Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 57

The News from Manhattan: Wednesday, June 24, 2020

An old man tripped and he fell

And he did not cry out or yell

But landed, ker-smack,

Flat on his back.

He refused sympathy,

Knelt on one knee

And arose gracefully,

Like a USMC

PFC or QB (NFL).

A lovely evening on our New York terrace made even lovelier by the host, 77, arising from his chair, tripping on it, losing his balance, then stumbling over a serving tray and crashing to the floor. His wife was horrified but he rolled over, got up, and said, “How did I look?” The guests assured him that he looked very graceful in his collapse. He poured himself a ginger ale. He said, “Not many hosts my age would go so far to entertain guests.” It was a jolly bunch, though his wife took awhile to calm down, and the conversation ranged widely from golf to dogwood trees to Connecticut to grandchildren to the Bronx and the need not to fight hopeless battles — and not one mention of the Bolton book or the current president. The old man’s wife was very affectionate toward him the entire evening, putting her hand on his knee, leaning against him, asking him if he was all right every time he couldn’t remember something such as the trip to Mackinac Island or an Episcopal church in Boston, as if he might be suffering traumatic memory loss. MORAL: There are clear benefits to taking a fall but you need to do it carefully.

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The News from Manhattan: Tuesday, June 23, 2020

An old man writes his memoir

And sees how crucial friends are,

Through life’s betrayals,

Their love never fails

Round twists and bends,

It’s all about friends

And their charity

Til you put out to sea

And your vessel is crossing the bar.

It’s all about friendship and the pandemic proves it. You need to avoid crowds of strangers, which is too bad, but you find out who you want to stay in close touch with and it’s your old friends. They have plenty of time to talk and in the lockdown they have plenty to say and you call and before you know it a half-hour is gone and you’re still in the thick of it. Back in my big crazy career days I went for weeks without talking to friends other than my sweetie and now I’m in close touch with a dozen people and it’s wonderful. Who can explain why conversation flows thick with some people and thin with others? For one thing, with true friends, you’re not so bound by orthodoxy and p.c. For another thing, it helps to have common history. And for another, you need to have a rational feeling about civics. It is no longer possible to talk to a Republican. I used to like a bunch of Republicans and now they are beyond the pale. There’s nothing to be said

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Some good advice from an old memoirist. Take it.

My advice to you, young people, is to start asking questions of your elders about family history and who did what when and why and don’t stop until you get answers because, though you’re much too cool to be interested in family history now, someday you’ll want to know these things and by that time they will all be dead.

Okay? Read that paragraph over a couple of times to yourself and then go do it.

I’m trying to finish a memoir and I realize now how much I don’t know and I was too busy careering around as my elders began taking the long walk and I didn’t sit down and ask for the story. My elders were self-effacing Midwesterners brought up not to talk about personal things and they kept many secrets from me such as how did the men fall in love with the women and vice versa, they being such righteous folk and sensible and circumspect. Mother came from a family of thirteen, Dad from eight, and when I knew them, they were all settled in comfortable marriages, and what I want to know is what transpired when they were infatuated and savoring sensual moments and looking forward to throwing caution to the wind.

It happened, even in cautious Christian families like mine. I see the pictures of my youthful aunts in their white summer dresses sashaying around the lakes of Minneapolis and I sense adventure and light-heartedness, not wary mothers I knew them as.

I know that my parents met on July 4, 1931, as teenagers at a picnic at the Keillor farm and were crazy about each other but I wish I’d asked them for more details. He was a farmboy, she was a city girl, slender and shy, and they didn’t marry until six years later, it being the Depression and all, but what happened in those six years? I grew up with two parents who held hands and flirted with each other all their long lives and I’m grateful and I want to know how come and there’s nobody left to ask.

I write about my life, the lost world of hitchhiking, which I knew as a kid and got picked up by angry half-drunk men who raged against the government, their bosses, their Army commanders, their wives, and I got a view of life you couldn’t get in school or from the newspaper. It’s gone and so are the downtown department stores of Minneapolis, the smells and bells, the ladies with white gloves who ran the elevators. I went to a state university back when tuition was so cheap you could pay for your education with a part-time low-wage job, no debt, no need to ask your dad for money, and so you were free to make impractical plans such as become a writer of fiction. I came from a fundamentalist family that was wary of higher education and I plunged into campus life and before I knew it I had four close friends, Larry and Barry and Maury and Arnie, all of them Jewish. I did an early-morning radio show back when people listened to radio religiously, before YouTube and Google and InnerTube and Bugle and iPod and pPod and all the other platforms.

