Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 47

Me and Emily, out on the town

It got into the 90s back home the other day and friends complained to me over the phone though guiltily because they knew I’d spent a day in the ER in New York which, honestly, had been a beautiful illuminatory experience and not miserable at all, but they felt sheepish about complaining of a heat wave and the raccoons devouring their strawberries despite the netting and apologized for talking about it, feeling that a brain seizure trumps a heat wave and rapacious raccoons. Not true.

I came through the valley of the shadow of death and the Lord prepared a table before me in the ER and poured oil on my head and I came out feeling like Emily in “Our Town” — “Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.” I can’t help it that I have a Grover’s Corners side to my personality that emerges during big thunderstorms and at night on the bow of a ship in the mid-Atlantic and once hiking into the Grand Canyon and once during Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and also that time in the ER. Is there such a word as “enraptured”? If there is, that’s what I was.

I expected to be grumpy in old age and of course there’s still time, but instead I’m awestruck. As Emily says, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it — every, every minute?” No, Emily, but I’ve realized life for about 245 minutes since a week ago, and it’s delicious. I was released on Saturday and went to church on Sunday and the choir was glorious and I wrote in the bulletin:

The words come in with a whistle
Like the sound of an incoming missile.
It’s so good to hear it,
“Let us live in the Spirit,”
From Romans, St. Paul’s epistle.

When you’re in the Spirit, it’s a sort of weight loss. I became 165 pounds, walking down Amsterdam Avenue to lunch with a friend whose granddaughter got married recently, the wedding dress refitted to accommodate the little boy in the bride’s belly, and in her great happiness, the grandma is setting out to write a memoir. I told her to avoid modesty. “No problem,” she said. She is 88, a decade ahead of me, and she is funny and sassy and when she goes after the high and the mighty, she can be devastating. She’s a scout riding ahead on the trail and the report is inspiring.

As for raccoons, I take this seriously. My dad grew up on a farm and he loved fresh strawberries, sweet corn, and tomatoes, and that’s why we were landowners, not apartment dwellers. He knew the difference between fresh strawberries and store-bought and fresh was a pleasure he cherished. He didn’t drink whiskey or chew tobacco or dance the tango, but he loved stuff from his garden. I had artistic ambitions and felt superior to gardeners; I was a songwriter and my best song was the one with the verse in the middle:

I love you, darling,
Waiting alone.
Waiting for you to show,
Wishing you’d call me though
I don’t have a phone.

But now I don’t see it as superior to strawberries. The wonders of the world all join in praise of the Creator. Minneapolis made a political decision to require dogs to be leashed because loose dogs can be frightening to children. Dogs running loose also defend the garden against raccoons. And so, Rocky Raccoon devours the good strawberries and people have to buy a pint at the grocery for $6, unfresh from California, and so a growing minority believes that a conspiracy of Satanists is running the country.

I do not. A man who goes into the ER amid the dying and distressed and comes out and goes to church is like Emily, a ghost walking among the living, telling them to love this life and all the ordinary things in it, clocks ticking and coffee and the walnut baklava with gelato and the couples walking along Amsterdam and the long-legged woman in denim shorts and the cops having a smoke and the smile on the waiter’s face as she sets down the bill, which moves me to tip her 40%, that smile that says, “Oh, earth, you are too wonderful,” and I say goodbye to my friend and come home. I have ten more years. What a gift. Life is good and one visit to the ER confirms it so let us drive upstate, darling, and look for a sign, “Pick Your Own Strawberries,” and be ecstatic.

.

The post Me and Emily, out on the town appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

A man in a back pew, thinking to himself

I’ve been avoiding the news for a while, but it was hard to ignore the recent poll by the Public Religion Research Institute that showed about 15 percent of Americans believe the government is controlled by Satanists who kidnap children and drink their blood and that patriots will need to depose them by violent revolution. This represents as many people as belong to Methodist, Presbyterian, and Lutheran churches in America. It is sort of dizzying to contemplate, even for an Episcopalian like me.

The study found that 55 percent of Republicans “mostly disagreed” with those ideas but not entirely. One-fourth of Republicans disagreed entirely, compared to 58 percent of Democrats, which still leaves a good many ambivalent Democrats.

It makes me wonder about the purity of drinking water in the middle of the country. These are not ideas taught in public school civics courses. I’ve never overheard anyone discussing Satanist pedophiles at a table near me at lunch. But PRRI now classifies QAnon, which holds these views, as a major religion. So there you are. Welcome to the 21st century.

