Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 35

Let’s talk about gender, but only for a moment

On summer vacation, I get my news from my wife, which is a great convenience and helps brighten the mood and she’s just read me the story about sharks sighted off the coast and beaches on Cape Cod and Long Island posting warnings to swimmers, which only reaffirms my lifelong aversion to beaches. Lying sunburnt on the sand, looking out at ocean vastness in the company of people who have no business wearing loincloths in public never appealed to me, especially not the vastness part. I am a domestic creature, I love enclosed spaces. I went to Alaska once, checked into a hotel in Homer, ordered room service, sat in my room with the shades drawn, and was quite content.

Now that I know about shark-infested beaches, I have one more reason to stay inland. I don’t want some poor reporter to have to write the second paragraph of my obituary, “Mr. Keillor was eaten by a shark off Jones Beach on Tuesday while wading in a raspberry-colored swimsuit and wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat fringed with straw fronds. A memorial service will be held at a time to be announced later.”

“Memorial service” suggests that there was not enough of me left to put into a burial plot. The shark took the meaty parts and other sharks got some and turtles finished the job. What was left could be put in a tunafish can. I was a productive author for fifty years but in the future, if my name comes up in conversation, someone will say, “Wasn’t he the guy who was eaten by sharks?” So I renew my vow to avoid beaches.

Thus journalism performs the useful function of confirming us in our prejudices. I read stories about Texas to confirm my decision to never set foot in the state. I read about celebrities to confirm my feeling that there are no really huge ones out there, nobody on the level of Cary Grant or Marilyn Monroe or Groucho Marx, just a hundred dozen minor ones who get into little snits about the media invading their privacy.

WELL, EXCUSE ME ALL TO PIECES — but that’s the role of the press, to peer in the window and see Mister Big Pants caught naked. Imagine seeing a secret video of Orange Man taking a mindfulness class at Mar-a-Lago, listening to sitar music while sitting in the lotus position, with lotuses around his neck.

People go to beaches to look at vastness and to temporarily forget their humdrum inland lives in enclosed quarters in the urban grid, going to an office and staring at a square screen. The occupations have nifty titles like Integral Technology or Investment Encompassment, but basically they’re all farmers, cultivating the cornfield, harvesting the eggs, butchering the pig.

After ten years or so, about the time they get the hang of the job and are truly productive, they start to feel trapped, and this is when men are tempted to purchase a boat. They want to smell the salt air and head into the waves and learn to tie interesting knots. Women scorn this. So the urge to buy a boat and go to sea is a manly urge to escape from women. This is a dangerous course for a man to take: women are the ones who can say, “What in God’s name are you doing?” and save a man from climbing a ladder to get up on a limb and take a chainsaw to cut the limb off while standing on it. Women won’t tolerate this sort of thing.

But a man on a boat is free to head out into deep waters aboard Pequod II with a bottle of brandy and a pair of binoculars and he enjoys the pitch and roll of the ship and decides to tie a half hitch in the rope on deck to secure it and accidentally gets it wound around his ankle and it’s the rope attached to the anchor and the roll of the boat loosens the anchor and it falls in the water and the man is yanked overboard and eaten by sharks. His life preserver is no protection against sharks, they chew right through it.

I promised my wife that I won’t be eaten by sharks. I’m planning to go quietly, at home, while cheering up the mourners, but I am only 80 so there’s no rush.

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Listening to that lonesome whistle blow, etc.

I am in the process of packing up and leaving Minnesota where I’ve lived for most of eighty years, which seems dramatic but isn’t since most of my classmates left long ago and Bob Dylan, who overlapped with me at the University of Minnesota, heard the lonesome whistle blow and matriculated his way to New York and if Bob ever wrote a song about hating to leave home, I’m not aware of it. The itinerant life was what he was all about.

I am fond of Minnesota, the home of Hazelden and the recovery industry and America’s front line of defense against the flood of illegals from Canada, which has led to the boom in hockey, the season now extending into summer. It’s the home of Robert Bly, author of Iron John, which was big back when there was a men’s movement but it disappeared due to gender fluidity when masculinity liquified and men were no longer required to be solid granite. I tried to be Agnes for a while but it was too late, I was in my late sixties, stoicism was baked into me, voice-raising drugs had no effect, my eyebrows are bushy, and I hate hockey, which real Minnesota women are very good at.

