Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 58

The News from Manhattan: Friday, May 29, 2020

When I was 16, some friends and I formed a basketball team and we arranged to play a team at the Phyllis Wheatley Settlement House on the North Side of Minneapolis. We went and found ourselves surrounded by black faces for the first time in our lives, a minority of white teenagers playing against boys who were bigger, faster, better players than we, and it was scary. We got our pants beat off us but the other team was polite and we shook hands afterward, but nonetheless we were shaken. We came from a small-town high school with one black boy, Lincoln Berry, who came from an evangelical family and played piano. Being minority whites was scary.

Racism comes from fear, including the fear felt by white men. It is the result of limited experience, the result of segregation. It changes over time but slowly because it isn’t an intellectual fear, it comes from narrowness of experience. It can’t be talked out of you, you have to live the life.

I went away to the U of M where African students were plentiful and you’d sometimes see African men and women walking through campus, speaking beautiful French, since they came from French colonial Africa, which was an astonishing sight to a Minnesota kid. But they were more serious students than we, and our habits of separation persisted. I never met African-American folk from north Minneapolis at the U. Never. College was where I made close friends with Jewish kids — that barrier was crossed in my youth and crossed swiftly and easily — but I was never thrown in with black people except in the civil rights movement, which at the U of M was quickly overshadowed by the anti-war movement.

Our righteous anger at the Vietnam war led to the end of the military draft in 1973, a profound change in male society. For our fathers, military service had been a near-universal experience, a profoundly democratic one, in which (especially after the military was desegregated in 1948) young white guys from small towns were thrown into close contact with black urban America. Society became more stratified as a result of the volunteer military.

The liberal progressivism of my generation in Minneapolis is a rather thin aspirational ideal not based in real life experience and that’s why the city I love is burning, people living in dread, as the result of having tolerated a police force that has its own code and doesn’t live by our ideals. (Maybe our ideals don’t translate into law enforcement, I don’t know.) I don’t know anybody in law enforcement. My friends are writers and musicians. I only know a couple of people in the military. This isolation is changing in the generations behind me, but the change comes slowly.

Meanwhile, there are angry forces in society that thrive on chaos and thanks to social media, they are able to rally each other. Anger does not change the fear that lies behind racism.

The burning and destruction happened in the neighborhood beloved to my mother’s family, thirteen kids grew up not far from there, around 38th and Longfellow. I walked those streets as a kid, our Sunday School was in the neighborhood. I pray that peace returns. This pandemic has isolated people and maybe that was a factor — schools are our most basic democratic institution, followed by grocery shopping and sports, the bus system, and your early work experience. That’s where real change occurs, not in righteous pronouncements like this one.

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The News from Manhattan: Thursday, May 28, 2020

We sat outdoors for a meal

Which is, as we say, Quite The Deal,

To sit with our friends

As the sunset descends

And talk about things that are real.

What’s real is work and love and it’s work that we talk about — bad luck to talk about love — and two people at the table are musicians and out of work, and one is an investment fund manager, which involves specialized vocabulary, and one is a writer who’s talked for a living and is trying to retire, so the conversation ranges widely, most of it optimistic. Supper is a meatless hot dish. Dessert is fresh fruit. We look out over New York rooftops and talk about future travels (uncertain) and the underpants men in a nearby apartment and books and the Minneapolis cops who murdered a handcuffed man. A summer night in the shade of a small tree. I want to write a magazine piece about my teachers who made a difference in my life. I want to write another Lake Wobegon novel, having almost finished the current one. I want to get out and do shows again someday. I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t work. The manager says, “I wouldn’t either.” So on we go. Got a magazine rejection today but it doesn’t matter. I can hear my daughter singing in the next room. My wife is restless, tired of the pandemic, but now and then, three or four times a day, she comes over and puts her arms around me and her head next to mine and that counts for everything. Everyone I know is pretty much in the same boat: nobody is exercising their freedom to crowd up against strangers. So much is strange in this lockdown but the overriding fact, to a Minnesotan, is that it’s summer at last, we’re eating outdoors, and we’re all in this together. Meanwhile, I hear word that my church will not open for public services probably until Easter, 2022. Have mercy, dear Lord.

