A few thoughts about privilege

Over at my church last week we celebrated the risen Lord and the promise of our own resurrection and in my friend’s Unitarian church they heard a sermon about recycling, but despite this difference we get along very nicely — and why? Because we’re older than we were. The pride of possession of the Truth diminishes; the urge to share the sunshine succeeds it.

And a day later I made my annual pilgrimage to Rochester, Minnesota, where I was twice resurrected as my congenital heart problem was fixed when heredity said I should drop dead but instead here I am, having my say. Gratitude is the prevailing attitude at my age. My older brother went skating, slipped, banged his head, and died at 71; he was five years older than I and now I’m nine years older than he; it could’ve happened to me and it didn’t. He was a good man and I am a fly-by-night operator and his demise obligates me to be a better man than I know how to be. So I’m trying.

Mayo put me through the tests, then sedated me to do some electrical work on the defibrillator implanted in my upper left pectoral, which, if my heart stopped at your dinner table during a discussion of hush money paid to a porn star, an electric jolt would bring me back to life. The surgical team ran into problems inserting a wire and five hours later I awoke in the hospital in a state of stupidity and they explained what the problem was, something about a vein, or perhaps personal vanity, and there I was, an invalid, wires attached, feeling like a failed experiment.

I revere Mayo, a place where two surgeries, one to repair the mitral valve, one to replace it, gave me two excellent decades I had no right to expect, and I remember the air of competence and intense concentration among the team in white and blue scrubs in the OR, no small talk, no false moves, and because Medicare paid sixty-some thou for each procedure, I feel obliged to go on being useful in any way I can. Modern health care has made me a person of privilege.

There are progressive zealots among us who scorn me as a privileged person, the people who want to rename the Jefferson Memorial the Sally Hemings Acknowledgement and get National Public Radio to change its name to Inter-relational Public Radio because the word “nation” evokes the evil of nationalism and the racism in our nation’s history, but those projects are amusements, and I’m in the amusement business myself so I don’t object.

The real idealists are the ones who teach third grade, which is hard work and carries with it the possibility of making an enormous difference in people’s lives, just as Mrs. Fern Moehlenbrock made in mine. She let me spend recess in the library so I could read Dickens and it changed my life. Changing NPR to IPR is like renaming Little Falls Great Falls, it doesn’t affect the water flow.

A medical clinic is where it all happens. I see old people facing their mortality with good grace, I see to my amazement that guys can master the art of nursing, the delicacy, the empathy, the soulfulness of caregiving, something I never thought possible.

And I sit with my doctor who’s looking at the chemical analysis of my blood and urine tests, and he reports that my cholesterol level is a small fraction of what’s normal, my level, me, a man who lives on bacon cheeseburgers and onion rings. There is injustice in the world and some of it is in our favor.

Yes, gratitude is the prevailing attitude at my age, far ahead of confusion or dread. I haven’t been angry for years. Mortality is all around us, which makes each day beautiful. Sitting in a waiting room, I imagined making a museum of my boyhood in the mid-20^th, the old school desks with iron scrollwork on the sides, the Regulator pendulum clock on the wall, Mrs. Moehlenbrock, her upper arms jiggling as she wrote sentences on the blackboard. Uncle Jim’s hayrack and his team of horses, his Model T, the outhouse. Riding my bike into Minneapolis, I passed massive printing plants, a slaughterhouse, warehouses, a sawmill, they’ve all been renovated into offices where people look at screens and never make anything tangible. I am privileged to tell the story.

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