Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 12

It is never too late for a revelation

I was in a flesh-eating mood last Sunday and so I and two other cannibals headed for a steakhouse in Midtown Manhattan –– my beloved, the vegetarian, was up in Connecticut so we were free from moral censure –– and we found a joint on West 52nd with tables out on the sidewalk so we sat there.

The carnivore section of the menu was extensive and the prices were stunning. The Japanese Wagyu steaks cost more than my quarterly tuition at the University of Minnesota back in 1961. I am often shocked by prices these days –– Tootsie Rolls were penny candy when I was a kid and now you pay $72.99 for a box of 36 –– but I stifle my shock at high prices, not wanting to seem out of touch or sound like a cheapskate. So I bit my tongue and ordered the 10 oz. Wagyu medium-rare, meat from highly sensitive cattle who are given emotional therapy and massaged daily and fed kale and arugula and mushrooms and are not slaughtered but anesthetized.

It was a lovely summer evening, watching the people passing by. This is the beauty of outdoor dining in New York: the constant floor show. Here, individuality is allowed to blossom fully, even extravagantly. You watch harmless crazy people, tattooed ladies, kids who are creating a gender all their own, elderly adolescent men like Donald Trump, it’s a show.

My steak arrived and I hated it. It was tender to the point of being gelatinous. It was rare, not medium rare. It wasn’t chewy, as steak should be. It was sort of like eating raw liver. But when the waiter came by to ask if everything was okay, I said, not wanting to be a complainer or seem unworthy of this great delicacy, “It’s wonderful.” Other Midwesterners have this same problem. Hauled to the gallows to be hanged for a crime we didn’t commit, asked by the hangman if the noose is too tight, we’d say, “It’s just fine. Very comfortable. And if you don’t mind, please don’t offer me a last cigarette, I quit smoking years ago.” Self-advocacy was not taught in the Anoka, Minnesota, public schools back in my day. We were taught to be grateful for what we had.

I paid for the dinner, a sum of money I associate with first-class round-trip airfare between New York and L.A., and I went home, fell into bed, woke around 3 a.m. feeling an urgent need for Alka-Seltzer. I took two tablets, which helped. Around six, I took two more. I felt queasy most of Monday, was okay by Tuesday.

A true New Yorker would’ve rejected the steak. He would’ve raised his voice to the restaurant’s manager. He might’ve posted devastating reviews of the restaurant using the phrase “food poisoning.” Did I complain? Are you kidding? Who do you think I am?

I am a Minnesotan and I take this experience as a lesson. BE WHO YOU ARE, NOT WHO YOU AREN’T. I have rolled into many a drive-up window under golden arches and ordered a double quarter-pounder and a medium vanilla shake and was perfectly happy with it. Why ask for more? I used to live in a mansion in St. Paul once owned by a lumber baron; now my sweetie and I live in a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. It suits us. The mansion obligated us to hold big parties and me to wander through the crowd being charming, but I am a recovering fundamentalist and charm is a language I’m not fluent in.

On Tuesday, I went to LaGuardia to fly home to Minnesota and standing outside Terminal C, I had an illuminating moment. Back in college, I was an ambitious guy, wanted to be a writer, a great writer like Liebling and Wodehouse and Perelman, meanwhile I put myself through school working as a parking lot attendant, handling the 8 a.m. rush, directing cars to park in double straight lines, yelling at the independent-minded, bending drivers to my imperious will to achieve maximum efficiency, and as I watched the young guys in yellow vests directing drop-offs at Terminal C, I realized that maybe traffic control was my true vocation. I was good at it. I really was.

I don’t know what traffic controllers at LaGuardia earn but my guess is that I wouldn’t be paying round-trip first-class airfare for a piece of meat, I’d be riding the subway out to Rockaway and stop at a burger joint and get me a double quarter-pounder and that’d be just fine by me.

The post It is never too late for a revelation appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Looking ahead down the road a ways

When Mr. Trump goes down to defeat in November, after he’s done complaining about the rigged election, the unconstitutionality of Biden’s withdrawal, the AI enlargement of Harris’s crowds, the oppression by the Fake News, he will finally turn his attention to the creation of the Trump Library, two words that do not sit comfortably together, and my guess is that he will designate Mar-a-Lago as the site for the government to maintain and for him to have the right of residency. A special wing will be created for the public display of top-secret documents.

He will, of course, want to control the narrative of the Library, choose the historians who will be in residence there, so it will proclaim his Greatness and the Tragedy of his Unjust Defeat and the Meaning of his Martyrdom. There will be a great deal of Capitalization of Key Words at the Library, and in the Portraits of Himself will be no flaws of pigmentation nor strands of hair askew. The Faithful will come to the site and Rededicate themselves to the Great Cause. But eventually they will all die off and one day a young executive will take charge and she will ask herself, “What do I do with this trash heap?”