All of my women friends play hockey from October to June and — I don’t say this critically, believe me — they are very pushy for those eight months, and by “pushy” I don’t mean bossy, I mean they pass you on the street and give you the hip and send you careening into a parking meter. I do not get into an elevator with women; it makes me perspire just thinking about it.

I’m leaving Minnesota because there are recovery groups for everything under the sun — grief at pet loss, height inadequacy, Scandophrenia, vegephobia, compulsive colorlessness, northpolar disorder, nomenclature amnesia, traumatic taciturnity, hypercalmness, disagreement anxiety, disaster anticipation, suppression, and so forth — you name it and there’s a program for you where you will hear a talk and then break up into discussion groups, but there is no group for people in my category, old men at the high end of the contentment spectrum.

I’ve met men like me in Minnesota, and we eyeball each other and one of us says, “So how’s it going then?” We add the “then” so the other guy knows we’re from here. If I said, “So how’s it going then?” to a New Yorker, he’d say, “You mean how was it going? And what period of time are you referring to?” But a Minnesotan says, “Not so bad then.” He says it looking around to make sure no millennial hears who might grab him by the lapels and say, “Easy for you to say, having stolen land from the Lakota people and now living high off the hog thanks to the exploitation of woman and minorities.”

It’s true, of course. They’re right to be righteous. Life is unfair. I had the advantage of having seventeen aunts who all loved me and encouraged me and believed I was gifted and praised my childish scribbling and my crazed literary ambitions and predicted I’d become somebody and so I did, I became me, and I got into show business though I have the personality of a village assessor but I learned to be affable and I found eyedrops that make my eyes sparkle, but I recognize that not everyone had that advantage of admiring aunts.

Thanks to cowardice, I avoided contact sports and never was concussed, which made it possible for me to memorize the eighty-seven counties of Minnesota in alphabetic order and recite them at high speed. I was the only person in Minnesota who could do this and I did it dozens of times, once at the State Fair grandstand in front of thousands — Aitkin, Anoka, Becker, Beltrami, Benton, Big Stone, Blue Earth, Brown, and so forth — but once people have heard you do it, they’re not eager to hear it again so it’s time for me to go out in the world and make my way among strangers. I’m going to New York because I’m a fan of underground public rail transportation, and also because my wife loves New York and I love her. There’s no better reason. If you’ve gone down the wrong romantic roads often enough and then find the right one, you will follow the woman where she leads. It’s as simple as that.

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Some days are perfect: why not say so?

A summer evening on the porch overlooking the Connecticut River and Her Healthness has relaxed the rules and we’re having beef hamburgers off the grill and corn on the cob slathered in actual butter, not a vegan imitation, and the Parisian niece has baked custard tarts so delicious I decline a second knowing it would push me over the edge into decadence, a gent in capri pants and caftan, smoking a Gauloises in a cigarette holder, listening to the Gypsy Kings on my earbuds, aloof to those around me.

I’ve avoided decadence so far except for a mild addiction to Dairy Queen Blizzards, which so far is under control. I’ve avoided COVID and knee replacement and wood ticks that carry a virus that makes you talk endlessly in run-on sentences about a former president, and so it’s a pleasant evening, and we hear the happy cries of children at an old children’s camp nearby that teaches traditional values of friendship, sharing, good manners, daily chores, curiosity, and creativity. Children are not allowed electronic devices and “social justice” and “healing” are not in the mission statement, presumably “friendship” and “sharing” cover that. The boys and girls wash their faces in the morning in cold water at an outdoor trough. It’s not a church camp so they miss out on Ecclesiastes, but there is an evening campfire and I’m sure I’ve heard “Kumbaya.”

The niece and her husband are exhausted from a long day of home improvement, something else I’ve avoided. And I have escaped from youthful ambition as well to become a beloved uncle, listening to the patter of conversation and tossing in punchlines. The niece knows about tastefulness, the nephew is in finance, Her Healthness knows salads and music and art, and I am required only to be amiable.

In England, the temps got up past 100 Fahrenheit, but it’s not my problem. H.H. is an insomniac and listens to the BBC in the wee hours to induce sleep and so she is up on things British. Not me. My people left there during the reign of George III, put monarchy and Oxford accents and warm beer and baked sheep’s kidneys behind them and learned which side their corn cob is buttered on. There are no Dairy Queens in Dorset, Durham, or Cornwall, only Her Majesty and her corgis, and that’s the end of that, so far as I’m concerned. I could not be seduced by some Thames temptress the way poor Harry was stolen away by Meghan. I am content with my American woman.

