Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 10

The morning after, the sun comes up

So America has gone and done it, elected the evil grandpa, which goes to show that literacy is in serious decline. Nobody who read the transcripts of his two-hour rants would want this old man in the White House. I’ve been reading them with fascination for the past couple months and they are beyond description, the anger and violent obsessions, the confusion, the incredible frequency of blatant falsehoods, the absence of any coherent philosophy, but now the Secret Service is going to have to guard him on his daily golf round, probably requiring the help of the Army and Marines, and who knows if there will be another election in 2026? Congress will be deadlocked, the man owns the Supreme Court, who will stop him if he declares the name of our country is now United Trump?

The beauty of being on the losing side is that there is no shame. Kamala Harris was a serious and tireless candidate who ran a heroic campaign and spoke about the real world, and the outcome shows the high degree of misogyny among American women. She could have been an excellent president. Everyone in my life voted for her, nobody ever walked up to me and tried to talk about her opponent’s good points, so it’s clear that I don’t live in his country. And because I’m 82 and he never talked about cutting Medicare and Social Security or deporting elderly people or accused us of having bad blood or eating dogs and cats, I can rest easy. His 20% tariffs are likely to cause inflation but an old man doesn’t need much to get along.

And the gorgeous thing about being a Democrat is that I can stop reading the newspaper and ignore Washington and walk around the Upper West Side of Manhattan where the Don got maybe 12% of the vote and enjoy the parks, the cafes, the little kids heading for school in the morning, talk to people in the subway, go to the public library on 42nd Street and sit in the reading room among college kids and work on my musical comedy.

The country voted against politics Tuesday and voted in a man who will fix everything. He will make Ukraine and Gaza disappear. Big tax cuts, Bobby Kennedy Jr. will end fluoridation and eliminate vaccines, Elon Musk will cut two or three trillion from the national budget, the U.S. Army will round up ten or eleven million undocumented migrants, many of whom are employed on farms or in hotels or nursing homes, and the profound results of all of this are on the heads of the Make America Cruel Again people.

I’m glad that Minnesota went blue though it was a close one, and I have to admit that Lake Wobegon went 58% for the Don and that will be the subject of my next book. It’s going to be a comic novel. Norwegians can be cranky, as any Minnesotan knows, and though they’ve been here for five or six generations, America has been a disappointment for many of them, they feel ignored or looked down upon and the Lutheran pastor talks like a socialist sometimes. They don’t like the Germans and the feeling is mutual and many of their children have married aliens, and there is resistance to the idea of public education (why should we pay for it after our kids have grown up) and coffee costs 50 cents that used to cost a dime. Nothing is like it used to be, young people are rude and go around with earphones and they mumble and you can’t read their handwriting and the language is vulgar. They’ve been unfairly dealt with left and right and they like the Don because he’s been mistreated too and is angry and he’s going to fix things. Nuts to Europe, to hell with Mexico and South America, and let’s show the Chinese who is who. Congress is a mess, can’t get anything done. We need one man who can take charge and do the job right and anybody who doesn’t like it, send them to Canada.

There’s a whole novel here and I’m going to enjoy writing it and I’m tired of worrying about democracy. You go worry about it and stew over the news. I’m done. The New York Times said that a vote for Kamala was the only patriotic option. Which shows you how important the Times is.

No, journalism is dead. There is no point in stating facts anymore. I’m going back to fiction. It’s worked beautifully for the Don and now it’s my turn.

The post The morning after, the sun comes up appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Happiness and the price of groceries

When I go to Trader Joe’s on Columbus Avenue to buy groceries, I do it to buy guy food, which my beloved cannot buy because she knows it’s not good for me. I don’t do this secretly; I come home in broad daylight and unpack the bag and she watches without comment. Sometimes, in place of comment, she’ll tell about something she read in the Times about some encouraging development in health care or public education, meanwhile she watches me put away the frozen mac and cheese, large potatoes for baking in the microwave, a few ears of sweet corn, a couple filets mignon, frozen lasagna, frozen meatballs, frozen knockoff White Castle sliders.

I don’t buy greens because that’s her territory, along with other vegetables, coffee, olive oil, cereal, rice, condiments, et cetera. With coffee, for example, she has a specific dark bean from a particular valley in Guatemala that meets her standards. Me, I’m happy with Maxwell House Instant. Coffee is coffee. She favors Portuguese oil from hand-harvested olives. Me, I’m fine with Mazola.