This was why I took a vacation from the news, to avoid getting foamed up about something that exists only in people’s minds and not in the world you and I walk through every day. There are paranoids who view passersby with suspicion. I grew up among gentle people who believed that God had revealed truths to them that were denied to the rest of Christendom. I am related to some of those people. Slightly nutty, but harmless.

The day that Senator McConnell proposes a temporary suspension of the Bill of Rights to allow a cleansing of Satanist pedophiles in the State Department is the day I get alarmed about QAnon and until then I don’t care what they think. Let Joe Biden worry about it. That’s what we elected him to do.

I am going to focus on what I hear directly from people I know. I know two women who recently gave birth to their first babies and are joyful and so are their men and that is real news. A grandson is starting college. A daughter is moving. A friend has finished a novel. A widowed friend, marrying again at 84, writes to say he is well and adds, “And it’s none of your business but the sex is great.” A cousin attended a graduation ceremony at a school for intellectually disabled children and one poor graduate stammered through a speech of which little could be understood and the crowd clapped all the harder for him.

Life Goes On. That’s the news. Mosquitoes drink children’s blood and they don’t run the government. And after a year away, I return to my church, the one that believes God sent His Son to this planet to suffer and die for the redemption of the wayward human race.

All of my spiritual elders are gone, the ones who taught me lessons from the Bible, so I am on my own. I pray that they found the heavenly reward they trusted would be theirs. I believe in a fraction of what I was taught, my faith wavers. My faithful older brother whom I could talk to about these things went skating one day, slipped, hit his head, and died, and now I am much older than he is. My elders believed in a fiery Hell but did not beat up on us about it; I don’t. Nor do I believe that Heaven is the most beautiful golf course ever. (“If you hadn’t made me stop smoking, Marge, I could’ve been here years ago.”) But I do believe that when Jesus, surrounded by the sick and impoverished and oppressed, the blind and demon-possessed, said to his disciples, “Whatsoever you do for the least of these, you do for me and your Father in heaven,” he spoke the truth, and if you wish for some truth in your life, along with your interesting attitudes and opinions, this is the one to go for.

My elders tried to make Scripture be clear, rational, inevitable, irrefutable, but it actually is miraculous. Ancient tribes wandering the desert discovered that they were dearly loved by their Creator who allowed them to suffer in hopes it would draw them closer to Him. I don’t get it but I go for it. And the choir was glorious on Sunday. Oh my God in heaven, what a joyful noise.

The post A man in a back pew, thinking to himself appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Out of the bubble, into the hullabaloo

Spent twenty-four hours in an emergency ward and am still giddy from it and from having gotten off light when it could’ve been otherwise, which someday it will but not yet. I lay in a little alcove, off a busy core of staff at computers, gurneys coming and going, beepers beeping, but vast professional courtesy prevailing. It was a big hospital on 68th and York in Manhattan, so it was an international staff, Asia, Africa, all over. My neighbor was a woman with cancer who often yelled, “Somebody come and help me! I just want to die! Help me!” and my other neighbor was a drunk who was mentally ill and also a jerk, a terrible combination. He had checked himself in and was now calling 911 to come get him out. Four cops arrived. It may have been the highlight of their day.

As for me, I’d been sent by my doctor for tests after I’d twice blanked out and had memory lapses (including the name of my doctor), which alarmed my wife. I called the doctor and his secretary asked for my phone number and when I couldn’t recall it, she put me right through. I took a cab over and Dr. Nash quizzed me. I’ve suffered a couple of strokes in the past, light ones, and he is a good explainer, and I canceled everything and went over to ER. My wife kissed me goodbye and said, “You remember that Maia was born here, right?” I did, then.

One nurse referred to it as “purgatory,” and maybe so, but it was fascinating and maybe the cure for a brain episode is to go to a place that gets your full attention. They shipped me in for an MRI, thirty-five minutes of honking and rasping in a small dark tunnel but I thought of that day back in December 1997, when my wife delivered at this hospital and the Filipino nurse took the little tadpole wrapped in a blanket and handed her to me and her eyes met mine and we’ve been studying each other ever since. This memory was worth the MRI.

