Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 59

The News from Manhattan: Tuesday, May 19, 2020

In Wisconsin the barrooms are packed

With citizens in close contact,

In joyful defiance

Of medical science

Which they would deny is a fact.

They’ll take home the virus

To Gladys and Cyrus

And see if the old folks get whacked.

Sunny in New York this morning so already it’s a good day. Met a man online yesterday who’d been a sheepherder on the Snake River, a carnival barker, a forest firefighter, an artist’s model, a farmworker, actor, politician, and an Army lieutenant in Vietnam, and a woman, the daughter of an Air Force master sergeant, who’d lived in a dozen places including Spain, France, England and North Dakota by the time she was twenty, and they made me feel immature and inexperienced by comparison. This is the price you pay for finding your vocation early, you miss out on living. I grew up cautious, eager to find a safe place in the world, and now, during the lockdown, there’s plenty of time to think about it. My grandsons are thinking about college in the fall, not sure they want to spend time taking online courses, and surely it would be better for them, on the whole, to work in a carnival or fight fires or herd sheep, but I’m not sure those jobs are available. And should a grandfather suggest such things? Nonetheless, it’s true. My college education was mostly a waste, as I look back on it, though it seemed logical at the time. Seven years in the wrong harness.

Isolation due to pandemic is a great boon to thoughtfulness. You’re home, free of the usual routines, and for once in my life there’s plenty of time to think. I think this is good. At 7 p.m. last night, we went out on the terrace to join in the Upper West Side jubilee and stood there dinging and whooping and clapping and Jenny was overjoyed to see the Indian family (from India) on their terrace in a building a hundred yards west of us. They haven’t been seen for months and there they were, waving and whooping, the parents and grandma and the kids whom we’ve seen grow up to teenagerhood. She’s never met them, doesn’t know their names, but feels an attachment. Saw them once on the street and felt too shy to walk over and say, “Hi, we live just east of you and we’ve been observing you for ten years.” But there is nonetheless a social bond. As there is daily at 7 p.m. Some trumpets play from distant balconies, an undercurrent of applause, whooping and clanging and dinging, a daily statement of solidarity. “We’re still here.” Thank you, Lord, for Tuesday the 19th and let us enjoy it as we can.

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Some self-isolating thoughts about hair

Jenny cut my hair yesterday out on the balcony in the sun and she kept laughing as she did, which doesn’t instill confidence to hear your haircutter laugh, but at least the hair stays out of my eyes and the worst part (she says) is in back, and we’re in isolation so who cares, and at my age I’m not applying for a job, so it’s rather immaterial. If I wanted to do something wild with my hair, dye it deep purple with bright green stripes, now would be the time to do it, but I lack the motivation to be colorful. I’m a writer and an observer and you can’t see the world clearly if other people are staring at you: it’s see or be seen.

Hair was crucial in the 10th grade, 1958, when you had greasers like Trump and jocks with crewcuts and farmboys had shaggy hair and we cool guys aimed for an Ivy League look. My dad cut his sons’ hair and he was a carpenter and not so keen about fashion. I told him, “Short on top but with a part, a little longer in back.” Coolness was the point of it, blue button-down shirts, khaki pants, loafers, white socks, but now I have no clue about what’s cool, if anything is, and coolness is no longer a factor in my life. I’m old. The first section of the paper I turn to is the obituary section. People I know keep showing up there.

I went away to the U aiming to be a writer so I majored in English, not knowing how much I’d come to hate it. I wanted to be F. Scott Fitzgerald and my teachers were his mortician. The English Department was across the street from the Institute of Technology and we writers loved to look down on the engineers. They wore the wrong color shirts with plastic pocket protectors and high-water pants with belts hitched way up under their rib cage and half-rim horn-rimmed glasses and short nerdy hair whereas we had long majestic hair and we wrote dark incomprehensible poetry. If I ever felt miserable about having to write a paper about Dryden or Coleridge or Milton, I just crossed the street and mingled with engineers, their slide rules in a holster on their belt, a race of dullards without a single amazing and original thought, and it gave me the arrogance I was looking for.

I think of this now as I consider what engineers have given the world, such as this little gizmo the size of half a sandwich that is always near me, a telephone that is also a camera, encyclopedia, newspaper, calendar, compass, weather monitor, phone book, and twenty other things I’m not aware of. Quiet studious men from the world of numbers changed the world in some wonderful ways. Bill Gates does not appear to spend a great deal of time worrying about his hair. Mark Zuckerberg has hair like a skullcap. Facebook is my link to family and friends. The nerds who invented Google gave a great gift us old people who forgot what “postmodern” means and can’t remember the year Rod Carew set a record for stealing home base and Google will find it for you: he stole home seventeen times. Seven times in 1969 alone.