I don’t defend my choices and thanks to her, I don’t need to. I love mac and cheese because I loved grade school back in the Fifties and that’s what Mabel served in the Benson School cafeteria and when I eat a bowl of it now, I am back there sitting with boys and observing Corinne and Elaine and Diane with great interest. As a teenager, I loved to ride my bike downtown to the Minneapolis Public Library and I got my lunch at the White Castle across the street, sliders for 15 cents apiece. When I heat up a frozen one today, I am 15 again, enjoying independence, spending my babysitting money, reading Hemingway and Kafka and Cummings and other books my parents don’t approve of.

Joe doesn’t always stock radishes but if I see them, I buy a bunch because picking radishes was my first job around the age of 12, and I graduated from that to potato picking and hoeing corn.

I like Trader Joe’s because the clientele is half my age or less and I stand with my cart in a long double line with college kids and mothers of tiny children and I listen to fragments of phone conversations that are fresh and fascinating to me. These people lean toward eagerness and curiosity with a streak of satire; my people tend toward dismay and resignation. The lines move fast at Trader Joe’s because the store has 24 checkout cashiers and as I come toward checkout, this being New York, I wonder how many of the cashiers are hoping to be actors, writers, artists, dancers, composers, and I worry about them as I catch sight. I was a dishwasher when I was their age and I hoped to be published in The New Yorker where my heroes Updike, Perelman, Thurber published. For me, the magazine was the Big League and I needed to climb out of the Minors and when I made it, at 27, I bought filet mignon.

The Bigs are still around but the young and ambitious have found new roads — podcasting, for example — in which you pitch your own tent and invent your brand and see who stops to look at the goods. I find this sort of astonishing and wonderful. I look at the young and see how their ambition is to make their own good and productive life rather than win the silver trophy or be admitted to the Big Shot Society.

My beloved is 15 years younger than I and while I sit and toil at my new novel, her ambition is to walk six miles a day through the city and see the sights, the barefoot cellist in the park, the woman telling her dog to improve its attitude, the delight of apartment children set free on the playground, and talk to the French tourists taking photos of squirrels and the guy with the sign “Write You A Poem, $5.”

I want my novel to win the National Book Award. It won’t but that’s what I want. She wants to make a good life and every day she does. I come home with my autobiographical bag of groceries and she makes no comment. Life circles back. I eat Mabel’s macaroni and I am once again curious about girls. I once picked potatoes and now eat one with butter and sour cream and it is delicious and I feel truly grateful.

The post Happiness and the price of groceries appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Walking in Scotland, crazy happy

I took the fast train from London to Edinburgh a few weeks ago to do my solo show at Queen’s Hall and sitting in the café car watching the countryside pass at a hundred miles per hour, I felt utterly happy. It was the fourth day of my tour and finally I was emerging from the prison grip of jet lag, which I’d tried to sleep off, which only makes it worse. The cure is daylight, movement. Now I was feeling resurrected.

When I visit Scotland, I think of my grandpa William Denham who emigrated from Glasgow to Minneapolis in 1905. I only knew him as a querulous old guy with high-top leather shoes who pronounced “girls” “gettles” but cousin Joyce told me he left to escape the Calvinist cruelty of his stepmother. William and his wife had 13 children, my mother Grace the 10th, but the first kid was born only four months after the wedding. He was never forgiven. When he returned years later to visit his dying father, he kept a detailed journal of the voyage and it goes blank once he reaches Scotland. My guess is that guilt and shame shut the door. The story couldn’t be told.

I got to the hotel in Edinburgh and hiked from Grassmarket up to the castle through throngs of lively youth, a parade of languages and dialects, including some like his. A guy played electric guitar to a blues rhythm track and sang, I assumed, about a woman who’d left him but it might’ve been about a stepmother, I couldn’t tell. Three little kids sat on the curb admiring a hairy terrier, patting him in wonderment, and he tolerated their admiration well. I saw three stunning beauties nearby, their hair pale red, their very own hereditary hair, and immediately wanted to get to know them better, but I pulled myself away and kept walking. But I am still stunned a week later.

