Freedom is a beautiful thing when you’re young, allowing kids who know they should be focused on the perils of global warming to instead be fascinated by the troubles of Britney Spears, but for an old guy it means a loss of direction as the people whose approval you worked for die off and you’re left with no direction. My teachers have left the planet, my uncles who looked at me and shook their heads, my dad, and my editors who would look at this paragraph and say, “Nobody wants to know what you think about global warming. You’re a humorist. Be funny. Throw it out.”

So I now have an app on my laptop that sounds a shrill alarm when I write about global warming, race, gender, politics or people whose last names begin with T, such as Thoreau, Thackeray, Trillin, Justin Timberlake or Tammy Tequila, and instead I shall write about my long court struggle to get free of the conservatorship imposed by my wife after I bought a dozen books, some of which we already had at home.

“You have a library card, so why not use it instead of filling the shelves with expensive books, most of which you never bother to read.”

She could detect non-readership by putting confetti in the first page that’d fall out if the book was opened. I wasn’t aware of that.

So my credit cards were taken away and I was put on an allowance of $24 a week, which in Manhattan will hardly keep a man in snacks, so I was forced to panhandle, which, when you’re a white male in his 70s wearing a brown pinstripe suit and wingtips, is no easy matter. I pretended to be demented, which worked but only with other demented people, most of whom don’t carry much cash. I tried walking into a bank and telling the teller, “I’m a novelist working on a criminal mystery and I need to find out what it’s like to commit robbery, so hand over all the cash in your drawer or else I’ll stab you with my ballpoint, but I promise to return the money immediately, I only want to have the experience.” They thought it was a joke.

My wife also accused me of putting too much milk on my cereal. “You practically fill the bowl with milk and you wind up throwing away most of it.” So she locked the fridge and I had to ask her to pour milk for me and she limited me to two tablespoons per bowl, not enough to so much as moisten the bran flakes, and so I went to court. My wife argued that it was a conservation measure, a milk-economising mandate meant to reduce methane emissions by dairy cows, but my lawyer Sarah argued that rationing a man’s milk in his own home is cruel and unusual tyranny, and thank goodness I hired a woman attorney. The judge was a creepy old guy and Sarah is young and attractive and the guy couldn’t keep his eyes off her blouse, and right now my alarm is screaming at me and I have to shut it off.

Thanks. That’s better. My wife is a forgiving person and she’s put the conservatorship battle behind us. There is, however, Sarah’s bill to pay, $75,429.32, and I’ve had to sell my Rothko painting, Vienna Midnight, at auction. It’s a fake Rothko, but with authentic Rothkos going for up to $82m, a first-class fake can earn you a hundred grand, so we are all set, and with the remaining 25 thou, we’ll be able to spend January in Florida.

Down there, due to my wife’s fear of snakes and alligators, I become the one in authority. We go for walks and I carry a spear and a large rock and she clings to my side, trembling. Any movement in the underbrush and she is frozen with fear, and I, feeling empowered, reassure her that we’re OK. Water moccasins are very territorial and can roll themselves into a hoop and chase people at 15mph for a considerable distance. Alligators are omnipresent and omnivorous. A man feels needed there. And my wife is happy to get away from winter weather and also there are no bookstores in Florida. People don’t go to Florida to read books. They go to enjoy the outdoors, especially when they have a big man with a spear and a rock to protect them.

Originally published by garrisonkeillor.com and reprinted here with permission.