And then, once more, America will need to deal with the delicate issue of what to do with historical relics from shameful periods of the past. Other nations deal with this; we are not alone. Brussels is full of magnificent buildings paid for by Belgium’s vast profits from the African slave trade in the Congo and elsewhere. Same with London. Outside of Berlin is the enormous moldering estate of the late Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s right-hand man, which the stigma of fascism and the Holocaust has rendered unusable. Germans simply want it to disappear and eventually it will but not nearly soon enough. Some great architecture was accomplished during the Nazi era and was preserved, but people had to pretend not to know they were once decorated with swastikas. In America, some statuary and memorials honoring Confederate heroes have been quietly removed. The statue of the old imperialist Teddy Roosevelt on horseback has been removed from the steps of Museum of Natural History in Manhattan and shipped to North Dakota, which doesn’t want it either.

History is a complicated business. There are high plateaus and also a good deal of swamp. The Little Bighorn battlefield in Montana was preserved in honor of General Custer who there gave his life along with his men of the Seventh Cavalry, a sacrifice that no longer strikes anybody as noble. What is the good of preserving an enormous site of military stupidity in an unjust cause? The granite monument on Last Stand Hill was put up in 1881, five years after the debacle. In 2003, a monument was erected to the Lakota, Arapaho, and Cheyenne who wiped out the arrogant jerk and his poor soldiers. Tourists still come to look at this, but why? It’s a dishonest historical site: the reason for its existence is a piece of trivia, a few hundred white guys on horseback thought they could spook a few thousand Native men and they were dead wrong about that. But the larger context of the story is lost. The real enemy wasn’t the Seventh Cavalry but the smallpox and other diseases that Europeans brought to the Great Plains that decimated the tribes. The whole wretched mess should be torn down and the land set aside for the instruction and practice of Native religion, the sweat lodge, the Sun Dance, the quest for visions and dreams, the worship of the Creator.

I’m an Episcopalian and I think I could profit from a few months dancing and sweating out on the Plains, dreaming. I’ve had dreams of miserable times in my own life, marital miseries, fascistic periods when I threw myself militantly into realizing my vain ambitions and abandoned spiritual wakefulness entirely. The Little Bighorn would be a national spiritual park meant for people of all colors and religious beliefs or unbeliefs to gather on the prairie and attempt to rediscover the best parts of themselves and let those bloom and bear fruit and the crappy stuff wither away.

As for what to do with Mar-a-Lago fifty years from now when Trump is long forgotten, I take no position. The number of lies he’s told has surely passed a hundred thousand and is close to two, maybe three. Any statue of him is a waste of good marble and that’s the truth.

The post Looking ahead down the road a ways appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Let’s get together, people, what do you say?

It was rousing, even riveting, to watch the glorious art of public speaking come bursting out alive at the Democratic convention in Chicago, never mind your political persuasion — to hear the English language crackle like fireworks in the cadence of great gospel preaching — and here in the age of social media, influencers, memes, to see one speaker after another light a fire under that enormous crowd and bring them to their feet, roaring, arms upraised. Churchill would’ve been cheering, Teddy Roosevelt raising a ruckus, William Jennings Bryan shouting Bravo.

The Democrats could’ve called off the convention; they’d already phoned in the roll call and given Kamala the nomination. But this one was worth the trouble.

Nobody could ever claim that AI pieced this big sweaty raucous circus together from old Bears and White Sox clips, it was by God real, the two nominees, the two ex-presidents, and the one who stole the show, Michelle Obama. You had to get tears in your eyes to see the close-ups of Black women, the pride gleaming in their faces when she lit into Trump: “Most of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward. We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth. … If we see a mountain in front of us, we don’t expect there to be an escalator waiting to take us to the top. No.” And then came the punchline, snatching up Trump’s line that illegal immigrants are taking “Black jobs”: “Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those ‘Black jobs’?” The roar that followed was like a hurricane.

Millions of Americans adore Donald Trump for his outrageousness, the man is without precedent in history, and his people love seeing him wing it for an hour or more, riffing on the Deep State, the stolen election, the flood of crazy criminals flowing across our borders and the elitists destroying the country, an hourlong rant that drives fact-checkers crazy, but the man can’t tell a joke to save his life and he never came up with whiplash punchlines like the escalator on the mountain and the affirmative action of generational wealth. Those are classics, they’ll live on YouTube forever.

Michelle, where have you been all these years? Thanks for coming to the party. Don’t stay away too long. We need you.

I’m an old man and I worry about our kids sitting in isolation in front of a screen wandering in the underground caverns of the internet. I believe in big public events. I go to downtown Minneapolis and am stunned by the loneliness everywhere. Thank goodness for the Minnesota State Fair, ten days during which you can wander through Horticulture, the Hippodrome, Home Activities and the hog barn and get up-close encounters with Minnesotans.

I keep a clear memory of the Beach Boys playing the Fair ages ago and ten thousand Minnesotans entranced by surfer songs about good vibrations and excitations, the high male harmonies and images of ocean waves as we stood under the prairie sky and caught a whiff of the cattle barn nearby. You had to be there.