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The News from Manhattan: Wednesday, May 27, 2020

I lie on a bench by a tree

And experience infinity

With nothing to do

But look over at you

While you lie staring at me.

A blissful day in isolation, part of it on the terrace snoozing in the sun, mostly indoors working on the novel. We three ate dinner out there as the sun was setting, a cold macaroni salad with melon for dessert. A productive day with some phone chatter including a call from the amazing Nellie McKay over in the Poconos, the jazz pianist and singer (sometimes with ukulele) who is so phenomenally gifted and witty onstage. She was supposed to have been on the cruise that got cancelled March 11. I got a chance to tell her how amazing she is. Life is idyllic now that it’s warming up and the mockingbirds are nesting in the vines. At one time, that would’ve been tinged with dread that some tragedy was on the way but now I am better able to accept the idyllic. It helps to ration one’s news intake. I get up in the morning and instead of poring over the Times and the Post, I compose this little missive. Yesterday I invented a whole passage of my novel in which I reminisce about knowing F.S. Fitzgerald in Minneapolis in the late Sixties, a little digression that I feel sort of proud of and even read over the phone to a friend who called. I never do that sort of thing but there I was, doing it. That’s the sort of day it was. And now I can’t wait to get back to work. Sorry to be so brief. More tomorrow.

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A modest proposal for a day of forgiveness

Memorial Day gives us a long weekend and marks the beginning of summer, but I remember back in my Boy Scout youth attending a service at a military cemetery and listening to a chaplain talk about men who willingly gave their lives for their country, and heard Taps played by a bugler in the distance. It was moving. Since then, however, we became aware of men who didn’t give their lives — their lives were taken from them by their country fighting a misbegotten war it didn’t know how to stop.

Even in the Good War, WWII, in 1945, preparing for the invasion of Japan, men had no enthusiasm for giving their lives. A friend of mine was in the invasion force, stationed on Okinawa, and was glad when the A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “We were cannon fodder and we knew it,” he told me. “The death toll in an American invasion would’ve been in the millions. It took a nuclear horror to break their will. What a relief not to have to do it by hand-to-hand combat.”

We spent lives heavily in Vietnam and lost the war and now we wonder, “What in God’s name was it for?” Vietnam is a major trading partner, cruise ships stop in Hanoi, Da Nang, and Ho Chi Minh City. My nephew lives in Hanoi and works in a bank there. I could call him and FaceTime if I could figure out the time difference.

I can imagine that FaceTime, YouTube, Instagram, Google, by making the world smaller, might lead to an epoch of relative international peace, and Memorial Day might become a museum piece, and if so, we might consider a Marital Memorial Day, when we honor our divorced and bring some peace to our personal lives. The current divorce rate is around 40% and that is a sorrowful thing, and just as the VFW honors the war dead, knowing how easily the living and the dead might have traded places, so we should acknowledge that marriages crash and burn for reasons not understood and blame should be withheld and peace restored.

To live all the days of your life with your best-informed critic is a heroic venture and it’s worth honoring. Respect your failures and you will more fully enjoy your success.

The MMD should be held in the spring and there should be a lighthearted lunch with exes and their families. You sit next to your ex and toast each other’s health and catch up on the latest and recognize that you launched a romance out of hopeful idealism and though it crashed, the impulse was admirable.

You’re done with the yelling, the door slamming, the lawyers. Sit down and be decent, look each other in the eye, forgive. This would be more valuable in the real life of our country than the patriotic speech and Taps and the rifle salute.

The pandemic has brought husbands and wives closer together than ever and in some states, angry men have stormed state capitols demanding that the bonds be loosened, even at the risk of death. In quarantine, men quickly realize that they married women who possess powerful corrective impulses — who rush to clean up things even before they’re spilled, who straighten and adjust and set things right that men have left askew. Women will edit your sentences as you speak, and if you pause, she will finish the sentence for you. Men are grateful for women’s corrections but it can be exhausting to be held to high standards 24/7 and so, in order to escape supervision, men take up fishing. Fishing makes no sense whatsoever, to go to great trouble and expense to catch inferior game fish when for a fraction of the dough, you can buy salmon or tuna and broil it briefly and have something fabulous. That’s why so few women fish. Men fish because women don’t. For the same reason, they go hunting, go to blues clubs, sit in crowded sports bars and play video games. These things have been shut down by the pandemic. That is why armed men have threatened the woman governor of Michigan.