This is her old family summer cottage and she is busy freshening the place up and disposing of hereditary trash, while I watch her do it. Today I held a screen in a door while she tightened the screws. That was my one assignment of the day, that and toweling off her back after her shower. “Scratch my back,” she says sometimes, and I do and I am good at it. So apparently she intends to keep me, which is good to know.

My classmates are fading away. I think back to the guy who had a heart attack at our 50th class reunion while I was giving a speech, paying tribute to old teachers — meanwhile, Rex was slumped over his mac and cheese, his neighbors asking, “Are you all right?” and he was not. My speech was the last words he heard in this world. I wish I had told a joke instead so that he had gone out laughing. Maybe the joke about the man who walks into the house with his hands full of dog turds and tells his wife, “Look what I almost stepped in,” which sums up much of life in one sentence.

We washed the dishes — H.H. believes that a dish towel only spreads germs so the dishes were racked up and left to dry overnight — and I put my hand on the niece’s shoulders and told the two of them to go home, which they wanted to do but didn’t know how to express it, and I sat on the porch with the lady and scratched her back, up high, between the shoulder blades. “Higher,” she says and I massage her elegant shoulders. This is not a chore, there’s not much creativity involved, it comes under friendship and sharing. Justice is a fine idea but I’m going for wild good fortune and now I have it in my hands.

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The author disembarks almost

A beautiful summer day, sitting on a porch in Connecticut, looking at boats anchored in the cove, grateful that I don’t own one. It’s one foolishness I’ve avoided in my life: most of the other numbskull boxes I have checked and as I sit here enjoying the breeze off the water, I torture myself with memories of dumbness, mistaken romances, real estate stupidity, as vivid as the incident on Wednesday when, stepping out of a New York subway car, I paused to make sure it was 42nd, and the subway doors closed on my neck.

Yes, you read that right. I had bags in my hands, and I dropped them to try to pry the doors open, my head poking out, and couldn’t, and then a man pulled them open and I got out, turned and said thank you. He was a construction guy in an orange vest. He looked concerned. Then I remembered that Penn Station is at 34th so I had to catch the next train for one stop. I got on that train and got off without incident. So I’m a man whose head is caught in the doors while getting off at the wrong stop. There are worse things. The guillotine, for one.

I beat myself up because I’m an old fundamentalist and self-mortification is our specialty. And I’ve been having too much fun lately, which confuses me, doing shows in red states to crowds that include a good many Republicans who voted for the landslide winner in 2020 but nonetheless were warm and receptive to me who voted for the thief. In blue states, audiences are listening to make sure you check the boxes of Inclusivity, Diversity, Equity, and Antiracism. These are people who don’t mind that many theaters refuse to do “Our Town” because the “Our” does not acknowledge that Grover’s Corners was stolen from indigenous people. I use the possessive pronoun in singing “My country, ’tis of thee,” which audiences in red states enjoy singing with me, and also our national anthem, ignoring the fact that Francis Scott Key did own slaves.

Back in the Sixties, when I was in my twenties, we sang “We Shall Overcome” and clearly we did not overcome, we only created new hairstyles. So we pass the torch to the young, some of whom feel the word “person” shows gender bias and want to change it to perself. To which I say, “Good luck with dat.”

Meanwhile, I study the pictures from the NASA telescope a million miles out in space, pictures of light emanating from suns billions of light years away, and I am made freshly aware of our insignificance on this tiny fragile planet circling our sun. There may be planets out there who are studying us and observing our decline and inevitable self-destruction, much as we observe a lightning bug flash and expire on a summer evening.

I am not disheartened by insignificance. I am content to be a bug. Insectitude is no problem at all. I grew up with stories in which God is seen as a person, or three persons, and He speaks to His people directly, but when I look at light that is billions of years old coming from an infinite number of galaxies, it shocks the imagination into gratitude for existence itself, nothing more, nothing less. It also makes my political registration less than interesting.

I feel this in church on Sunday morning. Feel myself disappear, my opinions, likes, dislikes, and believe myself loved by the Creator, and in that moment I am joined to others surrounding me, which was the feeling down South recently when we sang, “O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder consider all the worlds Thy hands have made,” and we were briefly united, all of us equally. I was onstage but still a firefly, singing bass.

