Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 15

THEY WERE SO YOUNG

Memorial Day and the old folks come
And stand in the sun feeling sad and dumb.
The boys in the ground—there are so many,
They’re eighteen, nineteen, maybe twenty—

They just moved out of a boy’s bedroom
And went to war, now they lie in a tomb
Old people come on Memorial Day
And people speak but what’s there to say?
The dead would trade it all for the chance
To find a girl and ask her to dance.

Ticonderoga, Hamburger Hill,
Young men marching out to kill.
Manassas, Shiloh, Chancellorsville,
They fell down and they lie there still.

World War I: they picked up their arms
And marched to Ypres and the Battle of the Marne
Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele, the Somme,
Midwestern boys far from home.
On ninety acres near Ardennes
Five thousand 162 men
Who left the U.S.A. to strike
Down the wickedness of the Third Reich.

Eight thousand near Henri-Chapelle,
Outside London, in northern France,
Lie men who served their country well
And fought to liberate foreign lands.
On land and sea, in the air they fought,
Landed in France, advanced to the Rhine,
Ferocious battles along the line.
In a terrifying moment, died
And now they lie in a narrow lot,
Head to foot and side by side

Far from Ohio, New York, P.A.
And now their families are fading away,
And memories fade,
And how many visitors come around
To visit this or that burial ground?

So on one day at the end of May
We pause and think of what we owe
To those who lie here row after row
Who fought for freedom long ago.

Iwo Jima and Normandy,
Anzio and the Coral Sea,
The Battle of the Bulge, the Korean War,
Pork Chop Hill, the Chosin Reservoir,
Loc Ninh, Dak To, the siege of Khe Sanh,
The Tet Offensive and the battle of Saigon:
Young men running and young men fall,
Their names are inscribed on a long stone wall.

Iraq, Afghanistan, again and again,
The story repeated of elderly men
Wary of appearing weak,
Needing heroic lines to speak,
Sent the soldiers out to die,
Leaving the mothers and sisters to cry.

Tragic mistakes were made, it’s true.
Generals sent young men to do
What shouldn’t be done,
What couldn’t be won.
At a terrible cost,
The mission failed, young men were lost.

History will not ignore
The screw-ups that are a part of war.
Presidents, senators, leaders will be
Closely examined by history,

And on 9/11 in the terrible hours
When the fires burned in the twin towers
Men and women of the emergency force
Came racing through the downtown streets,
Cops and firemen and EMTs
Dragged equipment through the doors
And headed for the upper floors.
Knowing this was no accident.
Up the smoky stairs they went
With every reason to assume
That this building would be their tomb.
And those who suffered and fell will be heard,
And history will have the last word.

But all we say on Memorial Day
As bells are rung, hymns are sung,
Flowers are brought and strewed among
The stones and crosses in this yard,
The graves of those who did their part.
All we say is, it breaks your heart:
They were so young.
They were so young.
They were so young.
They missed out on so many years

So after you decorate the grave,
After the speeches and the tears,
Enjoy this land they died to save.
Enjoy your life, see your friends,

Put the hamburgers on the grill,
Toss a salad, eat your fill,
Let the festivity commence,
Take a walk, go for a run,
Let jokes be told and songs be sung,
Do the things they would’ve done,
Those who died too young.

Copyright 2024 Garrison Keillor

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Don’t name a library after me, please, I’m still writing

I had a long talk with my friend George Latimer, the mayor of St. Paul, last Monday, which went on for 54 minutes, which is a long time for a dying man, but Mayor Latimer is quite feisty at 88, has been in and out of hospice a few times so his intentions aren’t clear, and he was very funny, which is how I want to be when I am dying, should this ever occur. Though he left office in 1990, I still think of him as mayor because he is memorable. He won office despite being short and Lebanese, which some voters misread as “lesbian,” and is a native of Schenectady, which is not in Minnesota nor even near it, but he could talk like a bartender, speaking with great conviction while taking both sides of a question so as not to disrespect those who disagree and elaborating on the complexities so thoroughly that you forgot what he had said. And St. Paul was in rough shape at the time and why would you impose the mayorship on a friend? So we elected an out-of-towner. In St. Paul, you’re not a full citizen unless your grandmother was born there. From the mayorship, he descended into a spiral of deanships and professorships, board memberships, various eminent vacancies, and ten years ago St. Paul’s downtown library was named the George Latimer Library, which led many people to assume he was dead. He called me last week to tell me, in his own words, that he was not.

We agreed that the world we knew is slipping away. We were troubled by the Minnesota Republican convention the previous week at which their apparent presidential nominee said he’d won the state “by a landslide” in 2020 and the Republicans applauded even though he’d lost the state by roughly 230,000 votes, a margin that’s hard to ignore. In his speech, he said, “No matter how hateful and corrupt the communists and criminals we are fighting against may be, you must never forget … this is a nation that totally belongs to you. It is your heritage.” They paid $500 apiece to applaud this bilge.