It’s all interesting, but it’s the love stories that a person craves. You want to know that you’re descended from passionate irresponsibility, not a business arrangement or a science experiment, but two people mysteriously drawn to each other. My mother’s parents, William and Marian, courted in Glasgow and she was four months pregnant when they married. Their brood of thirteen children testifies to their feelings for each other. Dad’s parents, James and Dora, were twenty years apart in age. He was an old bachelor on the school board and she was a teacher; she boarded with him and his sister. He came to school and helped her clean blackboards and clap erasers and he kissed her and they ran off and got married. They came home in the buggy and he left the horses standing in harness all night, the reins on the ground, as he carried Dora into the house, his sister having disembarked for a house up the road. It’s good to know these things.

Sit your people down and ask questions. The secret of investigative journalism is: ask questions and keep asking — people want to spill the beans, they just need some warming up. Apply the heat. You will thank me for this someday. I won’t be around but you’re welcome.

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The News from Manhattan: Sunday, June 21, 2020

Father’s Day, what shall I do?

A burnt-out bulb to unscrew?

Does the A/C compressor

Need repair? Yes, sir,

Soon as I find super glue.

Shall I explain

The cause of migraine

Or the origins of World War II?

I have seniority

As an authority,

So salute before speaking. Thank you.

Father’s Day was a bigger deal back when I was a kid because fathers knew more then and fixed the family car, did carpentry and painting and plumbing repairs around the house, could install A/C or put up a TV aerial, handled the finances, drove the car on vacation trips and packed the trunk as well. He was an expert packer. And my father had built our house from the basement up. He was the Master of the House. So of course we honored him every June.

Compared to him, I am a large pathetic person who spills a good deal and needs wiping up afterward. Plumbing problems, my wife calls a plumber, of course. I ask my daughter to show me how to install an app. I am still called on to dispose of dead bodies and to put away baking dishes that go on a very high shelf. I say table grace. I hold a chair steady so my wife can climb up on it and change a lightbulb.

I am a liberal and so is everyone I know and therefore my freedom of expression is severely restricted and I am constantly editing myself as I speak to make sure I haven’t marginalized anyone — such as Marge or Ina or Liza — and because I grew up fundamentalist I’m not able to curse fluently either and because I’m old I don’t know the current slang like “teeter” and “gouchy” and “25” — it’s a miracle that I can manage to squeeze out a whole sentence. I sit here silently in the kitchen, hoping someone will ask me to unscrew a lid. And hoping I can, when they do.

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The News from Manhattan: Friday, June 19, 2020

The pleasure of pure solitude

With no one around to intrude

Brings me to tears.

I love you, my dears,

But silence is basic, like food.

Mothers, as well,

And health personnel,

Teachers, preachers,

All of God’s creatures,

Need periods of quietude.

My family is extremely considerate of the writer in their midst and during the quarantine they disappear into corners of the apartment and let him be, a ghostly presence, tapping at the laptop, scratching at typescript. But the past week has been delicious with them at the old Holman family cottage on the Connecticut shore, hanging out with sociable cousins, breathing salt air, feeling grass under their feet, and meanwhile I toil at the loom. It’s good not to have Jenny here to complain to. So I don’t complain. Shut my mouth. A big relief. The world is better for it. And I dive back into the memoir and remember when I was 13 and visited cousins in Idaho and, with my cautious careful mother away at church, I got to drive a tractor up a steep mountain road, gunning it, avoiding trees, a wild ride with two cousins hanging on for dear life, engine roaring, a big burst of freedom. So now that’s in there. I’m cutting exposition, replacing it with stories. No excuses, just experiences.

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The News from Manhattan: Thursday, June 18, 2020

I’m the whitest white man you will know,

White since a long time ago,

But Jesus my brother

Said to love one another.

