Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 51

A late dispatch from the New York correspondent

A chilly night in New York, fall in the air, geese winging along a flyway over West 91st, a lively crowd watching a playground basketball game. Unusual in these pandemic days, to hear a cheering crowd. We’ve been isolating here since March, avoiding the dread virus, leading a life more like that of a lighthouse keeper than a New Yorker, no plays, no Fauré or Bizet or cabaret, though Sunday we sat in a sidewalk café and had a cassoulet, a small soirée, just three of us, me and the Missus and our friend Suzanne whom I like to hang out with because she’s older than I and very lively. She is proof that aging, though likely to be fatal, need not be dull. Gusts of talk, none of it touching on the Unmentionable.

I’m fond of fall, the beauty and brevity of it. Soon the iron gates will clank shut and we descend into the dark trenches of winter. A person always imagines there will be more warm evenings and suppers outdoors, but fall teaches otherwise. And that is what makes life beautiful, the knowledge of approaching November. Last week the world was drenched with the beauty Van Gogh was crazy for and that is why we send our kids off to school, so they don’t become obsessed with beauty and goldenness and can pay attention to algorithms and multiplicity and divisiveness. I was a mediocre student, but every fall I appeared in the classroom door, struggled through college and humanities courses of which I remember nothing at all — I should’ve studied auto mechanics — and then when I was 27, I was hired by a radio station to work the 6 a.m. shift and the same fall, a magazine bought a story of mine for $500. My monthly rent was $80. I was off to the races.

We want what we cannot have. The heart wants life to go on and on. So the old writer goes on writing stories, still hopeful, though there’s plenty of evidence that you hit your peak at forty. You sit doing something you’ve done steadily since childhood and it’s still of keen interest. And Sunday night I dreamed about writing. I’d written a book about the Soviet Union and was invited to talk about it up in the Berkshires and drove on winding roads through little hill towns to a house where I walked up a strange steep staircase with tiny steps to the attic where a dozen people sat around a table to hear my talk. I joked about who should leave first if there were a fire and nobody laughed. They were all communists and took sharp issue with my book and shouted at me in Russian, which I understood but could not speak. The quiet domestic pandemic life has been bringing me a wild dream life.

We bought a new TV in August to liven up our days and somehow cannot figure out how to tune in news programs — which platforms are they on — so we don’t watch them, which is a relief. I’m tired of hearing the name in the news, don’t care to hear words that rhyme with it such as “dump,” “hump,” “lump,” “chump,” “rump,” “slump,” look at the news online and avert my eyes from the smug New York playboy face with the fruitcake hair. It’s time for the election now though it’s September. The election should’ve been held a year ago. The man is a bad dream. I’m an American, I love hamburgers, country music, baseball, small towns on the prairie, the American September, Levi jeans, the poetry of Jim Harrison and Maxine Kumin, and this guy is a Russian who learned his English at the movies. He isn’t one of us, not even slightly.

Nonetheless, life is good. Our happiness never depended on foreign con men. I’m here because my parents loved each other and even though Hitler had overrun much of Europe and was bombing England and people could see what was coming, nonetheless those two nestled in each other’s arms and took their pleasure and I appeared in 1942, on the day of the American assault on Guadalcanal. We got through the Forties and we’ll get through the Twenties. Water is coming out of the tap, the mail is left at the doorstep, the buses are running, and the grocery store is open, we’re in business. The election approaches. Let’s get it done.

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The News from Manhattan: Saturday, September 12, 2020

Our girl left for school this morning. I miss her. I woke her up at 7 this morning, singing “What A Wonderful World,” with the line “I hear babies cry, I watch them grow, they’ll learn much more than I’ll ever know.” She came in to breakfast, sat down, said, “Make me laugh.” And I said something that made her laugh when she was six, I said, “How do bears pick their noses?” And she laughed, though she’s 22. I said, “Are bear boogers brown and do they eat them for breakfast?” She is the only person in the world I could ever say this to, to everyone else I am a dignified elderly author. It’s slightly disconcerting to the old man that she seems eager to go, I can hear excited conversations from her room. We won’t see her until late November. We had supper on the terrace and afterward she threw a pitcher of water at me and I threw one at her, a tradition that goes way back and still makes her laugh hard, and then a last game of Uno and tomorrow she’s gone and we face weeks of domestic quiet. As we used to sing in the Hopeful Quartet, “I’m lonesome for my precious children. They live so far away. O may they hear my calling, calling, and come back home some day.”

