Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 57

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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The News from Manhattan: Saturday, June 13, 2020

I wrote a book in six weeks

Where normal folk turn into freaks.

There is cheese. People eat it,

Evil’s defeated,

And believe it or not, the Lord speaks.

Friday morning, the novel went off, which should be exhilarating, one would think, but I loved working on it and so it’s depressing and you go to bed and sleep. Time to get back to practical matters. Got to sell our old house in St. Paul, which has been on the market for a year. Got to break out of this pandemic quarantine. Yesterday, for the first time since February, I got on the elevator and rode down and walked across the lobby to take an elevator up to visit friends on the other side of the building. It felt like a long journey. I wore a mask for the first time and received mask instruction which is complicated and strict. Eventually I should leave the building and go for a walk, but where? What’s out there? The big question is: do we still want to live in New York? Will the city come back? When? I miss going to St. Michael’s, going to the Rose Reading Room at the NYPL on 42nd and sitting in that beautiful space with all of those industrious people working silently around me, almost all of them less than half my age. I feel at home among people dedicated to work — this transcends race and ethnicity and gender — hard workers can recognize each other and bond on that basis and the other stuff doesn’t matter so much. I miss my work life, when I went to the Prairie Home office or went to the New Yorker office and was quartered with people dedicated to the same enterprise. It won’t happen again but I miss it.

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The News from Manhattan: Wednesday, June 10, 2020

Minneapolis, the town of my aunts,

It all comes back in a glance,

The sweet bungalows,

My good Sunday clothes,

The smell of pot roast,

My grandfather’s ghost,

Elsie and Jean

And Mother convene,

Recollecting a teenage romance.

Far, far from home, isolated in a pandemic, still working on a memoir, and that old life is quite vivid, the men in the living room, struggling to find conversation, the aunts in their glory in the kitchen, working up a perfect dinner with a fabulous lemon meringue pie and talking a blue streak about the summer of 1931 when they took the trolley up to Anoka to the Keillor farm and Elsie and Mother both were taken with young John, and the little boy sits quietly in the corner, wondering which one John will fall in love with. He is 18 and they are 15 and 16 and it is all still up in the air.

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The News from Manhattan: Tuesday, June 9, 2020

A lie has to come to an end,

So that the damage can mend.

You know you did it,

Come out and admit it,

And you’ll be forgiven, my friend.

I was wrong about the Minneapolis police and out of loyalty to a city I love, where I grew up, I covered for it – said most cops are good, said police work is terribly hard, said young people don’t understand how complicated the world is – but the New York Times article on police unions opened my eyes, the fact that a Minneapolis alderman who stood up to the cops was punished by the police federation who refused to respond to 911 calls from his ward, says clearly that the federation is corrupt, the cops have made themselves into a mafia, and this is borne out by a talk last night with a retired public defender who said, “Cops always lie. There’s a code of silence.” And a heartfelt note from friend Jearlyn about “the talk” that black parents give their boys – never talk back to a cop or you could be killed. The protesters are right, I was wrong. My experience in Minneapolis is 150% different from that of a black man or woman. We are a progressive city only for the white majority. Some people have been fighting this battle uphill for my entire lifetime and I didn’t know it. This is a terrible failure of journalism in Minneapolis: an honest crusading newspaper should have taken this battle on. This is a moral failure that the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party is complicit in. I have no idea how the city should proceed and this is not my crusade, I’m a humorist, but I do know that this is a moment when a horrific fact – the video of Mr. Floyd being murdered by four cops in broad daylight – should lead to something good and honorable. Justice.

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How we survive in these hard, hard times

A man in isolation in a pandemic with his wife in an apartment is a sailor without a ship and a cowboy with no horse and I shouldn’t complain but life without complaint would be too much like church so I will. A year ago my wife and I left our 5-BR house and became apartment people because we didn’t know four other couples we wanted to form a commune with and play dulcimers and work for world peace, and it’s okay but I miss my house and feel a loss of manhood.

I once, solo, wearing gloves, carrying a plastic pail with an LP record jacket for a lid, removed a bloodthirsty bat clinging to the curtain in the family room and pounded a stake in its heart and saved my wife, who was on the balcony in a diaphanous gown looking at the moon, from an eternity of undeath. In an apartment building, the manager would do that.