Was he white? I do not think so.

I’m a writer and I write alone

About people and places I’ve known.

I can’t change that

But we need to work at

Making the Other our own.

I’m in quarantine and not about to march in the street, so what’s to be done? Listen, read, pay attention, and send money to places where it’ll do good. Friends of mine have done heroic things in establishing and supporting charter schools in hard-up neighborhoods. With the money I’ve lost in truly stupid real estate deals, I could’ve done something good. I hope to get another chance. The big task is to uproot a corrupt government in Washington and elect people more inclined to see the realities of inequality. It’s amazing to see Mr. Floyd’s picture everywhere — how one man, driving along Lake & Chicago in Minneapolis, a corner I know very well, caught in a terrible vise and executed while people on the sidewalk yelled at the cops and filmed it with their phones, now becomes the inspiration of a powerful movement. How the President of the United States, using tear gas to clear a peaceful protest so that he and his sycophants walk across the street and he can stand in front of a church and hold up a Bible like the alien object it is to him — it’s the dumbest show he ever put on. Anybody who looks at that picture can see that the man is a 10cent phony. Anybody. He lost his re-election by walking across the street.

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The News from Manhattan: Wednesday, June 17, 2020

Why does one write a memoir?

It’s not to promote; that’s bizarre.

It’s a confession

With some discretion,

It’s a thanksgiving

For decades of living,

And what we’ve learned so far:

How temporary we are,

A lightning bug caught in a jar.

The family’s up in Connecticut at a cottage where they can breathe salt air and the old drudge is at work at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. Talked to a friend in Connecticut who is trying to fend off deer from his garden and raccoons and now a bear. A disrespectful bear who one night came up on the deck and left a load of bear shit by the back door. The friend is a pianist, not a hunter, and probably the bear is aware of that. The friend has tried urinating around his backyard to mark territory but the bear doesn’t get the message. This makes me grateful to be living on the 12th floor in Manhattan, it enables one to focus entirely on the memoir and writing clearly about those years on the radio. Memory blurs when you’ve been crazy busy, the mass of detail seems to erase itself. I’ll bet my friend has forgotten a lot about the many shows he’s played. I’ll bet the bear will be memorable for years to come. I had no bear in my life. It was all much too easy. The secret of a good story is danger and struggle. I had great freedom to do whatever I wanted to do for forty years. The shortcomings were all my fault and nobody else’s. Painful but true.

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The News from Manhattan: Tuesday, June 16, 2020

The race is between Joe and Don,

Two names from an era bygone,

I wish the race

Were taking place

Between a Nicole and a Sean.

What I’ve read and heard about systemic racism in my state of Minnesota, the housing covenants, the zoning, the lending laws, and so forth that all contributed to create a segregated society that put black families at a terrible disadvantage, makes me feel stupid. I followed a very narrow professional track, was single-minded ambitious, and I can’t apologize for that, but it did isolate me from the realities faced by thousands of people in our midst. I believed the Democratic party was on the side of equal opportunity but despite good intentions the system remained capable of brutality. I think it can change. People of color have taken great leaps forward in music and the arts and sports because those talents can survive in desperate circumstances — a lousy school system isn’t fatal to them — but now we need to reform public education. Reading, math, and composition are crucial — studies in which the student is excited by a sense of progress — and let’s trash literature, history and political science which are so shot through with white supremacy and mythology. For political science, schools could begin by teaching the story of systemic racism and how it was legal, enforced at all levels of government. History and literature need to be overhauled. I’m too old to get smart, but I don’t want the young to inherit our ignorance. I want to see us move toward a more just society and a happier culture. There are hard times ahead but progress can be made, as it was in the Thirties.

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In mid-June, we look ahead and think big

I’ve now spent three months in a Manhattan apartment with my wife and daughter, a life that is not so different from, say, living in a lighthouse in the Orkneys. We can see tall buildings, some bright lights, helicopters overhead, but it’s not the New York high life I dreamed of growing up in Minnesota. The problem is that I like it just fine. Solitude suits me pretty well. So why am I here?