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The News from Manhattan: Friday, September 11, 2020

Thinking about San Francisco today and that beautiful drive up Highway One across the Golden Gate Bridge and through the tunnel with the rainbow painted over it to the Stinson Beach exit and a narrow two-lane asphalt road that goes through a series of tight U-turns with trees overhead and you’re going 20 mph transfixed by the clouds touching the mountain, the eagles soaring overhead, and also the absence of guardrails. You swing around a curve and it’s straight down a thousand feet. You pull off into the Muir Woods to look at the redwoods, fog drifting through and beams of sunlight filtering down, ferns and green moss and a damp chill in the air, mud on the ground. Down at the beach, the sea washes in on the shore and a girl rides a horse, an Appaloosa, along the tide line, a man throws tennis balls to his dog. All the times I went to the city to do shows at the Herbst or the Masonic Temple or the Sydney Goldstein Auditorium, I always made that drive and spent a few hours at the beach. The picture of the orange sky in today’s Times is a horror. There have always been forest fires but this is exacerbated by global warming and I feel we’re looking at the future and the country is in desperate need of leaders who acknowledge scientific reality. Meanwhile, dare we imagine that the President has said and done nothing about the fires because he knows California, Oregon, and Washington will not vote for him?

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The News from Manhattan: Thursday, September 10, 2020

I spoke with the humorist Calvin Trillin tonight who was enjoying his nightly whiskey. He said the Village is like Paris with all the outdoor dining, but no tourists. He said he’d once heard that if you make babies with your shoes off, the babies are more likely to be girls, and that it had worked in his case. And he recalled a gym teacher in Kansas City who said, “Standing on your head is nothing complicated. All you do is make a stool.” He said that when shopping around for a book to read, he looks at the jacket copy and if the writer has an MFA or if a blurb uses the word “lyrical,” he doesn’t buy it. He also used the term “alter kocker,” which you don’t hear so often anymore. It cheered me right up, which is what a humorist is supposed to do.

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The News from Manhattan: Tuesday, September 8, 2020

I was in radio for years and now my voice is thin and creaky, all the baritone notes are gone from disuse, and my dread of the virus has made me a homebody so my social skills have atrophied, but for the first time in fifty years I am entirely a writer, day and night, and that is wonderful, to live in your head, to rise in the morning with ideas, to sit and jigger with paragraphs, to cut and cut and trim and shape. Having an inner life is how we can survive if the world falls apart in November. It’s how people have endured and thrived living under authoritarian regimes even worse than the one the guy has in mind. If a populist regime of billionaires is in the cards, it’s time to become bird-watchers and hikers and readers of classics and take care of our friends and children and ignore the ignorance and cruelty afar.

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Some great music is played on old fiddles

It’s great to see an old, old magazine in headline news for something other than its obit and bravo to The Atlantic and Jeffrey Goldberg for the “losers” and “suckers” story on Trump and his contempt for military service or anything else nonprofitable. It’s been hot news for several days, it got Joe Biden highly impassioned and powerfully articulate, and if any of Trump’s entourage who heard him say what he said would step up and tell the truth, we could get this election over with in a hurry and get on with our lives.

As an old man, I’m pleased by the success of old institutions. The New York Times and the Washington Post have never been so day-to-day excellent as they’ve been in covering the Twitter presidency. The big story isn’t about actions he’s taken or not, it’s about his flagrant contempt for the office, the law, science, knowledge of all sorts, American history and tradition, his laziness and short attention span, his small world of wealthy advisors, his weird sycophants, his whole reality show, a phenomenon never before seen in our time, government by social media based on something he heard on Fox. Journalists at the big papers were trained to take government seriously, and how do they cover a president who doesn’t give a rip?

