Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 54

The News from Manhattan: Sunday, August 2, 2020

I miss worship service at ten
And wonder when will we again
Gather in pews
And put on the shoes
Of the gospel of peace
And our wisdom increase,
May it be soon, Lord, Amen.



One day runs into another, one project after another but not much progress is felt, a book is opened and soon shut, and the future remains as murky as ever, but I’m a lucky man with work in mind, a terrace to step out on, a happy daughter at summer camp, a grandson canoeing on the Boundary Waters being careful not to cross into Canada, and my lively and loving wife returning today from the seashore. A screenplay awaits, about the Fourth of July in Lake Wobegon. I hope to go scout some towns this fall.

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The News from Manhattan: Thursday, July 30, 2020

A song that I loved long ago
Came back to me yesterday so
I sang loud and clear
To my darling and dear
And now it is here and won’t go.



I was so happy to have her back, I remembered the old Jim Reeves song and leaned down and sang it to her:



Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone
And let’s pretend that we’re together, all alone.
I’ll tell the man to turn the jukebox way down low
And you can tell your friend there with you he’ll have to go.



She was not moved the way I wished she were,
She simply sat and read the Times.
She never hung around in the old Mixers bar
And stuffed the jukebox with her dimes.



And now “He’ll Have To Go” keeps going around and around in my head. I have a memoir to work on today, I have a screenplay to finish, I need my mind to focus on the work while I still have a mind, before they send me off to the Home. Wait til you’re 77 and you’re walking a tightrope of pharmacology. When my friend Chet was this age, he sat forlorn, an overcoat over his shoulders, a guitar on his lap that he could no longer play. I sang a song to my dear wife last night and now it’s echoing in the canyons of the cerebellum. I need to know more people in their 80s and 90s to serve as my scouts up the trail. I’ve got George, 85, and he’s good, but I’m looking for more. My cousin Olive Darden died at 102 and I miss her, a cheery old lady. Hadassah is 100 but quite deaf, I hear. I need to get to work on this. Meanwhile, tell the man who’s there with you to beat it.

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The News from Manhattan: Wednesday, July 29, 2020

I’m a lonesome old radio host
Whose wife just returned from the coast
To be my companion
In a Manhattan canyon
And bring conversation
And a sense of sensation
Which I’ve been needing the most.



It was only for two days and I got some things done in that great emptiness, such as start a murder mystery and sign a bunch of books, but her absence was felt keenly and it was a large moment when she walked in the door. A blessing of the pandemic. After two days of silence in an apartment, the return of the lover is triumphant, bands play, she rides in on an elephant accompanied by men waving scimitars. So now I wonder if we shouldn’t incorporate periods of monasticism into our lives when “normal” life resumes. Go sit on a mountaintop for a few weeks. Or, in Minnesota, sit by a river. In the late 70s I lived in a house by a creek that went over a waterfall by the bedroom window and I remember that my sleep was deeper in those years, helped by the low rumble of moving water. We come to accept a high level of confusion and racket as normal and this lockdown is a break from it. But I’m afraid it’s the racket I miss. I wish I were about to get on a bus for a 27-city tour doing shows with the band. A bunk on a bus rolling down the road toward Denver or Seattle, that’s what I miss.

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One man’s pandemic is another man’s picnic

I love reading columns that snap and crackle and poke powerful people in the kisser and I am bored by columns like this one, which is about the goodness and generosity of life, but what can I say? When you’re busy doing things you love and you skip the news for a while, life can be beautiful. My love and I have been absorbed in the lives of the mockingbird family in our backyard, the parents ratcheting at us when we set foot out back, the little beaks upraised, the relays of food, the first hesitant hops from the nest, the high anxiety, the chirps of the teenagers, and then one morning, nobody’s home. Gone. No word since.

Instead of studying Joe Biden’s 13-point lead in national polls, we were absorbed in the lives of birds. We’ve never run for public office, but we have been parents and we have empathy for them, even birds. It’s odd to me, at 77, to see two men my age running for the White House. I remember the excitement when Kennedy, 43, succeeded Eisenhower, 70. We needed that this year and it didn’t happen.