I remember standing in a crowd of five thousand who came to hear Robert Frost after he’d recited a poem at the Kennedy inauguration in 1961, and there he was onstage at the U of M, bushy white hair, looking out at us and speaking from memory, “Whose woods these are I think I know, his house is in the village though; he will not see me stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow.” At the end, he exited down the aisle where I stood and passed within three feet of me. I could’ve touched him. I still sort of think I can.

It’s beautiful to reach the age of 82 and remember those crowds I’ve been in. An enormous tabernacle at the Methodist camp in Ocean Grove, New Jersey, and thousands of people singing “It Is Well with My Soul.” The Grateful Dead playing a ballpark in St. Paul, Midwestern hippies singing along on “Brokedown Palace.” I don’t claim to be an opera aficionado but I remember “A View from the Bridge” and “Der Rosenkavalier” at the Met when the audience was utterly enthralled and me too.

I’m writing this in a New York apartment but it makes me think maybe I should fly out to St. Paul and walk into the Dairy Building and look at the sheep while I’m at it and stand in line for the Skyride. I’m sitting here looking at a screen; I need to get out and mingle with humanity.

The post Let’s get together, people, what do you say? appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

The beautiful winding road of August

I went up the coast of Maine last week and came across a wonderful little café and it was so good I pulled out my pad and pen and sat writing for a couple hours. I like to write with people nearby but not involved with me personally. The waitress was all business, she greeted me by saying, “Yeah?”

I asked if they served lunch. She said, “Yeah. Take a seat.”

I’d had a bad encounter with a lobster roll the day before so I ordered a garden salad and a grilled cheese. “With chicken or crab?” she said. I said, “Crab.” Crab is not lobster.

The salad was fresh. Greens, tomato chunks, slices of cucumber. Croutons. But fresh, not shipped in cellophane bags from Croatia. And the sandwich was just fine. And so was the blueberry pie à la mode.

What I loved though wasn’t the food but the ambience. I sat in the dark interior looking out an open door to a bright sunny boardwalk and marina and the Atlantic. Younger people sat under an awning out there. My generation, indoors. The customers were stocky people, good eaters, shorts and sneakers. A chorus of children’s voices from a kiddie area about 30 feet away. Kids eat fast and then want to hang with other kids and they were busy jousting and teasing, squealing, playing with puzzles, while the grown-ups sat at tables and conversed and I sat looking out the door, aware that I was in a crowded room of happy Americans enjoying lunch, children shrieking, infants tossing out syllables, parents declaiming or describing their day, the light laughter of women, and out the door the basso rumble of boats’ engines, heading out of harbor. To listen to crowd vocalization, like musical notes, flutes, bassoons, violas, a few violins, a composition titled “Lunch Hour,” simultaneous happy talk, I felt uplifted.

It made me imagine the mood has lifted in this country and the plague of MAGA is passing, people are sick of the insults and the self-pity and the massive naked ego, and Democrats have found happiness and are leading the tourists in that direction.

The accusation that Kamala is antisemitic for having passed over Shapiro for v-p, ignores the fact that her husband is Jewish. The attack on Walz that he shirked his duty, a man who served in the National Guard for 24 years, is ridiculous coming from Mr. Bone Spurs. This guy needs to start attending his own briefings.

This is one of the happiest summers of my very long life. My wife installed WhatsApp on my phone and it dings and I pick up and she talks to me from the wine country of Portugal where she’s hiking with her brother and his wife, on their way to a baptism and pig roast. Sometimes my daughter comes on and says, “Make me laugh,” so I tell her about the woman at Yellowstone Park who was chased by a bear and the park rangers arrested her for running with a bear behind. She laughs.

I’m an old man, I have no ambition whatsoever but I love my work. I do 90 minutes of stand-up, I go back to the hotel and work on my novel, and in the morning I repeat it. The audience laughs a lot and then I have hours of pure silence occasionally interrupted by the voice of the woman I love lying in her hotel room in a heat wave in Portugal and recounting her days’ adventures. Or my little girl needing a joke. So a woman was hit by a car and lay in the street bleeding and someone yelled, “Call a priest!” The woman said, “No, I’m Unitarian.” Someone yelled, “Then call a math teacher.”

According to the actuarial tables I am coming within sight of the end of my life, so why do I feel I am just hitting my stride? On my 82nd birthday last week, I got a video of my high school gym teacher Stan Nelson wishing me a happy birthday. Stan is 103, almost 104. Stan was a landing officer on an LST at Omaha Beach that horrible day in 1944 when young men did their part to save European civilization, and here he is, smiling, speaking clearly, greeting one of his worst pupils. What a beautiful world we live in.

I see that happiness in Kamala’s face, waving to the crowd. Jamaican, East Indian, born to people who came here for opportunity, and this bright well-spoken woman with a big sense of humor and no self-pity has made millions of us look forward to autumn. Our country, sweet land of possibility.