A café advertised “Breakfast and A Pint” where some folks were chasing their scrambled eggs and bacon with beer and around the corner a fine baritone played mandolin and sang about the bonny banks and braes of Loch Lomond. I was his lone audience. I saw only some coinage in his mandolin case — and yes, I know it’s a smart street singer’s strategy to keep an empty case — but I dropped in a twenty-pound note anyway. The twenty shocked him and he stumbled on the verse about the wee birdies singing. But I sang the song in my show that night and the audience sang it with me and it was very sweet.

A sunny day, cool, 50ish, and I sat in a sidewalk café and had lentil soup and coffee and watched the river of youth flowing by and felt happy and content. The secret of happiness, I guess, is to get jet-lagged and then emerge from it and also to be ignorant of the American election news, to not be a radical left-wing Marxist enemy within but simply a very happy old man in a square in Edinburgh.

My grandpa fathered 13 children, a man of enthusiasm, and died at 73, deep in dementia. I am 82 and still trying to make sense and that night at my show, I recited love poems by Burns and Blake and Shakespeare and my poem about sperm,

Beneath its shiny dome, it contains your chromosomes, and the tail can kick just like a leg. Nothing could be fina than to swim up a vagina in search of a rendezvous with an egg,

and I talked about the beauty of being old, assuming one has a little luck, which I do, having never been a criminal defendant, never fallen off a roof, never taught third grade, and at my recent checkup the doctor skipped the digital prostate exam. It felt good to be away from America and walk in the streams of youth up the hill toward the castle and buy marmalade and whisky fudge for my true love and enjoy a sunny October day.

Grandpa, I don’t understand my country anymore, but it’s okay. Life gets small at this age, and somehow a sunny day and coffee, the parade of youth, the bonnie banks, the gettles with pale red hair are enough. Coffee comes in at the mouth and love comes at the eye. That is all we know of truth ere we grow old and die. I think of her and sigh and I’m crazy happy.

The post Walking in Scotland, crazy happy appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Looking forward to Nov. 6. Me. Looking forward.

I am looking forward to November 6 when at last we may be done with the “How in the world is this actually happening in America today” conversation and we will return to enjoying our lives, watching the weather, maybe reading a classic or two, maybe read aloud to a child, perhaps take a walk out of earshot of freeways, maybe astonish a distant relative by writing a letter longhand in ink offering your humorous take on life as you observe it, maybe deal with the boxes of junk in the back of your closet. We will leave the past decade to platoons of authors to dredge through sloughs of the irrelevant and ridiculous and our national leaders will turn their attention to the real world.

In New York, traffic will resume moving on Fifth Avenue, which the Secret Service has pinched tight to protect Melania and Barron up in their tower, and someone will show mercy to poor Rudy in his cruel downfall and it will no longer be required of all Republicans that they reaffirm that up is down and it’s 1953 and Commies in the State Department are selling us down the river and we’ll go back to being the country God intended us to be, one with a sense of humor and gratitude for His generosity and a decent respect for the facts.

This is English I’m writing, it’s not a mysterious code carrying secret instructions to election judges, it’s a gorgeous language rich with a wealth of synonyms for b.s., including twaddle, hogwash, babble, blather, bilgewater, humbug, balderdash, baloney, malarkey, piffle, tripe, drivel, dreck, rubbish, hooey, claptrap, crapola, and a crock, and if you go online and read a transcript of the guy woofing for two solid hours in front of his followers, you will see him clear as day. It’s a stream of darkness, no structure, nothing solid, no factual footing, and never before has a major party candidate offered such a negative vision of a failed nation, criminals coming from countries we’ve never heard of so you can’t walk across the street to get groceries, illegal migrants living in luxury hotels at government expense while our veterans are sleeping on the streets in front of those hotels, the country is going to hell, becoming a dumping ground for the world’s criminals. A dumping ground. Our country. A dumping ground.

Except for Arnie Palmer’s penis, it’s a very dark picture, the government is run by low-IQ people, very stupid people, who have weaponized the Justice Department and the FBI against him, but in January he’s going to tell them, “You’re fired. Get out.” Otherwise the country is done for. Ruined. Cratered. Crippled.