I became an author because books appeared sort of permanent to me, and now I see it’s not true, but the recognition of brevity makes one grateful for this day, not assuming there will be another. I felt this when the subway doors bit me and I imagined the headline Author Decapitated On C Train but it didn’t happen.

Being bitten by doors is a chastening experience but it’s also a privilege to discover the kindness of strangers, a discovery worth the price. We are surrounded by goodness. The man in the orange vest was brought up to rescue the perishing. The country is full of those people. You and I are counting on that every day of our lives.

 

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Good manners are a sign of trust, no?

I was in Nashville last weekend and saw an old man wearing a shirt with eagles and red and blue stripes on it and also the preamble of the U.S. Constitution. I did a show there in front of an audience wearing more brightly colored clothes than you’d find up north, including pastels I thought had been outlawed long ago. During the show the audience (at my invitation) sang “How Great Thou Art” and other hymns with such evangelical power I was tempted to come to the Lord then and there except I’d done that already years before. And after the show I drove past two blocks of bars with garish neon signs where everyone in sight was very young and very drunk. So the South is still the South. In New York, the audience would’ve worn a lot of black or tan, the hymn would’ve been sung reluctantly but tolerantly, and you’d have to look far and wide to find universal intoxication. And in all Manhattan you wouldn’t find a shirt like that. Only on Staten Island.

I enjoy living in this country with the rest of you who are not much like me, I truly do, but I do have my limits. I come across nice young women whose arms are covered with tattoos like a child’s doodling and big dark serious ones on their legs, and I wonder why a perfectly nice woman is trying to look like a convicted felon.

So I’m narrow-minded. I’m also wary of men who collect firearms and drunks and conspiracy theorists and people who display obscene flags or bumper stickers. Have they no friends who can say, “Why are you doing this?” And I’m alarmed by people who’re rude to waiters, cleaners, cashiers, service people — I’ve been with friends who treated wait staff with cool contempt and it’s an indelible black mark by their name.

One day I was passed by a man in a supercharged car with a booming muffler who sat at the red light revving the engine so the pavement vibrated and he was a fiftyish dude with a thinning gray ponytail. And I wanted to rap on his window and ask, “How do you wish to be remembered after you’ve left this world? As a man with a loud car?”

“To each his own,” we say. “There’s no accounting for taste.” But so much of life is based on simple trust and when I see the tattoos or hear the loud muffler, I don’t want to have anything to do with those people.

I live in a New York building with doormen, which is not a job you find in the want ads. You have to know somebody, probably another doorman. Somebody retires, and Luis recommends Carlos and he’s hired and so Carlos comes as part of a compact, which is crucial for us because we trust our doormen absolutely. The keys to our apartment are at the front desk. We can’t live here without trust.

I trust my fellow New Yorkers. Now and then I’ve stumbled on a curb or a crack and staggered and right away someone or two someones are there to say, “Are you all right?” When people look out for little things, you trust they’ll look out for big things too.

I once signed online a four-page real-estate contract without reading a word of it because I knew the agents Ralph and Joyce and on that basis I casually sign an agreement involving a rather large amount of money, but if Ralph had tattoos all over his arms, I would’ve thought twice, but being a real estate man, he wears a suit and I don’t ask him to roll up his sleeves.

Go write what you want on your arms, rev your engine, drink yourself to a stupor, but I favor normality, maturity, and competence. We’ve had one 15-year-old president and now as we get a new look inside his world, there’s no need to repeat the experiment. When I go into the OR next month and meet the surgeon who’s about to replace the mitral valve, if I see a MAGA hat on his head and eagles and flags on his white scrubs, I will climb off the gurney and ask for a substitute. I prefer people who’ve skipped lightly over adolescence and become seriously fascinated by their calling in life and not be so interested in making a big noise and defying convention. The Constitution grants the right to free speech, which probably includes the right to be obnoxious and ridiculous but there is a price to be paid. You may fall and people will pretend not to notice.