But thanks to the recumbent, the man in the large golf pants, we live in the Golden Age of delicious vicious columnry, the best of them being conservatives such as Jennifer Rubin and George Will whose outrage rises to great literary heights whereas old liberals like me sit and play “Honolulu Baby” on the ukulele and toss in a little tap dance. For Mr. Will, Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party is like Mother poisoning Dad and marrying a Mafia hitman. I turn to Mr. Will in the Washington Post and feast on lines like “this weak person’s idea of a strong person, this chest-pounding advertisement of his own gnawing insecurities, this low-rent Lear raging on his Twitter-heath has proven that the phrase malignant buffoon is not an oxymoron.”

It’s a great line and I have nothing to add to it. Mr. Will is a lifelong Republican conservative and he knows in his heart that the recumbent is no more a Republican than Nancy Pelosi is a pole-vaulter and the recumbent is no more a believing Christian than he is the Dalai Lama-rama-ding-dong. It is an insane moment in the history of the Republic and it drives Mr. Will wild, but to me, it’s just a TV show and I turn it off and go sit on the shady terrace and feast on these giant blueberries grown in Peru and feel content. I toss a few of them toward the mockingbirds’ nest, hoping to lure them back, but no such luck.

I am almost 78 and America’s problems are my grandchildren’s problems, not mine, and I have been married for 25 years to a woman who thrills me and to avoid the plague we’ve spent four months in close proximity and it’s been good. I am capable of bitter sarcasm — I had a column all set to go about the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, N.H., dropping the word “colony” from its name because it suggested exclusivity and hierarchy. But I don’t care about artists’ colonies, have no interest in spending time in one, am grateful to be excluded. The higher the ark the better; I don’t want to get on board. The street carnival in Portland is not my concern, except to hope that nobody gets hurt. The Bullying that is going on over Capitalization of certain words is — how shall I say it? — Remarkable. As for racism, there is no room for it in the Christian faith where it continues to thrive.

I come from a generation that spent 57,000 American lives in a war that had no point then and has no defenders now and American cruise ships now dock at Hue and Da Nang and Saigon and folks from Omaha and Seattle eat in sidewalk cafes whose owners may have been among the guerillas who defeated us and who cares?

Madame and I have our own colony, and beyond that, each of us has a circle of pals, which the pandemic lockdown makes all the more enjoyable. Theaters are dark and concert halls, but the telephone still works and now that people are sticking close to home, the phone calls get longer and more fulfilling and launch into stories, and we don’t bother talking politics, we talk family history, which is more interesting. And if asked what we’re up to, we will talk about mockingbirds.

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The News from Manhattan: Sunday, July 26, 2020

Our mockingbird family has flown
And we sit on the terrace alone,
Missing our neighbors,
Their parenting labors,
Who worked without rest
Bringing food to the nest,
To the squawks and squeaks
Of wide open beaks.
We wish them well off on their own
But wish they would write us or phone.



A perfect summer evening with neighbors on the terrace, a little breeze, a few choppers in the sky, the city peaceful under a half moon, light conversation about this and that, nothing about him, talk about daughters, the pediatric psychiatric nurse-practitioner, the mathematician niece expecting a baby, the resumption of baseball, a trip to Maine, music, the difference between Dairy Queen and Mister Freeze, and how much we miss our birds, how whenever we came outdoors the parents took up defensive positions and threatened us. Do a mockingbird couple and their kiddoes stay together when they flee the nest? Might they return? We don’t know. We never fed them, not wanting to make them dependent, but we miss the shrieking and the chittering of the babies. Yes, I know — life must be awfully easy for you guys if you miss a bird family — well, not necessarily, but anyway we do. It’s a dangerous world, hawks and cormorants zooming overhead. And God’s eye is on the sparrow and we know He watches us.

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The News from Manhattan: Saturday, July 25, 2020

I sat last night at the box
Watching the Twins play the Sox,
No fans, just the men,
Life seems normal again,
Rational and orthodox.