The post The beautiful winding road of August appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

What an awesome August this has been

Mon Dieu! Mille Félicitations to you French for the merveilleux et excitant Paris Olympics, and many thanks to YouTube (or Toi Tube) for the nightly highlights (points forts). An old man doesn’t have hours to spend whilst commentators kill time and runners warm up for the 1,500-meter, just shoot me the juice, Bruce, and show me the Olympic break-dancing gold medal taken by a Canadian — a Canadian ! — and, okay, he’s a Korean-Canadian, Philip Kim, but Olympic break-dancing? B-boys and B-girls spinning and twisting and doing impossible physical feats. And the USA’s Suni Lee doing the twisting vault routine that needs to be seen in slow motion several times to be believed.

I am 82 and, for me, trotting around the block would be an Olympic event. So to see the Swedish pole-vaulter Duplantis perform the ridiculous feat of lofting himself feet-first with the rubbery pole and squiggle over the crossbar is like watching a man climb up a brick wall — it’s surreal, it has no relevance to life on this planet today.

Much more relevant is the 4×100 women’s relay. Back in my day we looked down on fast women but these women are unbelievably swift and the art of handing the baton at full speed to your galloping teammate is a wonder to behold. And what about the 1,500-meter men’s and the two leaders jawing at each other almost to the end when the USA’s Cole Hocker suddenly came racing from back in the pack to win by a couple feet?

Thank goodness the Americans won men’s basketball over the French. It’s our game, Americans invented it. To lose would be like English Sauvignon Blanc beating out French. Some English wines have beaten out French in blind tests but who says vision-impaired persons are experts on wine?

My event is the old man’s 90-minute stand-up storytelling with some poems tossed in and my routine had an intelligent dog, a girl challenging a boy to wrestle, Babe Ruth, a funeral, and the audience singing “America,” “In My Life,” and “My Girl.” It kept the crowd’s attention pretty well.

It was a good week. I did my show every night and all day I sat working on a novel and loved doing it. I have writer friends who’re unable to write so much as a thank-you note because they once wrote a book hailed by heavyweight critics as heralding a new era in American literature. Nobody ever said that sort of thing about me. The most I’ve gotten was “amusing yet often poignant.” That’s not a pedestal; it’s a low curb.

I traveled around doing my show, feeling free as a bird. I grew up the middle child in a big family and so I could ride away on my bike and not be missed and that’s when I discovered freedom. I was ten when I rode into downtown Minneapolis alone past factories and through the red-light district to the downtown library and sat reading books my evangelical parents disapproved of, Hemingway and Mencken and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and nobody tried to stop me.

And now I walked out onstage and sang:

I’ve had many wonderful teachers,

I’ve had more than my share of good breaks,

And thanks to modern medical procedures,

I’ve outlived all my worse mistakes.

I’m not one of the Olympic winners;

I just do what I need to do.

But thanks to surgeons and blood thinners,

I’ve reached the age of 82.

One story I decided not to tell in my show was about the helicopter ride I took with a famous New York model who had dated Donald Trump and it ran into instrument failure over New Jersey and had to make an emergency landing in a swamp, a very dramatic near-death moment, both of us thinking the end was near, and during this emotional moment she told me that Trump eats with his fingers and spills food on himself and is functionally illiterate and has a poor grasp of multiplication and division and she told me other things about him such as the fact that he has a vocal resonator implanted in his neck to make his voice boomy, and without it he has a voice like that of a ten-year-old girl, but who am I to judge? We each have our own limitations. I couldn’t do a pole vault if you put a gun to my head. So don’t.

The post What an awesome August this has been appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Marine on St. Croix’s Ralph Malmberg, the inspiration for Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery

Malmberg was an ‘amazing and interesting character for being, you know, a quiet Swede,’ Garrison Keillor said
By MARY DIVINE | mdivine@pioneerpress.com | Pioneer Press

Obituary: Marine on St. Croix’s Ralph Malmberg, the inspiration for ‘Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery’

Ralph Malmberg, the former longtime owner of the Marine General Store in Marine on St. Croix, never set out to be famous.
But one of Malmberg’s frequent customers was radio broadcaster Garrison Keillor, who lived in Marine on St. Croix from 1977 to 1980. Malmberg was often mentioned in Keillor’s “News from Lake Wobegon” monologues on his weekly radio show, “A Prairie Home Companion.”

Ralph Malmberg outside the Marine General Store in Marine on St. Croix.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Malmberg died Aug. 6 of complications related to Alzheimer’s disease at Croixdale in Bayport. He was 90. (Courtesy of Jennifer Malmberg Henry)

“The name ‘Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery’ I stole from my landlady, Judy Wilcox, who was a good friend of Ralph and Marian Malmberg,” Keillor said Monday. “She also gave me the motto ‘If you can’t find it at Ralph’s, you can probably get along without it.’ That was her joke. Neither one was mine. I simply used them for 50 years.”

Keillor said he last mentioned “Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery” and the slogan during a show on Friday night in Concord, N.H. “And it got the same reliable laugh. Not a guffaw, but a healthy laugh of recognition. I deserve no credit for it; Judy Wilcox gets that.”

Malmberg, who owned the store from 1961 to 1982, was an “amazing and interesting character for being, you know, a quiet Swede,” Keillor said. “That store was the heart of Marine on St. Croix.”

