Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 33

A true story about last Tuesday

I am feeling good about myself today, if you can believe that. I come from simple peasant stock in the middle of Minnesota (not the end of the world but you can see it from there) and I’ve lived my life with a severe sense of inferiority. My parents never praised me lest it lead to arrogance, and teachers didn’t praise us: if you got a good grade, you were simply working up to your ability, and our preachers didn’t tell us that God loves us, though Scripture says He does, but emphasized our abject iniquity. And so, though I’ve written a couple dozen books and done hundreds of radio shows, I never came away from one with a feeling of elation and if someone said, “That was terrific” (or “awesome” or even “rather good”) I shook my head and said, “I don’t think so,” which, as my wife said, was rude — when someone praises you, you should say “Thank you,” but I honestly felt that everything I did fell short. Until today.

It was a gorgeous October day in New York. I took a cab to an appointment at the podiatrist’s and got out of the cab and a moment later, as he pulled away up West 72nd Street, I realized that I didn’t have my billfold. I had had it in the back seat of the cab and I didn’t have it anymore. He was about thirty yards ahead of me and I did something I haven’t done in years — I broke into a run. I’m eighty years old, I had heart surgery two months ago, but the thought of having to replace credit cards and driver’s license and insurance cards was too awful to contemplate. At this age, one doesn’t have time to waste on the unnecessary. And I dreaded going home and saying, “I left my billfold in a cab,” which might lead to my beloved putting me under guardianship and hiring a walker to accompany me. All of this flashed in my mind, the tedium of replacement, the suspicion of dementia, and so I ran.

The light turned green and he got well ahead and I galloped after him. Though it wasn’t a gallop so much as the headlong hurtling of a terrified goose, and surely it was a sight to behold, but I hustled onward and almost caught him a block later but he turned left and I ran diagonally across the intersection, heard a bicyclist yell at me from nearby, and then, thanks to slow traffic, I caught up and rapped on the cab window and opened the door and there was my billfold. “Thank you!” I cried, grabbed the billfold. An exuberant moment. Hours, weeks, on the phone with bureaucracy (“Using your keypad, tell us the number of the driver’s license you’ve lost”).

A young woman asked, “Are you all right?” She’d seen me galumphing past, perhaps an elderly lunatic running from his custodian, and I said, “I’ve never been better.” Which was the simple truth. I had made a mistake and then set out to correct it, avoiding death by bicycle or sudden coronary. I held up the billfold in triumph.

I walked back to the podiatrist. My heart was pounding. I was also aware of the pain in my left foot. The deformed nail of the big toe hurts when I walk and it hurt even more after my gallop. That was the reason for the appointment with the podiatrist.

She was a very cheerful person and went right to work with her clipper and I sat and felt triumphant. It’s good to think of triumphs now and then. I recently sang with Heather Masse and Ellie Dehn a Grateful Dead song, “Attics of My Life,” and we knocked it out of the park and the audience cheered. I savored this memory and also the memory of the lunch in 1992 where I first met my wife. So, as I left the podiatrist, I called her. She was nearby. We met for lunch, an hour after I’d cheated mortality and chased down the cab. She was her usual effervescent self and talked about the Rauschenbergs she’d seen at the museum. Somehow I won this woman’s heart thirty years ago and now autumn leaves, podiatry, a three-block sprint, marital love, and a hamburger had all joined harmoniously together. In a few months we may be on the road to fascism. As my dad used to say, “Enjoy your ice cream before it melts.

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Sitting in the sixth pew, brooding on things

My grandpa Denham grew up in the tenements of Glasgow back when the residents leaned out the window and shouted, “Comin’ oot!” and threw the contents of the chamber pot into the street. Grandpa got sick of being dumped on and brought his brood to Minneapolis and he never looked back. He wasn’t nostalgic about his origins. He was happy to be here.

I thought of him when I took the train to Washington last week, a city he wanted to see and never did. I go to Washington to remind myself what a beautiful city it is despite the contempt brought upon it by so many elected officials, many of whom are emptying their chamber pots in the form of campaign advertising. The Jefferson and Lincoln memorials are stunning but you look at the dome of the Capitol and remember the mob that stormed it in the name of a miserable lie that is being repeated this election year and how do you explain this? The mob went to the same schools we did, learned about Jefferson and Lincoln, and yet they are fascinated by fascism and long for a dictator.

