Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 56

The News from Manhattan: Wednesday, July 8, 2020

Yesterday, a day historic,
I walked outdoors in New Yoric
The first time since March
In the skyscraper arch-
Ipelago feeling euphoric.



Four months shut up in a 12th floor apartment is bliss for a writer and you get lots of work done but it also leaves you feeling 87 years old, a shambling geezer with poor balance who steps carefully lest he go crashing to the floor, and yesterday my lover the outdoorswoman walked me around Central Park along the path around the reservoir and over to the Great Lawn and back home, wearing masks, keeping our distance, and it was exhilarating. First time outdoors since March 11. Wearing a mask makes my glasses fog up, but what’s a little fog? Kids out playing, young women running, old men doing interesting exercises involving straps, young men shooting hoops, a happy scene, and what’s great is that even after one brisk hike, you can feel the difference, you’re steadier. I will no longer be playing right field but that’s no big loss, I was never that good anyway. Today we repeat the routine. She is a patient trainer, allows rest stops, doesn’t push too hard, and so I feel as if some progress is being made. I finish a novel, I go for a walk, I start on a screenplay. Keep moving. Keep moving. Keep moving. This masked isolated life is going to continue for a good long time, don’t kid yourself — the country is in the hands of a man who is unfit to be a third-grade teacher and we are paying a steep price for his resolute ignorance — but when you get out in the park, it all seems quite pleasant.

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Now and then some statues need replacing

When I heard that the statue of Stonewall Jackson had been pulled down in Richmond, I wondered why it was in Richmond when Stonewall was from North Carolina and made his career in Nashville, then I remembered that in addition to the country singer, there had been a Confederate general.

In fact, the singer had been named for the general, which was no problem in country music in the Fifties. I used to sing a song of his, “Don’t be angry with me, darling, if I fail to understand all your little whims and wishes all the time. Just remember that I’m dumb, I guess, like any foolish man, and my head stays sorta foggy cause you’re mine,” which, in the annals of love poetry, doesn’t rank with “My love is like a red, red rose that’s newly sprung in June” or “Give me my Romeo, and when I shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night” nor even “Be-bop-a-lula, she’s my baby,” but still I sang it, I admit, not considering its Confederate connections.

Not enough people are aggrieved over Thomas (“Stonewall”) Jackson’s statue falling to reelect the president, which he will find out in due course, and my only question is: whom can we replace Jackson with, and Beauregard, Davis, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and the other heroes of the Lost Cause? It’s good to have statues that give old people like me a chance to stop and rest, while out for a walk with a young person, and tell about who that bronze figure on the pedestal is. Nobody in Richmond knew enough about General Jackson to say much about him, and that’s why he and his horse were dismantled. He said, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees,” which, as dying words go, is very elegant. Too bad Lincoln never had the chance to utter dying words, he was watching a fourth-rate comedy and Booth waited for the laugh line, “Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal — you sockdologizing old man-trap” and fired the gun on the laugh and that was Lincoln’s last line.

As replacements for generals that nobody much remembers, I’d propose Little Richard, a fascinating character who swung back and forth from “Good Golly, Miss Molly” to “How Great Thou Art,” from raunch to gospel, and Miss Flannery O’Connor who said, “Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.” She said, “Conviction without experience makes for harshness.” She said, “Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.” Any one of the three would make a terrific inscription on a statue and I say there are enough statues of men on horses, there need to be more statues of slight women in plain dresses wearing glasses and looking intently down at their visitors.

For New Orleans, instead of Beauregard, you’ve got King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton and Fats Domino to choose from. In Richmond, you can put up the satirist Tom Wolfe (“The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That’s not true with nonfiction.” ). Memphis could have Memphis Slim and Willie Dixon and as you approach the statue, you’d step on a steel plate and they’d sing to you, “Nobody loves me, nobody seems to care. Speaking of bad luck, people, you know I’ve had my share.”

The smartest thing General Stonewall Jackson said was, “Always mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy, if possible; and when you strike and overcome him, never let up in the pursuit, for an army routed, if hotly pursued, becomes panic-stricken, and can then be destroyed by half their number.” And that is what Joe Biden should do. The current Confederate president is starting to panic and it’s time to rout him and bring out the Bolton information, the Mary Trump revelations, the Mattis denunciation, the video of Ivanka praising her father from a script as he listens, the Trump tax returns, and let’s get this wide-ride on the run, his hair flying in the wind, chase him down the road with Mr. Pence hanging on to his coattails. Goodbye, Queens, and hello, Delaware.