Times have changed and I know it because I have children, one born in the olden days and one in modern times. One was born before seat belts, when a child might ride standing up in the front seat next to Daddy as he drove 75 mph across North Dakota, and one rode in a podlike car seat belted in like a little test pilot. One grew up inhaling secondary smoke and the other in a house in which nobody ever smoked though sometimes a guest lurked in the backyard like a Soviet spy and lit a cigarette to notify his criminal confederates that he had the secret papers in his possession. The younger one’s rearing was guided by a ten-foot shelf of books. The older one was raised by pure chance.

I am a Democrat — I gave up communism back in 1982 when I quit smoking — but I am wary of liberals and the hesitations they imposed upon us, the box of razor blades with the warning, “Sharp: may cut skin if pressure is applied.” The warnings on wine bottles: “May have serious consequences in your choice of romantic partners.” Boxes of butter that say, “You know this isn’t good for you and yet you do it anyway.” There is an obsession with syndromes and disorders among liberals, short people become “vertically challenged” and “overlooked” and programs are created to guard against self-minimalization by requiring schools and restaurants to provide stilts.

I think of it as Creeping Unitarianism, the love of organizations like Anger Anonymous for parents who have yelled at their kids, which lets you form committees and subcommittees and hold meetings and conduct research. And Men Coming to Terms with Their Maleness, in which guys sit in a circle of folding chairs and talk about how happy it made Mom to see her boy grow up big and strong and how this made them insensitive and tyrannical and they must now regain vulnerability and learn to weep in front of other men, which they attempt to do every other Wednesday night in a Unitarian church basement near you. I am all in favor of this so long as I’m not required to participate.

In addition to communists and criminals, the Democratic opposition includes many Christians and crossword puzzle workers, and those Minnesota Republicans know that. I know they know it. I wish they hadn’t clapped. Long life, George. Ten more years and you’ll be almost done.

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Losing my mind in New York and then finding it

I went into a Manhattan ER last Saturday out of concern about incidental memory loss (name of primary physician, for one, name of building I live in, a vagueness about the previous two weeks) and if you need an ER, Manhattan is the place to be. My sweetie was in St. Paul playing viola in an orchestra. I took a cab, walked in the door of New York-Presbyterian, and a few minutes later I was peeing in a plastic container and ten minutes later a neurologist was asking me what year it is, what date, date of birth, name of spouse or loved one and had I recently ingested marijuana or cocaine or anything of the sort, and the answers were 2024, May 18, 8/7/1942, Jenny Lind, and no and no. (Had this been Fargo, North Dakota, she might’ve asked for the name of my wife and left off the “anything of the sort” but this is New York and there are all sorts of that sort of thing.

It’s a fascinating drama, beepers beeping, pagers, men and women in blue quickstepping about their jobs, the occasional wacko screaming, the various souls you and I have no wish to deal with, but what is most dramatic is the kindness, the sheer kindness, the unrelenting gentleness and politeness, the doctor’s gentle pat on the shoulder when the interlocutory is done. Do they teach this in Med School? I guess so. Everyone, even the orderly who pushes your gurney, tells you their name and calls you by name. Nobody is anonymous. A woman is crying in the next alcove: a nurse says, “I’m coming to help you, dear.” The woman says she is in terrible pain.” The doctor is on his way, sweetheart.” Two doctors query two young men about drug usage — marijuana? coke? — and the young men hesitate and the doctors say, “I’m not here to judge. Was it meth? Was it fentanyl? Do you not know?”

I am not in pain, thank you, but memory loss worries me because I am in the business of doing unscripted monologues from memory in front of paying audiences, sometimes for two hours and if I can’t do that anymore I’ll have to go to Shady Pines and play bingo. A woman wheeled me into X-ray (it’s called Imaging now) — “I have a very poor self-image,” I said so she’d know that I’m funny and my life is worth saving. She laughed. She was Black, with a definite French accent. “Haiti,” I said. “Oui, monsieur,” she said. I asked if life will ever get better in Haiti. She said, “I hope so. It is a very beautiful country.” Black/French accent — Haiti: I seize the chance to demonstrate brain function. I tell my orderly, Raphael, “This is an exciting place you work in.” “Every day, something you’ve never seen before,” he says.

But in the midst of my vagueness, I have a clear memory of the novel I’m writing, a novel that thrice in the early morning hours, I’ve awakened with clear ideas about, one for the general structure, then that it’s a novel about a happy marriage, and then a clear vision of the ending. This hospital is going into that novel. People need to hear about kindness happening in New York.

And then around midnight a woman walked in, a civilian, no blue on her except her eyes. She was a Unitarian minister, making rounds, saw my name and remembered a column I wrote back in the Bush era saying what a terrible mistake the Iraq War was. My one good protest column and she remembered it all these years later. I told her I’m Episcopalian and that I’ve read Emerson and decided not to come forward. “We never give up hope,” she said. “This building, the George F. Baker Pavilion — he went to my church, so you’re one of us,” She was very funny. She said, “We think of Episcopalians as people who write thank-you notes after orgies.”