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She and I and you and us, all watching TV

I have it on good authority that we now have 26 sets of personal pronouns available in English, including the gender-neutral zie, zim, zer, zis, zieself, and I expect there will be more to come since the spectrum of personal differences is endless. My wife, for example, who is adored by me, I can no longer think of as she or her, lumped in with other women including harridans, hags, harpies and shrews, and so my wife is jen and jer and jenself and several individuals whom I despise are scheiss and scheissen and scheissenself. My fellow tall persons have the pronouns hi and hiya. Height is every bit as crucial an identifier as gender and so is intelligence. I don’t know any people I’d refer to as dem or dose but surely dey’re out there somewhere.

Personal identity is a complex matter and if a pronoun is all you need to validate you, fine. It’d help if you pasted your pronoun on your forehead, but if you feel that would marginalize you or stereotype you, I understand. And now that the Supremes have made it a basic constitutional right to carry a concealed loaded weapon, I predict that we’re going to respect gender identity more than ever. A guy with a .45 under the jacket thereby becomes plural and they is going to be more numerous and you might want to become plural too.

I am thinking of becoming unique myself, and using geek and gink and gawk, but I don’t expect the plumber Mitch to respect this or my barber Tommy or Lindsay my dermatologist. Mainly it’s for my own benefit. When I was a kid, I avoided playing football and instead I wrote poetry, which was considered weird in Anoka, Minnesota, but there were other weird boys to hang out with and so we didn’t need a separate pronoun.

And now, with the Thompson-Cheney hearings, we are hearing about a president who considered Himself presidential even though the vote count showed otherwise, and He called up the fellow in Georgia who counted the votes and told him to find 11,000 more. “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” He said. He ordered that voting machines be seized. He self-identified as a capitalized pronoun and was justifiably agitated when others, including men He had appointed, told Him otherwise.

Mr. President did not wish to lose. Joe was a radical left-wing desperado who was missing some marbles, but more important, Mr. President’s father, Fred, had instilled in his boy a powerful aversion to defeat, and why should He take it lying down. And so you had that extraordinary meeting in the Oval Office in which Jeffrey Clark, an environmental lawyer in the Justice Department, offered to declare the election fraudulent if he were appointed Attorney General. And Mr. Rosen the Acting AG and Mr. Engel and Mr. Donoghue sat across the Executive Desk from Himself and told Him that all the top people at DOJ would resign en masse if Mr. Clark were made AG. And so the president backed down slightly, thus preserving the remaining integrity of the DOJ.

Mr. Clark, who pursued this ploy and lost, was a Harvard grad who got his law degree at Georgetown and you wonder what the heads of dose institutions feel like. Probably like scheissenselves. They wish Mr. Clark would take a long sabbatical in Samarkand and change his name to Janice and grow long hair and tie it up in a bun. Meanwhile, they are thinking about making Ethics a required course.

Congressman McCarthy, who will likely become Speaker of the House in January, has urged his fellow Republicans to ignore the hearings and that is excellent advice. What you don’t know can’t hurt you. The phone calls from the White House to change the vote in various states, the rampage of Rudy, the 250 million raised by Him to fight a legal battle that was already over, the mob that busted into the Capitol while He watched on TV, Mr. Clark’s tongue shining the president’s shoes — I admire people who can ignore this. It shows real willpower. I’m thinking of identifying as a Republican and using the pronouns We and Us. Democrats are a flock of flibbertigibbets and the Republican base is made of granite. Nothing can shake us. Nothing. Dynamite wouldn’t make a dent.

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Thanks in advance for reading this letter

It’s the age of gratitude, the decade I’m in. Gratitude for bromides: you wake up to find that your excellent hamburger of the evening before has made you gassy and you fizz two tablets in a glass of water and feel quick relief. It was a man named Hub Beardsley who got the idea for Alka-Seltzer back in 1928, according to Google, and it was Larry Page and Sergey Brin who invented Google, and if you’d been around Palo Alto in 1998 and befriended two nerds and bought them hamburgers, you might be fabulously wealthy today and be weird and miserable, a problem that bromides cannot touch.

A physicist, Dr. Ivan Getting, and an engineer, Col. Bradford Parkinson, are credited as the creators of GPS though it was the U.S. Navy and Dr. Roger Easton at the Naval Research Laboratory who pushed it to completion with a network of satellites with accurate atomic clocks that will guide your car through Tangletown and make it possible for newly arrived immigrants to work as Uber drivers. And so my wife drives and I don’t correct her — I’m not in the business of correcting atomic clocks on satellites — I tell her about the husband and wife driving along and they hit a bridge abutment and in the next moment they’re in heaven and he’s at a heavenly golf course and he hits a hole in one and turns to her and says, “You know, if you hadn’t made me quit smoking, I could’ve been here years ago.”