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The News from Manhattan: Monday, July 6, 2020

I am told it comes down to the heart

And the numbers you see on your chart

And your gene pool

That determine when you’ll

Pack up your bags and depart.

I spoke to an old friend the other day who is 89 and will go see his cardiologist next week but knows there’s not much to be done, his shortness of breath gets worse and worse, and though he still loves life, he doesn’t want to prolong it beyond a certain point that he feels is approaching. “People live too long,” he said. “When it’s time to go, I want to get out. I told my doctor that.” I told him that I have the solution to his problem. I’ve just put the finishing touches on my new novel and I promised to send him a copy. It’s so funny that he won’t be able to live through it. Somewhere midway through he’ll laugh himself to death, a humor-induced coronary. He laughed long and hard at that. He said it was the best laugh he’d had all day. I said, “There’s more where that came from.”

This has given me a whole new perspective on my career. Face it – when you’re 77, you’re not talking to teenagers anymore. You’re dealing with the dementia demographic. I did a show once in Seattle where a man died. It was an outdoor venue, Marymoor, and he was sitting with his wife right in the front row. He was leaning against her, then he lay with his head in her lap and I thought he was just resting, but during intermission the EMTs came and carried him out. He’d died listening to me talk. So I’ll spend my twilight years writing comic novels intended to usher people my age into the next world. It’s a high aspiration, ushering. I say, “Exit laughing.”

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The News from Manhattan: Saturday, July 4, 2020

I got the mean pandemic blues

Sit in my PJs, don’t wear shoes

Seldom shave, don’t use a comb

Got no job, just work from home

Don’t go nowhere, got no car

Look out the window, can’t see far

Lose track of time, what day it be

Just think of myself and mortality

Feeling lonesome and let down

Feel so sad, I should leave this town

Ought to go but I don’t dare

Because there’s fever in the air

People coughing, people sneeze

Covid-19 on the breeze

So I’ll stay here in my room

Wait for good times to resume

I’ve had enough of the absurd

Things will change November 3rd

Four months away but I can wait

It’s joyful to anticipate

The ducktail hair, the long red ties

The scowl and the cruel eyes

Oh the joy, no sad goodbyes

Out the door, away he flies

We’re done with that reality show

Let’s get real. Vote for Joe

And America resume its journey

Though some folks wish that it were Bernie.

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The News from Manhattan: Friday, July 3, 2020

Hurrah for the 4th of July

When fireworks burst in the sky

And our descendants

Gain independence

And the elderly crawl off and die.

Writing a memoir I discover what an antique I am and I try to make light of it, of course, but the world I knew is gone. The beloved Underwood typewriter, the big Zenith radio built to look like a temple and the family gathered around it, the aunt who sat telling stories about family history, the old hymns, the vegetable garden, the chickens waiting to be slaughtered, the big state university where tuition was cheap and you could pay your way through school with a part-time job, the cars that’d pick you up when you hitchhiked driven by old soldiers who told you grim stories about the war. And something else is lost in the current culture, a love of American culture including jokes. Nobody tells them. So what do you do with an elephant with three balls? You walk him and pitch to the giraffe. A man told me that the other day and I was astonished. Maybe it makes fun of physical deformity. I was pleased that he’d want to make me smile. Anyway, don’t write a memoir, it’ll depress the daylights out of you. If you must write one, do it before you’re forty when you don’t know so much. And enjoy the 4th and celebrate America.

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A modest proposal: Make today a new day

The beauty of quarantine is that you don’t have to see people you don’t want to see, which simplifies life, just as memory loss does. Life comes down to basics. Sleeping, eating, talking, reading, writing, cooking, doing your business. Days are so quiet that a cup of ginger tea might be a highlight or my wife’s beautiful shoulders where she stands in the kitchen and I put my hands on her, and feel like singing a few lines of Verdi’s “Celeste Aida”. But she’s slicing onions for supper so I don’t. Never sing a big aria to a woman holding a knife, she may forget which opera this is.

