No. of Recommendations: 3
from his daily email.
The old man I knew when I was a kid was my Grandpa Denham who was irritable and not tolerant of playfulness and sat at Sunday dinner and was not amused if one of us kids spoke up — it was our house, he was a guest, we felt entitled to speak — so I imagined I’d wind up cranky like him and now I’m ten years older than Grandpa and I don’t feel it happening. He was a bookkeeper for the Soo Line Railroad and I did a radio show and maybe that’s the difference though I knew plenty of unpleasant people in radio because I was in public radio where folks take their pretensions very seriously and I was in the comedy business, which made me a rube in their eyes. Nonetheless I had a good time and now I feel rather lighthearted, even naively so.
Last Wednesday I flew from JFK to LAX and the plane sat on the runway for two hours while a thunderstorm passed and it didn’t bother me in the least. I sat and worked on a new book, which I think is the best thing I’ve ever done, which surely can’t be true, but I read a few paragraphs and think, “This is what Proust wished he could do but his English wasn’t up to the job.”
America was built on wild optimism, as I see it, and my ancestor David Powell crossed the Missouri in 1859 hoping to get rich in the Colorado silver rush, which didn’t happen, but he got to hunt with the Cheyenne and trade with the Arapaho and see the mountain grandeur of Colorado.
I landed in L.A. at midnight and went looking for the taxi stand and a man came running up and said, “Are you looking for a taxi?” and I was so tired, I said yes, and he took my bags and led me to a car and I said, “I’m going to Malibu” and he said, “A hundred and sixty bucks.” It wasn’t a cab, just a car, no license or anything, and I knew I shouldn’t but I went with him, a stranger, off into the night, in a strange city, and what if the man should pull out a gun? Well, he didn’t. He took me to my hotel. I was so grateful that he didn’t rob me, I tipped him forty bucks.
I did my stand-up comedy show at a theater and afterward a young man and his uncle came backstage. I could tell the boy was autistic, his diction was hard to understand, his gait uneven, he wore a black strap around his chest, which the uncle hung on to, and the uncle explained that Noah was a fan of my old Saturday night radio show, listened to it faithfully, especially the “Lives of the Cowboys” sketches with Dusty and Lefty riding the open plains, and that he had CDs of the sketches and listened to them over and over. But the whole story was written in Noah’s face. He gave me a beatific smile so big and bright, I was stunned. It absolutely knocked me for a loop. One minute I’m a guy telling jokes and then suddenly I’m St. Michael the archangel.
So I sang him a little bit of “Whoopee Ti Yi Yo, Git Along Little Dogies” and did some cows mooing and horse whinnies and coyotes howling, and I almost started crying.
I can deal with compliments but to this boy I was Mister Magic and my little show was the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and Noah got so happy, he was bouncing up and down on his toes. He wasn’t the audience I had had in mind but here he was. Some people come into the world with a cognitive disability that isolates them from others and one great thing America has done in my lifetime has been to rescue them and find them a way to an enjoyable life. As recently as the Sixties and Seventies, these kids were locked up in state institutions and driven insane by the isolation and now, thanks to a growing cadre of young people who see this as their vocation, kids whom nature has cheated are given a chance. As for me, I meant something to this boy without ever meaning to. Just a friendly voice from a little box. What more can one ask than to be important unawares to someone in need. Thank you, Noah. You made my week.