A Marital Memorial Day would be a small step toward civility in this anger-riven country. The country needs to calm down and learn to speak gently. Once we do MMD, then perhaps Democrats and Republicans will be able to talk to each other. If you can make peace with a well-informed critic, what’s the harm in talking to an ignorant one?

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The News from Manhattan: Monday, May 25, 2020

Every night, phenomenal dreams,

Peaceful, no violent extremes.

Long conversations

In calm situations,

Consciousness flowing in streams.

The phenomenal specificity of my dream life astonishes me. Last night, I was in Dublin and was shopping in a pharmacy for some pens and postcards and I walked around the shop several times and looked closely at the displays and saw all of the products in clear detail, names, packaging, all sorts of things, up close, and found the postcards and chose some and then bought some Sharpie pens. What an odd dream, like taking inventory. And then I was in a living room with strangers — except my friend Tony Judge was there — and listening to a Catholic from the North talk beautifully and persuasively about the Troubles and the Prots in the room listened to him. A dream in which a man spoke sensibly at length. Of course it started to evaporate the moment I woke up and now it’s mostly gone, but it was enjoyable while it lasted. I draw no conclusions except that in isolation, one still needs social life and here it is in a dream. I haven’t been shopping since January and last night I enjoyed looking for pens in a drugstore in Dublin.

Off to prayer. Make a good day for yourself.

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The News from Manhattan: Sunday, May 24, 2020

A writer got locked in Manhattan

And hard was the chair that he sat in

As he wrote fiction,

Prayed for benediction —

Light up your pipe and stuff that in —

It is a comic romance,

Graceful as a tap dance,

And you’ll laugh until

Your coffee you spill

All down the front of your pants.

For the first time in a long time, I have a great deal of time, and I am truly grateful. Up at 6 a.m. and the day stretches ahead. The pandemic has given me something new — the 45-minute phone call. I call up friends who live alone and they launch into ambitious monologues that go on and on and I put the phone on Speaker so if they say something I might put in the novel, I can write it down, but mostly I just listen. Sometimes I do my exercises listening to them. Cousin Elizabeth told me a story about a canoe trip down the Flambeau River on which she and others almost drowned. It was a novel in itself and she is a person who pays close attention to detail. She speaks in complete paragraphs. Her last line was, “God does not come to help us on account of goodness but on the basis of need.” Fascinating. For years I talked to people on the radio and now it’s their turn.

In this sequestered life, the imagination roams freely. Maia is busy with her friends on Facetime and Zoom, locked in her bedroom, laughing, and Jenny is running our lives and reading books and watching movies, and I migrate from kitchen to living room and back, working away. We sit in the kitchen and observe two men who live together in an apartment opposite us, facing the air shaft, who go around all day in white underpants. Why? This is our big question. Where are their pants? We speculate about them and a few other interesting people who leave their shades open and do odd things. We’re not proud of our voyeurism but not ashamed of it either.

An old friend read the memoir and said he thought I was too self-deprecating and that I should take out the chapter entitled “Disasters,” but of course I can’t. Another old friend is reading it and says she loves my aunts and uncles, which pleases me. They were separatists and avoided non-believers and so they didn’t give many people the opportunity to love them. A few weeks ago, I thought the memoir was finished and now I feel it needs another couple months of intense work. So we may extend our quarantine beyond the rest of you. The Minnesota State Fair, an annual staple in my life, has been cancelled and I’ve seen enough Fairs that I can skip one. No plans to travel until I get booked to come do a show. Time to cogitate and get to know my family.

Stay off the Flambeau River today, please. Be well, do good work, etc. Love your life.

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The News from Manhattan: Saturday, May 23, 2020

Day out and day in and day out

Is what quarantine’s all about.