In the opera, Aida is locked in a tomb with her lover, Radamès, which is like quarantine but without grocery deliveries and no Zoom. Saturday I did a Zoom chat with fellow workers from back in our touring days, doing shows, and we reminisced about shows in outdoor venues in the rain and the show from Yellowstone where a bison lay down to sleep in front of the satellite dish and the show where squirrels ate the mike cables, the show in Dublin where the audience was completely schnockered.

We won’t be sitting around telling pandemic stories five years from now, stories about sitting on the terrace and looking at the moon, and that’s okay by me. I’m not as interested in stories as I was back in the day. Since January 2017, the nation has seen a thousand fascinating stories out of Washington, each one with the same name in the headline, all of them unbelievable and fascinating, and after three years, a person is exhausted. What remains to happen? Will there be a big statue of him holding a Bible? Will he sign an executive order making the coronavirus go away? Will Jared be put in charge of the Pentagon?

My wife, who I almost sang Verdi to, said a sweet thing the other day. She said, “I wish people would just focus on the future, rather than the past.” I had been saying something about renaming our national capital because George and Martha had 300 slaves, renaming it Emerson after Ralph Waldo who had no slaves and had all his teeth and said smart things, such as “If a man can make a better mousetrap, the world will make a beaten path to his door.” He recommended good books, good friends, and a sleepy conscience. He was in favor of curiosity and science and ambition. All Washington said was “I cannot tell a lie” and that was not true. He was a general who got lucky and caught the British in a trap. Emerson was a philosopher and a poet. If you renamed Washington Emerson, people would start reading him and this would be a far better country.

But she’s right. This country is guilty of mistreating its children. Seventeen million of them struggle to get enough food; malnutrition in the first three years of life can cause enduring problems. Lousy schools limit a child’s prospects for a happy life. Feeding and teaching children are things we know how to do. A sensible society looks after its children, its future. Nothing you do for children is wasted. We can condemn each other for old mistakes, but if we decide that 2021 is a new start and we start looking forward with a clear eye, then we can get somewhere. If Mississippi can finally surrender the Confederacy and take down its flag, there’s hope for the rest of us.

The city of Washington is an object of general scorn and abuse across the land. Let’s wipe the slate clean, rename it Emerson, and restart the idea of good government and common sense. We desperately need his optimism. “Trust thyself,” he said. “Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries. Let us not be invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, advancing on Chaos and the Dark.” This year, we’ve seen the worst. Good. Now we know what it is. Now we can rise above it and join forces and work for what should be, equality, justice, prosperity, and good sense.

“Bad times have a scientific value,” he said. “These are occasions a good learner would not miss.” Washington state and all the Washington counties are enough for George. “This time, like all times, is a very good one if we but know what to do with it.” No need to make a statue of Ralph on a horse, just quoting him is good enough.

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The News from Manhattan: Tuesday, June 30, 2020

For this quarantine, thank you, Lord.

I will never again think I’m bored

If there’s enough light

To sit down and write

And I’m with my beloved Adored.

P.S. And we have room and board.

I honestly wonder if I ever need to leave this apartment ever. Big events come to us. Yesterday Lulu our cleaning lady came for the first time since February and I got to see Jenny busy cleaning before Lulu came, washing the stove, tidying up. The explosive thunderstorm yesterday with the hail clattering on the terrace doors and the pouring rain and today the appearance of teenage mourning doves grooming each other and investigating the vegetation outside the window. And phone calls from friends and a memoir to finish. And every day brings the reassurance, if it was needed which it wasn’t, that I married the right person. Four months of quarantine is proof of that. I smile whenever she comes into the room. She told me yesterday that I no longer do the thing that used to irritate her which now I forget what it was so how will I know if I do it again. I’m a lucky man, as I tell myself several times a day and she tells me too. Two days ago, she replaced a cracked toilet seat with one she ordered from Amazon. She did this herself. I married a violinist and got a funny and loving woman with mechanical aptitude who also loves music.

Onward. Improve the day. Praise the Lord for the rain.

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The News from Manhattan: Sunday, June 28, 2020

The comedian Erica Rhodes

Brings in laughs by the loads.

Here in America

I think that Erica

Has cracked the comedy codes.