I had paper and pen with me, so waiting was no problem and there is plenty of it to be done in ER. A man who experienced blankness does not go to the head of the line. So I wrote. My nurse was Yemeni, the neurologist Israeli, the night nurse was Black from Des Moines. I felt like I was hosting a panel on diversity.

At 4 a.m., a man awoke me to install the electroencephalograph wires on my scalp, an intricate gizmo. He was from Nepal but I heard it as “Naples.” “Beautiful city,” I said. “Country,” he said. It put me in the mood for comedy. I said, “It looks as if you’ve done this before,” and he said, “Each time is like a new experience.” This struck me as the funniest thing I’d heard in days. He thought so too. I asked his name and he said, “You’d only mispronounce it. Call me Bob.” “So you like to work under an alias, then?” I said. He said, “With men your age, yes.” We were an act, meanwhile he was putting contacts on my scalp, freezing them in with a freeze-gun. I said, “So Nepal—you’re Buddhist, right?” “How could you tell?” he said.

He said, “Buddhism is the easiest religion in the world. You just don’t hate anybody. Hindu is very complicated. They love cows and everything else is a matter of degrees.” I thought briefly of the one person in the world I hate, a corporate killer I encountered four years ago, but he seemed irrelevant in this moment. It was almost 5 a.m., I was giddy from lack of sleep, like back in college, and it made me think maybe I could use more nights like this, and the dying woman was moaning, a useful reminder that time is limited.

I still felt good at 9 a.m. when Dr. Nash came by to tell me the tests showed it had been a seizure, not a stroke, a spark in the circuit that throws off the timing. I was lucky. I told him that a resident neurologist with wild hair had been by to see me who looked like a junior in high school and I told him we expect our neurologists to be bald. Dr. Nash said, “Actually, he’s a sophomore.” I asked him if an EEG can detect dementia and he said, “Yes, some kinds, but you’re not there yet.” Dr. Nash is bald, so I’m going to take his word for it.

The post Out of the bubble, into the hullabaloo appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Why we are staying home tonight, not going out

We sat out on our terrace in New York the other night, she and I, and cherished the feel of summer, a great blessing to us stoical northerners unaccustomed to paradise, so we contemplate all that is to come, the first rhubarb and strawberries, strawberry-rhubarb pie, sweet corn, fireflies flashing each other, the light produced by the oxidation of luciferin — one of those insignificant facts you carry around, waiting for a chance to dazzle someone with. If I were a firefly, I’d say to a female, That’s the oxidization of luciferin there, you know, and she’d be impressed and we’d mate and then I’d die.

I look forward to the next big storm, purple sky, lightning ripping the sky, volleys of thunder, so I can be calm and reassuring, a manly role, though I’m the last person you’d want in a real emergency. If I tried to give artificial respiration, I’d probably suffocate the patient.

The pandemic is easing toward an end, the sort of good luck it is bad luck to talk about, so forget what I said. The country is divided, but when was it otherwise? We don’t get many Montanans or Dakotans visiting us in Manhattan. We had relatives who disappeared down South and joined a church that is opposed to literacy and people speak in tongues and it’s hard for us to understand them. It’s too big a country to be united, so we have a loose confederation of nations, vegan nation coming into prominence as the gardens ripen, and earbud nation, which doesn’t engage in conversation at all, and the nation of the progressive conquistadorista Ocasio-Cortez that seeks to make us ride bikes and be reeducated and write pronouns on our foreheads. These deep divisions will fade with time and be succeeded by others. But the deepest division is long-standing, between the competent and the complainers, the doers and the dreamers, the professionals and people content to be passengers on the bus. My competence is editing, not writing, but I belong to the typewriter age so I have a friend in Wisconsin whom I call to say, “I’ve been trying for half an hour to make the screen brighter” and he says, “Go to System Preferences, click on Display, and you’ll see the brightness scale.” And the screen gets bright.

I defend my competence, slender as it is, by sitting up here on the 12th floor out of range of ticks that carry bacteria that can fog your brain. You hike the Adirondacks and a week later you’re unable to spell “cat.” I stay home. There are excellent picture books about the Adirondacks and a person needn’t go see it firsthand any more than you need to be marched to the gallows to see what that’s like. Just read In Cold Blood.

My niece got a bad case of poison ivy last week and had to go through the misery of the American health care system, which is no system at all but a conspiracy of chaos. She is French. The French have a system. You provide your medical history, they give you a card, you can present it to any doctor or hospital and they look you up in the system. You don’t have to go to an ER and fill out four pages of questionnaire and sit for four hours waiting.