A big event, our first venture out to eat since the plague descended, and on a beautiful Friday night, there were waiting lines everywhere, the Italian place around the corner, and all along Amsterdam in the 80s, and finally we found a vegan place, around 82nd. Good enough food but loud hip-hop music, the sort that makes us feel berserk, no melody, just repetition like a broken record or an alarm clock, and service was slow, so it was torture. But back at the apartment, Jenny got me hooked up to the Twins opener and I sat and watched, mesmerized. So good to have baseball back. I liked it without fans, all the focus on the game, no closeups of couples kissing. My hero Max Kepler, a slight fellow who appears to be about 14, hit two home runs and the Twins pounded the Sox, 10-5. The Twins fabulous CF Byron Buxton is expected back soon after a foot injury. So there is hope. Rosario looked good, Cruz, Arraez is a great bad-pitch hitter, but what looked fabulous was the diamond itself, grass, bases, infield dirt, fences. It’s been a long wait.

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The News from Manhattan: Thursday, July 23, 2020

An old man wrote his memoir
About how tasty things are,
Orange marmalade,
Bands on parade,
Hot dogs, a Cuban cigar,
The smell of his dear,
Her lips in his ear,
Offering him beer in a jar,
The July atmosphere,
The stars bright and clear,
Driving at night in his car,
Listening to 12-string guitar,
Now 78,
The night’s getting late,
He’s thinking: so good, and so far.



All my life I’ve had two or three things going at one time and I hope this never ends, though of course it will. Finished with the novel, working on the memoir, got a screenplay going, and now I’m thinking ahead to winter, remembering how good La Jolla was back in January. Got a little video of Heather’s little girl, standing on the ocean shore jumping up and down for pleasure at seeing the waves roll in. I sang duets with Heather when this girl was in utero and now she is saying words and soon sentences. I should write a book for her to read when she’s ready. I want to do standup again. I want to do a Prairie Home reunion. Another Lake Wobegon novel. Jenny is anxious to get back to playing in the viola section of the orchestra. The future awaits. Just have to get past November.

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The News from Manhattan: Wednesday, July 22, 2020

An old man felt glad in July
And couldn’t quite figure out why
In the midst of pandemic,
Depression, systemic
Racism, heat,
No cabs on the street,
Fools on the march,
Conmen in charge,
Though one ought to lie down and cry,
He felt happy, this pitiful guy,
Even slightly ecstatic, no lie.
You may not believe me, but try.



I’ve spent the past few days in a recording studio, reading my new novel, and one thing that makes me happy is the enormous competence of the engineer Cathleen. She listens to me read, following on her copy of the text, and she allows me to improvise a little, as an author can, running sentences together, tossing in an extra word here and there, making speech attributions clearer, but she catches my mistakes and stops me. This requires close attention. And at the same time, she tosses in a “Good job” and once in awhile a “Marvelous.” Your typical 23-year-old male recording engineer would never do that. Too uncool. Way too uncool. And he likely wouldn’t dare say, “I think it would help to blow your nose” but Cathleen is the mother of three and it comes naturally to her. I expected to suffer in the studio and instead it’s been great fun. I could go on. I’ve worked with a hundred studio engineers in my long checkered history and I know a good one and it is a GREAT JOY to come across ENORMOUS COMPETENCE. The doormen at our building, Uber drivers, my cardiologist back in Minnesota, the dental hygienists at Boger Dental, the butchers at Zabars, it never fails to cheer me up.

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The birds are worried and I feel just fine

Thirty-eight percent of Americans surveyed believe the Prez is doing a good job with the pandemic, which is good news for folks offering Florida timeshares for August and telemarketers who’ll turn your songs into No. 1 hits if you give them your credit card number. Thirty-eight percent approval means that there is a big market for agates as an investment.

It’s a dangerous world out there, don’t kid yourself. I feel for the mockingbird parents on our terrace who screech at us, warning us not to grab their fledglings. We can see them in the nest, beaks wide open, squeaking for food, just like our own daughter years ago. The parents are in high anxiety. My wife and I are liberals, we eat beef and pork, have no interest whatsoever in eating mockingbird — and I feel their pain.