“That’s high church; I’m low church.”

She said, “Just don’t kick the bucket because if you die in the George F. Baker building, you go to a Unitarian paradise and that’s a series of committees planning paradise and designing the gates and deciding who all will speak at the dedication.” I said, “You identify as Unitarian and you took the hormones but underneath you’re Episcopalian.” She reached down to pull up her skirt but she was wearing jeans.

She said, “You’re quick. You ought to go into radio or something.” I said, “God bless you.” She said, “I’ll tell her you said so when I see her.”

And now I’m back home, feeling fine. Not a bad column for a demented man. Don’t send flowers. But be kind to any Unitarians you meet. Google “Unitarian jokes” and keep one on hand. Every thirty or forty years there’s a new one but they love them all equally.

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How I survived the solar flares and stayed sane

The geomagnetic storm caused by solar flares that hit Earth last week and triggered the Northern Lights and threatened to disrupt telecommunications and knock out power grids made me a little paranoid, sitting in a 12th-floor apartment in Manhattan, imagining my laptop computer getting fried, smoke pouring from the keyboard, and my novel-in-progress turned to ashes as well as my entire life’s work, leaving me to spend my remaining years in regret, but perhaps not many years would remain, perhaps the flares (which emanate from a sunspot 17 times the size of Earth) would also trigger thermonuclear war and within three hours Earth would be just another roasted planet like Mercury and Venus.

I worried about nuclear war as a child. In grade school, we practiced ducking under our desks in case of a nuclear attack but it only made us question the intelligence of our principal, Mr. Lewis. A nuclear bomb makes a deep crater, and ducking under a desk doesn’t change that nor is it protection against radioactive dust clouds. I’m sure the danger of nuclear war is very real and the prospect is horrendous but how long can you go on worrying over it? You move on to other things such as the prospect of electing a 78-year-old con man from Queens to high office. Didn’t we do that already? Why would we try it again?

We live in an Age of Disgruntlement and when I dine with grumpy people, I listen to their gripes and when they stop to take a breath I talk about the great progress made in my lifetime, which of course irks them no end. For one thing, the cash card. We used to go into the bank and hand a check for cash to Mildred the teller with her pert hairstyle and starched blouse, her specs hanging on a chain around her neck, and she’d wrinkle her mouth and peruse the check, questioning the wisdom of handing you money, and eventually she’d count out your thirty dollars and say, “Now don’t go spending it all in one place.” And now there are ATMs everywhere you look and you slide in the card and get $300, no look of disapproval.

The laptop computer. You can throw away all of your old 45s, the old hits are all on YouTube, you just type it in the browser and you’ve got Danny and the Juniors singing “Let’s go to the hop (Oh, baby), let’s go to the hop (Oh, baby).” The iPhone. You forget who Natalie Wood’s costar in “Splendor in the Grass” was; no need to agonize over it with other seniors and ruin your lunch at Burger King, you just pull out your phone, google, and of course it’s Warren Beatty. William Inge wrote the screenplay, the movie is set in Kansas, the title comes from Wordsworth. Next question?

Thanks to modern electronics there is probably no need to ever leave your room ever again. Have the deli send over a Reuben and onion rings, order a bottle of vodka from Acme Liquors. Everybody delivers, even proctologists — just FaceTime him, drop trou, and sit on the phone, it’s called a butt call. You can get the news from the QAnon website, listen to the Ronettes, Marvelettes, Brunettes to your heart’s content. You can even do your job from home. Live your life in your PJs. You can talk to yourself, just as I’m doing now.

I’m a writer, working solo in a quiet room but I dread isolation, and the beauty of life in New York is that I can walk out on the street and be in a flow of people, board the subway and experience diversity for real. If someone looks at me, I can talk to them. A flock of high school kids — “Where you off to?” They’re going to MoMA, to see Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night. I step into a coffee shop, buy a tall latte, pay for it, put a tip in the tip jar, and the guy says, “Thank you, my friend.” Which makes me unaccountably happy. Van Gogh painted the night sky while in an asylum, shortly after he cut off his ear, a year before he committed suicide. No need to tell the kids all that. Enjoy your day, kids. Look at the Monets too. Walk tall. Don’t duck. Be beautiful. Let’s hop in the van, oh, baby, and do not drive too slow. Step on the gas, man, and make this van go.

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BRISK VERSE – preview

Foreword

I blew away most of my youth writing bad poetry—long lugubrious lamentations about unbelonging in a crass uncaring commercial world of cutthroat competition that offended my delicate sensibilities—but when I hit 27 I became a grown-up, was married, had a kid, a car, a house with an address where bills were left on the Welcome mat, and I was forced to find my vocation in radio, working an early morning shift, where I learned that lugubriosity was of no earthly use to me. The audience was sleepy and not in need of narcissism. They were farmers, clerks, teachers, truckers, had work to do, and they needed something brisk to awaken them and arouse them to the prospects of the day. They needed cheering up.