There is no poison ivy on the 12th floor so I’ve avoided health care and thus I can write this cheerful essay. Were I afflicted with poison ivy, this would be a searing indictment of the indifference of American society to my suffering. It is the elevation that makes the humorist and also old age: you retire and you have the beautiful freedom of irrelevance. More divisions are on the way but thunderstorms and fresh strawberries pull us together.

On the 12th floor, we’re talking about what to have for dinner tonight. We like it up here so we won’t go to a restaurant where some pigeon-borne virus might make us sick and send us to the ER. We’ll eat on the terrace as the sun goes down. She votes for a big salad, I vote for a ground sirloin hamburger on a bun with a slice of onion, a slice of lettuce, a slice of Havarti cheese, and plenty of mustard. We compromise on a big salad with some onion in it and little chunks of Havarti. Thanks to sudden memory loss, I’m fine with that.

The post Why we are staying home tonight, not going out appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Going to Newport with Mrs. Dashboard

We went to Newport for three days last week, two Minnesotans long married, to rediscover the fact that ocean air is delicious and invigorating and can even make you happy. That surely is why the Vanderbilts built their monstrous mansion on the shore: sinking into decadence in a fake palace with more marble than Arlington Cemetery, nonetheless they could take a deep breath and feel childlike pleasure. So could their servants. So did we, crossing the beautiful bridges over the bays to Aquidneck Island, seeing the Atlantic, thinking “Oh wow” and “Oh my god.” The world is in turmoil, but walking along the shore and inhaling salt air lets you remember how good it felt to be twelve years old.

It’s a fine old town. You come and eat oysters and cod, text videos of the surf to your inland friends, and drive around and get your fill of colonial homes in dark greens and browns, many of them turned into boutique hotels. It’s here that I appreciate having a car with an electronic lady in the dashboard to give us directions. You simply press a button and say, “Cliff Walk,” and she says, “In six hundred feet, turn left on Narragansett Avenue and drive one-half mile.” Her vocal inflexion is very good; she sounds like an educated American woman in her mid-forties who knows her way around. And you drive down Narragansett and there, past Salve Regina College, is the ocean with Cliff Walk above it and you walk along the cliff and you can look across the vast green lawn to the marble pile where the Vanderbilts sank their ill-gotten gains, which is open for tourists to wander through and see how grim boughten grandeur can be.

Back in Minneapolis where streets are numbered, avenues alphabetical, Mrs. Dashboard is not so crucial, but in Newport there was no urban planning until it was too late, and you drive through a jumble of streets, Gidley, Ann, Brewer, Dennison, Young, Howard, Pope, so forty years ago, one spouse drove and the other read the road map, and right here is where many marriages came to a screeching end, the Mr. cursing the traffic and the Mrs. yelling, “I said to turn left two streets back!” and the big map blocked his view and he crashed into a parked car and he went back to Minnesota and she went to her sister’s in New Rochelle and lawyers were called. The dashboard lady makes everything simple and pleasant.

Someday she will become a close personal friend. She’ll know you from your car conversations and keep track of your family members near and far, their Facebook posts, names of children, birthdays, occupations, politics. She’ll be able to carry on a conversation with you while being aware of passengers in the car and what can and cannot be said in front of them. Our dashboard person is a lady but you’ll be able to choose a gender, male, femme, neutral, trans, or anything you can think of. I’d keep our dashboard lady but have her be lesbian, hard-core conservative, and very sarcastic, to make car trips more fun. Ask her for directions and she tells you to go stick your head in the toilet.

An old man appreciates modern technology. At Grandma’s farm when I was little, the phone was on the wall, you cranked it to get an operator, sometimes you had to wait for someone else to finish talking. It was the size of a breadbox. Now my sweetie and I walk around with tiny wireless phones that enable us to go our separate ways without making elaborate plans for when and where to meet up. She walks four miles along the cliff, inhaling the air, and I sit and write postcards and eat a scoop of caramel cookie dough ice cream.

I also come to Newport to celebrate my ancestor Elder John Crandall who settled here with Roger Williams in the 1640s, a virtuous ancestor who didn’t live off the labor of others or build a big ugly stone house. Lucille Ball and Katharine Hepburn were also descendants of his. They have no connection to the Vanderbilts. And then there is the ocean air. How many times in the past week have you said, “Oh wow”? My sweetie and I are up to twenty, heading for fifty or more, a wowful week indeed.