Malmberg, of Marine on St. Croix, never knew when the store would get a cameo on the radio show. Keillor once told a story about the store’s new “foot vibrator.”

“I had all my compressors in the basement, and it got very hot there in the summertime, so I installed a big circulating exhaust fan, and I hung it on the rafters near the produce counter,” Malmberg told a Swedish TV program in 2011. “When I ran that fan, it vibrated the floor quite a bit. Garrison walked in, and he was pacing back and forth and standing in front of that produce counter. I didn’t really think about it. The next day, he remarked on the air about the new foot vibrator that Ralph had installed, and that the people should come there after working hard and get their feet massaged.”

‘Wanted to work for himself’

 

 

 

 

An undated photo of the Marine General Store when it was owned by Ralph Malmberg. It was built in 1870 as a company store for a lumber company. (Courtesy of Marine General Store)

The white clapboard store, built in 1870 as a company store for a lumber company, is a landmark in northern Washington County, known as much for its original wood floor and counter as for its in-house deli and bakery.
Malmberg discovered that the store – then owned by the Strand family – was for sale during a sales call to the store in 1961, said Andrew Malmberg, Malmberg’s son.

Ralph Malmberg was selling trading stamps for Business Incentives at the time, “but he was looking for a business to buy because he wanted to work for himself,” Malmberg said. “He wanted to get out of Minneapolis. He wanted to try living in a small town, and the store came up and that’s kind of all she wrote.”

Malmberg grew up in Minneapolis and graduated from North High School. He studied mortuary science at the University of Minnesota, but later graduated with an associate degree in business from the U, said Jennifer Malmberg Henry, Malmberg’s daughter.

He met Marian Wicker, who was studying education at the U, through mutual friends from North Minneapolis, Jennifer Henry said. The couple married in 1959 at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Minneapolis. They had three children.

Malmberg, who became the town’s butcher after he purchased the store, was especially proud of the store’s meat department. When he bought the store, there was still a chicken coop in the back – where the Nita Mae’s Scoop ice cream shop is now located, Jennifer Henry said.

Other endeavors

Malmberg expanded into other businesses as well. An avid cross-country skier, he opened a ski shop above the Marine General Store, where he sold skis and his own brand of Malmberg 3-pin bindings and a wax scraper he had invented, Andrew Malmberg said.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ralph Malmberg inside the Marine General Store, which he formerly owned, in Marine on St. Croix in 2009. Malmberg died Aug. 6 at the age of 90. (Courtesy of Andy Kramer)

“He loved skiing,” he said. “He liked to compete. He was in a lot of ski races, and he liked to be outside.”
Malmberg was the founder of the Marine O’Brien Ski Race, a race from the Marine Elementary School to William O’Brien State Park. The race celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2022. The race, a fundraiser for the St. Croix Valley Ski Club youth-skiing program, includes 12.5 km and 25 km classic and skate races and a 6 km wood ski race.

Ralph and Marian Malmberg also ran an airline crew specialty store and founded the Marine Messenger, the predecessor of the Country Messenger. The free weekly newspaper, which started as a grocery store broadsheet, was published in the basement of the store.

“It had sale information, special information, they called it ‘gossip,’” Jennifer Henry said. “They expanded into local events, anniversaries, graduations, church events, news about the fire department, you name it. She wrote it by hand and then printed it out or used a typewriter and cut it out. She would literally use glue sticks to put it all together. She would stay up until 3 o’clock in the morning doing it.”

The Malmbergs “weren’t afraid to start new things,” said Gwen Roden, the store’s longtime manager. “He had an Episcopal church in the office area upstairs for a time as well. When the church left, he rented skis and the first VHS videos.”

When Ralph Malmberg would get an idea, “he would just march forward with it,” Henry said. “Because his personality was so palatable to everyone, he could just get people to help him make things happen. He could really get people to rally. He was quiet, but very friendly.”

Employed local youth

The Marine General Store was the first employer for many of the youth in Marine, Roden said. “He was fair, and he was funny,” she said. “He had a great sense of humor. He employed every kid who grew up in Marine and taught us how to work.”

“For scores of young people, it was where they learned good manners, how to deal with customers, reliability, cleanliness, the list goes on,” Keillor said. “It was like Junior Achievement. It was a forum for young entrepreneurs, and they went on to other things.”

Henry said her father had high expectations of his employees. “They learned so much from him,” she said. “He let them do a lot. He was willing to give them a lot of responsibility and trusted them.”

In 1982, Malmberg sold the store to Dan and Sue Pruden, who had worked in the grocery business in Forest Lake.

Andy and Karen Kramer, who owned the store from 2005 to 2015, said Malmberg loved sharing stories about his time at the store. “He said Garrison came in one day and was looking around and said, ‘Ralph, I don’t suppose you have any capers, do you?’ And Ralph looks at him and says, ‘What’s a caper?’” Andy Kramer said.

“When Ralph was telling us that story, I told him, ‘Well we have capers in the store now!’ and I showed him where they were,” she said. “He chuckled and thought that was kind of amazing.”