In the house, I once made a risotto that my wife said was the Van Gogh “Sunflowers” of risottos, which I accomplished because she was outdoors sunning on the patio. In the apartment kitchen, I would’ve been under her close supervision and, frankly, I’ve never done well under supervision. As I write this, she is not looking over my shoulder pointing out that Van Gogh painted several series of sunflower pictures and maybe I should be more specific and say it’s the one in the National Gallery in London. The paragraph was better without that sentence, was it not?

My wife is a violinist/violist and so she believes in exact precision, whereas I am a writer of fiction and enjoy the freedom of living in our apartment here in Montmartre with a walled garden in back where I read Proust in French and have no idea who is in the White House, none, and don’t care to know. “C’est la vie,” as we c’est.

I don’t say that mine was a great risotto, but of all the men who’ve trapped a bat, I make as good a risotto as any of them, but I am a man and we don’t discuss our exploits, which is why, on last week’s Zoom call with a couple in Northern California, the two women did most of the talking, discussing their vacation plans and the doings of children, while Russ and I kept silent, as we old Navy men tend to do. Loose lips sink ships. And when we talked, we spoke in short declarative sentences. Like that one.

Russ is a mountain biker, a slight man with a will of steel whose quadriceps are deadly weapons. I can envision him going up Mount Denali with snow tires, not breathing hard, to rescue naïve climbers in shorts and sandals and diaphanous windbreakers. But did he talk about his exploits on the screen? No, nor did I talk about the fact that I wrote a novel and a memoir in the past few weeks.

The novel is in French, about me and a woman named Madeline, and the memoir covers my early years in Minneapolis when F. Scott Fitzgerald was my Scout leader (his book Boats Against the Current is about canoeing the Mississippi) and Bob Dylan was majoring in political science at the U and read me his paper on Bob LaFollette as we walked out of Folwell Hall — “How does it feel to be all alone like a complete unknown, breaking through the attitudinal bandwidth to the paradigm of proactive empowerment” — and I was about to edit that sentence when a truck went past and the term paper flew up in the backwash of wind and got scattered in the hard rain and he said, “It’s all over now” and I said, “Look, it’s blowing in the wind” and that was that. I understand he’s done well since then.

The women were talking about their kids’ social lives and I spoke up and said, “Alexa, take the ladies into the next room” and she did and Russ and I leg wrestled for a while and he threw me, two out of three, and I recited “The Miller’s Tale” in Middle English, and he recited the periodic table, and we punched each other hard in the solar plexus, and as the women came back in their diaphanous gowns, we competed for the Best Last Line. Mine was: “The winner of any contest is the historian who writes it down.” Not bad, huh?

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The News from Manhattan: Sunday, June 7, 2020

I awake in the morning and choose

To postpone a look at the news.

I had a good sleep

And the anger will keep

Until later, no need for previews.

This old man normally awakens two or three times in the night since I married a woman who urges me to drink more water, otherwise I’d drink less than a tree toad, but it’s no problem since I can awaken, do my business, return to the marital bed, and doze off in seconds. This is not due to a guiltless conscience, but compartmentalization: I keep guilt in a separate drawer, with the frying pans. Last night, however, was one of those rare uninterrupted nights of sleep like the ones I had when I was in my 20s and 30s, a child, and I now sit down and brew my coffee, dazed at the blessedness of sleep, how peaceful the brain is. Today is a day of work on the novel, filling in some shallow places, adding jokes, padding it a little — some parts of it need to slow down. Monday I’ll send it to my editor. Note, I say “my” editor. I’ve not met him yet but this is a personal relationship. I started out with Roger Angell at The New Yorker who was the kindest man ever, all rejections were made with deep regret, acceptances were like Pulitzer Prizes. I had Bill Whitworth at The Atlantic who was a newspaperman at heart so he was fond of fact, resistant to rhetoric. I had the great Kathryn Court at Viking who, for Lake Wobegon Days in 1984, came out and lived with my girlfriend and me in St. Paul and edited the book on our dining room table. You don’t find an editor like her today. Some editors work from home but not from your home.

This novel has come so easily and quickly that I’m going to miss writing it. It came quickly because we were quarantined and I had no interruption, Jenny and Maia were self-sufficient. And yesterday I started to think about writing another book after I’m done with the memoir which is almost done. It’s the greatest pleasure to have work ahead, waiting. Other people do the jobs I was suited to do, drive bus, wash dishes, punch tickets, and somehow I lucked into a literary career. Every time a word eludes me and won’t drop, I imagine dementia is ahead, but it hasn’t happened yet. So now, to work. The Tangerine Spleen is on his own today, I can’t be bothered. Enjoy the day.