Someday GPS will be able to tell jokes or answer questions about the history of wherever you’re driving through, which was my job when I rode with my dad from Minnesota to New York City in the summer of 1953: I read to him from the state guides put out by the Federal Writers’ Project in the Thirties, a geo/historical narrative that followed the main roads. So I read: “At 3.1 miles, on the left, is Lincoln State Park where Abraham Lincoln spent his youth from age 7 to 21 and where his mother, Nancy Hanks, is buried in Pioneer Cemetery” and though I was only eleven, I made myself useful to my dad.

The Federal Writers’ Project was part of the Works Progress Administration of FDR’s New Deal and it’s a government program that could be usefully reintroduced today. The purpose was to offer employment to thousands of impoverished writers, but it accomplished more than a handout: it saved thousands of people from writing bad poetry and drippy memoirs and self-conscious fiction and instead to create useful nonfiction that explained the country as you drove through it.

I see this as a turning point in my life: my dad wanted to go to New York City where he’d spent some good years during WW2 working in the Army Post Office on Fifth Avenue. He did not want to take me with him. That was Mother’s idea. She felt that the father of six children should not go gallivanting off to the big city, leaving her at home with three toddlers and a half-acre garden. I was sent along as his ball and chain and he resented it, but he knew she was right, so off we went. And in reading from the FWP guides through Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, I made myself a partner on the trip. We bonded. I read interesting stuff in a loud clear voice for three days straight on two-lane roads. I believe this is where the seeds for my career in radio and as a writer were sown. So every summer I say thank you to the spirit of my mother, Grace, remembering that skinny kid with wire-rim glasses in the front seat of the Pontiac back out of the driveway with a silent father at the wheel and a pile of state guides beside me. He doesn’t know it but he is heading in a lucky direction in life.

The beauty part of being a writer is that once you pass fifty you’re surrounded by piles of unfinished work so you never run out of things to do. Singers start to decline around fifty, hockey players are finished by thirty-two, and most songwriters are done before they ever start. But an old man who writes stories sits down in the morning amid stacks of fragments and first drafts and failures that fortunately avoided publication, and this occupies your morning and you gain the illusion of productivity that gives you license to waste the afternoon on the phone and the evening watching a ballgame. Praise God from Whom all blessings flow, especially those of long ago.

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Good isn’t good enough, seek perfection

I’m in Minnesota where the other day I ate a radish that had a real bite to it, not the tepid politically correct radishes I’ve become accustomed to but a confident self-aware radish like the ones I picked in a truck garden when I was a kid and when the farmer wasn’t looking I’d yank a radish out of the ground, wipe it off on my shirt, and chomp on it and it was thrilling. A red root that warmed your heart.

Not many vegetables are thrilling. Greens aren’t or green peppers, and spuds and squash are only vehicles for butter. Corn, as we know, is a grain, not a veg, so it doesn’t count. I consider tomatoes a fruit but either way, the tomato of today is bred for long shelf life, not for flavor. Beans are beans. This leaves onions and radishes, and the sharp keen-edged radish I bit into the other day was so rare, it made up for the fact that half an hour before I had stood up from looking through the cupboard and slammed my head into the cupboard door. Which is as close to being beheaded as I care to come.

I stood up fast and the sharp sensation of wood on bone made me pause to recall my Social Security number and the address of my childhood home, 312 77th Avenue North, Minneapolis 12, Minn. And Juniper 8-2014, our phone number, to make sure the marbles were intact. But the radish made everything right again. It was fabulous.

Perfection is rare in this world. I look through my hard drive at stories I wrote years ago and I’m happy to delete them, shapeless tasteless compost that they are, compared to which this radish is a Monet water lily. Of course it takes a radish afficionado to recognize it and I am that man. I am also a man who believes the American hamburger is capable of achieving perfection. You need a good bun and a slice of onion, and the burger should be slightly pinkish. Some people ruin it with ketchup. Mustard is what’s required and it should be American mustard, not some Dijon variety. A Dijoned burger is a mistake. You go down that road and you may move to New Canaan and change your name to François Moonbright and your family will have to go to court and get guardianship.