I went to a show in the Wharf district Friday night, which was interesting — a poet, a soprano singing Puccini, four-hand piano, some stand-up — but not really enlightening so I went to church Sunday morning, which I need to do if I want to know whether I’m a believer still or if it’s just nostalgia.

The opening hymn was one I love, especially the lines “Teach me some melodious sonnet sung by flaming tongues above. Praise the mount I’m fixed upon it, mount of God’s unchanging love.” The idea of a sonnet sung by flaming tongues is appealing to me; most sonnets barely smolder and give off little heat. And then came the opening prayer in which we acknowledge that to God all hearts are open and from Him no secrets are hid, which, if candidates for public office sincerely believed were true, democracy would work much better.

God is a forgiving God, as we know from our prayer of contrition, but if you raise millions and millions of dollars to broadcast lies and thereby gain power and do damage to society and its institutions, this is a sin of another magnitude than just telling your mom you didn’t eat the ice cream in the freezer. When you invest so heavily in a lie, you make it almost impossible for yourself to feel real contrition and thereby gain forgiveness. You leave yourself no way out.

A moment later, in our reading from Jeremiah, we see: “We acknowledge our wickedness, O Lord, the iniquity of our ancestors,” which has been a political issue lately, whether schools should be allowed to teach history or whether it should be sanitized. Jeremiah seems to favor honesty.

After we heard from him, we heard from David in his Psalm 84: “My soul has a desire and longing for the courts of the Lord … Happy are they who dwell in your house,” which happened to be true Sunday morning for me at any rate. I was surrounded by men and women absorbed in prayer, calling up the people in our lives, their needs, their troubles. And our leaders: we prayed for wisdom.

There was a sermon Sunday but I didn’t hear it because I was sitting in a part of the church that is acoustically dead and during the homily I thought about November and about the rabbi who stood at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and prayed for hours a day, week after week, year after year, and finally a guy asked him, “What are you praying for?” He said, “Peace. Justice. Honest leaders who serve the people.” The guy asked, “So how’s it going so far?” The rabbi said, “It’s like talking to a stone wall.”

We sang the closing hymn to the Lord who shelters us under His wing and were dismissed to go serve God and the organist played a powerful Bach fugue and I walked out the door, skipping the coffee hour. After hearing Jeremiah, David, Paul, Luke, I’m not in the mood for small talk over coffee, especially not about politics, which is what’s on everyone’s mind. I’ve made dreadful mistakes, wasted time, indulged in self-pity and prideful ignorance, but I am a believer and it was worth my while to confirm that. I believe we’re all susceptible to lying awake at night imagining horrible things but eventually the truth dawns and we rise up and find our way to where we need to be, following the light.

Garrison Keillor © 10.25.22

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Less is more: repeat ten times daily

I am noticing a good many books and articles about masculinity in crisis these days, and am faithfully avoiding reading them, since I’m not in crisis myself and I’m on a campaign of clearing out clutter in my life. I have just cleared off the top of my desk and am feeling good about myself, even though some of the flotsam got stuffed into the desk. I am now going to rid myself of books I’ll never read and clothes I never wear.

Sometimes I sit in the evening drinking ginger tea and watching baseball on TV with the sound off, two teams I don’t care about and so it’s not about winning, it’s about the art of baseball, the sharp reflexes of infielders and the unique windup of each pitcher, the occasional incredible full-tilt leaping outfield catch that kills the rally and the fielder casually tosses the ball into the stands. It’s such a cool move. Home runs mean nothing to me but that beautiful high-speed intersection of outstretched glove and ball and there’s no victory dance, just cool disdain. Tough luck. The fielder heads for the dugout, the ball goes to a kid in the grandstand. The commentary of the announcers is worthless; it’s all about the beauty of youth and agility and discipline. In another ten years, that fielder will be a civilian like you and me.

This love of silence may be a benefit of three years of pandemic isolation. Or maybe it’s something that comes with being 80. I don’t have a lot of spare time to read righteous writing about other people’s crises: I have no time to spare, in fact, and want to enjoy what’s left to me. I discover that I truly enjoy silence. I know people who, when they have guests for dinner, like to play background music, and it drives me nuts. I hear souped-up cars and Harleys sitting at a red light, revving their engines, and see porky men with thin gray ponytails at the wheel, and wish they could be locked up in a treatment center. I live in an apartment building that, because it’s expensive, has no residents under forty, so there aren’t loud parties on Saturday night.