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The News from Manhattan: Saturday, June 6, 2020

Saturday, June, no baseball,

Maybe no Series next fall,

So I’ll write fiction,

Avoiding addiction

To opioids or alcohol.

I’ll still have ice cream, but that’s all.

A perfect summer morning in New York, sitting outside with my love, discussing world issues so as to get those out of the way, the pandemic, the shops out of business, the anger in the streets, the insane fool in Washington, the 50% of the population who worship him no matter what he does, and now that’s done and we can go about what we’re here for, which is to live our lives to the fullest extent and be grateful for it all. I wish I had three ears of fresh sweet corn for the three of us, that’s all I’d need. Someday.

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How we live in these troubled times

The world is falling apart but my niece has sent me pictures of her, her friends, people from her church, cleaning up along Lake Street in Minneapolis, something that distinguishes a Minneapolis riot from one in Chicago or Philadelphia: when the arsonists leave, the brigades of nice people come in to tidy up.

Say what you will, but this is our neighborhood and we don’t accept trashiness, we believe that clean streets, nice lawns, well-kept houses, bring out the goodness inherent in humanity. My aunts believed that, my mother, my grandma. Men with incendiary devices come through and torch businesses, a library, a police station, but the women will have the last word, count on it.

I have learned this during the almost three months of quarantine: woman rules the roost and man is a detriment to be tolerated. We’ve been isolating in a two-bedroom apartment and she has gotten very strict about squalor. She holds up a pair of black underwear she found on the couch. It is a large pair with a slit in front. I weigh 220 pounds, she weighs half of that. “Whose is this?” she asks, rhetorically.

She knows that I, like other men, have strong latent bachelor farmer tendencies. I set something down where it doesn’t belong — a magazine on the floor by the toilet — and minutes later, you’ve got papers strewn on the dining room table, a sinkful of dirty dishes, bedsprings in the front yard and an old rusted-out Chevy up on blocks, a refrigerator and two rusty sinks in tall weeds. It starts with one magazine on the floor and your life descends into chaos. Without a woman to hold up the underwear and say, “Is this yours?” it’s all over, goodbye Information Age, we’re back to Bronze.

She is tough. Man is a hunter: give me a rock and I’ll go out and bring home my kill and skin it and roast it over a fire. She leans toward veganism. So my meat ration has been cut to a tenth of what it once was. I used to travel for business and wake up in a hotel, having hung my breakfast order on the doorknob the night before, and in comes the waiter with coffee, an 8 oz. top sirloin, two eggs fried over easy, a breakfast that prepares a man to go out and vanquish the Visigoths. No more. In my vegan prison, it’s wheat cereal with some blueberries. She loves lentils, quinoa, green leafy things, stuff that cattle eat.

“It’s good for you,” she says and of course she’s right and that’s the irritating part. She wants me to do sit-ups and jumping jacks and stretching, she encourages me to join her in yoga with her YouTube instructor Adriene. I don’t do yoga, I’m a guy. Some male persons may do it but guys don’t. What’s His Name doesn’t do yoga with Melania and neither does Joe Biden with Jill, and if either one were to be photographed in black tights doing Ardha Chandrasana, he would no longer be eligible to become Leader of the Free World. The LOFW plays golf. He doesn’t kneel or squat, he swings a club and sends a missile flying with deadly accuracy.

Before the lockdown I went to an office and was consulted by employees who offered their suggestions, which, wisely, I took, with minor revisions. I wore a suit, sometimes a tie. I had a role. Now my usefulness is limited to reaching the copper boiler on the top shelf and bringing it down and then, later, putting it back up. Height is my main asset, not experience. Sometimes I unload the dishwasher. Once in a while, if the sky turns black and bolts of lightning appear to the south and the wind moans in the weatherstripping and she becomes anxious, she turns to me for manly reassurance, though I know less about meteorology than the average medieval peasant did, but I put my hand on her shoulder and say, “It’s okay. Only a storm.”

And that is what makes quarantine bearable, putting my hand on her shoulder. We’ve been locked up together for a long time and whenever I walk into a room and see her, I put my hand on her shoulder, her back, I kiss her hair, I know this woman by heart. For her sake, I eat lentils and quinoa instead of muskrat or wild boar. She runs the house and I get to put my hand on her shoulder. It’s not a bad deal.

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