IN AUTUMN WE ALL GET OLDER AGAIN

By Garrison Keillor

IT IS COLD IN THE MIDWEST, WINTER IS COMING, AND DEspite our best efforts, we are still getting older. The fabulous anti-aging vitamin cathline-b, discovered in burdock and the fiddlehead fern, was discovered too late for us; bales of burdock wouldn't make us a minute younger. In the pasture, where our burdock grows, Holsteins recline, chewing their cud. Cud is food previously eaten, then regurgitated into the mouth for further chewing. This is how a cow's digestive system works, how we get milk. A Holstein lies in the pasture, eating vomit, thinking about her career.

Holsteins are hardworking Danish cows who make it possible for well-disciplined families to earn a living from ground not good enough to grow corn or soybeans. Dairying is not a sentimental line of work, however, and a cow's productivity chart hangs by the stall where she can see it: she knows that when her output declines she's dead meat; retraining will not be an option. Dogs and cats, when hunting became too hard, retrained as house pets, but a large hoofy animal that chews its own vomit will never be welcome in the American home.

So Holsteins are trapped in their profession, which is declining anyway, and someday a brilliant geneticist will engineer an enzyme that can be thrown into a tank of silage to produce a nonfat miracle milk that makes people younger, and the Holstein breed will face a bleak future, perhaps as a game animal for the slower hunter. A sad fate for a virtuous creature who lets down her milk twice a day and never is a problem to anybody.

Time catches up suddenly to us all. One day you're young and brilliant and sullen to your elders, and the next you're getting junk mail from the American Association of Retired Persons and people your very own age are talking about pension plans and the prostate. Last week, on the southwest windowsill of my studio, I found a note written in tiny strokes in the dust, with two exhausted houseflies lying beside it:

go ahead and kill us god what are you waiting for you bashed our friends so whats two more you dont care youre a lousy god anyway you put us here in this beautiful world and just when life starts to get good you kill us so go do it just dont expect us to admire you for it

I got a rolled-up newspaper and killed them both. In the time it would have taken to explain things, they would have died anyway.

Fall is gone; winter comes soon, and a freezing rain. And as your wife fixes a casserole of Spam and pineapples and hashbrowns, you go out to put salt on your sidewalk and slip, your arms waving like windmills, and something in your lower back twists loose, and you never attend the opera again. You spend the rest of your life in search of pain relief and wind up in India, penniless, lying on a mat at the Rama Lama Back Clinic, as the Master's disciple places the sacred banana on your back--ice can do this to a person, make you much older very suddenly.

I'll never forget what George Gershwin told me about aging. He was 37 at the time. I met him because I had gone to New York City to be honored for my heroism in riding my bike across a frozen lake to rescue a lost child, and my bicycle, the Schwinn, had been invented, of course, by Gershwin's father. Gershwin was pacing the floor of his apartment on Riverside Drive, trying to write Love Walked In when I came through the door, except he was calling it Truth Walked In. He said, "Listen to this, kid," and sang it. I said, "Mr. Gershwin, I'm only 14, but I know that truth doesn't walk right in and drive the shadows away, and it doesn't bring your sunniest day either. I wonder if you don't mean love."

After he corrected the song, he and I walked out onto the roof. The lights of Manhattan twinkled beneath us. His hair was slicked back, just like in the pictures, and he was holding a Manhattan and a cigarette. He said, "When I was your age I owned the moon and the stars, I could do anything, and now I'm lonely as a hoot owl and my mouth tastes of cold ashes. Thirty-seven is depressing, kid. My life is half over. What am I supposed to do now?"

A kid can't answer that question, but I can now.

A sense of mortality should make us smarter. Life is short, so you do your work. You spend more time attending to music and art and literature, less time arguing politics. You plant trees. You cook spaghetti sauce. You talk to children. You don't let your life be eaten by salesmen and evangelists and the circuses of the media. The Trial of the Century was a pure waste of time. It was a tar pit, and nobody who went into it came out smarter or kinder or happier or more enlightened. It had no redeeming aspects; it taught nothing. Midwestern farm boys can get 18 years in prison for raising marijuana; rich people can walk away from murder: everyone knew that. Time to get back to work.