Don't Go to Heaven Without Something to Read.

By Fred Bruning

Aug. 3, 2025

Elder alert!

I noticed the other day that I have stopped dotting my “i’s” and wonder if this is evidence of certain decline like finding you are wearing two baseball caps, one inside the other, at the supermarket or staring at a leftover bean burrito in the refrigerator as though awaiting epiphany.

“The occasional ‘t’ also not crossed,” announces Wink, my wife, who, now that I think about it, has begun checking thank-you notes and envelopes. “Oops, another,” I hear her say, pen in hand.

This comes just as an old reporter friend admits she has been contemplating heaven and decided that if a subscription to the New Yorker magazine was not available, she would just as soon not go.

My preference for the hereafter, I told her, would include old-timey newsstands with a dozen dailies on display, a candy rack crowded with Butterfinger bars and Milky Ways, and an impatient seller who snaps “you buying or just looking?” if a customer hesitates.

Should that wish not be granted, I would settle for an eternity where the Penguins are always singing, “Earth Angel,” Jackie Robinson is still at second and Hires Root Beer and pretzel sticks are delivered to your door every morning like Amazon only no charge.

Sure, laugh it up. Heaven can wait. What, me worry?

“I’m not afraid of dying,” said Woody Allen. “I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

It’s all the old existential bob-and-weave, as Allen says, the ultimate avoidance two-step. How else are we supposed to escape psychiatric intervention and added measures of Zoloft?

Keep smiling, I declare, stay on the move.

In an attempt to assert our sane and (mostly) unimpaired selves, Winky and I headed north for a few days – on the road again, if only briefly.

Once we were warriors.

This now seems incredible to me – totally nuts – but one summer we took five weeks to travel back and forth across the country with our four little kids in a Volkswagen camper that was huffing and puffing by Pennsylvania.

Moose, elk, deer and unknown other creatures stared at us as we sputtered at night through Montana. We met a bear on the way out of Yellowstone. I prayed the brakes would hold on steep, curvy Lombard Street in San Francisco. We did Disneyland. As we approached Mount Rushmore in South Dakota and shouted “look!” the children gazed idly – big deal – and went back to playing hangman.

“Crazy,” I said to Wink recently. “What were we thinking?”

“We weren’t,” she said.

Quick aside on Rushmore. Current events.

Did you know legislation is pending to make President Trump the fifth figure carved into Rushmore’s granite – Washington, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, Lincoln and…DJT?

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Florida) introduced a proposal earlier this year to honor the President “for his transformative impact on America and the historical significance of his leadership.”

So far, not a lot of action on the measure but, people, you have been informed.

Duty done. Northward, Ho!

We spent a night in a downtown Albany hotel – Albany because we still love the plucky, blue-collar burg where we lived when I worked at Hearst’s afternoon Knickerbocker News, long-gone, of course.

It’s the capital, busy during legislative sessions, low speed otherwise. I walked along the Hudson the next morning, quiet, kayakers here and there, and soon we were on our way to Vermont – Bennington, Manchester, gorgeous, memory lane.

In our mid-30s we sold our house on Long Island and dropped out for a year to live – the six of us – along a country road in Groton, Vermont, just short of the Murray dairy farm and across from a pasture where Ken and Barbara’s cows moseyed and moaned.

It was the 70s, far out. Come on, you remember.

Reality took charge, as it does, and we came back (penniless) to New York, but Vermont still makes a claim, quiet and green and blessed with good folks like the Murrays.

On the last day of our little road trip, we stopped in Brattleboro. Wink has trouble finding shoes that fit – except, in all the world, a shop in this hilly river town. She bought out the place. We ate tacos at Tito’s and headed home.

“Bushed,” I said, the next morning.

“Me, too,” said Wink.

Later in the day, I was writing letters.

“Don’t send until I have a look,” said Wink.

In this life and maybe the next, everyone needs an editor.

Previous Invisible Ink posts at: https://fredbruning.substack.com/archive