We Minnesotans are a self-effacing people so I’d never say to the guy at the grill, “This hamburger is perfection” because he’d feel obligated to say, “I think I took it off the grill too soon” but nonetheless it is perfect. Cheese would only diminish it. The bun is thin and lightly toasted on the grill. A bite that brings bun, mustard, beef, and onion into the oral cavity simultaneously is a sensation that makes up for whatever worthless things you did today, like my grousing about politics.

It’s a great country and it’s been divided ever since it was founded. My Crandall relatives were loyal to the king and had to high-tail it to Canada, taking only their silverware and the good china, and the men who signed the Declaration that July suffered too, nine of them died in the war, others were bankrupted and left penniless.

Meanwhile, we appreciate perfection in the radish or the limerick: Hooray for Henry Thoreau who lived in the woods long ago and wrote lovely prose while his mom washed his clothes and fixed him hot lunches to go. It’s perfect. So is the stolen base, the double play, the outfielder’s long gallop to deep left center to snatch the fly before it becomes a triple and he turns and tosses the ball over his shoulder into the stands and trots to the dugout having killed the rally and broken the hearts of a quarter-million Yankee fans.

But maybe New York will experience perfection that night in the form of an explosive thunderstorm, bombs bursting in air, lightning strikes, a downpour, sheets of rain, cars stopped in the street. Sunsets are vastly overrated and only make me think of dreadful greeting cards: a thunderstorm is the real thing.

Sometimes sitting in a chair, I feel my wife put her hands on my shoulders and whisper an endearment into my hair, and this small perfect gesture, though you won’t find it in The Joy of Sex, is very moving to me. It’s perfection. When she puts her hands on my shoulder, now that we’re getting older, this gentle affection is a perfect connection in the eyes of me, the beholder. Not perfect but you get the point.

Garrison Keillor © 07.05.22

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A Wednesday drive in the old neighborhood

Another perfect summer and despite all there is to be forlorn about, I feel the same mindless happiness I remember from when I was 20 and running around Minneapolis in a red Mustang with a girl named Maggie and listening to the Cleftones and Cadillacs, the Coasters, the Drifters singing, “Out of the sun, we’ll be havin’ some fun. People walking above, we’ll be making love under the boardwalk.” We had no boardwalk at Lake Calhoun but there were dim places where we sat and necked. She had no plans for me nor did I for her, which was part of the mindlessness. Two young mammals keeping company, enjoying warm weather.

It all came back to me, riding around south Minneapolis Wednesday with my family, looking for the Dairy Queen on 38th Street, two blocks from the Grace & Truth Gospel Hall I attended as a boy in a small separatist sect where I enjoyed the feeling of complete comprehension of absolute truth, from Genesis to Revelation, right up to the age of twelve or thirteen.

Thanks to this upbringing, I have a good ear for the humorless self-righteous and when I got an email from an old friend asking for a donation to a collaborative storytelling collective to create a safe space and healing life-affirming environment for an inclusive group of young people focused on the intentional use of language to deepen self-awareness in the face of stress and trauma, I knew where he was coming from. I don’t object to this, I’m just a harmless old guy cruising around and looking forward to a Dairy Queen.

I did, however, note that in his list of minorities he’d serve, he listed “Dakhota” with a right-leaning accent mark over the o. I’d never seen the word spelled that way and I don’t know how to create that diacritical mark on my computer keyboard. But clearly, though he is white with no Dakhota corpuscles in him that he’s ever mentioned, he was demonstrating his moral superiority as one sensitive to indigenous nuance compared to a bigoted peasant such as myself.

Maggie and I were not inclusive, we were content to be two, both wanting to be writers, and we did tell stories, hers were about bad boyfriends who were too grabby, so I avoided grabbiness and simply held hands and eventually she kissed me and I kissed her back and was careful to make my kisses approximately equal in passion but not try to outdo her. Our safe space was the Mustang and the healing environment was July. In Minnesota you have to suffer a good deal to get to summer and when the perfect days arrive, you owe it to yourself to experience them fully. At the DQ I ordered a medium Butterfinger Blizzard and it was life-affirming.