My theme song was the Mills Brothers’ “Bugle Call Rag” and I spun Tex-Mex and klezmer, polkas and patriotic songs, doo-wop and bebop, jug bands and gospel quartets, tossing in a tap dancer here, a jaw harpist there, Bach, “Help Me, Rhonda,” Caruso, calypso, bel canto, singing belugas, blues guitarists, the Boswell Sisters, and now and then a poem. It started, I believe, when a man named Fred Petters from St. Cloud asked me to wish his wife a happy anniversary and I recited Shakespeare’s “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments” and I got a thank-you note from Rosemary, the wife, that suggested that children were sort of impediments but they were doing very well, thank you. So I started writing poems again, but not ones about alienation, bereavement, chaos, despair, existential fatalism, grinding hopelessness, impotence, etcetera, but jazzy ones like “My eyes get misty when I think of Julie Christie; if a man wished to be kissed he would want it to be her lips.” I had an audience, why not talk to them? I wrote rhymed metrical verse so it would grab their attention and I ventured outside standard poetic topics, love, beauty, natural wonder, blah blah blah, to outlying areas, sex, flatulence, urination, good manners, suicide, linguini, bikinis, bratwurst. I employed poetry to entertain the rank and file rather than try to impress fellow poets. It made me feel good about myself, a Sanctified Brethren boy slipping the bonds of sanctity to make people feel good.

I did radio for years and then suddenly, for no good reason, I was very old. I find that life quickens when there’s less in the tank, so you step lively, get to the point, wake up and die right. You’re too old to hold grudges or get in a fury about politics or imagine that maple syrup causes multiple sclerosis or that stepping on a crack can break your mother’s back. Past 65 it’s the age of gratitude, so seek out the beautiful, virtuous, loving, humorous, and true, and let the younger people obsess over the meaningless and the acquisition of nonsense and trash.

In 1994 I started up The Writer’s Almanac, which included a poem—Mary Oliver, Maxine Kumin, Theodore Roethke, Billy Collins, W.S. Merwin, Grace Paley, Louis Jenkins, etc., etc.—which I chose for its clarity—poems that could be grasped and enjoyed by a person whipping up an omelet with small children tugging at your pant legs— and because many stations broadcast TWA at 7 or 8 a.m., I excluded poems of dread, cynicism, agony, meditations on evil, poems about death, especially the death of small children. Too early in the morning for that. And over the years, as listeners wrote to tell me they looked forward to the daily poem, I felt I was performing a public service. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, for example, which details his miseries and regrets and then For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings that then I scorn to change my state with kings, a useful reminder in the morning while facing a difficult day: the redemptive power of love.

Back in college we never used the word “useful” when discussing The Waste Land or Berryman’s Dream Songs—we considered great art to live beyond such a mundane standard—and I pondered plenty of poetry that, I realized later, was written by poets who were falling-down drunk or batshit crazy and looking for the rat poison, and I’m sorry but you don’t go to the locked ward of the loony bin to figure out how to live your life.

In my twenties I stumbled along writing unreadable stuff and thinking of life as meaningless, which in my case was true at the time, and then I stumbled into radio and started enjoying talking to people, and, as it turned out, depression passed me by entirely, and now I could no more write about desperation than I could write about being an Alabama sharecropper locked in the Mobile jail for drunkenness and possession of a deadly weapon. I’ve never been to Mobile. I quit drinking long ago. My only deadly weapon was sarcasm.

I like the poem that you write as a gift to someone, such as:

This is a limerick for Jenny
Whose virtues are golden and many,
Whose faults are few,
Perhaps one or two,
Though right now I can’t think of any.

And if you’re ambitious, a poem, the first letters of whose lines spell out the recipient’s name:

Elegant, energetic, entertaining, and effusive,
Rarely repetitive and hardly ever tedious,
In every situation, she makes full use of
Comedy and command of all medias,
Always cool, she keeps turning the page,
Roving restlessly on the nightclub stage.
Happily at work while highly wary
Of jerks and opportunists, always very
Diligent in serving the sad and solitary,
Entertaining therapists with her private episodes,
Sail on, sweet soloist, Erica Rhodes.

I wrote poems for many of my doctors, including my cousin Dan who likely saved my life when he heard wheeziness listening to me tell the news from Lake Wobegon on the radio and shipped me to Mayo to get cut open and have my mitral valve sewn up. When someone saves your life, you don’t write a meditation on death. I wrote:

A diligent doctor named Dan
Is stuck with being the man
To urge compliance
With medical science
Which you won’t though you should and you can.

And recently, for Dr. John Chen:

My eye doctor, good Dr. Chen
Did magic recently when
He lasered one eye
Briefly, now I
Who couldn’t read signs
Or books or the Times
Can read them clearly again. And this, for me,
Who am literary
Makes Chen worth a poem with a pen.