I went to loud parties fifty years ago and hosted some of my own, and now the thought of it strikes me as torture. My favorite social interaction is daily marital congeniality and my second favorite is when the phone rings and a friend is at the other end who is a good conversational partner and we do a very delightful verbal dance for half an hour and say goodbye. This, to me, is one of the supreme pleasures of old age. In the course of living your confused and sometimes crazy life, you’ve managed to collect an assortment of people you love to talk with.

Unfortunately, they die off. Margaret Keenan is gone, Bill Holm, Louis Jenkins, my brother Philip, Roland Flint, Arnie Goldman, but others are waiting to be discovered. I don’t text, I don’t TikTok, because there’s no feeling there, no meaning, it’s like waving from a passing car.

My brother was an engineer, a very different line of work from mine. I’m in the amusement business and he was a problem solver. In my life, I’ve tended to be a problem creator, but in my new octogenarian life I’m trying to atone for that. It is never too late to make amends.

I’ll keep two suits to wear to church, and I’ll give away ten others and also the four tuxedos I wore back when I did shows with orchestras: no occasion for them now, so some homeless guy may enjoy looking snazzy. My uniform is jeans and black T, I don’t go for shirts with humorous quotations, so my closet is small. One pair of comfortable shoes. A belt. I’ve lost weight lately and once, carrying groceries to the car, my jeans slipped down to my knees before I could set the groceries down. A woman whistled at me. I did not respond, didn’t know how to.

Less is more. I went through some tumultuous years and don’t miss them. In this whole day, I only want to do a few things right. Dive to my right, backhand the hard grounder, jump up, throw the runner out by half a step at first. Know when to use a semicolon instead of a comma. Put my hand on her shoulder and tell her I love her.

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A lesson for the wise as winter approaches

Here in the northern latitudes, it appears we’ve come to the end of the golden October days and soon gray November will descend and then some snow flurries followed by an arctic air mass. The next morning you awaken to find the driveway drifted in, schools are closed, a Snow Emergency is declared, but your inner Dad says, “You think you’re staying home from work, you got another think coming” and you climb in your car and head for Amalgamated Federated. Abandoned cars in the ditches of the Interstate, which is glare ice, but you make it downtown and find a parking spot and ignore the “No Parking” sign — a man makes his own rules in a blizzard — and you arrive at Amalgamated and go to your tiny cubicle on the sixth floor.

The company execs have spaces in the heated underground garage but they were Ubered or Lyfted to work by drivers named Abdullah and Mohammed from East Africa, and when they see you in your tiny cubicle, your heavy parka and thermal vest and ski pants and insulated boots, suddenly the social order is turned upside down. You’re a hero and the privileged are exposed as moral weaklings. The president of Amalgamated decided to “work from home” and the stigma sticks to him. Winter is warfare and deserters are disdained. His secretary sneers at him and types his letters changing his verbs from indicative to subjunctive and earnings go down.

Some Minnesotans head for Arizona in November, which is an admission that your services are no longer needed, but Mr. Cubicle shovels his walk and the walks of elderly neighbors. He turns his furnace down to conserve energy. He takes a toboggan to the grocery and loads up on rice and beans and potatoes. He sees a deer struggling in deep snow and cuts its throat and skins it and brings forty pounds of fresh venison home to his family.

Minnesotans who leave for warmer climes lose their moorings and become enamored of gin fizzes and Blue Lagoons and avocado daiquiris and spend their evenings in a haze watching golf on TV. They sleep late and feel listless and hire a trainer named Lorna to bully them into doing three miles daily on the treadmill but treadmills are absurdity in motion. You get nowhere, you accomplish nothing. What you need is two feet of snow to shovel, which is unlikely in Phoenix. And then you are attacked by tiny subcutaneous ticks attracted to persons of northern ethnicity and you wind up in a Situational Care Unit absorbing chicken broth intravenously, dreaming of Mama and the chicken coop and the John Deere tractor.

Meanwhile, the man with the inner Dad is thriving in his natural element, the frozen tundra. He has a brilliant idea one night. Cold weather stimulates the brain because survival is involved and the body wants to survive and when challenged it will do what is necessary, even think clearly.

