IT'S A SIMPLE, cheerful life but with occasional grim complications that one simply ignores, such as mortality or the 1970s or the demise of the downtown department store, writes Garrison Keillor.
I love my downtown store, a block from the old stone courthouse where Alvin (Creepy) Karpis of the Ma Barker gang was tried for kidnapping in 1936. It's near a fine old popcorn shop, just down the street from a haberdashery where the other day I got fitted for a seersucker suit and was shown how to tie a bowtie. A great mystery, like the Trinity, suddenly made clear. You don't get this instruction at a mall.
With a seersucker suit and a bowtie, I am equipped to run for public office on the States' Rights ticket and stand up for Our Way of Life and let's support our boys fighting for Unconditional Victory in Korea - that's what I associate with seersucker. It's a man perspiring heavily and mopping his brow with Coca-Cola and crying out against the gummint and pointy-heads who interfere with Our Way of Life. A charlatan, in other words. My daily uniform is black T-shirt and jeans, which, if you saw me on the street and didn't know me, might lead you to believe I speak French and love jazz. Non non non, madame! Je suis un authentique Americain.
An American guy is capable of many costumes - Riverboat Gambler, Sensitive Aesthete, Wilderness Scout, Lounge Lizard, House Husband, Dangerous Radical and Scourge of Society, Aging Preppie - and I've tried out most of them. But as you enter your golden years, your interest in masquerade naturally diminishes, and so it's interesting to see America's Oldest Presidential Candidate out on the hustings transforming himself into a yahoo and a cracker. Whatever consultant told him to do this is being paid way too much.
The political exploitation of wounded American soldiers by Senator McCain and his eagerness to introduce race into the race was yahoo behaviour, but never mind - if you lived through the Nixon years and then read the transcripts of the tapes, you are not surprised by anything in politics whatsoever.
And famous G-man J Edgar Hoover was gay. He and his lover, Clyde Tolson, brought Alvin Karpis to St Paul for the trial. So what? It's an amazing country.
It's an amazing country where an anthrax researcher working for the Defence Department may have carried out a murderous campaign with anthrax and thereby succeeded in winning vast new appropriations for the anthrax programme.
And it's an amazing country where an Arizona multimillionaire can attack a Chicago southsider as an elitist and hope to make it stick. The Chicagoan was brought up by a single mom who had big ambitions for him, and he got scholarshipped into Harvard Law and was made president of the law review, all of it on his own hook. Meanwhile, the Arizonan is the son of an admiral and was ushered into Annapolis though an indifferent student, much like the Current Occupant, both of them men who are very lucky that their fathers were born before they were.
Meanwhile, the casual revelation last month that Mr McCain has never figured out how to use a computer and has never sent e-mail or Googled is rather startling.
It's like admitting you've never clipped your own toenails or that you didn't know that toothpaste comes out of a tube because your valet always did that for you. It's like being amazed at the sight of a supermarket scanner. What world does Mr McCain live in? Where does he keep his sense of curiosity? My 94-year-old mother has sent e-mail. Does somebody plan to show him how it's done and will they explain to him what "LOL" means? - ( Tribune Media Services)