One old institution that’s been flummoxed by Trump is public radio, the industry where I spent forty happy years creating fiction. At news, which is its primary business, public radio has been lost in the wilderness. Its big marquee shows, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, have never laid a hand on Trump so he’s never bothered to insult them. Part of their problem is gentility: a deep fear of vulgarity, which rules public radio from the top down. Back where I’m from, Minnesota, public radio assiduously avoids the darkness in favor of covering the arts, education, civic uplift, small children, pets, colorful hobbies. It doesn’t try to cover business — much too complicated — or sports, though it loves meteorology: every snowfall is thoroughly examined. The real journalism is practiced by citizens with cellphones who upload video of the forest fires dancing around the houses in the California hills, who caught the cop with his knee on George Floyd’s neck in south Minneapolis back in May. Public radio is capable of inviting a sociologist and a social psychologist to discuss the history of racism for forty-five minutes, but it’s the video by passersby that unleashed a powerful popular agitation for social change.

Radio was Rush’s medium, it lent itself to incantatory hallucinations about the Apocalypse, and he opened the doors to a parade of wild wackos, one of whom is about to be elected to the U.S. Senate from Minnesota. I did a different style of radio, a goulash of old jazz and antique oddities, wishing people a happy birthday, offering joke contests, taking phone calls from the irate. Rush’s style thrives, my sort of show is deader than downtown Detroit. We’ve moved into Podcastville and the production of small clever idiosyncratic audio that gives the listener the sensation of belonging to an exclusive club. Live radio shows are dead because they’re available to everyone. You want to subscribe to “What’s In, What’s Up,” where you can feel united with your tribe of superior intellects.

This is Trump’s bond with his believers. They adhere to him no matter what because all the people they loathe also loathe him. Foreigners, city people, English majors, Times readers, the latte crowd. Loathing is not a prime Christian value but it binds his evangelical base to him even though the man is a stranger to the Word and has never knelt in church except at his three weddings. I feel bad for my evangelical friends; they know what they’re doing, they’ve made a deal with the dark side and so far haven’t seen any benefits, except for the pleasure of making Anglicans and Methodists writhe in misery.

This is why I’m proud of The Atlantic, which now, having recently subscribed to, I can report is a great read. I’m an old man, I don’t have time to waste reading or listening to crap. The Atlantic has been around since Ralph Waldo Emerson’s day and he would be proud of its renaissance. Emerson said, “There is a tendency for things to right themselves.” This November, I hope he’s right.

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The News from Manhattan: Wednesday, September 2, 2020

So you get in a cab and go to see an otolaryngologist over on the East Side, sent by your doctor who’s worried about a certain gagging tendency you report , and on the way across town you think about throat cancer of course, remembering your twenty years as a two-pack a day man back when literary guys needed to smoke as a sign of intensity, and you anticipate the surgical removal of your larynx, loss of speech, having to walk around writing notes to people, a diagnosis of six months to live, perhaps eight or nine, and you sit in the chair and the doctor is extremely competent, which is evident immediately, and she explains the procedure and runs a thin tube up your nose and down your throat which is not exactly painful but irritating in a ticklish way especially when she has you sing a high EEEEEE and then some low notes and vocal swoops, and she withdraws the tube and says, “It looks just fine. Some phlegm. No tumor or swelling or anything to worry about.” I sit there, speechless, grateful to be in the hands of competence, and I write her a limerick in gratitude.



The doctor looked way down my throat
And told me to sing a high note
So I sang, La La,
And she looked and saw
I had swallowed my quote “pride” unquote
So she gave me a whack
On my lower back
And I’m fine, so I wrote her this note.



This is an excellent day.

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Destroying (not) the American way of life

As a Democrat accused by Republicans of trying to take away people’s hamburgers, I have to speak in my own defense. I am second to none in my fondness for the beef patty in a bun, a thin slice of onion, and mustard. I do not eat hamburger in a croissant; I am not that type of person. Ketchup is for French fries, mustard for burgers. No mayo, please. The Democrat who’s trying to take away hamburgers is my wife but it’s only my hamburger she’s after, not yours. She thinks they’re unhealthy. I enjoy them even more for her opposition.

As for our wanting to destroy the American Way of Life, I wouldn’t know how to go about that since there are so many Ways of Life involved. Love of human variety is part of it: we’re not a race or breed, we’re an amalgam of strangers and the fact that we can make space for each other is remarkable. Walk down the street and you pass people with headphones tuned to Beyoncé, Brahms, a preacher proclaiming the gospel, a Scientologist, Sean Hannity, poetry plain, poetry strange, Gershwin, George Strait, a podcast about strategic planning. Yes, the country is at war on social media, but in everyday life, Americans show each other enormous tolerance. We look, we smile, we move on.