Lake Wobegon character

In the 2011 interview with the Swedish TV station, Malmberg said he could often picture himself in Keillor’s on-air stories.
“I think when he’s talking about the Lake Wobegon story and the character he’s talking about, I think people kind of fit themselves into that and dream along,” he said. “I know I do when I listen to him.”

Malmberg loved Keillor and listened to the show religiously, Andy Malmberg said. As for being a featured part of the show, “he kind of ate it up, but he was a real humble guy,” he said. “He didn’t make a big deal of it. Mr. Keillor would come in and he would talk to him. He was just a regular friend of his.”

Malmberg was preceded death by his wife, Marian, and daughter Elizabeth. In addition to his son and daughter, he is survived by two grandchildren and a great-grandson.

The post Marine on St. Croix’s Ralph Malmberg, the inspiration for Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

It is never too late to learn a lesson

A dear friend once said to me out of the blue, “Today it will have been forty years since the last time I vomited,” and I said to her, “How do you celebrate an anniversary like that?” It was a witty moment, one of many in our friendship, and if we’d only collected them all, we could sit down and write a Cole Porter musical, but we didn’t and anyway Cole Porter isn’t so hip anymore and we’re busy doing other things.

I, for one, have been on a tour doing a one-man show and having a great time until last week in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, after a dinner of six oysters on the half shell, clam chowder, and a lobster roll, I awoke at 4 a.m. feeling sick to my stomach and headed for the bathroom.

You can continue reading; there was no regurgitation, just a strong impulse in that direction, but I stilled the impulse by (1) remaining very still, (2) thinking of other things, and (3) finding the packet of Alka-Seltzer I’ve had in my briefcase for at least a decade waiting for just this occasion. The other things I thought of were Kamala Harris and how steadily she would deal with this sort of situation, and the show I’d do that evening and whether I should mention vomiting in a humorous way, and my wife, who’d flown the night before to Lisbon to attend a great-nephew’s baptism at his grandparents’ farm where a hundred villagers would gather for a huge pig roast. Roast pig is something my beloved would not ingest or venture near lest she should suddenly need to be alone for a while.

What I conclude from this is a profound truth: each of us has his or her limitations and it is noble to venture beyond them but in the end — I say this as a newly minted 82-year-old: Be Who You Are And Not Who You Ain’t. I am a Minnesotan. I grew up in a home with a half-acre garden; we ate fresh vegetables. Now and then, Dad bought a few chickens from a farmer and we slaughtered them in the yard. We ate the flesh of critters who walked on legs and fish that swam in the lakes. We also ate Chicken of the Sea tuna. But we didn’t eat critters who crawl along the bottom. We were not bottom-feeders.

I have many bottom-feeding friends. I also have a friend who supports RFK Jr. for president, which to me is like eating earthworms. We just don’t talk about it. I have atheist friends though they don’t announce the fact for fear I’d say, “The problem with atheism is who do you cry out to when you’re having orgasm?” and they’ve heard that joke before. And I have several friends who think that ripping a lobster apart and gouging its flesh out with a fork is one of life’s great delights, one reserved for sophisticates like themselves, a higher order than the hamburger crowd.

I like hamburgers. I went into a McDonald’s the other day and ordered a Double Quarter Pounder and thought it was good. At McDonald’s you do not have the carcass of the cow on a spit by the drive-up window, the eyes glazed, the tail hanging down, and the workers don’t gouge the meat from the cow’s rib cage. The hamburger is handed to you wrapped in paper. So after my night in Maine, I believe I will stop my quest for sophistication and be myself, an old man of the prairie. If I hadn’t read A.J. Liebling in the eighth grade and set out to write like him, I could’ve become a small-town teacher and coach like Tim Walz and been quite satisfied with my life.

Governor Walz is a straight shooter. A mob of armed right-wingers gathered at the governor’s mansion once in 2020 and Mr. Walz called up President Trump at the White House and asked him to talk to the governor’s daughter who was frightened and Mr. Trump, to his credit, did. When Mr. Walz takes office in Washington and the Walz family moves into the mansion at the Naval Observatory, I believe that even as he sits in meetings regarding national security and Ukraine and Gaza and the warming of the planet, he will remember his days as a high school teacher when he had to supervise the lunchroom. Speaking of which, I recommend a tuna salad sandwich and a tomato and cucumber salad and a Fudgsicle for dessert. It’s good.

The post It is never too late to learn a lesson appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Riding around the country in August

Ten blissful days driving around New England doing a one-man show in small towns and it’s not easy to write about bliss but one should try, especially since I write so kvetchingly about misery and annoyance.