Violence is part of life. Every day you get dinner or you are dinner. Fish are beautiful, like fashion models parading back and forth, and then a killer dashes in and eats one: that is a fish’s way of life. The mouse is in the cornfield, shopping for his family, and he hears a rush of wings and feels sharp back pain and suddenly he is very high in the air. Our football teams are named for killers, lions, wolverines, eagles, gators. Only two for religious figures (saints, cardinals) and one for temp workers (gophers). Will the Washington NFL team now change its name to the Sergeants and the Minnesota Vikings become the Viruses? Go to Oslo and you’ll see that the Norwegians are not the marauding warriors they were back in the ninth century when they raided and pillaged widely. They’re more into tillage now.

We liberals tried to create a safe world for our fledglings. I grew up before there were seat belts so I rode standing up in the front seat as my dad drove 75 mph across North Dakota, but my children rode in podlike car seats belted in like test pilots. They rode tricycles, wearing helmets. We banned smoking. There were warnings on everything, like kitchen knives (“Sharp: may cut skin if pressure is applied.”) and ovens (“Do not insert head when gas is on.”).

No wonder we are kerfluxxed, reading about a man with no conscience, no empathy, no principles, not a shred of honesty, who presides with great indifference over a plague. As any New Yorker can tell you, the problem with the Trumps is that the 90% who are corrupt give the others a bad name. In Manhattan, where he spent his adult life, he got 10% of the vote. And now 38% of our fellow Americans think he’s doing okay when the disaster is out in the open for all to see. The body count is staggering. Vietnam does well, Japan, Italy, but America is a pitiful giant.

I’m locked up and don’t worry about catching the virus but at 78, I’m aware of mortality and can imagine going to the doctor and finding out I have a rare case of desiccated angiofibrosis of the fantods, four months to live, maybe six. I’d thank him and stop at the drugstore for a carton of Luckies and come home and get out the gin bottle.

I’d have a martini on the terrace, my first drink in eighteen years, and toss the lemon twist away and the mockingbirds would pick it up and immediately they’d calm down. With the screeching stopped, the fledglings would fly. My neighbors would smell the gin and knock on my door. I’d get out the shaker and martini glasses, and we’d have a party. They’re all liberals; they’ve lived on a fixed schedule of their children’s social, educational, recreational, and therapeutic engagements, and the gin would make us good and silly and we’d say things that don’t appear on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times. Things like “That which has been is that which shall be, there is nothing new under the sun” — these are Roman times, Nero is in power and he won’t relinquish it so long as the generals are loyal. He is half naked, and 38% of our people like him in just his underwear. Let the fledgling millennials talk about justice and equality, let the old man enjoy his gin and vermouth. These desiccated fantods are not going away. Nero is your problem, not mine. Hand me down another bag of pork rinds, darling, and I’ll put a porterhouse on the grill.

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The News from Manhattan: Saturday, July 18, 2020

My particular Friday delight
Was a call from my friend Annie Wright
Up in Rhinebeck,
Who has a full deck
At age ninety-one
Which I, just for fun,
Someday hope to be,
Here she’s talking to me,
About poetry, so clear and bright.



The other big event was a return to revising the memoir, after a week off, and reading the editor’s notes, which begin with “I enjoyed reading this” and cites a number of virtues, “funny,” “moving,” etc. and then gets into a scientific dissection of its problems. A moment of truth. And the third was supper on the terrace, under the anxious eyes of the mockingbird parents whose two fledglings are poking their open beaks up out of the nest. The parents kept an eye on us and made raspy sounds to warn us not to come close. Instead, we looked up mockingbirds in Wikipedia and learned that they will sometimes call in neighboring mockingbirds to help them defend the nest, so we imagined a flock descending from the clouds. We also read that when there are two offspring, sometimes one will eat the other. Siblicide. Surely it can’t be true.



And now this morning I go off to record the audiobook of my novel, another moment of truth. I liked the novel fairly well when I finished it a couple weeks ago but now? Reading it aloud? There will be moments of doubt and one simply has to plod ahead and ignore them. I’ve never gone back and read my own writing for pleasure. In case you were wondering, the answer is no. Definitely not.

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