The post Going to Newport with Mrs. Dashboard appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

An adventure in my own home on Tuesday

The life of an honest satirist is a hard life and so there are few of them. We cherish our delusions — I am very fond of mine, especially the belief that I am master of my house and captain of my ship, but on Tuesday, sitting on the throne, I saw that the toilet paper dispenser was empty, no extra rolls of Scott tissue in sight, and the Chief Provisioner was off on her daily walk, and so I had to hike around the apartment, pants at half-mast, looking for the goods.

A man who doesn’t know where the toilet paper is kept in an apartment he’s lived in for many years is in a ridiculous position. He knows this as he wanders from room to room, opening cupboards, looking in drawers, hoping she does not walk in and see her husband the noted author in this delicate moment. He has lived with his head in the clouds and lost touch with the essentials of life.

The satirist H.L. Mencken would have cherished the thought. He was an old newspaperman who wrote for blue-collar freethinkers who rode the streetcars and enjoyed Henry putting down the authorities. “A judge is a law student who grades his own examination papers. A historian is an unsuccessful novelist. A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there. A theologian is the man who finds it. A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin. An author is a man who, in the absence of toilet tissue, is forced to use his own manuscript and regrets that he wrote on such stiff paper.”

The last one is mine; the others are his. I discovered Mencken in high school and admired the snap of the short sentences: he wasn’t out to persuade, only to poke you and get your attention. I was 18, the son of gentle evangelicals whom God had entrusted with truths not shared with others, a bookish boy, seriously shy but feeling my oats, and Mencken was my liquor. He wrote: “I am a newspaperman. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.”

Years later I visited his rowhouse on Hollins Street in Baltimore, nicely restored after his death in 1956, an important house in American letters and culture, a hotbed of agitation for civil rights, new writers, intellectual freedom, journalistic integrity, and that afternoon I was the only visitor. His office on the second floor was a pretty ordinary office. A battlefield is fascinating — go to Gettysburg and even with the odds and ends of monuments you can imagine what took place there — but an intellectual battlefield is found in books, not in offices.

He loved Baltimore. He was good to up-and-coming writers. He was the man who said, “Marriage is a great institution but who would want to live in an institution?” but when he was fifty he married Sara Haardt, a writer from Alabama, and loved her and was grief-stricken when she died five years later. I met my wife when I was fifty.

He was a conservative, anti-New Dealer, he loathed FDR, and he was opposed to World War II, a serious moral flaw that cast him into outer darkness, and he wrote too much, but Google bestows immortality and Mencken gave good quotes. He wrote: “The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule humanity. Idealism — not materialism — is the chief curse of the world. People get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.” You can argue with that, and you should, but the clarity is admirable. This is the advantage conservatives have over us liberals. We write long windy misty twisty sentences. They write succinctly. He said, “All we know is that we are here and it is now. Other than that, all human knowledge is nonsense. Time stays, and we go. Life is a dead-end street.”

The toilet paper was in the laundry room, on top of the dryer. Now that I know that, there is no stopping me, I’m good to go on for years and years. Repeat this story to anyone and I will deny the whole thing.

The post An adventure in my own home on Tuesday appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

The impending crisis of exploding cicada data

My grandpa left Glasgow in 1905 and sailed to America and brought his thirteen children up as Americans and so I haven’t yet taken a position on Scottish independence but with the resounding victory of the Scottish National Party in elections last week, I suppose I’ll have to. I like to involve myself in other people’s problems where I myself have nothing at all at stake. Someone asked me about Ukraine the other day and though I haven’t heard anything from there in a long time, I gave a good answer, reasonable, balanced, on the one hand this, on the other hand that.

Meanwhile, I’ve been focused on the crisis of the seventeen-year cicada, trillions of which will soon crawl out of the ground from the Mississippi to the Atlantic, from Georgia to New England, their incessant skritching filling the air for weeks, as they breed and the males drop dead and the females lay eggs to hatch into larvae to tunnel down into the ground to spend seventeen years and then resurrect.

Incessant skritching is a trigger for me, it makes me do crazy things. During the last cicada uprising in 2004, I wrote a book about my liberal politics and thereby offended half of my radio audience; in 1987, I moved to Denmark; in 1970, I went into radio, and in 1953, I decided to be a writer so I could stay indoors and get away from the skritching, the piles of wings and carapaces and dead males on the lawn.