I loved sitting and admiring Erica Rhodes on Zoom last night from a comedy club in Minneapolis. A tiny crowd, due to social distancing, and they’re Minnesotans so they hesitate to be the first to laugh at a joke, but she is a great pro, keeps moving, doesn’t throw material at you but talks to you, is friendly, works the crowd, and her stuff is so great. So smart. She stays off the well-worn paths, off coronavirus, off DJT, off mother stuff, didn’t make fun of Minnesota (thank you). I’ve been watching her work since she was 11 because she’s my niece, but I’m only slightly biased. She’s good. It’s such a pleasure, after you’ve worked hard for a long time, to sit back and admire someone else. It makes me want to teach a comedy course. Making people laugh is a great gift. Speaking of which: When God created woman, He gave her not two breasts but three. But the middle one got in the way so God performed surgery. Woman came before God with the middle breast in her hand. She said, “What shall we do with the useless boob?” and God created man.

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The News from Manhattan: Saturday, June 27, 2020

I got up this morning at five

Feeling very awake and alive.

I love this hour

Of quiet and now’re

The thoughts in my brain

Riding a train

That approaches and soon will arrive.

I awoke early because I had a dream about my novel and a scene toward the end where I give a crazed speech about the beauty of sweet corn and in the dream I was adding a song to the dream so I got out of bed and wrote it. Last night, to celebrate the novel, Jenny made a supper of corn on the cob and hamburgers and we ate it on the terrace in a beautiful New York twilight which then turned to sunset. And then Jenny strung lights on the railing — Let Your Light Shine. Maia adjourned to go talk to her friends on Facebook or FaceTime or whatever facial platform they use. She spends hours in her room and we hear constant chatter and laughter and we try to enforce a 10:30 curfew but who knows. It is so pleasurable to sit outdoors with one’s love and talk about her walk in the park that day and what she saw and her conversations with friends and what we will do when this pandemic ends. I worked all week revising the novel so I’m a big bore. Hard to make interesting conversation out of fixing misspellings and quotation marks and what should be in italics and should “hotdish” be one word or two and do we want to accent “café” or make it “cafe”. It’s the Chatterbox Cafe in Lake Wobegon so it’s not accented. The name in the window of the Chatterbox does not have an accent mark. It would be considered an affectation and a signal that prices have been raised and there will be too much garlic and pepper in the hotdish.

The reason to write a novel is to say what you think in a form that allows enormous freedom – you can put the thoughts in different characters so you can express your own conflicts fully. And the other reason is that it’s FUN, especially the last stages of revision. The early drafting part can be tedious because you have to look at your own crappy writing but as the work is revised upward, it becomes more enjoyable and in the end stages – such as when you dream a revision and wake up and put it in – it is downright exhilarating. Some people get pleasure from soaring in gliders, some from gardening, or conversation, or playing banjo, or cooking, and this is my pleasure and I intend to keep on doing it. Maybe a comic novel about dementia. Why not? It’d be my “Finnegan’s Wake”. Or a novel about Thoreau. He and God get into an argument in heaven and Thoreau instructs the Lord what He should do about America and God is offended and punishes Henry by putting him back on earth, married, with three kids, teaching 11th grade English in the Bronx. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” Thoreau wrote long ago and now he is living it. I think this could be funny. But I’d need to go do research in a school in the Bronx and that won’t be possible for awhile.

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The News from Manhattan: Friday, June 26, 2020

I’m a man who’s writing a book,

I’m head bottle-washer and cook.

And I have faith

September 8th

The book comes out, so have a look.

An exciting day, editing galleys and I’m down to the last twenty pages. The end is in sight. An author has to be a tough critic, especially an old one because people tend to be terribly polite to the elderly and you show them a few pages and they’ll say, “That’s very nice” so you need to squint at your stuff and say, “That’s a piece of crap. Dump it.” No time to waffle about writing when you’re 77. And I reluctantly admit that on p. 168 with thirty left to go, I think this is a pretty good book. Last night I thought my eyes were giving out but this morning they’re fresh again and so, God forgive me, I am skipping Morning Prayer on Zoom and going straight to work. This is my joy, this is what I live for: my beloved and our child are sound asleep and I sit in a quiet kitchen and work on a book I am starting to think is pretty good work. Thank you, Lord, for eyesight and all the rest of it.

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