He invents a little box using parts from an old wall phone and a mimeograph, a box you can speak to and tell your computer what you need it to do and the word will get through. Computers now can perform 11,874 functions that you don’t need and your 17 crucial functions involve complex procedural sequences described in the computer manual, which was written by a high-tech person so as to impress his colleagues. It was not written for you and me.

My computer tended to toss in double or triple letters where I only wanted one, particularly the t and the r. It would write “ttterrrible” instead of “terrible.” I bought the box and set it by my computer and said, “Don’t add letters to the ones I type or I’ll throw you out in the snow” and that solved the problem.

The inventor left his 6th floor cubicle and took over Amalgamated and promoted the competent and fired the inept and the company’s profits sextupled. Meanwhile, the former pres who “worked from home” was about to enjoy a hot shower one morning, not realizing his wife had had a plumber install a new shower gizmo and the guy turned it to Tropical Mist and stepped in and then decided to make it warmer but turned the knob the wrong way and suddenly he was standing in Arctic Surf and he slipped on the wet tile and twisted his axial spondylofascia and began a painful journey from lower back surgery to the application of sacred oil to meditation and the reading of the Book of Jeremiah but still could only walk while crouched and holding onto furniture. A word to the wise should be sufficient. Listen and learn.

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So Moses said to God, “Let me get this straight”

My friend Larry Josephson died in July in New York at the age of 83 and I miss him because he was one of the last people I knew who would run into me and tell me a joke. He had a good career in radio at WBAI but I was too busy doing my own show to listen to his but in later years I used his studio on 89th Street to record at and when I walked in, Larry’d say hello and then he’d say, “So Moses was talking to God and he said, ‘Let me get this straight. They get all the oil deposits and we have to cut the tips off our WHAT?’”

I used to know guys who told jokes, Arnie and Roland and Marty and Al, and it was part of normal male repartee, and sometimes one joke would lead to others. “Moses came down from the Mount with the tablets in his hand and he told the Israelites, ‘Okay, I managed to talk him down to ten, but I’m afraid adultery is still in there.’”

We were in our twenties, grad students, we reconnoitered in a booth at a bar, drinking beer, sometimes whiskey, and muttering about the layers of bureaucracy and the medieval rigidity of academia, but jokes kept popping up, and now I can’t recall the last person who told me a joke. Maybe it was Larry.

His beloved daughter Jennie wants me to speak at a memorial service, which I can’t, but if I spoke, I’d tell about the mine owner who hired an Italian to be the paymaster and a Russian to run the lift and a Japanese guy to manage supplies and all went well for a while until they ran out of supplies. The mine owner walked around looking for the Japanese guy and suddenly he jumped up from behind a rock and cried, “Supplies! Supplies!”

On second thought, maybe not. Times are changing and I can imagine that joke getting a chilly silence. Why risk the awkwardness? So the Zen master said to the hot dog vendor, “Make me one with everything.” So the vendor fixes a hot dog and hands it to the Zen master, who pays with a $20 bill. The hot dog vendor puts the bill in his pocket. “Where’s my change?” asks the Zen master. And the vendor says, “Change must come from within.”

Larry was safe telling Jewish jokes, being Jewish and able to get the accent right, whereas I’d be treading on the edge of anti-Semitism, so I tend toward Norwegian jokes. Scandinavian people have no sensitivity about jokes at all. (Maybe because they don’t get them.)

So Ole came home early from work and there sat Lena on the bed, naked. He asked her, “Why naked in the middle of the afternoon?” and she said, “I don’t have anything nice to wear.” Ole said, “Of course you do” and he opened her closet. He said, “Look, you’ve got a nice yellow dress, a nice green dress, a nice blue dress, there’s Svend, a nice purple dress, a nice black dress …”

Some women might think that joke unfunny, so I should find a better one. Ole was dying and he lay on his deathbed, feeling horrible, and then he smelled fresh rhubarb pie from the kitchen downstairs, so he made his way painfully down the steps and into the kitchen and there it was on the counter, just out of the oven, and he got out a knife and started to cut it and Lena slapped him upside the head and said, “Leave it alone, Ole, that’s for the funeral.”

I told that joke once to an audience and the laughter was mostly soprano.

I can’t go to the memorial so this column is my farewell. I’m asking my readers to tell a joke this week in honor of Larry. It will be a great tribute.