Lake Calhoun was renamed Bde Maka Ska in honor of the Dakhota and surely it made no sense for Minneapolis to honor John Calhoun, the South Carolinian proponent of slavery and a man with bad hair, but for Maggie and me in the Mustang, the lake had no political significance, it was only a large body of water we looked at as we laid hands on each other. But I’m fine with the name change. Woody Allen was Allan Konigsberg and decided not to be; Allen Ginsberg’s first name was Irwin and a guy named Irwin could not have written “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” he would’ve become an insurance salesman. If Bob Dylan had remained Bob Zimmerman, Columbia Records never would’ve seen him as a poet and visionary and he’d be a cabdriver today. Maybe Maggie has become Starflower Moonbright and is conducting collaborative life-affirming workshops in Fargaux, North Dakhota. I wish her well.

As for me, I am enjoying a mindless summer day in the back seat behind my wife and daughter as we drive through my old neighborhood, eating our Dairy Queens. Some things we know for certain and that’s one. Another is that the two states west of here will never put the h in their names and the right-leaning accent mark over the o. There are good people there but they won’t let Minnesotans tell them how to spell their name. The originalists on the Supreme Court could find that Thomas Jefferson spelled the name with the h and the accent but I say, Live and let live. Enjoy the day. It’s summer.

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Talking on the phone to Joyce and rejoicing

We sat in the sun and played Scrabble Monday and a few minutes later a vulgar four-letter profanity appeared on my letter rack that I could’ve played for 47 points and did not. I just wasn’t in the mood. I’d spoken on the phone that day with Joyce, a preacher and a favorite cousin of mine. Our grandfathers were brothers, and a long-ago rift between them separated our families for decades and I didn’t meet Joyce until I was an old man. This strange story of two stubborn Scots keeping their distance draws me even closer to her. She’s a student of family history and when we talk Jesus comes easily into the conversation with no change of tone of voice, same as you’d mention your brother or father. He is not in a separate universe.

I’ve tried to say the four-letter word several times and I can’t get it to sound natural, not like my two friends who use it often to bold-face what they’re saying. I don’t object. They’re neighbors and Jesus said to love them so I do, mostly, though the word sounds alarming to me like breaking glass. There’s no kindness about it.

Joyce’s grandfather was in the Navy and mine worked for the railroad and they must’ve heard plenty of profanity but never took up the habit. My grandpa, however, was capable of silent anger of an enduring nature, which his children knew and dreaded. My mother as a girl once sat down in the kitchen window and didn’t notice the fresh blueberry pie on the sill and knocked it out on the lawn and she was terrified her dad would berate her for it. He once got angry at her for being too friendly with boys at school and sent her to transfer to a school where she knew nobody. She forgave him and a few years later she had to confess to him that she was pregnant by the boy who would become my father though they hadn’t said their vows yet.

It was 1936, he was still needed on the farm, his father having died three years before, and she was in nurse’s training. They’d been in love for five years and had no money and one day, driving a double team of horses, he almost broke his neck when the horses bolted and the wagon crashed in the ditch, and he was so elated by his survival he wrote her a long letter describing the mishap — the only sustained narrative I ever knew to come out of my father — and he borrowed his brother’s Model A and drove to the city and a few months later she was pregnant. They lied to Grandpa, said they had eloped, and both families were upset but the storm passed. Grandpa’s anger might have exiled her to a home for unwed mothers and my brother Philip would’ve been adopted and I would not have come into existence. But they were forgiven and the story was kept secret by my 21 aunts and uncles and I never found out until my parents were gone and I was an 70-year-old orphan.

Righteous indignation is the easy part of the Christian faith and the hard part is forgiveness. Our country is caught up in ferocious indignation but there is a more merciful culture among us. We know that our country is a haven for the hopeful. We grieve for the migrant workers who died of the heat in the semitrailer that hauled them up from Mexico. We grieve for the pregnant women trapped in an impossible dilemma. The children in room 112 are still on our minds.

What Grandpa never told my mother was that her mother was pregnant for three months before he married her and the indignation of his family was one thing that drove him to leave Scotland and come to America. This is why Joyce and I are keen about family history. Each of us owes our life to a marvelous combination of circumstances, and mercy and kindness and forgiveness are entwined with it.

The righteously indignant are missing out on comedy, which is at the heart of America and which is about forgiveness. Jews don’t recognize Jesus as Messiah, Protestants don’t recognize the pope, and Baptists don’t recognize each other in the liquor store. I heard that joke from a Baptist when I was a kid and I still love it. Jesus broke bread with sinners and Republicans and we should do likewise.

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