I wrote my mournful poems when I was young and in good health but as I got into my sixties and had scary experiences such as seizures that sent me to a neurologist, I was forced to become an optimist.

There is a neurologist, Jim,
Whose diagnoses are grim— So he opens each visit
By asking, “How is it?”
And singing an uplifting hymn.
He gave me a pill for a start
That let me understand art.
One pill from the bottle,
Now I read Aristotle
And I think I am René Descartes.

In other words, Folks With Strokes Can Still Tell Jokes.

I departed from the poetry we studied in college, Auden, Berryman, Crane, Dickey, Eliot, et al., and toward rhymed metrical verse because rhyme is an aid to memory and I like to have poems in my head, and also meter creates an illusion of order within which loony gestures and inspirational asides have more impact.

I quit going to poetry readings long ago. Too much dramatic exhibition of keen sensitivity, too many obligatory sighs of wonderment. I much prefer laughter. Nobody fakes laughter. I give these to you in hopes that you might like some enough to read one aloud to a person sitting nearby. You just say, “Listen to this,” and read the poem and if it lands right, you’ve created a pleasant moment, and then we go on to something else.

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My position on congestion pricing, plainly stated

Congestion pricing comes to Manhattan in June, a system of tolls to reduce daytime traffic on streets that have become sluggish so they’ll start moving again and not turn into parking lots, which is a noble idea, just as no-smoking laws were back in the day: you don’t have a right to be a public nuisance. If you drive into Manhattan below 60thStreet, a license plate reader will assess you fifteen bucks, more for trucks and buses; your taxi fare will go up $1.25, twice that for Uber or Lyft, and the $1 billion collected per year will go to improve mass transit. Like most bold reforms, congestion pricing is unpopular, and New York being New York, people love to jump into the fray, lawsuits are filed, bureaucracies are denounced, families are split, lovers break up, conspiracy theories abound, the death of the city is predicted, dread mounts as June 30 approaches, and why shouldn’t I, a Minnesotan in exile in the city, not voice my concerns? I pay taxes here. I vote. Why should I be silent? You got a problem with that, pal?

I like congestion. It’s part of city life. Why try to turn Manhattan into Minneapolis? Downtown Minneapolis is a ghost town. Walk down Hennepin Avenue at noon, you feel like the lone survivor of a catastrophe. But a taxi ride from the Upper West Side down Columbus Avenue to a 1:30 appointment on 23rd Street is very very exciting. You jump in the cab at 96th and you cruise for a few blocks and in the Seventies it becomes a dramatic slalom run. The cabbie keeps switching lanes to avoid stopped vehicles. Delivery trucks are double-parked, reducing three lanes of traffic to a single lane. Sometimes cross-street traffic blocks the intersection so you may sit through a couple of stoplight changes. Bicyclists fly past, ignoring red lights. Motorcycles thread through the jam, helmeted guys with delivery boxes on their backs, zooming inches away from your cab. If you jumped out of the cab at any point, your mangled body would lie there until the cops arrive, further tangling traffic; eventually a hearse would pull up. Other drivers would curse you as they passed. There is extensive cursing in times of congestion: English and other languages are fully employed, horns honk, pedestrians shake their fists. Diners sit in the restaurant sheds built in the parking lanes back during COVID and eat their lobster rolls and Thai chicken while inhaling carbon monoxide and paying exorbitant prices. You sit in your cab as pedestrians pass, the whole carnival of diverse ethnicities and body types. Food aromas waft from the food trucks, hot dogs, burgers, felafel, burritos. It’s the Minnesota State Fair on amphetamines. Your awareness is heightened. You arrive at 23rd an hour late — your appointment is canceled, or you’ve lost the gig, or the lady’s left the restaurant and won’t ever speak to you again — but it’s thrilling.

Back when I lived in Minnesota, I got into several romances that I later wished traffic congestion had prevented. I paid huge sums for houses that a good traffic jam, a missed appointment with a real estate agent, would’ve saved me a bundle. I made rash decisions that, had I sat stuck in traffic for an hour in the back of a cab and thought over my options, my life would be better.

I met my beloved in 1992 at Docks Restaurant on 90th & Broadway. We had lunch for almost three hours. The marriage has stood up for almost thirty years. I adore this woman, as she is well aware. I lived at 90th, she lived at 102nd. We each walked to the restaurant. We didn’t meet by way of a dating app — they didn’t exist then — I knew of her by way of her older sister who was a classmate of my younger sister. She grew up in my hometown of Anoka, on Rice Street, a block from where my old girlfriend Christine lived on Benton Street. My school choir director Ruth Hallenberg was a member of my sweetheart’s church. My eventual mother-in-law was a friend of my classmate Pete Benzian’s mother. Do you get my drift here?

The wild ride down Columbus to 23rd through single lanes between double-parked trucks with motorcycles and bikes passing may not be the road you really need to travel, exciting though it be. Your heart’s desire may be right in your own neighborhood. A pedestrian romance may be what you’re really longing for. My sweetie is a walker in the city who knows mass transit forward and backward. Case closed. Congestion for pleasure, but for romance look around you.