I look back at dining out and I don’t miss it, two hours in a loud room where waiters with big personalities serve you tiny portions of a dish that includes much too much lentils to be worth $48. I look back at dinner parties and most of them were two hours too long and the conversation felt like a rehash of the Op-Ed page.

In quarantine, you learn that there’s a lot to be said for a fifteen-minute phone conversation with one other person who’s been in lockdown too and is excited by verbal communication with another human being.

I’m not complaining. People have died from the virus, many of them my age (77). I’m a writer, a trade that can be practiced in a lighthouse as well as in New York. I loved working in the reading room of the New York Public Library but sitting in my kitchen in the month of May, I wrote a novel about a small town in Minnesota. It can be done.

I’m a hermit in a cave. My daughter is fully engaged with her social circle via electronics that I, having grown up with a paper tablet and a No. 2 pencil, know zilch about. My wife knows about it and Zooms with people and puts on a mask and walks through Central Park and I, the fragile old guy with underlying conditions and other conditions lying under those, sit in my room and am okay with that. What once was a punishment is now a privilege.

Thanks to a sensible governor, New York has come through the plague reasonably well, but now comes the hard part: do we want to stay?

I came here because in the eighth grade, a teacher handed me a copy of the New Yorker magazine with a story by John Cheever and I loved his writing and loved the magazine, the urbanity, the humor, the curiosity. I once saw John Updike on the downtown Broadway local train, a thrilling experience. I once went to a party at a writer’s that was so wonderful I stayed until 5 a.m. and stood on the street and felt too happy to go home to bed. I bought a notebook at a newsstand and went to a café and sat and wrote and had breakfast. People passing, heading for the subway, the writer deep into invention.

For true New Yorkers, the city is the only place to be. But for a guy who wrote a novel in the back bedroom? I don’t think so. I don’t need to see Times Square and its flashing signs and canyons of glass where rivers of humanity move through, most of them simply for the experience of being in Times Square.

Locked up for three months, I’ve lost interest in the big city. The Orkneys have sandstone cliffs, seal colonies, and the electricity is wind-generated. Exports include beef, whiskey, cheese, and seafood. The climate is mild, thanks to the Gulf Stream. There are sheep and many lighthouses. Surely there would be one that would welcome a lightkeeper.

It sounds wonderful to me, sleeping in a room under the glass dome, the light sweeping over the North Sea, the sense of public service, warning fishermen from the rocks. Being the only novelist on the island. And I’d escape from the heavy burden of being an American, which has become onerous lately. In my Orknitude, I would only be an old man in a tower and a provider of light.

It’s a perfect plan and now all I need to do is convince my wife. I’m looking at her now as she reads the paper. Surely a man with my language skills can sway this woman’s heart. My darling, my love, take my hand, let us speak of things to come. We’ve done New York. Let me tell you of a wonderful place far away. Put your trust in your husband. If, after ten years, you don’t like the island of Graemsay, I promise we’ll move straight back.

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The News from Manhattan: Sunday, June 14, 2020

It’s Sunday, the fourteenth of June,

In our pandemic commune,

Three birds in a tree,

We live peaceably,

Like Maggie and Jiggs

Or the three little pigs,

Here in our Sunday cartoon,

Our dialogue in a balloon.

Three months in our apartment in Manhattan, three months without going to dinner parties and guess what? I don’t miss them. No need to make conversation, it comes naturally with this family. Meanwhile I get some long fascinating phone conversations with distant relatives. An hour with a cousin last night and in ordinary times an hour would be a major imposition but what do we have but time? Time, time, time. We talked about systemic racism and I learned a few things.

Montaigne said the most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness, which is the opposite of what I thought in my youth, but I’m adhering to it now as best I can and cheerfulness is the keynote of pandemic life, in the apartment or on the phone. No brooding, and if you must, then go in the back bedroom. Every day my daughter and I surprise each other on the terrace, one approaches the other with a pitcher of water and tries to corner the other and heave a quart of water through the air. Squealing and laughter. She squeals, I take my drenching with solemn dignity.

I’m going to work on a screenplay today. The idea came to me in the middle of the night. A Lake Wobegon story and I see John C. Reilly and Jessica Lange in the lead. Don’t postpone. Today’s the day.

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