So Moses had a wonderful time with God but finally he had to say, “Lord, I know you’re omniscient and everything, but the knock-knock joke doesn’t work if you don’t say, ‘Who’s there?’” At which point, a guy walked in with his hands full of dog turds and said, “Look what I almost stepped in.” It never gets old. Larry did, and God bless his memory, and if you’ll do as I say and tell a joke this week, you honor a good man. And next week you can tell another one.

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Lighten up, he says and he means it

The picture sticks in the mind, the mobile home park after the hurricane went through, the boxes scattered, the tide of flotsam and wreckage, trees blown down by 145 mph winds, a former paradise become a moonscape of destruction, and how will they ever put it all back together? It’ll take years. And many of the occupants were elderly. Do they now go back north to live with their children? Has the loss put them in a funk for the next three years? What can be done?

I recall my dad’s love of his Florida mobile home after he fell off a barn roof in Minnesota and fractured his skull and got bad sinus problems that made winter unbearable, he took Mother to Florida to live in a trailer. They had a canopy over a little terrace where they sat in the shade and ate supper. He read about Minnesota blizzards with some satisfaction and I don’t recall him worrying about hurricanes. Both of them are gone now but I look at the pictures and imagine flying down to Florida to rescue my parents.

They were cheerful people, came of age during the Depression, went through the War, built a house in the country, had six kids whom Dad worked two jobs to support, and I cannot remember them ever complaining. And I imagine that, even in the midst of wreckage, they’d still be cheerful. They’d say, “Well, we’ve been meaning to downsize anyway.”

I inherited my cheerfulness from them. I’m an easy-going guy. I go through the scanner and the TSA guy says he needs to pat down my inner thighs, I don’t report him for sexual aggression, I pretend it isn’t happening. I hear people misuse “that” and “which” or “lay”
and “lie” and I don’t correct them, certainly not in the airport anyway. If I saw that someone’s hair was on fire, I would give up my own double latte to douse the flames and not ask four bucks in compensation. It’s how I was brought up.

I look at the upcoming midterm election and I see candidates running for Congress who believe that gravity is a hoax and Caesar salad dressing causes strokes and the CIA caused Ian using Infrared Atmospheric Nuclei and the polls show them ahead and come January we may have a House with a large Dementia Caucus, but I am not dismayed. Call me a fool but I believe the old amiable America I’ve known is still functioning.

I believe that if you want to see America clearly, don’t read the paper, go to a state fair. I only know the one in Minnesota but when I went in August, I didn’t see a Proud Boys booth or militiamen with AR-15s walking around the Midway. I saw people eating deep-fried cheese curds and looking at pigs the size of VWs and riding on something like a giant salad spinner while screaming. They inspected giant John Deere tractors and Caterpillar dozers and displays of championship quilts and art made by gluing seeds to plywood, and in all the milling around and waiting in line and consumption of animal fats, I detected no polarization, no civil strife, just great cheerfulness on a sunny summer day. The gentleman serving up milkshakes in the Dairy Building was quite affable though it was the ninth day of the Fair, nine days of mixing shakes; he said, “So how’s your day going then?” “Never better,” I said.

His sentence, beginning with “So” and ending with “then,” told me that he’s a native Minnesotan, not a Canadian, not a Floridian. And his “so” had a distinctive Minnesota elongation of the “o,” which I like.

I worry about Minnesota, looking at Europe where fascism raises its head in France and Italy and Sweden, countries with large percentages of non-natives. It’s a fact. People are wary of being outnumbered at home. America has been the exception, proud of being a nation of immigrants. Minnesota has growing populations of Hispanics, Hmong, Somali, Ethiopians. They don’t pronounce that “o” the way we natives do but we admire their spirit, having escaped dreadful conditions, who now want simply to live in peace and raise their families.

They bring a spirit of cheerfulness that is thoroughly American and will prevail. Today is a new day. Put yesterday’s mistakes behind us and the darker aspects of American history, and let us meet as equals and do our best for each other. And don’t forget to rake your leaves and pick up after your dog. That is all. Thanks for reading.

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It’s a good October and it’s only begun

It was delightful and a big relief to see Aaron Judge hit No. 62 this week and break Roger Maris’s record and see Roger Maris Jr. hugging Aaron’s mom in the stands. Judge is a great ballplayer and a decent understated guy and the country needed this beautiful moment. And if he’d failed, we’d be reading turgid commentary about the trauma of eminence and high expectation and instead we can admire the guy’s beautiful swing. He’s 6’7” with a strike zone the size of a wardrobe trunk and he’s batting over .300 and he’s graceful and well-spoken and whatever they’re paying him, it’s worth it to have him as an example to youth.