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All of me loves olive oil and this is why

I am now putting olive oil on my pancakes, in my coffee, sipping it from a wine glass, after reading that it is beneficial in holding dementia at bay. Don’t ask for proof, I believe what I want to believe, like most other people my age. I don’t want to spend my last years babbling in a seniors’ warehouse; I plan to do stand-up comedy until I’m 97 and then be shot cleanly by a jealous husband whose wife told him she wished he were more like me. A Republican husband — these guys can shoot straight — will aim his .44 and send me instantly, no mouth-to-mouth, to whatever paradise God keeps for us Episcopalian liberals. Probably a dorm where we’ll sit around and read the same copy of the New York Times over and over. No bliss, just boredom.

Do I sound demented to you, dear reader? Tell me if I do.

Meanwhile I’m alone in a New York apartment; my sweetie’s back in Minnesota, hanging out with artsy people, engaged in witty conversation over glasses of exquisite sauvignon blanc, discussing the merits of Messiaen vs. Saint-Saëns, while her pathetic pal sits worrying about going gaga while sipping olive oil.

Is this how I imagined my life would be back when I was your age, kiddos?

No, I thought I would grow up and be distinguished — I got an honorary doctorate long long ago, and okay, it was from a little Lutheran school in Minnesota, but still. I looked good in the gown and a professor with a genuine doctorate read the citation, which made me sound like a combination of Jonas Salk, Will Rogers, and St. Julia the Uncomplaining. I never won a literary award but Stephen Sondheim once walked up and told me he enjoyed my limericks. Modest man that I am, I didn’t even snap a selfie of us. I was interviewed once on the BBC and I don’t mean the Boston Boys Club, I mean the one in London with the ladies and gentlemen with the excellent accents, accents unavailable to the son of a postal clerk in Anoka, Minnesota.

I was forced into hard labor when I was ten years old, sent to the cruel Fred Peterson, a farmer just west of us, where I slaved in his cornfields, hoeing endless rows in the blazing sun, and then picking the corn, and then picking his potatoes, a heavy burlap bag over my skinny shoulders. My back is still stooped from the weight, and when I go over to someone’s house for dinner, I notify them that if corn or potatoes are served, I am likely to be violently ill. As a result, guess what: I’m never invited. I long for a cheeseburger but I pull up under the Golden Arches and smell the french fries and I am blinded by tears and have to lie down with a cold compress on my forehead.

It happened back in the Fifties, long before young people were allowed to choose their gender, and I was forced to be a man even though I didn’t understand football, didn’t care for dirty jokes, had no interest in cars or guns or poker, had no taste for beer, and I have been stuck in this gender ever since. Men avoid me, and I try to be friends with women and they mistake it for flirtation and turn away in disgust. It’s a sad story and do I complain? No, I feel gratitude. I was forced to be grateful when I was a kid. I was fed wretched food and Mother said, “Children in China would be grateful to have that macaroni and cheese.” And look at what happened to those Chinese children. They’re grown up and wealthy and have advanced electronics and it’s not a democracy so they don’t have to deal with politicians.

No, it’s been a hard life and I didn’t mention the time I was kidnapped by coyotes. But I’m grateful. I tell myself, “It could be worse. I could get old and lose my mind.” The other day, I forgot the word “cognitive” for hours, I thought, “Alert? Informed? Awake? Attentive? Cerebral? Incognito?” The very word for the skills I’m scared of losing. And then I made a salad with olive oil and vinegar dressing and the word came back. It wasn’t the vinegar. It was the olive oil. I read that somewhere. Maybe a newspaper, maybe online.

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Let’s talk about honesty, grrrr, rrrfff, rrrfff

Whenever I open an egg carton, I think of the chicken at work in the factory, creating this elliptical work of art onto a conveyor belt, to be stolen away, and then the hormones in the chicken feed kick in and the process of creation repeats itself, sort of like me and limericks: I write a good one and it stimulates the next limerick and pretty soon I have a hundred of them, which I could collect in a book but won’t because very few people appreciate limericks — women do not, because so many cruel limericks have been written about women, and when men read a limerick they think, “I could’ve done better than that,” being the compulsive competitors they are, and meanwhile here I am with this work of art in my hand.

Minneapolis is great. Have you seen it?

The streets go from Aldrich to Zenith.

It’s the birthplace of Prince,

Than whom no one since

Has been any hipper, I mean it.

The city is good for the sickly.

The streets are numerical, strictly,

And alphabetical

All so that medical

Teams can get to you quickly.

I handed this to a friend — I’m in St. Paul, as I write this — and he said, “Nice,” and handed it back. It’s a useless work of art, not like the egg, which, in addition to being a source of life, is also good in cakes, omelets, Egg McMuffins, nog, and so forth. But at least that limerick is factual and provides information about the street system of Minneapolis and it honors Prince. Not like —

A lady who lives in Vancouver

Drank two quarts of varnish remover

And did not get ill

And vomit, but still,

It didn’t do much to improve her.