What makes it blissful is that I’m not in charge. My wife took away the car keys long ago and it turns out to be a pleasure. In a few months, Joe Biden will experience this. He’ll go back to Rehoboth Beach and play Scrabble and finally have time to read Dickens. I was a boss for years and I still remember the dimwit things I did, but now, with my road manager Janis Kaiser at the wheel and making all the decisions, I am in the blessed position of passenger, just like when I was ten, looking out the window, watching the world go by. She drives through Connecticut into Massachusetts, four-lane highways lacing through deep forests, and suddenly we’re in torrential rain, the wipers slapping, we’re passing giant semitrailers, blasting through puddles, and it’s all a travelogue movie to me: she keeps us on schedule, I sit and take it all in and my mind wanders. We slow down and motor through a town of brick storefronts right out of the late 19th century, we pass a herd of Holsteins, we come into a traffic jam caused by a flock of geese casually crossing the highway, it’s one lovely moment after another.

We can talk or not, as we like. She grew up Norwegian in Brooklyn, has been in theater, is a sailor, has worked in big corporations, is tech-savvy, so she knows plenty that I don’t. I talk on the phone to my wife, who misses me in New York but she’s okay and I feel cleansed, transformed, in the role of octogenarian stand-up. And after every show, shaking hands out on the street, people congratulate me on Kamala Harris’s choice of Tim Walz as a running mate, as if I had something to do with it.

I hosted a fundraiser for him at my house in St. Paul when he ran for governor and was impressed — the guy taught high school so he knows how to talk to people whose minds are elsewhere and persuade them to wake up and take an interest. He’s the perfect guy for the job. If people think of Democrats as unhappy childless cat ladies, Tim can tell them it’s more about providing free meals to schoolkids and college to people who can’t afford to pay tuition. Nonetheless, he coached football and is a hunter. He makes Minnesota proud. I even wrote a limerick.

Kamala just picked Tim Walz,

A Lutheran in coveralls

Who grew up on a farm, he

Did time in the Army,

And I’ll bet he has plenty of courage.

When we elect President Harris, I think many men are going to feel a sense of relief, seeing a satirical cartoon character who exemplifies male bragging and bluster and B.S. at its over-the-top worst go back to Mirage-of-Long-Ago or maybe fly off to Saudi Arabia to avoid prosecution.

We don’t talk politics in the car. We soak up the beauty of the landscape, the rainstorms, the little towns of Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, New York, the Main Streets of brick storefronts, and we appreciate GPS, a gift of Big Government and the friendly voice that steers us through the unfamiliar maze of roadways.

One beauty of GPS is its service to small independent entrepreneurs. Looking for a place to have lunch? You type in “café” on your phone and in addition to McDonald’s and Domino’s, it’ll give you the little Thai café and Joe’s BBQ and Mama Giovanni’s and Mickey’s Diner, saving enterprising businesspeople big bucks on ads and billboards.

Tim Walz is a man of the heartland and when J.D. Vance of Yale described him as a San Francisco liberal, it had the tone of desperation, same as if Walz were to call Vance a “hillbilly.” If a venture capitalist from the Ohio suburbs can be a hillbilly, then I am Taylor Swift.

I am not well-tailored, nor am I so swift. But I do write a good limerick.

I’m at Boothbay Harbor up in Maine

On a tour and feeling no pain.

I’ve turned 82

And still do what I do,

Standing up, with a heart and a brain.

The post Riding around the country in August appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Standing on the sidewalk shaking hands

I did something last Sunday I’d never done before in my 82 years. I went to a café on the main drag of Keene, New Hampshire, and I could hear my wife say, though she was five hundred miles away, “Wash your hands before you eat, you’ve been shaking hands with a hundred people,” so I walked to the rear of the café and found the men’s room door locked. A waitperson nearby, what we once called a “waitress,” said, “Use the ladies’.” I looked at her aghast. “Go ahead, we do it all the time,” she said. “Yes, but you’re a lady,” I said. She laughed. She said, “Go ahead, it’s no problem.” I waited a minute. She laughed at my timidity. The guy in the men’s must’ve been doing his eye makeup. So I went into the ladies’. (That’s not my term; that was the word on the door.) It was a regular toilet, except with no urinal. I put the seat up, aimed very carefully, then flushed, washed my hands, and emerged. A woman stood there waiting. She was more my age than the waitperson’s. She looked at me somewhat severely. I wanted to explain but didn’t know how. (“I was told to go in there”? It sounds sheepish, even shamefaced.)

I’ve been at the Metropolitan Opera during intermission when women standing in a long line at the Women’s broke out of line and stalked into the Men’s, no waiting, and, I assume, went into a stall and did what needed to be done, and if a man had stared at them afterward, they would’ve said, “What’s your problem?” But I’m not a New Yorker.

I’d shaken hands on the sidewalk outside the opera house in Bellows Falls, Vermont, not far away, where I did a show. It was just me and the stage was so big, I decided to stand down among the customers, which the lighting guy didn’t like, having arranged the stage lighting, but I made my career in radio for a reason — I look like a security guy who wandered out by mistake — and when you are 82, nobody argues with you for fear of causing a seizure. It was pleasant being in their midst, especially when I got them to sing. I told them, “This is an ugly election year when half of the people believe the other half is crazy, so let’s stand and sing together in the park, no matter what you think,” and they sang about the land where our fathers died and the spacious skies and the fateful lightning and the terrible swift sword, and it was rather thrilling.