One reason for his appeal is repetition. The guy likes to say things three times in a row. He ended inflation, the numbers were the best numbers that ever were, there was no inflation, zero, and he made China pay. Other presidents didn’t get ten cents from China; he got hundreds of thousands of billions of dollars. Hundreds of thousands of billions. From China. Other presidents got zero. He got hundreds of thousands of billions. There is a rhythm to his weave, a definite rhythm that is not like any other politician’s.

We’re being ripped off by everybody, and our friends do it worse than our enemies. Ripped off. Us. By our friends. We used to be great and now we’re turning into a third-world country. Because they’re ripping us off. Our friends. Us. Ding, ding, ding, ding. If he’d been in office, Russia never would’ve invaded Ukraine. Never. No chance. Zero. Zero chance. Never would’ve happened. Big buildings knocked down and a lot of people got killed. Never would’ve happened with him. Stupid people let Ukraine happen. If he was there, no way. Zero. October 7th in Israel, never would’ve happened. Stupid people let that happen. There’s something wrong with these people. Something wrong. The worst people in the history of this country. Sick people who lie about everything. We’ve never seen anything like it. Lie after lie after lie after lie. The level of lying is just incredible. You can’t even imagine it’s legal.

If the Times and the Post would just quote the guy word for word, he’d be down around 15% but no, they try to explain him. If everyone just read what he says, this never would’ve happened. No way. Zero. It’s baloney, babble, claptrap, crapola, blather, piffle, hooey. Never should’ve happened. November 6th, it stops. MAIA. Make America Intelligent Again.

The post Looking forward to Nov. 6. Me. Looking forward. appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

An American out looking for his people

I flew to Dublin a week ago and even with jet lag, it was downright glorious and I’m eager to do it again. I flew out of JFK, a prison camp attached to a strip mall, and landed seven hours later and was struck by the friendliness. The immigration lady seemed glad I had come and I got into conversations at baggage claim simply by asking questions. I find the Irish accent impenetrable but when I cupped my ear and said, “Eh?” they instantly switched to clear English.

The cabdriver was friendly. I asked him about Gaelic and he said, “Yes, they teach it in the schools but we forget most of it except for a few words and not many of us could carry on a conversation.” I asked him about the Irish gypsies, the Travelling People, and he said, “Yes, you still see some horse-and-buggy folk but they don’t allow them to camp on the roadsides anymore. They’re trying to settle them.” The cab fare was 31 euros and I handed him a fifty and said, “Thank you,” and he hesitated. “Are you sure?” he said. A cabdriver trying to decline a tip. Remarkable.

My hotel was the Grafton on Stephens Street in the old section of town, among walking streets with little shops, and I encountered such kindliness out walking, due to my poor vision and inability to read the street signs painted on the second-story corners of buildings, I kept asking for directions and Irish people recognized my accent and some recalled their own time in America and some conversations came to the point either sitting down for coffee or moving on and I kept moving.

I walked into the hotel restaurant and got the best breakfast buffet ever, an assembly of croissants and pastries, perfectly poached eggs, ham, bacon, cereals, cakes, jams, and coffees and teas, and friendly uniformed women with impeccable manners there to assist. I cupped my ear and they spoke clear English.

I walked around the neighborhood and felt welcome there. And what made it especially pleasant was getting away from the news of the impending American catastrophe. If the lunatic felon is elected and takes his revenge on his opposition and uses the Army to round up migrants and destroys the economy, Dublin strikes me as a beautiful place to live out the rest of my life.

The party of Lincoln has been corrupted on the national level: you cannot be a Republican without swearing to things you know are not true. Its standard-bearer runs for office on the proposition that America is a hellhole, which everyone knows it is not. New York, for example, has seen a steep decline in violent crime. But mid-America still believes in the mythical city where gangs roam the streets freely doing what they will.

Some blame goes to the Left, which holds that we must never be content, there is more to be done, and which, in good times, can always find injustice to complain about, and it is married to the idea that ours is a racist society. It refuses to acknowledge that great strides have been made.

For the felon, resentment is a powerful platform, the idea that a contemptuous elite has rigged the system to their own benefit. And your Mexican cleaning lady, the construction and farm workers, nannies, are an advanced invading force, and soon we’ll be singing “La bandera de las estrellas” instead of The Star-Spangled Banner.