There is no such lady and the reader knows this immediately, even before getting to the varnish remover. It’s fiction, which I’ve devoted a good deal of my life to, though I come from a family of farmers, engineers, teachers, caregivers, people who sought to be useful citizens and not merely decorative. Why did I make up things instead of learning to fix things?

The fact is that when I was a kid in Minnesota, struggling my way through six-foot snowdrifts to school, long before lightweight down coats were invented — I was an 82-pound fourth-grader wearing 42 pounds of heavy woolens and corduroy, and one day I was caught by a pack of coyotes who carried me away to their den where I remained for several years and learned their language of growling, snuffling, snorting. I, being prehensile, was sent into the henhouse to snatch chickens, while the others distracted the farmer’s dog, and I bit the chickens’ throats and bled them dry and carried the bodies back to the den where we ate them raw.

I was rescued by hunters and returned to my parents who had recovered from their grief and didn’t know what to do with me. I relearned English and I regained a semblance of good manners, though even now, years later, I sometimes urinate on the bathroom floor to mark my space against intruders, which upsets my wife and so does my habit of woofing in my sleep and sometimes I’ve smelled feathers in my sleep and attacked my pillow and chewed a hole in it, so we switched to foam rubber.

I’m in a therapy group, Hominids Undergoing Manifest Animalist Natures, and we have formed a very tight pack, meeting in a nearby park, and sometimes I get into conversations with dogs, some of whom believe their jailers are in touch with life on other planets and that an invasion by Martians, Venusites, and Jupiterians is imminent, and they live with relentless dread. Dogs are not nearly so bright as coyotes though the two languages are similar. Coyotes sing, they like to look at the stars, they tell stories; dogs are hostages to the approval of humans and without the pat on the head, the snuggle, the treats, the “Good dog,” they are bereft. I am more like coyotes. I stay centered by writing limericks and praising the Lord, no matter what other people think. I look up at the stars and I sing:

I sing to the stars and Infinity,

And God who made everything in it, He

Created the frame

And is not to blame

For my sins of gross masculinity.

I trust that after I die

I will fly to His arms in the sky,

And if it’s not so,

I’ll never know.

I could worry about it, but why?

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The critic who lit up my week and more

April was an awfully good month for me, so good that I’ve been walking around St. Paul, looking up into the branches of trees, making sure there isn’t an anvil roosting in one of them that’s waiting to fall and kill me and thereby serve justice. I’m a happy old man in love with my wife and in touch with good friends and I’ve been on the road doing good shows at which, among other things, the audience sings beautifully some songs they and I have known by heart since we were in grade school and now, on top of all this, my book Cheerfulness, in which I attempt to defend the title attitude against our present Age of Dread & Gloom, has gotten a long, intense, brilliant review by Meghan O’Gieblyn in Middle West Review, the spring issue. Only a fellow writer can know what this means. A lot.

I’m still writing books but haven’t been reviewed by anybody in ages, maybe because I’m an Old White Male and our time is up, or maybe I’ve written too many books, and I’m okay with unreviewing — going way back to Veronica Geng’s caramel custard review of Lake Wobegon Days in the New York Times in 1985, the reviews have been warm and sweet, which is nice for the publisher but for me, the hardworking writer, are unremarkable, like a friend’s cat climbing into my lap: not the equivalent of good conversation. But O’Gieblyn’s essay is a brilliant and engaging piece of work and I feel honored that she went to so much trouble. It pleases me that she quotes funny lines from the book and not pretentious ones: she could easily have used my own words to make me look like a hack and a bore. She does use the word “schtick” in connection with my radio monologue, but I don’t mind: in stand-up, schtick is simply useful, like the handheld microphone. She says that my willful optimism seems somewhat strained at times, and she writes, “There is, alas, no shortage of holes in the book’s logic that could be exploited by an attentive critic”and she goes ahead and sticks her finger in some of them, but she also says, “It’s hard not to conclude that Keillor has reached the sunny equanimity of enlightenment.” (I’ve made it as hard as I could, Meghan.) And then she says, “The prose throughout the book is both sharp and buoyant, and often arrives, somewhat unexpectedly, at profundity.” I was aiming for buoyancy. Profundity is well above my pay grade; it’s Ms. Gieblyn’s territory, not mine. To me, this sentence from a writer so sharp as she is worth more than any prize given by a committee. “Sharp and buoyant” is a nice phrase for promotion, but what makes it meaningful to me is the brilliance of Meghan O’Gieblyn.

She writes, “In the age of doomscrolling, eco-anxiety, and runaway AI nightmares, truth on which our fractured polis seems to agree is that the world is going to hell, cheerfulness has become an unmistakable symptom of self-delusion, willful blindness, or blithe ignorance of one’s privilege.”