I’m an old Democrat, a member of the party of childless cat ladies who are miserable about their own lives and want to make other people miserable too, but I do not like that schools have removed “America” and the pledge of allegiance from the classroom, I am in favor of strict standards of behavior in school, a dress code, and I believe that good manners are essential to a civil society. I could go on.

The world I grew up in is fading fast. Thanks to the internet, parents don’t hold sway over their children’s minds. Curiosity is a powerful natural urge and censorship died when Wi-Fi came in. You can burn books; you can’t burn radio waves. So everything has suddenly come under question.

What remains powerful is love. My parents loved each other dearly and I witnessed this and it remains large in my life. When I was six, I was a slow reader — when you’ve grown up trying to read Hezekiah and Jeremiah, it does crimp your style — and my teacher Estelle Shaver noticed and kept me after school to read aloud to her from Dick and Jane. When Bill the janitor came in to empty the wastebaskets, she said, “Listen to this boy, Bill. Doesn’t he have a wonderful voice? He’s entertaining me while I’m correcting workbooks.” It was remedial reading but she made it feel like a privilege and this act of kindness sticks with me. Call me naïve but I think marvelous feats can be accomplished by small acts of kindness.

The country is moving toward electing a woman president and I am touched by how presidential she looks, her warmth, her gracefulness, how she can converse with a crowd, how she ignores the insults and the bellowing of walruses, and speaks in clipped sentences about the future of the country. This will be a first in my life and I’m looking forward.

The post Standing on the sidewalk shaking hands appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

A perfect summer night in Manhattan, under the stars

What a world of marvels we live in. I sit with my daughter at night on a terrace under a birch tree looking out at the lights of Manhattan and I take my phone and shoot a video scanning the city lights and text it to a friend facing surgery in Minnesota who is in isolation, her immune system compromised by chemo. She is Catholic so I also send her a joke about the priest and the Baptist sitting together on the plane. The priest orders a glass of wine, the Baptist a 7-Up. The Baptist says , “Christians should not touch alcohol,” and the priest says, “Jesus drank wine.” The Baptist says, “Yes, and I’d have thought better of him if he hadn’t.” All this with a gizmo the size of half a sandwich. No wonder young people love it so much.

I’m of the ancient pen-and-ink-on-stationery era and I like to write limericks to friends such as an Episcopal priest facing surgery:

To Laura our associate rector

As doctors prepare to dissect her,

Life can be risky

For a reverent Piskie,

And I pray that God will protect her,

And that the procedure

Won’t harm her great feature,

Her joyful humor detector.

But this little sandwich in my pocket is a great tool of friendship. A friend is someone you can call up for no specific reason and just exchange thoughts for ten or fifteen minutes. A high school classmate on Bainbridge Island, a friend in the Presidio whose late mother I’m making a character in my new novel, a friend on 105th Street who wants to write a book and I give him two specific encouraging pieces of advice, my sister in Minneapolis to offer a morsel of family history.

Two days ago I was up in Connecticut, sitting on the front porch of an old white house at 5 a.m., my favorite time of day, looking out at the river in the pale light, a fine time to think and also to pray silently for people I know. I don’t tell God what they need, He knows, and I don’t work from a list, I simply see them walk through my mind, my grandson and his girlfriend, my daughter and son and stepdaughter, my wife, my sister, some cousins, the couple next door, my nephew and his wife and their baby, Kamala Harris, some cousins, my colleagues — I hold them in my mind, touch them, and move on. I pray because I am not a good person, I have abandoned people I love again and again and thrown myself into my work, the treachery of ambition. But God hears the prayers of a sinner, I believe.

I am a lucky man so I don’t pray for myself. In a few days I set out on a ten-day tour as an octogenarian stand-up, playing theaters here and there, doing a 75- or 90-minute set, all from memory, which is an excellent way to keep dementia at bay. A man gets careless late in life and when you walk out into bright light and 400 people applaud, it focuses your mind. I was brought up Sanctified Brethren, a judgmental branch of the faith, and I feel blessed to be in comedy, my job to make strangers happy, maybe even delighted, and you can feel it when you accomplish this. It’s unlike other jobs in this regard. During this tour, I will turn 82 and that’s why I’m hitting the road. I want to spend my birthday doing a show. I don’t want to sit at a long table with other elderly people, each with a medical history to share, as someone wheels in a bonfire of a cake and we sit and eat angel food and melted wax and someone tells me some interesting facts about prostate cancer.

I was brought up by Midwestern stoics who drummed the lesson into us: Don’t think you’re somebody because you’re not. You’re not so smart as you think. You’re the same as everybody else. So buckle down and get your work done and don’t fall behind. So I turned into a hard worker. But sitting on this terrace at night with my daughter, and then my wife comes out with her glass of wine, this sandwich putting my friends within easy reach, it is clear to this old Episcopalian, God’s great generosity, how much He loves us, to give us this summer night. In this ugly election year, let us be good for each other.

The post A perfect summer night in Manhattan, under the stars appeared first on Garrison Keillor.