It was also good to see Joe Biden and Ron DeSantis shaking hands in south Florida after the hurricane ravaged the Gulf Coast and talking about government coming to the aid of the victims. Florida always was a paradise for people of modest means to live cheaply in pleasant weather and the state sometimes lucks out with hurricanes and now you look at the wreckage of mobile home parks and it’s heartbreaking. Most homeowners don’t have flood insurance. A conservative could argue that insurance is your personal responsibility and if you skip it, that’s your problem, but a conservative up for reelection can’t argue that, so the prez and the gov form a compact to work together.

This is how it used to be, Republicans and Democrats joining hands in times of true emergency. If it was uncomfortable for Governor DeSantis to ask for help from a man who is not the rightful president, nobody cared. There are the miles and miles of destruction; let’s help these people and resume sparring later.

Two beautiful moments, the swing and the handshake, and they happened on these golden October days, a good week all in all. We old codgers sit and wait for young people to take over the world we screwed up and this week gives us some hope.

“Life can only be understood backward; but it must be lived forward,” said Kierkegaard, who only lived to be 42, died of TB, much too young to enjoy the blessing of old age as I do. I was in the sixth grade when Eisenhower was inaugurated. Our teacher brought a TV to class so we could watch it. We didn’t have TV in our home and I was fascinated by this one: the screen was the size of a saucer. We crowded in close and watched the old man take the oath. (He was 62, eighteen years younger than I am now.) He’d commanded Allied forces in Europe and was elected and reelected in landslides. I don’t recall anyone bad-mouthing Eisenhower except for some nightclub comedians whose names I forget.

This is the beauty of being my age. Kids say, “Get a life” and I got one and I can look way back and see some incredibly dumb things I’ve done — me, a college graduate and an Episcopalian, a good speller. Well-spoken people are capable of being dumber than dirt and the beauty of being old is that your dumbness is way behind you, receding, and you won’t do those things again. I can be frustrated by my new laptop and how Apple engineers have worked to make it more challenging, adding many features I don’t need and making essential functions so bizarrely complex I must read the instruction manual, which is written by engineers for engineers and not for the ordinary American.

I did dumb things in search of euphoria and then I had two wisdom teeth pulled and the surgeon gave me a sedative and I found euphoria and didn’t particularly like it. Numbness is not a good goal in life. And I eased myself into a life of cheerfulness. Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.” And that’s it. Write it on a Post-it note and put it on your forehead.

I did the sedative thing, I experienced exhilaration when I rode the roller coaster at Coney Island, and now, seeing No. 99 lope around the bases, seeing two guys take off the gloves and shake hands, wow. It’s a golden October, it’s a good country.

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A new day dawns and we rise cheerfully to meet it

There is a magnificent Presbyterian church in New York being hassled by its neighbors who’re tired of the scaffolding that’s been standing for fifteen years. The scaffolding is there because the building is falling apart, and the little congregation is dwindling and can’t afford the repairs. They’d like to sell the property and let the buyers demolish the church and put up a 19-story condo tower. But the Landmark Commission doesn’t want this building, a landmarked 1890 Romanesque Revival masterpiece, to be replaced by a filing cabinet. Meanwhile attendance is fading because who wants to go to church and be struck by a fifty-pound chunk of sandstone?

I favor demolition. There is nothing holy about a building, the Holy Spirit moves freely in and out of buildings, people can feel God’s grace wherever they happen to be. If the building were preserved and sold to Pizza Hut and ovens placed where the altar used to be and the organ automated to play Metallica and Black Sabbath, how does this serve the common good?

Tear it down before it kills somebody. Time moves on, so move with it.

I say this as a very old man who is not landmarked but doing my best to avoid demolition. The body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, said the apostle Paul, and so far, the temple is intact. Some days I feel like sixty and sometimes I’m closer to fifteen. I have no idea what eighty would feel like. I use a cane only as an affectation: it makes me feel European.

I know I’m on the last stretch, but I intend it to be a cheerful stretch. I am married to the woman I love and after three years of pandemic isolation with her, I adore her. This desert island suits me. But she is more sociable, so we need to ease back into normal life and have people over for lunch, maybe take up cribbage, go bowling, attend lectures where you break up into discussion groups, those sorts of things. I sense her restlessness. Sometimes she goes into the back bedroom, and I hear peals of girlish laughter, shrieks of delight, as she talks to friends on the phone — does it make me jealous? Yes, of course.