The seventeen-year cicada is one more mystery to ask God about when we reach the hereafter in addition to (1) the story of the Flood: it was metaphorical, right? (2) How could a just God torture Job, a righteous man, for no reason except to test his faith? (3) What is the purpose of all these dead insects? Except in heaven, there is only rejoicing, no Q&A. You only get to meet God if you already believe in Him and have the answers — so you never get the chance to ask; it’s all done by faith. Okay? Got that?

So on Saturday night, I flew to New York City, which is pretty much exempt from cicadas because the ground is mostly paved and cicadas don’t have access to jackhammers. It was a stressful trip from Minneapolis: the cab was late, I arrived at the airport late for check-in, had to hustle, and I was delayed at Security by three TSA agents who inquired separately if I am over 75 and therefore don’t need to remove my shoes. I accepted the stress in good grace because, compared to the male cicada who, after seventeen years underground, has one sexual experience, dies, and never gets to see his progeny, my life is a fairy tale.

The cicadas are out for survival of their species — survival is victory. Father David touched on this in his homily on Sunday and quoted the verse in 2nd Corinthians: We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. “Struck down but not destroyed” describes cicada existence pretty well. As for being “persecuted,” we Episcopalians have it pretty easy. Flocks of cicadas are carried by the wind over Manhattan and a few land in Central Park and some in flower pots on terraces and our persecution, believe me, is minimal.

Then I went forward for Communion and saw slight movement on Father David’s vestment sleeve as he held out the wafer to me and said, “The body of our Lord,” and I saw an insect on his extended thumb, perhaps a dying male, and he said, “Hang on,” which he’s never said before during Communion and I flicked the cicada away. “Thank you,” he said. “And also to you,” I said.

At my age, I no longer worry about Noah and the Ark and all those folks knocking on the door begging to be let in. I haven’t read Job in years. The city is noisy, the numerosity is staggering, crazy people yell at you, I don’t belong here but then neither do most of the others. And there have been times on the uptown C train, packed into a car with people on all sides standing within inches of each other and still not touching, avoiding eye contact, when I’ve thought, “We are all one in God and He loves us dearly,” and known it is true. It’s hard to explain this to Midwesterners. You have to be there.

The post The impending crisis of exploding cicada data appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Chapter 47: the joys of aging

“Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward,” said Kierkegaard, who only lived to be 42, died of TB, too young to enjoy the blessing of old age as I do. The longer you live, the more you understand how ignorant we were and by the time we know better, it’s too late, so we let young people run the world and in our remaining years, all we need do is enjoy them. The economy is their problem.

This dawned on me Tuesday at the ophthalmologist’s, sitting with his giant ophthalmoscope up to my face, my eyes dilated, looking at his left ear as instructed, as he told me that my macular degeneration is, though hardly immaculate, not as degenerate as it was a year ago. The certificates on his wall are a blur, I can’t see if he’s an ophthalmologist or an opera singer or a member of the Optimists, but I take his word on faith and go forth in hope out onto 65th Street, which is like a beautiful impressionistic cityscape, like Renoir but with a “Don’t Walk” sign you should notice.

In college, I tried to be cynical; I liked Ambrose Bierce who said, “Democracy is four wolves and a lamb sitting down to discuss what they’d like to have for lunch.” Bierce was not an idealist, having fought in the Civil War and seen brutality up close. I had no reason to be bitter, walking around on a pleasant campus in my black turtleneck, smoking Gauloises, and this was the longhair Sixties, and so I switched over to the sentimental Democrat I am today, my politics is basically “Bridge Over Troubled Water” — “When you’re down and out, I’m on your side” — there’s less actual ideology than in most Hallmark cards — and I’m not proud of this but I admit it: I am fond of Enya and when I hear her singing “I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls” or “When love is lord of heaven and earth, how can I keep from singing?” my soul is reunited with my angelic aunts, Marian, Margaret, Ruby, Jean, who shone upon my childhood. The uncles were cranky; the aunts were sweethearts.

I am a tribal creature, bonded to people from my hometown in Minnesota, who grew up near me on the Mississippi, people I played softball with, and my fellow evangelicals — when I hear someone use the word “beseech” or “vouchsafe” or “propitiation” I know I’m in the company of people who know the same hymns I do and I want to throw my arms around them but don’t because we were brought up to avoid physical contact lest it lead to sexual intercourse. I feel a bond with people my age, 78.