Trump is a conman, as obvious as a $15 bill, and the New York Times, in all its high-mindedness, has absolutely no power against him. Millions of Midwesterners get a thrill voting for a convicted felon and a blatant liar that they never got from the Bushes. Let Putin have Ukraine, Poland, Germany, who cares? Climate change is nonsense, the climate’s been changing for eons. Skip the flu vaccine and inject Clorox. Drill for oil in the national parks, give Elon Musk the Federal Reserve, shut down the Fake News, MAGAnetize the country under one label, United Trump. How does one fight the conviction of unreality?

I can see the day when I’ll be an alien in my native land and when that day comes, there’s always Dublin.  I have no Irish blood in me but I vote for the pleasure of conversation and stories and gratitude for the blessings of life. The felon has no humor and no manners. Dublin has it all. A person could be happy there.

The post An American out looking for his people appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

My life story (short version)

I once owned a house on Goodrich Avenue in St. Paul, across the street from a house Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald rented in 1921 when Zelda gave birth to their daughter, Scottie, and this slight proximity let me imagine that someday college kids would write dull term papers about me as they do about The Great Gatsby and The American Dream. I tossed that idea aside long ago. Now I’m38 years older than he when he died, and clearly I got a better life and what’s the purpose of longevity if not to enjoy it?

I had my adventures with gin and whiskey, as he did, and sat in a bar with vets going to the U on the G.I. Bill who thought the Army was ridiculous but then they hadn’t been shot at. I once tasted a Bordeaux from the year of my birth (1942), which was pretty magnificent, war wine from the grapes of wrath. I once was given a sedative for a wisdom tooth extraction that made me ecstatic for a day and a half. I was baptized in waist-deep water by a preacher in a suit and tie. I entered many churches and heard the Gospel and confessed my sins and was forgiven. I wrote for a great editor, Roger Angell, who sent me delicate rejections — passages of wonderful writing but somehow it wasn’t you at your best — and crisp acceptances — and pleading letters — Everyone around here keeps asking when will we see another piece by Keillor. Write, I beg of you. — and I felt privileged for twenty years.

Once, playing third base in a softball game, I cleanly fielded a stinging grounder, backhanded it, planted my right foot, and threw the runner out by a stride, a perfect play, still vivid in my memory sixty years later. So is Uncle Jim’s hayrack pulled by two black horses, me holding the reins as Jim opened the gate and out to the field we clip-clopped to rake up the hay.

I performed at Goshen College and got the audience to sing “It Is Well with My Soul” and suddenly it was better with my soul than it had been in a long time. I have canoed in the Boundary Waters wilderness and slept on a beach and listened to the loons. I sat with my grandma Dora as she lay dying and sang to my mother in her last hours. I have embraced women in the dark while stunned with desire and I accepted my daughter from the obstetrical nurse a minute after she was born on December 29, which changed Christmas for me forever. I have made fifty or sixty ritual visits to the Minnesota State Fair for corn dogs and Ferris wheel and poultry barn. My brother Philip and I went canoeing around the Apostle Islands on Lake Superior and paddled into a deep cavern under one of the islands, and explored it for a while, ducking our heads under the low rocky ceiling, and then paddled out to open water a minute or two before the wake of a distant ore boat came crashing into the cave, four-foot waves that would’ve smashed us to a pulp, no need for EMTs, the turtles would’ve feasted that night.

I stood shoulder to shoulder with women who were real singers and sang duets with them, Renée Fleming, Brandi Carlile, Emmylou Harris, Heather Masse, and I knew the Lord was bestowing a privilege He wasn’t handing out like Tootsie Rolls. I stand next to Heather and we harmonize on the Dead’s “Brokedown Palace” and my heart is full. For an old writer, this is the gift of tongues.

I was brought up to be fearful but when we escaped from the cavern, which was back when I was Fitzgerald’s neighbor in St. Paul, I loosened up some. There’s nothing like almost but not dying to turn on the lights. Years later I got to know the director Robert Altman who was dying but still took joy in his work and I hope to wind up like that. He’d piloted B-17s and faced Japanese kamikaze, and not dying turned out to be awfully good for him. Nuts to the American Dream. I wake up eager in the morning and reluctantly turn in for the night. Thank you, Lord, for this life and guard our people from disaster and grant them wisdom if not abundance. For the sake of the children, keep the elderly incoherent crackpot out of the White House.