Days are the same,

A repetitive game,

But beautiful too, there’s no doubt.

Ritual grace is the key,

Rites are what make you free.

Fill in the blanks

As you give thanks

For heterogeneity.

We attended a Zoom wedding in Minnesota last night, sitting on our couch in New York, and Jenny was moved by it, the vows, the preacher’s homily — when he said that compatibility is something you work toward, not a pre-existing condition, she said, “Yes,” which gave me pause since I remember feeling compatible from the first time we met in the spring of 1992. Lunch at Dock’s seafood restaurant on 90th and Broadway. She lived on 102nd. She did most of the talking. That hasn’t changed. I was relieved. Taciturnity is a privilege and I cling to it, as a writer. I need to think. For me, thinking and talking don’t go well together. Last night, in the kitchen, talking to my old pal Pat Hampl in St. Paul, Jenny was making bread dough, and listening to Pat on the speakerphone talk about her brother who had overcome severe learning handicaps to become a highly skilled dental surgeon, J kept breaking in with her own thoughts and corrections and finally sat down and talked to Pat while I held the phone. I held it for about ten minutes and then I said, “You two ought to get together sometime.” I walked away. They continued. I didn’t mind. Finally, Pat asked if I was still there. I was and we said goodbye. I wish this would happen more often.

Off to prayer. Blessings on all.

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The News from Manhattan: Friday, May 22, 2020

I love to meet people on Zoom,

You can speak very boldly, ka-boom,

Be frank, let her blow,

Forty minutes or so,

Then sweep them away with a broom.

I pick up a cellphone and talk

For half an hour as I walk,

And I exercise

While I socialize,

I’m an intellect and I’m a jock.

A day of triumph for Jenny yesterday — she baked bread and it came out beautifully. She was haunted by old bread-baking failures and intimidated by her Swedish grandma’s baking, but finally broke through and now her self-esteem has risen a notch. I used to fly around the country doing shows and staying in nice hotels and now, thanks to the plague, I get to observe my true love close up. She’s a reader, a musician, a woman with many close friends, an art lover, but the other day she admitted to me that she loves a clean kitchen. She loves to cook. The bread-baking was a big challenge and she was proud that she succeeded. My staunch urban feminist wife has secret hausfrau leanings. We’ve had cleaning ladies forever but she takes pride in her ability to clean a bathroom floor and do it very very well. I should not be divulging this to you and if you tell her I will never speak to you again and I will put your name into my novel in a way you’ll regret. Loose lips sink ships.

People are suffering around us and I know it. A long talk with an old friend who is isolated at home alone and he launches into a long story that doesn’t seem to have a point or an end, and then he admits he’s not seen anybody for a week and his mind is “going wild” — news that a high-school classmate and good friend is in an old-folks warehouse in Minneapolis, penniless, with signs of dementia, and what can one do? She was a small-town intellectual and a good person and now she’s going into the dark for the long goodbye. An old friend went into that dark last week. I’d known her since 1976 and she was lively and sassy and full of enthusiasm and I saw her a year ago and she was friendly but she had no idea who I am. Now she’s gone. I’m at an age when part of one’s day is taken up with mourning. It’s just how it is.

The novel is whistling along and September is the pub date and I’m thinking maybe in spring 2021 I can get back to doing shows so that leaves a gap of six months that I need to plan for. This Wobegon novel has been so much fun, I should write another. Maybe Donald J. Trump moves to town. He got drubbed in November and his empire crashed in the recession and he’s under threat of prosecution from a dozen eager lawmen and people are writing vicious salacious memoirs about him and he comes to the Little Town That Time Forgot to be forgotten and gets a job pumping gas and is completely happy in a cabin by the lake. He takes up fishing. He gardens. His problem is that his father was born before he was and his father left him all that money and put him in a bewildering NY social circle and LW is what he was meant for. He becomes a nice guy. He gains quite a bit of weight. He stops coloring his hair. He changes his name to Danny Trondheim. He’s unrecognizable as a former POTUS but he confesses to me, his confidante. He is who he is, forgetful, small-minded, vain, but he makes a good gas jockey. He has no regrets because his memory is poor. He loves being a nobody, it’s what he was meant for.