But I resist bonding with fellow liberals because it gets to feeling too comfy, sitting and murmuring in unison about Mitch McConnell and how devious and evil he is, so I say, quietly, “The real problem is that he’s smarter than the others. There is an art to obstruction and he is an artist.” So they start unloading on Trump and I listen and then I put my oar in: “ Donald Trump is an original, nobody like him before or since. All the others, either party, are variants of a type, but Trump came along, boasting, wearing his contempt proudly, and enough people loved him for that to elect him. Other presidents took the job very seriously but he was more like a sultan or an emir. And here he is, the most admired man in America. Democrats approve of Biden; Republicans adore Trump. No comparison.”

This statement lets some air into the conversation. You sit around on a terrace with your fellow liberals and the conversation turns choral and my job is to soloize, offer dissent in a minor key. In the company of young progressives who see me as a person of privilege because we once had an interior decorator, I like to tell about my days at Providence College where I rode on the equestrian team and met Ophelia Brocklethorpe of the investment Brocklethorpes and thereby became a partner at 21and retired at 32 to hunt wildlife in Botswana. Fiction is my field, and macular degeneracy is an asset in storytelling, removing me from nitpicking detail, giving me the broader picture, tearing across the veldt in a Jeep, Mauser in hand, chasing the wildebeest, and afterward, Hem and I, being served dinner. There is nothing like wildebeest steak, medium rare, with a 1955 Pinot Noir. Nothing.

The post Chapter 47: the joys of aging appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Thoughts while ambling around Minneapolis

May is a beautiful month with a hopeful sound to it (I may write a novel, I may take tango lessons, I may buy a schooner and sail the Atlantic, I may survive the journey), but here in Minnesota, snowfall is still a slim possibility, and I can imagine going out for a walk one morning and with my glasses fogged up from my mask, I hit a patch of ice and slip and fall, twisting, waving my arms and a vertebra slips loose and I land on my left hip, hear something crack, lie with my leg bent funny, thinking about getting up but not yet, and I’m not angry, I don’t call on God to damn anything, but I know I have entered a world of pain and an endless odyssey from Mayo to Sloan Kettering to Cleveland Chiropractic to Chicago Shiatsu to Sister Faith Atkins at Holiness Baptist in Luttrell, Tennessee, and wind up in a mindfulness class in Tallahassee where a woman named Maple leads us in deep breathing exercises and shows us how to exhale all our stress and anxiety. A sudden fall can do that to a person. You feel invigorated by fresh air and you take long strides and look up at the greening of the maples and in one horrible minute your life changes to a quest for relief of lower back pain.

I am a cheerful man but I know that life-changing disaster is ever a possibility and so when I arrive safely at home and I have not been attacked by a herd of pigeons demented from having eaten garlicky croutons pigeons are allergic to, I feel grateful. And thus I go around in a mood of gratitude all the day long.

But sometimes I think of my ancestors who were run out of Rhode Island in the 18th century. They were good conservative people but 1774 was the wrong time to take a public stand for law & order and rebellious colonists drove them away at gunpoint and stole their homes and property. My Crandall ancestors should have been preeminent figures far before those petit bourgeois Rockefellers and the immigrant Kennedys. While the rest of you are shooting off rockets, the Fourth of July is a painful memory for some of us. I look at those elegant mansions of Newport and think, “This should’ve been mine.”

On the other hand, if the Crandalls hadn’t been driven north to Canada with only whatever household goods they could carry with them, they never would’ve married the impoverished Keillors newly arrived from Yorkshire, and then where would I be? And if my conservative ancestors had triumphed over Washington and Jefferson and the radical democrats and held onto their fortunes, how well would I deal with being a multibillionaire today, owner of eight or ten homes, the private jet, the hired pals, the pharmacologist available 24 hours a day? Not well, I venture to say.

And then I think about my luxurious childhood, the half-acre of garden, half of it in sweet corn, the summer evenings when I was sent to pick corn for supper, the water already boiling on the stove, and I husked as I walked to the house, the ears went in the pot, and we sat down to feast on corn twenty minutes removed from the stalk. Eating fresh sweet corn was a delight not readily available to billionaires in penthouses high above Manhattan. It strengthened your faith in a loving God.

