I board the plane at LaGuardia where everything goes well until I reach TSA and a uniformed woman asks if I have any metal implants in my body and I say that I do. “What do you have?” she asks. I want to say, “German shell fragments from the Battle of Ypres. General Haig sent us across muddy fields directly into point-blank Austrian artillery. A horse collapsed on me and saved my life and I alone am left to tell the tale.”

But I say, “Pacemaker” and she directs me to a gentleman who gives me a full-body pat-down the same as if I were being deported to El Salvador, and I am cleared to go to MSP instead.

I have boarded it in order to spend a week with my beloved who is engaged as a violist in an opera orchestra in downtown St. Paul, performing Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” at a hall across the street from the park with the statue of Fitzgerald. Downtown St. Paul is in sad shape, like so many downtowns these days. Dayton’s Department Store is gone.

My mother loved Dayton’s, run by a good Presbyterian family, and clothed her six kids in clothing with the Dayton’s label, following Paul’s admonition to the Philippians: “Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are of good report; think on these things.” But Dayton’s was supplanted by Amazon as prophesied in Revelation, that “a great red dragon with seven horns and ten heads will come among you,” and downtown is a mirage but I believe that great art can change the world and that it isn’t Required that Novelists be Drunks and I intend to sit in the hall and look down on the stage as Figaro sings “Largo al factotum” and see my lady in the pit, viola under her chin, making music.

I love the woman and I will take any risk to fly to Minnesota and see her and when the Count falls in love with young Rosina whose elderly guardian Dr. Bartolo intends to marry her himself and his man Figaro conspires to bring Rosina and the Count together and the old goat is frustrated and true love triumphs, then I swear there will be hope for downtown again.

We need downtowns; a website is not a center. You can’t build your life around drive-up windows. There is delight in Rossini not found in a mall. Fitzgerald didn’t need to act like a writer: he was one so push the gin away. Art is good enough. Find yourself a good barber like Figaro and tell him what you want and prepare to be very fortunate. 

It is highly informative to watch another marriage in a moment of stress and see how calmly they handle it compared to the hysterics that I’d go through in similar circumstances: 6:20 a.m., a nephew and his wife are assembling their bags to catch a cab to the airport for a 9 a.m. flight and the guy suddenly can’t find his wallet and so the search begins, bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, as I stand watching in my pajamas — the two are guests in our apartment — and it amazes me how calm and cheerful they are.

“Are you sure you saw it this morning?” she asks, matter-of-factly. “Yes, I’m sure,” he says and because he is a tech wizard, not a fiction writer, she takes him at his word. I’ve been in his situation numerous times when I proceeded rapidly from mounting despair to self-loathing and having to be institutionalized in a locked ward and tranquilized, but this young couple doesn’t go there. The search proceeds. The wife makes a few helpful suggestions in a calm voice, no shrieking, no wild hand gestures. Minutes pass. No panic.

The husband unzips a pocket on his knapsack and there is the wallet. All is well. No divorce lawyer got involved, no therapist, priest, or psychic. These two are rationalists but I am a writer and I need assistance when leaving on a trip to make sure I have my wallet, phone and phone charger, ID, Visa card, meds, hearing aids, notebook and pens, eyedrops, boarding pass, and make sure I am wearing a belt.