Every dog has his day

Mr. Blue takes his own advice and bids adieu.

By Garrison Keillor

Sept. 4, 2001 | Mr. Blue thanks you for your kind and funny notes in the wake of his heart operation, from which he is slowly mending, thank you very much. Still not bench-pressing Volkswagens or joining the rugby scrum, but able to sit at the table with everyone else and make appropriate responses.

The convalescent life is a good life, just like in the movies. You sit in a chair with a blanket over your lap and soak up sunshine on a brick patio and someone brings you tea and toast and various visitors come and converse gently on pleasant low-impact topics and inquire as to your well-being: What's not to like?

A heart operation is one of the best medical adventures one can have. The art is highly advanced, the prognosis is good and if you're at a great hospital (which I was), you can take a jaunty approach to the thing, joke with the nurses, smile gallantly at your loved ones in preop and march bravely into the darkness. And then the light shines again. And then you start to learn something about yourself and your nature in time of illness (reclusive). You feel the primal urge to crawl deep into the cave and lie in the dark and lick your wounds and comprehend this large experience. You appreciate the solitude. You do not want too many well-wishers, men in clown suits, etc. In my book, nobody should ever feel bad about not phoning or visiting the sick. The sick man has much to think about and you shouldn't try to dissuade him.

Illness offers the chance to think long thoughts about the future (praying that we yet have one, dear God), and so I have, and so this is the last column of Mr. Blue, under my authorship, for Salon.

Over the years, Mr. Blue's strongest advice has come down on the side of freedom in our personal lives, freedom from crushing obligation and overwork and family expectations and the freedom to walk our own walk and be who we are. And some of the best letters have been addressed to younger readers trapped in jobs like steel suits, advising them to bust loose and go off and have an adventure. Some of the advisees have written back to inform Mr. Blue that the advice was taken and that the adventure changed their lives. This was gratifying.

So now I am simply taking my own advice. Cut back on obligations: Promote a certain elegant looseness in life. Simple as that. Winter and spring, I almost capsized from work, and in the summer I had a week in St. Mary's Hospital to sit and think, and that's the result. Every dog has his day and I've had mine and given whatever advice was mine to give (and a little more). It was exhilarating to get the chance to be useful, which is always an issue for a writer (What good does fiction do?), and Mr. Blue was a way to be useful. Nothing human is beneath a writer's attention; the basic questions about how to attract a lover and what to do with one once you get one and how to deal with disappointment in marriage are the stuff that fiction is made from, so why not try to speak directly? And so I did. And now it's time to move on.

So adieu to Mr. Blue. My thanks to Ruth Henrich, who is in the pantheon of great copy editors, and also to the wily Web tycoon David Talbot, and special thanks to all the correspondents who generously shared their qualms and predicaments. Do good work and be well and enjoy your life.

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Dear Mr. Blue,

Ah, where to begin?

I am 36, widowed two years ago when my wife and children were killed in an accident. I have recovered to where I feel social again and have developed a good friendship with a woman who is my doctoral advisor and mentor in graduate school, divorced nine months ago, no children. We have known each other well for seven years, and after her husband left her, we spent many hours talking about life and loss, sadness and pain, happiness and hope, etc. There has been on many occasions the unmistakable spark of romantic interest. She is intelligent, beautiful, funny and, like me, alone. I find myself continually drawn more to her.

Now I have a formal social engagement where I need to bring a date. Neither of us has dated since we became single again. How should I invite her? I don't want to risk the friendship by seeming too eager for romance, but I think I need to take the chance.

Clueless

Dear Clueless,

You pick up a telephone and dial her number and when you reach her, you ask her to join you for the social engagement. Or, if the time for that is past, you ask her to have dinner or go to a movie. This is not a treacherous slope, it's ordinary social interaction. It is to put you and her on a different social footing, to change the parameters of what's permissible or expected so as to clear the way for the expression of personal feeling. Don't be afraid. Call her. You do need to take the chance. If you can't bring yourself to do it, write back and I'll tell you the same thing.

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