissing, no mascots dancing around in cartoon outfits. And I've discovered that if I put one tablespoon of fermented mead in my wife's Cream of Wheat, she becomes giddy and laughs at everything I say.
When I was 77, I could look back at my early seventies and even my late sixties and brood about the decline of civilization, but 78 means I'm looking at 80 and having to decide what sort of octogenarian I plan to be, an active youthful one who serves as an inspiration to others or a comfy old coot in a rocking chair with a quilt over his lap.
I'm familiar with the inspirational geezers — the kind who can do handstands and golf under par and bench-press a bureau dresser — you read about them in the paper on a slow news day, 80-year-old mathematicians still out on the frontiers of algorithms — and it never was my ambition to be an example to others. I am the least ambitious person I know. My ambition is to be content. I am grateful to have achieved that.
I am fond of my laptop and my iPhone and don't crave anything better. I do not need more apps. I may need a heart valve procedure in the future but nowadays they don't need to saw open your chest and leave you with a long zipper scar like Frankenstein's monster, they run a little tube up an artery, and snip snip snip, as you sit there reading a book.
Everything is better nowadays, how can a person complain? I come from the era of Karens and Larrys and now we have Sophias, Olivias, Avas, Arabellas — Aidans, Juans, Rolands, Noahs. This diversity bodes well for the country.
My one big ambition is to be America's oldest productive novelist. I'm competing against Joyce Carol Oates who is four years and dozens of novels ahead of me and Anne Tyler and several others. I have a new novel out, which won't sell well — it has the word "virus" in the title — why? Why did I shoot myself in the foot like that?
But I'm planning to step up production in 2021 when America will be in the mood for comic fiction again. I'm going to write a novel about an old writer in isolation in the woods during a pandemic who writes a brilliant novel and decides to keep it to himself and not publish, dreading the notoriety.
Then a novel about a young woman, Siobhan, who loses her mind due to unwise drug use and is given a memory transplant from a dying man of 95 and lives her life, a beautiful New York woman of 25 with clear memories of small-town South Dakota in the Thirties. And one about a colony of the Last Canasta Players in Massachusetts. As you may detect, there is a theme here. Systemic aging.
Enough about youthful anguish and childhood suffering.
Let's grow up.
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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.