My weekly walk to church and back

The Column: 04.04.25

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We seem to be in a war against science and research, which is causing anxiety among us geezers grateful for anti-seizure meds that guard against us suddenly shaking uncontrollably on the street corner and strangers having to remember first aid from 4-H to keep us from strangling on a hot dog and when we’re not reading about that, we see news of low-frequency seismic waves that can travel for hundreds of miles underground and cause tall brick buildings to crash to the ground, which is disturbing to us in Manhattan, and then there’s news of Mr. and Mrs. JD Vance who announced their trip to Greenland to see the dogsled races only to be told, “Nobody invited you,” so they flew to the U.S. military base at Pituffik for three hours and Mr. Vance announced that Greenland needed American defense whether it wanted it or not. He did not change the name of the area to Pitiful.

An interesting time we live in. And Wisconsin elected a Supreme Court judge other than the one Elon Musk favored and offered large sums of money to voters in a bid for a win.

But the crucial news is that spring is coming, the baseball season has begun and I will wend my way to CF and get a broad view of the action, and I will do the last big outdoor Prairie Home Companion of my life at Tanglewood on June 21, and then, unless RFKJ allows dementia research to proceed, I will retire to Shady Acres and play Parcheesi.

I’m enjoying being 82 more than I thought I would when I was your age, kiddo. I thought I’d be cranky and irritable but I’m not. I imagined that if the U.S. government canceled research contracts for institutions that used certain terms such as “Gulf of Mexico” instead of Gulf of America, the correct term, that I’d be upset about it. I’m not. I simply find it of interest and I move on. If the Justice Department told me, “You cannot cast scorn upon an elected government official,” I would say, “The idiot doesn’t even know how to punctuate his first two initials.”

I believe I know right from wrong and I think about it on a daily basis and also intensely on Sunday morning shortly before 11 depending how long the sermon went. The sermon itself is sinful in that it falls short of perfection and sometimes the attempt of woman or man to approach God in words is so inadequate that it’s best to tune out and I do and sometimes write a limerick in the bulletin.

But I sit up straight during Confession and I am disappointed by the brevity of the Anglican liturgy, spoken briskly in unison, which would be sufficient for a small child but a man my age needs more time. I envy the Catholics who can come in on Saturday and find a priest in a booth, his ear to a little window, waiting for me to recite the entire epic account. I was a boss for many years and committed sins of carelessness and arrogance and stifled promising talents and I was a pitiful parent and miserable mate and my memory is full of downright dumb things, not so much hell-raising as having been an outstanding disappointment, sloughing off on the writing and offering inferior goods to a radio audience, and I count on Confession to put the mounds and hillocks of trash behind me and start anew and by God it works, it really does. I walk home along Amsterdam Avenue and I look forward to the week. My fundamentalist upbringing trains the memory as to be accusatory but the grandeur of the acolytes walking tall and proud, the majestic woman swinging the censer, the vestments and candles, the stateliness of the King James readings, all work to stifle my peasant superstitions.

I leave the sanctuary calmed and renewed, honest to God at least for a while, and often I skip coffee hour because I don’t want to hear about the stuff in the first paragraph. All the way home along Amsterdam I feel it doesn’t matter. I don’t know about your church but in ours we don’t pray for stupidity, cruelty, and supercilious pride and smug disdain. I see dads pushing tiny kids in strollers and a mom following with a toddler and I pray for each of them as they pass me.

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