We need to befriend younger people. I’ve gone to birthday parties for octos and heard all about someone’s prostate problems or kidney stones and hip replacements and of course colonoscopies. I’ve been colonoscopied and it was no big deal. Yes, the liquid you drink the day before tastes like used motor oil. But so what? I choose to be cheerful. Let’s talk about happy memories such as the narrow pews in my church, which, when I twist to kneel on the kneeler, reminds me of the girl I used to neck with in the back seat of her VW.

Sometimes I regret my old age but then I think of my dear friend who died when he and I were 17. He rented a boat and went out on a lake with a girl he was in love with and when she dove into the water, he dove after her, forgetting that he could not swim, and he drowned. He got only a slice of life, he missed out on sex and fatherhood and the pleasure of vocation, and I got the whole helping and await seconds.

So many heroes of my generation died young, Buddy Holly, James Dean, Jim Morrison, Janis, Jerry, Elvis. They were done in by celebrity and delusion and you and I outlived them to come to this point where we delight in the ordinary. I lie in bed and am awakened by the light and rise up to the new day and do my business and drink coffee and my wife tells me what’s in the morning paper and I go for a walk and people ask me how I’m doing, and I say, “Never better.” I sit in the evening drinking ginger tea and watching baseball with the sound off, two teams I don’t care about, and I edit whatever I wrote today while admiring the pitcher’s windup, the reflexive agility of infielders, the occasional long loping leaping outfield catch that steals a triple and kills the rally and the fielder casually tosses the ball into the stands and trots to the dugout.

Tear down the stone pile. Sell the lots for millions and give it to the poor. Let the faithful meet in someone’s home, as the disciples did. A new day dawns. Don’t look back.

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I am an orphan and an officeless man

I miss having an office to go to. I had friendly colleagues and employees, and we were in the entertainment biz so we got to work with a lot of lulus and lunatics and we kept flexible hours and laughed a lot. I liked that we were in the business of making serious people split a gut. I also liked getting dressed up for work in a suit and tie, which you need to do when you’re involved with frivolity. Now I go to work in my pajamas at the dining room table. I don’t know if “clothes make the man” but I know that pajamas do not make the man. They make me feel like going back to bed.

I loved walking in the front door in the morning at 9 a.m., the way the receptionist straightened up and smiled, the electric anticipation among the minions that the captain was on deck, the ship was about to sail. I don’t sense that same excitement in my wife when I walk into the kitchen in my pajamas. She says, “Your hair is standing up like a rooster’s and I think you should check your left nostril.”

At the office, I was the Decider. I sat at the end of the table and I told the staff: “No more singing dogs on the show and the one tuba player who played ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ is enough: no more. I think we need a midget shot from a cannon and an acrobatic couple who work with two Percherons. And I say you can never have too many cat jugglers. The guy we booked who could keep six in the air simultaneously was a genius. Pay him whatever he asks.”

My staff was a bunch of college grads who thought in terms of jazz, folk, poetry, the arts, and didn’t understand the entertainment biz. They didn’t know raison d’être from a box of raisins. Art is art. You see a woman in a tutu swanning around, you think, “Everyone is so quiet, this must be good, I should be deeply moved.” You hear a folksinger do a traditional labor ballad, you feel like there’s going to be a quiz afterward. But you hear a man recite Allen Ginsberg backward while balancing a banana on his nose, and he finishes with “generation my of minds best the seen I’ve” and his pants fall down, you are stunned and delighted. And that’s entertainment. Now the biz has been taken over by angry millennials who’re out to use entertainment to make people feel wretched about themselves for the social injustices they failed to prevent. That’s why I left.

One of my favorite acts was a full-blooded Arapaho named Joe who danced and sang and twirled ropes and for a finale, he stood looking in a hand mirror at the stooge sitting fifty feet behind and he threw a tomahawk over his left shoulder and knocked the toupee off the stooge’s head without drawing blood. People protested this as stereotyping and we had to cancel the act. How could it be stereotyping when Joe was the only guy who could do it without mishap?