The post My life story (short version) appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

The week I got what I wanted

It was a good week. It began with a night I lay awake for hours listening to my daughter’s hacking cough in the next room like an inmate in the county tubercular farm. We were both weary the next day until we remembered a ride at the Minnesota State Fair from 12 years before, the River Run ride, the two of us on a raft racing around a sluiceway, that I’d shot a video of with my phone. Last week I got a new iPhone but she found the video on it, two solid minutes of her hysterical laughter as she watched water splashing on her father’s lap so that it appeared he had wet his pants. I pretended to be horrified but I kept recording her crazy beautiful laughter.

We ate soup for supper and she, with no trouble at all, texted the Pee Ride video to her aunt Kay and our friend Heather, each of whom texted back within minutes their delight at this video. To me, this alone justifies the invention of the phone that can text, though I, along with every other elderly person, have said caustic things about texting in the past. So? I changed my mind. Now I can see the good it can accomplish in our troubled world. Kay had been watching her favorite basketball team get drubbed and Heather had been teaching first grade. Two minutes of my girl delighted by the apparent urinary tract problems of her elderly father was exactly what they needed.

The video turned the week around. She pulled out of the respiratory troubles that had her mother and me and our girl in mutual misery and two days later I flew to Dublin and the next night made a crowd happy at Liberty Hall Theatre. I’ve played theaters but don’t remember playing a theatre and of course for a man my age, liberty is a beautiful thing and worth flying to Ireland to find. They didn’t laugh the way my daughter laughed at the Fair but that’s because I hadn’t drunk enough liquid.

I love making people laugh; it’s better than pity. I’m 82, people see me shuffling down the street, they think, “O my God, someday I’ll be like that too,” so they take up elliptical machines so as to avoid my fate, a member of the generation that screwed up the country and now our kids are wondering what to do with us, if they should stick us in some Nazi nursing home or should they wax our floors and put some loose rugs around so we can trip and fall and break our necks.

Elliptical machines may age you faster. Nursing homes are full of elliptical exercisers who got distracted and twisted their backs so they can’t drink orange pop anymore because it hurts to hiccup. And you can go for years without a sip of orange pop but it’s when you can’t have any that you desperately need it. That’s just how it is.

Life is precarious. You can’t always get what you want. Mick Jagger said so and now that he’s 81 he knows it’s true. I grew up in Minnesota where there are more Scandinavians than anyone needs, people whose idea of delight is “not that bad.” Trump complains about Hispanics crossing the southern border, I say we need more of them and more people disappearing over the northern border.

The Norwegian couple was celebrating their 25th anniversary and she kicked him under the table hard and said, “That’s for twenty-five years of bad sex.” He kicked her back harder and said, “That’s for knowing the difference.” I don’t tell that joke in Minnesota because people might think I’m making fun of them.

I grew up Sanctified Brethren, which is like Norwegian except they think it’s redemption. Their idea of ministry was gathering to read the obituaries and sending gospel tracts about eternal damnation to the survivors of the deceased. I got out as quickly as I could.

What I tried to convey to the Dublin crowd is the fabulous joke that you don’t truly appreciate the beauty of life until you come close to the end, which should make you sad but doesn’t because it’s incredibly beautiful. My daughter’s wild laughter delights me but in her absence, Dubliners’ will do. A glass of water was provided onstage and I was tempted to spill on myself but it was an older audience and they might not’ve seen it as a joke.

The post The week I got what I wanted appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

What it’s all about, I think

The Democratic nominee proposes Medicare assistance for home health aides to help people who must care for elderly parents while holding down a job and perhaps raising children, and on the same day the journalist Bob Woodward makes serious allegations about the Republican nominee to which a Republican spokesman says the journalist is “a total sleazebag who has lost it mentally.” There is the 2024 campaign in a paragraph. Serious civics versus a bucket of bird droppings.

This is not the Republican Party that my father respected, the party he felt he could trust to separate truth from fiction. The party of Dwight Eisenhower has been hijacked by a New York playboy who wants Air Force One and the helicopter and the Marine honor guard and though he’s been convicted of sexual assault and fraud, 80 million Americans love him and it will give them a thrill to vote for him. I’m glad my father isn’t here to witness this.

Of course you already know this. We’re two nations and either you believe the 2020 election was stolen and the crowd who took over the Capitol the following January were true patriots or you are confident it was not and that they were felons. There isn’t room for negotiation.