I beg to differ with the fractured polis. Delusion, blindness, ignorance are three monkeys I’ve known from time to time, but when I stand and sing bass with a couple thousand people in Spokane or Boise or Burlington or Bethesda, singing from memory, no googling, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” including the watchfires of the camps, the dews and damps, the flaring lamps, it would be willful ignorance not to be cheered truly and deeply. And to be scrutinized closely and praised by a fellow professional means everything. The respect of one righteous person is worth more than a silver chalice from the Federation of Associated Arts Organizations.

And as if that’s not enough, the Avon, Minnesota, Chamber of Commerce has invited me to be Grand Marshal of a parade on June 15 celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Lake Wobegon Trail, a 65-mile biking/hiking trail on the old Soo Line railbed. I will be there, marching. I will also stand up in the Avon Amphitheater and talk about Lake Wobegon, my hometown, which is supposedly nearby. There will be a craft fair, petting zoo, 5K Run/Walk, turtle races, fishing contest, beer garden, and a Food Court serving sloppy joes, corndogs, cheese curds, and pork chops on a stick. Fireworks at dusk. There will be a booth where I will sit under a sign, “Tell Your Story To A Novelist,” where people can come and whisper a story to me and I’ll try to put it into my new Lake Wobegon book. More novelists should consider doing this sort of thing.

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On the road again, meeting the folks

I went out West to Idaho and Washington to do my show in Boise (soft s) and Spokane, and was surprised by how vibrant, bustling, handsome both cities are, and walked out onstage and sang Van Morrison’s “These are the days of the endless summer, these are the days, the time is now” and they seemed to like it okay, so I hummed a note and they sang “America the Beautiful” with me and then we did “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” for the Republicans in the crowd and they sang it full-out, four parts, and then, for contrast, “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” and we were on our way.

It’s an age of dread, the news perpetually discouraging, TV and media merchandising ugliness, and either you join the Greek chorus of gloom or you go with the American choir of cheerful resolve, and I choose cheerfulness. I am capable of dismay: I’m dismayed by the Working From Home syndrome that is leaving our big office buildings half empty. I call up an office to get answers to difficult questions and I hear Death Chute singing “Vanilla Windows” and a guy says, “Yeah?” and a dog barks and a woman yells, “Put it on headphones!” This is what Allied Federated has come to. I’d prefer to get a woman named Mildred who is an authority on health coverage and who is looking at me across her desk. But never mind me, I’m old.

There is plenty to be gloomy about. Friends of mine are nearing the end, going through the Seven Stages of Dying: Dismay, Distress, Dread of Cheerful Visitors, Demanding More Drugs, and Delivery Into Divine Paradise, Discovering They’re All Catholics, Devoting Oneself to Daily Rosary Recitation. All the more reason to love jokes. Half of all people are below average and we are the ones who really appreciate a joke. Of course, men and women are different. Men pass gas more than women because women talk more so the pressure never builds up. Except for one of our ex-Presidents. Such a talker. He should pay himself hush money.

My darling daughter loves jokes, especially the anthropomorphic — Why do gorillas have large fingers? Because they have large nostrils. I hope to introduce her to the knock-knock joke, such as “Sam and Janet” Who? “Sam and Janet Evening” or “Eskimo Christians” Who? “Eskimo Christians and I’ll tell you no lies.” Most of the knock-knockers have departed this world but the jokes still work.

There are jokes in Holy Scripture: “Whoever increases knowledge increases sorrow.” That’s a joke — a scream at one time. They heard that and the pomegranates came out their noses.

Solomon said, “The thing that has been is the thing that shall be, and the thing that is done is that which shall be done: there is nothing new under the sun.”

Joke.

Eighty-one is a joke. I used to be cool but I got over it. Now I work at staying upright. I’m a stand-up comic, one of the oldest in the trade. I have a poor sense of balance, double-vision, a pig valve in my heart, but I gave good value out West and in the middle of my Spokane show, there was a medical emergency and I saw EMTs attending a woman and I got the audience to sing “It Is Well With My Soul” quietly and “We Shall Overcome” — could Jerry Seinfeld have done that? No, he would’ve said, “I came here to kill but I wasn’t thinking it’d be YOU.”

It was not a New York crowd. Lots of hefty gals and men with big beards. Maybe they had AR-15s in the pickup, had driven into town from their concrete blockhouses in the woods with freezers full of fresh venison where they wait for the Revolution. But I gave them a good time.

(So Ole took his boy deer hunting and as they snuck through the woods, Ole said, “Son, this is your first deer hunt, an important time in your life, marking your passage into manhood. Do you have any questions?” And the boy said, “Yes. If you die of a heart attack, how do I get home?”)

And the morning after Spokane, I sat down to breakfast at the hotel with six people who’d been to the show and their three little kids and we talked about everything under the sun for two hours and also about the afterlife. It was a delight. When members of your audience want to have breakfast with you, you know you did a very good show.

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