I produced the show every week, sitting in a little office, no credenza, a photograph on the wall of me and Marcel Marceau, the famous French mime, except he wasn’t French, he didn’t know a word of French, that’s why he was a mime, he was from Pittsburgh and he did great jokes about Unitarians but they attacked him as insensitive so he turned to mime, which was very sensitive to the deaf.

I could feel the biz changing when my staff booked a stand-up who walked out and said, “You came here to laugh and be entertained, right? Well, guess again. I’m going to talk about the plastics you people use that are making this world uninhabitable.” He spoke for twenty minutes, no laughs, and got a standing ovation at the end. I resigned the next week.

So now I sit at my kitchen table, still in pajamas at noon, and the other day I found my talent as a musical flatulenteur. I ate an onion, grabbed my ankles, and farted “Malagueña” with enough left over for a few bars of “Chopsticks,” which you could never do today because it’d be insensitive to Hispanics and Chinese, but still, it’s a gift and I’m grateful for it.

Garrison Keillor © 09.29.22

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Suddenly it’s clear why I wanted to be old

I look at the Great Milky Way
While inhaling the autumn bouquet
At eventide
And am mystified
And simply don’t know what to say.

I love this September chill in the air. I love sweaters. They hide the age wrinkles on my inner upper arms. A stocking cap means I don’t have to comb my hair. Delicate souls are yearning for Florida and maybe catch a temp job as a consumer influence consultant, enough to pay for a condo with a pool, but not me, I’m not into influence and Florida brings out the bad taste in people and nobody wants to see an old man in a thong bikini. So here I am. I like the coffee here. I’ve figured out how the shower works and no longer stand under scalding water because I turned the wrong knob; I don’t want to go to Florida and stay in a motel with a crank for a shower knob and be burned alive while naked. So I’ll stay up North. Here I take a shower, wrap a towel around me, walk into the bedroom and sing, “O my love, my darling, I hunger for your touch.” In Florida, I’d go to the ER.

The air is golden, smelling of wine and apples and woodsmoke. It takes me back to when I was 15, sitting in the press box and covering the football games for the Anoka Herald, my first paid writing job. And when I was 18 and a girl and I lay in a pile of leaves and made free with each other. Now I’m 80, the sky so clear I can see vast constellations, standing in the yard, aware of the universe and also smelling the rich spongy earth below my feet. An eternity of stars above, including stars that no longer exist but their light still comes to us, and I stand here in mystification, having unlearned so much of what I thought I knew about life, achieving this plain peasant life. It’s a second childhood. Someone told me the other day that “racecar” spelled backward is “racecar.” Amazing. This is why I quit drinking and got my mitral valve replaced, so I could see beyond the average life expectancy and it’s quite worth the wait, to live in a state of wonder.

Writing prose is a form of gardening, which my dad was good at, especially strawberries and asparagus and tomatoes. Store-bought tomatoes tasted like cardboard to him. (Now they taste the same to me.) My aunts Josephine and Eleanor were passionate gardeners. If my essays were as good as their cucumbers and lettuce, I’d be a major success, but frankly I like being a struggling octogenarian up-and-comer. People show me deference because I walk with a cane, and that’s okay, but I live in a very small world. My heroes are dead, my ambition is quite awake, I don’t believe in tragedy anymore, I believe in mystery.

I am mystified by my grandson and what an excellent human being he has become. He is a bulwark and an inspiration. I had two grandsons but the other one took his own life one afternoon after school. He was a lively inquisitive boy in love with all of nature, especially animals, and had the ability to retain practically everything he ever read, and he’s been gone for five years and I haven’t accepted his death. I will always be mystified by it, as I am by my childhood friend Corinne who paddled a canoe out onto Lake Cayuga one moonlit night in 1986, her pockets full of rocks, and overturned it and drowned.

It was thirty-six years ago but still vivid to me, especially tonight. Memory is tied to smell and on a September night chapters of life return to mind, unbidden. I’ve forgotten most of the books I ever read. Theology is of no use to me. I’m a child; I believe “All things work together for good to them that love God.” As a boy I used outhouses and now I walk into a men’s toilet and pee in a urinal and step back and it automatically flushes. I walk around with a device in my pocket the size of a half-slice of bread and I can call my grandson for a report on Gen Z or read the Times or do a search for “Success is counted sweetest by those who ne’er succeed. To comprehend a nectar requires sorest need.” It’s a sweet world. My beloved sent me out for a walk and here I am, going nowhere, looking at everything all at once.

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