It’s a revolt by Middle America against the coasts, old against young, commoners against college, evangelicals against agnostics, McDonald’s against pad thai, and I as an old Minnesota grad fond of the quarter-pounder feel conflicted, especially when I read that what infuriates Republicans most is political correctness. It irks me too.

It’s why I haven’t listened to public radio for fifteen years. Because even as Russia pounds Ukraine and Gaza is in ruins and fentanyl flows across the borders and the oceans are warming, which contributes to the monster hurricanes, if you listen to NPR you get the feeling that the major problem facing us today is the unhappiness of nonbinary teenagers. The mayor of New York is indicted, his staff flees, New Yorkers know what’s going on, it’s an old old story, but because he is Black, it has to be tiptoed around: the problem is that this great city is a one-party town that tolerates corruption and it needs a mayor who loves the city and that ain’t Eric Adams. It needs a Republican from Missouri who enjoys art and music and food and who feels happy in a crowd experiencing diversity up close.

It’s an election coming up that half the country imagines might bring about less regulation, big tax cuts in the upper brackets, cuts in Medicare and public education, the deportation of ten million, a ban on abortion, but I don’t see that. I see a police van pulling up to the gates of Mar-a-Lago and the Secret Service turning over their charge to court deputies who’ll ship him off to a nice facility in Connecticut that’s reserved for special cases.

There’ll be photographers at the gate and then that’ll be the end of it. The man will be given a very quiet life. Introspection will be inevitable. Maybe he and Mayor Adams will be cellmates. Over time they may develop a rapport. Instead of Fox or NPR they may pick up a Bible and feel the Creator’s great love for them and accept forgiveness and be changed. It has happened before. The freedom to be free of yourself: that’s what it’s always been about.

The post What it’s all about, I think appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Waiting for a cab one night

I flew home to New York from Seattle Saturday night, landed at JFK, retrieved my bag at Baggage Claim, headed for the taxi stand and there, in a long slow line, suddenly heard people shouting, “Doctor! Doctor!” and saw, fifty feet away, a twentyish woman lying face down on the sidewalk, an older woman kneeling over her. The kneeling woman shouted, “Does anyone know this girl? Anybody? Please!” Some traffic guys in bright orange vests ran off and came back with two big burly cops. The young woman lay motionless. One of the cops got on his phone and the other lay down next to her and put his hand on her back and spoke to her.

It was a dramatic sight, a lone person fallen in the midst of a busy scene in a huge city and you could see the alarm in the faces of the people in the taxi line: there but for the grace of God go I. I wanted to stay and find out if she was okay but I am not a doctor and the cops seemed to have it well in hand. So I got in a cab and headed home to Manhattan.

I got home and googled “woman collapsed at JFK” and got a stream of clippings about President Kennedy.

I thought about her in church Sunday morning and prayed for her well-being. God does not need Google and He knows what we pray for without our having to go into detail. I prayed that she was enjoying the city and now had a keener sense of living in a civil society — where we look after each other as best we can. I’ve had my own wobbly moments due to poor vision and have crashed on the sidewalks of New York and I know that if you do, you will be surrounded within five seconds by concerned New Yorkers.

Something similar happened Friday as I was walking around Whidbey Island north of Seattle where I was about to perform at a theater. I guess I must’ve looked wobbly because a man named Glenn stopped me and asked if I was okay and then he walked with me up a steep hill in the town of Langley. He was a retired home builder and he was so pleasant to talk to, I bought him a ticket to my show.

It’s a good show. I like it myself and other people seem to as well. It’s just me, talking, sometimes I sing a little, sometimes the crowd sings with me. I sing about the glory of the coming of the Lord and they are all there, a cappella, in harmony, astonished by how good they sound. They haven’t sung it since 9th grade and they still know all the words, even the “beauty of the lilies” and the “glory in His bosom.”

I also talk about my upbringing in the Sanctified Brethren with their mournful singing and apocalyptic preaching about the imminent end of the world when we’ll fly up to paradise, and my first paid job picking potatoes on a truck farm and dragging a heavy burlap bag of them on chill November days with a brisk wind blowing dust in my face as the farmer yelled at me that the bag wasn’t quite full, which cured me of any interest I might’ve had in hard work and also got me into the field of comedy and into the arms of the Episcopal church where the preaching is mostly about kindness and mercy.