I know three people who, though they live in the city, still maintain a backyard garden plot and fight against wily squirrels and raccoons who have infested city neighborhoods thanks to leash laws that prohibit free-range dogs. Our dog ran free back in my childhood and squirrels stayed up in the trees and we harvested corn and strawberries with no squirrel bite marks in them. The leash laws were passed by liberal nannies who have an urge to restrain and restrict whenever possible, and so my gardener friends find their tomatoes and strawberries nibbled at by rodents, their delight is dampened, the republic sinks into despair.

Someday liberals will require persons over 50 to wear shoes with steel cleats between November and May in order to prevent falls of the sort I dread, and that’s the day I take up skating again and eating steak tartare, and join a smoking society and get together in an abandoned mineshaft and smoke Luckies and drink straight gin and sing ribald songs. If we’re going to be free, why go halfway?

The post Thoughts while ambling around Minneapolis appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Sad story: lonely sleepless man thinks dark thoughts

For years I have put myself to sleep at night by standing at the rail of the Queen Mary 2 as she slips across New York Harbor past Miss Liberty and inches under the Verrazano Bridge and out to sea toward England. We sailed on the Queen Mary 2 to celebrate my 70th birthday years ago and my wife was wary of the extravagance but it has more than paid for itself by giving me thousands of nights of sleep. My sweetie lies in bed worrying about COVID variants and about all of her loved ones in turn and I stand at the rail with a glass of champagne but there you have it: life is unfair.

We have led a penurious life during the pandemic. “There is no point in wasting money,” she keeps telling me. So our refrigerator is full of tiny plastic bowls holding small portions of leftovers such as would sustain a Chihuahua and she has accused me of wasting laundry soap and I have to hide the books I buy: she only reads e-books she borrows from the library. She sleeps with two windows open so it’s cold when I wake up and I crank up the thermostat and she turns it back down. I ask if the stock market crashed during the night. No, she says, but you can put on a sweater if you’re cold. She says I use too much coffee. We are liberals so the coffee is a locally ground free-trade organic coffee, not made by child slave labor, so I don’t feel bad about generous portions, but I follow her instructions.

Last week she flew to Connecticut to visit family and I went to the store and bought half-and-half for my coffee and a New York strip steak for breakfast. I turned up the heat and closed the windows. I made the coffee strong. A man needs what he needs.

I was awakened at 2 a.m. by the roar of big dragster engines revving on I-94 nearby, drivers who love the bottleneck tunnel for the sheer reverberation. It sounds like a B-52 landing on the lawn. Pure adolescence of the Nobody-can-tell-me-what-to-do approach to life. There’s a lot of it around these days. Four hundred adolescents are likely to pay a price for storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, encouraged by members of Congress who then fled from the mob. It was all about noisemaking.

I tried to imagine myself aboard the Queen Mary 2 but it was gone to sea and I was wide awake. The apartment was still. I turned on the bedside lamp. My sweetie, who handles all the anxiety for the both of us, leaving me free to write a comic novel, an adolescent enterprise if the truth be told, was gone. I thought about Connecticut, I thought about Lyme disease.

I tried reading Henry James who’s put me to sleep many times over the years. No luck. I turned on the radio, a call-in festival of people in agreement that the U.S. government had covered up the landing of aliens in New Mexico in 1947 — alien beings who have spread a virus that causes people to think collectively instead of individually, and the COVID vaccine is actually boosting that virus.

I went to the kitchen and put the coffee on. I looked out the window and saw other lighted windows nearby. The insomniac brigade, sentries of the sleeping world, thinking our 4 a.m. thoughts. I opened up the Times and read that Verizon is selling AOL to an equity firm and I remembered the love letters I wrote to my sweetie on AOL. We were both traveling back then, she with an orchestra in Asia, I with a radio show in the Midwest, and our love was urgent since I was fifty at the time. She wrote me about a steep hike to a Buddhist temple in Burma, the strange tourists, the wild monkeys in the trees, her exhilaration at being alone in a foreign land, and I wrote: “When your happiness makes me happy, even at a distance, independent of me, that means I’m the right man for you.” A profound thought and I turned off the coffee, opened two windows, crawled into bed in the chill, and the Queen was on course on the open Atlantic, not far from where the Titanic had gone down but there wasn’t an iceberg in sight and I am still here to tell the story.

The post Sad story: lonely sleepless man thinks dark thoughts appeared first on Garrison Keillor.