For me, America means the love of spaciousness, driving west from Minnesota over the open prairie, preferably on two-lane roads, looking at farms, farming being the hardest work there is and unpredictable and dangerous. And also walking through Lower Manhattan and sensing the human history around you in the five-story brick buildings, the people who escaped an emperor or kaiser or czar to come here, no English to speak of, in behalf of their children. They believed that in a free society they would be judged by their character and their competence, not by their social connections. They worked terribly hard at whatever work came their way, in order to secure the right to be American. Certainly, the country produced its share of con men and card sharps, windbags, hustlers, but hard work and competence was honored here, more than family dynasties. We don’t bow to the grand pooh-bahs, we put a whoopee cushion on the throne.

When it comes to patriotism, it’s the American way to play it cool and not walk around jingling your medals. My high school biology teacher was a combat pilot in the Korean War, my phy-ed teacher was a Navy lieutenant on a forward observation boat at Normandy on D-Day, and neither of them went around talking about it, for the simple reason that they had survived and friends of theirs had died and self-aggrandizement dishonors the sacrifice of others. I asked the movie director Bob Altman about his wartime experience and he told me he lied about his age to enlist in the Army Air Forces in 1942 and become a B-17 pilot at the age of nineteen and the plane was loud and hard to handle and it was freezing cold at high altitudes. That was all he cared to say. It wasn’t for him to play the hero.

I know people who will likely vote for the man with his arms wrapped around the flag and I don’t try to talk them out of it but the business about hamburgers and destroying the American Way of Life is garbage of a low order and if you buy into it, you’re heading down a lonely road. Unreality is not a good strategy. It’s a beautiful country and we’re meant to enjoy it and to care about one another. I’ve been watching baseball on TV, a great sport for immigrants, and there seem to be more Latino names than ever, more players of color, but it’s the same beautiful game. This past week, I saw two perfect bunts, a rarity, the batter places his bat to tap the 90 mph pitch into the sweet spot in the infield, left or right, to advance the runners and also arrive safely at first. It doesn’t matter who does it, it’s astonishing. If the umpire were to call a bunt foul that clearly was fair, and if the opposing team were willing to accept this blatant lie, that would violate the American Way, and that is exactly what we’re seeing today. And that is a shame.

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The News from Manhattan: Sunday, August 30, 2020

The chill of fall is in the air, doing my stretching exercises out on the terrace, looking out at the Upper West Side. Time to put this lazy month of August behind us and get busy tackling the enormous tasks ahead. First is the common task of calming anger and restoring reason in the beloved country, but there is work to be done that we were put here on earth to do. It takes me back to the West River Road and waiting for the big yellow bus to go to Anoka High School. I had some excellent teachers there who I needed to impress and sixty years later I’m still trying. All except Lyle Bradley who was a great biology teacher but I never could get excited about dissecting a frog. That was a good thing. I might have become a mediocre pediatrician and caused harm to small children. The only children I’ve harmed have been my own. And now I really must get busy on this Lake Wobegon screenplay.

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The News from Manhattan: Thursday, August 27, 2020

I read in the paper that due to the pandemic, therapists are busier than ever, anxiety is up by 40% (how do they measure this?), people are suffering. For me, quarantine has simply been a vacation, a time to reexamine my life. I miss church, I miss going to a ballgame, I miss going out to hear music but most of the music I love, the musicians are dead or retired. I don’t miss restaurants much. Since March, we’ve saved a great deal of money and I like that. I am off Pellegrino. New York City water is just fine. If you want bubbles, stick a straw in it and blow. I’d no sooner pay for Perrier than I’d buy a balloon full of Parisian air. What the pandemic has given me is a quiet productive domestic life and a new appreciation of my wife. We’ve talked more in the past six months than in the previous ten years. Our NY apartment is like a cabin in the woods and this may continue when the pandemic is over. It helps a great deal that I get all my news from my wife. She reads the paper, I don’t, and she says, “You won’t believe this” and she tells me and I think, “So what?” I had an incredible busy life for about thirty years and I’m glad to have this new life brought about by the plague. I enjoy my morning coffee more than ever. I love marriage. This is the test: who would you want to spend the whole day with for an entire week? Don’t marry until you know the answer.

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