People like this story and it happens to be true. I combine it with others that are less true. I don’t work from a script. The monologue takes some sharp turns. I toss in some poems, some jokes. I might sing the Beatles’ “I Saw Her Standing There,” which my crowd knows and they love this opportunity to sing “Oooooo” falsetto. A person seldom gets the opportunity. I do a ninety-minute show without a breath of political commentary and people are grateful for this. I even avoid words like “hump,” “bump,” “dump,” and “terrace,” “ferrous,” and “plaster of paris.”

I do have a point of view, of course. I remember that sharp sense of alarm in the taxi line at the sight of the fallen woman and the knowledge that she was alone. We are a civilized people. Don’t doubt it for a minute.

The post Waiting for a cab one night appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Hugging is a habit in the Apple Capital

I am finally going to get my COVID booster shot, which I postponed while I was on the road doing shows after each of which I wound up in the theater lobby commingling with the crowd, shaking hands, patting shoulders, posing for pictures, 80-year-old ladies snuggling up to me, being breathed upon, which is the proper thing to do. When people’ve spent their Saturday nights tuned to your radio show, you don’t sit locked up in a dressing room.

This is an aspect of broadcasting I never imagined when I entered the field fifty-some years ago, the affection. It wasn’t my intention to make friends; I enjoyed radio because it made me feel important, more important than I had felt as a dishwasher or a parking lot attendant. Working in the parking lot during morning rush hour, I yelled at people a lot and now, years later, they don’t come up and press the flesh.

I grew up evangelical and we weren’t huggers by nature. I see young men hugging these days and am sort of amazed. My grandson hugs me. I don’t believe I ever hugged my father or grandfather or uncles. I’m pretty sure I didn’t. But here I am in Wenatchee, Washington, the Apple Capital of the World, on the Columbia River in the Cascades, being clutched to people’s bosoms. Apparently they consider me a friend. I reciprocate but don’t understand it. And this is a fairly reddish section of the state, which means that I am probably getting hugged by some Trumpers who, were it not for radio, might rather deport me. This is fascinating stuff.

The show assiduously avoids politics. The crowd sings “America the Beautiful,” including the verse about the alabaster cities gleaming and maybe “Home on the Range,” with the verse about looking up at the stars, but listening to it you’d never get a hint that I am a radical left-wing Communist Marxist intent on destroying all that is good and true. I am only out to amuse.

I grew up with the Gospels. In the American religion of football, everything is a moral allegory, one team wanted it more, our team blew it, choked, fell apart, while the other team refused to give up, and so a coach must be fired, a player demoted, human sacrifices made. I don’t see life as allegorical, except as a joke. I don’t see this mosh pit in the lobby as a reward for hard work. I see it as God being wildly, crazily generous.

The day before Wenatchee, I had breakfast with my cousin Stan, who is 93, and his wife, Gloria — Stan who has seen more tragedy than I’ll ever know and who radiates cheerfulness. Stan’s dad abandoned the family when Stan was a kid — ran off with a schoolteacher and Stan searched for him for years and finally found him and forgave him. I could not have done that. It simply isn’t in me.

My dad bowed his head over every meal, even if it was simply Raisin Bran with sliced bananas, and thanked God for it and for His love and mercy in our lives. If we ate in a café, he maybe whispered the blessing so as not to attract attention, but we still felt grateful. And now in a theater lobby, mingling with strangers, I am dazzled by life’s generosity. It isn’t an allegory, it’s just a gift, like the apple I ate before the show, a Wenatchee apple, a fabulous apple, though I’m no judge of apples. It was awfully good.

I’m grateful for my wife and daughter, two loving and funny people in my life. I’m grateful that my ambition to do good work has stayed steady, even grown, with the years, and each show is a hill to climb, the novel waits for me to address it and each day is graded A or B or F depending on the progress I’ve made. Work is one of the great gifts of life, and the beauty of the literary life is that the work is there when you wake in the morning, you don’t have to put on a suit and tie, you just make coffee and open the laptop.

What a fine country we have. I put my arm around you, friend. I believe the noise will diminish and we will return to enjoying our liberty, including the freedom to be very grateful.

The post Hugging is a habit in the Apple Capital appeared first on Garrison Keillor.