A perfect summer night in Manhattan, under the stars

The Column: 08.02.24

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What a world of marvels we live in. I sit with my daughter at night on a terrace under a birch tree looking out at the lights of Manhattan and I take my phone and shoot a video scanning the city lights and text it to a friend facing surgery in Minnesota who is in isolation, her immune system compromised by chemo. She is Catholic so I also send her a joke about the priest and the Baptist sitting together on the plane. The priest orders a glass of wine, the Baptist a 7-Up. The Baptist says, “Christians should not touch alcohol,” and the priest says, “Jesus drank wine.” The Baptist says, “Yes, and I’d have thought better of him if he hadn’t.” All this with a gizmo the size of half a sandwich. No wonder young people love it so much.

I’m of the ancient pen-and-ink-on-stationery era and I like to write limericks to friends such as an Episcopal priest facing surgery:

But this little sandwich in my pocket is a great tool of friendship. A friend is someone you can call up for no specific reason and just exchange thoughts for ten or fifteen minutes. A high school classmate on Bainbridge Island, a friend in the Presidio whose late mother I’m making a character in my new novel, a friend on 105th Street who wants to write a book and I give him two specific encouraging pieces of advice, my sister in Minneapolis to offer a morsel of family history.

Two days ago I was up in Connecticut, sitting on the front porch of an old white house at 5 a.m., my favorite time of day, looking out at the river in the pale light, a fine time to think and also to pray silently for people I know. I don’t tell God what they need, He knows, and I don’t work from a list, I simply see them walk through my mind, my grandson and his girlfriend, my daughter and son and stepdaughter, my wife, my sister, some cousins, the couple next door, my nephew and his wife and their baby, Kamala Harris, my colleagues — I hold them in my mind, touch them, and move on. I pray because I am not a good person, I have abandoned people I love again and again and thrown myself into my work, the treachery of ambition. But God hears the prayers of a sinner, I believe.

I am a lucky man so I don’t pray for myself. In a few days I set out on a ten-day tour as an octogenarian stand-up, playing theaters here and there, doing a 75- or 90-minute set, all from memory, which is an excellent way to keep dementia at bay. A man gets careless late in life and when you walk out into bright light and 400 people applaud, it focuses your mind. I was brought up Sanctified Brethren, a judgmental branch of the faith, and I feel blessed to be in comedy, my job to make strangers happy, maybe even delighted, and you can feel it when you accomplish this. It’s unlike other jobs in this regard. During this tour, I will turn 82 and that’s why I’m hitting the road. I want to spend my birthday doing a show. I don’t want to sit at a long table with other elderly people, each with a medical history to share, as someone wheels in a bonfire of a cake and we sit and eat angel food and melted wax and someone tells me some interesting facts about prostate cancer.

I was brought up by Midwestern stoics who drummed the lesson into us: Don’t think you’re somebody because you’re not. You’re not so smart as you think. You’re the same as everybody else. So buckle down and get your work done and don’t fall behind. So I turned into a hard worker. But sitting on this terrace at night with my daughter, and then my wife comes out with her glass of wine, this sandwich putting my friends within easy reach, it is clear to this old Episcopalian, God’s great generosity, how much He loves us, to give us this summer night. In this ugly election year, let us be good for each other.

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