Time for Morning Prayer. Today is Friday. Make it good.

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The News from Manhattan: Thursday, May 21, 2020

Who knows what the future will bring?

Will we rise? Will we fall? Will we swing?

Whatever our fate,

Let us sing as we wait,

“I’ve got the world on a string,

Sitting on a rainbow,” sang Frank.

I’m in luck, I got love in the bank.

I’m in the right place,

The wind in my face,

And plenty of gas in the tank.

Another sunny day. The mockingbirds seem to be making a home in the vines on the wall of our terrace. Two red finches too and maybe a couple of bluejays. We don’t put out birdseed for fear of attracting pigeons who tend to be bullies. Anyway, there’s plenty of food around. The novel is racing along and every morning I’m awakened around 5 a.m. by new ideas — this morning, I awoke thinking that a Norwegian bachelor farmer in Lake Wobegon is struck by a cow’s tail during milking and there’s fresh manure on the tail and in that minute he decides to sell the farm and go for an ocean cruise and he makes a life out of that, Mediterranean, Baltic, Pacific, Caribbean. Brilliant idea. I plan to finish it in three weeks. When you’re 77, you don’t take long views. Writer’s block is for kids in their twenties — I’ll be blocked when I die and that’s soon enough. I grew up on 77th Avenue North in Minneapolis so this is a magical year for me. Maybe it’s the end of my writing career and now I’ll get into yoga and baking and take ballroom dancing lessons. The pandemic has been good. I don’t kill time, I don’t watch movies or read books to keep busy. I love the sameness of the days. Up for morning prayer and to write a limerick and post a journal. Maia awakens and comes in and has breakfast, then calls her friend in London. I write. There is the beautiful moment when Jenny steps into the room and we embrace. There is a nap. We have dinner and hold hands and say table grace, something we never did regularly before but quarantine needs rituals and prayer is a good one. Also the 7 p.m. neighborhood racket, everyone sticking their heads out and whooping and clapping. I go to bed early. In this strange new life, my dream life has come to life, long elaborate dreams. Last night, J and I, along with our friends Jon and Marcia, went to a mysterious stone castle which turned out to be a prison and there I was reunited with a son I didn’t know I had, a teenage boy, very quiet, fearful, hesitant to leave the institution, and he and I walked together and then we threw a ball back and forth, and that pleased him. And now I shall get back to work.

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The News from Manhattan: Wednesday, May 20, 2020

I’m taking hydroxychloroquine

Which makes me attractive and thin,

It’s good for the skin,

The jawline and chin,

And sometimes I chase it with gin.

And when I win

I’ll stand up and grin

And the good life will start to begin.

Sunny yesterday and pizza for supper and afterward I took a pitcher of water out to the terrace to water some plants and Maia snuck up behind me with a glass of water and I turned and we pitched water at each other, convulsions of laughter — her laughter, not mine, I don’t laugh, as you well know. I was brought up Calvinist and still am.

Then had a nice long conversation with a friend in Connecticut who is enjoying gardening, thrilled with it, and solitude. His line of work, show business, is shut down for the foreseeable future and he’s intrigued by the idea of doing a stage show at a drive-in theater, but is in love with plants and fighting off the deer and the groundhog who are watching the crops.

My first reader sent a long detailed report on my Wobegon novel, which actually is a novella trying to add weight, and it’s the sort of editorial report I wish I’d gotten on my previous books in their adolescence, very specific, more of this, less of that, cut here, move A to B. Something about my Calvinist demeanor makes people think I know what I’m doing, but every writer needs an editor. Just as every incompetent man needs a capable partner, someone who can read a printer manual and figure out how to make it do somersaults. When you are falling in love with your lover, you should be thinking about mechanical aptitude and electronics and plumbing. My wife corrects my grammatical mistakes which I make deliberately so I know she’s listening.

And now it’s time for Morning Prayer, and then a day of writing. Is it okay to petition God to make me funny or would people laugh? Have a fine day.

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