Nineteen sixty-nine was an enormous year in my life. I was 27 and had a baby boy and needed to get serious and instead of finishing a novel that nobody would want, I got a job in radio doing the early morning shift and I shifted from tragic self-awareness to humor because that’s what people needed on a dark winter morning and that was when I started to feel useful and that’s when you find your vocation. And hair has nothing to do with it.

I write this on a laptop hooked up to a printer with an instruction manual written by engineers for other engineers, people who whizzed through college courses that to me were a solid brick wall, so it’s unreadable for me. Imagine if all your cookbooks were in French and you had to call one of your few Francophones in order to make pancakes. But never mind. Thank you, Nerdland, for the laptop and the phone. I could live without them but it wouldn’t be nearly so much fun. I apologize for looking down on you for your bad hair.

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The News from Manhattan: Sunday, May 17, 2020

The virus is highly contagious

And for people of elderly ages,

It’s an object of dread

As we go to bed

And we pray, Dear Lord, do not page us:

I’m old and yet I’m

In need of more time,

Though I know about sin and its wages.

Have mercy, I pray,

And then it is day,

The coffee’s on. How advantageous.

Yesterday was bright and warm. Rain was forecast and didn’t fall. The finches are building a nest somewhere below us. At 7 p.m. the neighborhood erupted in cheers and applause and Jenny tells me I am a very good whooper. Hamburgers for supper on the balcony, a rare concession on her part. I love a vegan who can bend. A little mother/daughter verbal sparring from the kitchen and I realize that I find raised voices unbearable and I ask them to stop and they do. I grew up in a quiet household and went through two failed marriages that nonetheless ended quietly and now I’m in a peaceful and happy one. It’s just the way it should be. Maia is engrossed in a play she’s making with friends on Zoom and Jenny gets into intense phone conversations and I love being surrounded by engaged people. Today I send my novel THE WOBEGON VIRUS off to a reader and await her report, meanwhile I make a few last fixes on the memoir. The novel comes out this fall, the memoir this winter. Exciting. I’m a lucky man to still love working but I don’t expect luck to go on and on and the day will come when I devote myself entirely to indolence and admiring the ambitiousness of others. That’s the real reason to go to the opera, to see hundreds of highly trained people who worked hard for a dozen years to get here and now they’re at a fever pitch of concentration trying to attain a level of perfection that is impossible, and I sit in a seat and do absolutely nothing. My wife sits in the viola section, fully engaged for two hours, and all I do is clap now and then. My urge to perform on a stage diminishes by the day, thank God. Now and then, a tremor of ambition, but this is the great gift of the pandemic: it’ll let a whole generation of performers sit down and shut up and let a younger bunch have their day. My goal in life is to be a lazy old man and I am getting closer and closer to it. Maybe I’ll write a book about it, called Let’s Stay Home. Bless the day. Be good to each other.

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The News from Manhattan: Saturday, May 16, 2020

I must say I don’t mind this scourge

And I’m in no rush to emerge.

And sit in a crowd

And whoop and get plowed

And Sunday I wind up in church,

The minister talks

As I lie in a box

And the organ is playing a dirge.

A gorgeous Friday, almost 80, and maybe we’re leaping ahead to summer. The finch family seems to be settling on the balcony below ours though we offer plenty of cover, but parents are jittery, as we all know. When Maia was small, she had a febrile seizure and we dialed 911 and the EMTs were there in three minutes and sized up the situation and one of them explained to me that febrile seizure is common, but it wasn’t common to me, the sight of one’s rigid prostrate child stays with you for a long time. Her school has gone to great trouble to set up a good online learning program and she’s been a faithful student. Meanwhile, Jenny complains about forgetfulness, trying to make the old man feel better and I appreciate the effort but yesterday I had to work long and hard to recall the word “metafiction,” meaning a piece of fiction in which the author comments on the writing itself, abandoning the illusion of naturalism. I never did it before and think that, at 77, it’s time to venture into new territory. In the course of trying to find the word, I searched through an enormous glossary of literary terms and was stunned by how many I couldn’t define. I once taught a creative writing course but nobody would ever hire me for that now. It’s a good thing I’m retired because I am no longer qualified for employment.

It was sad but not surprising to hear that Tanglewood canceled its summer season. Prairie Home played there ever June for years, a paradise grassy slope where people sat on blankets going way back and Heather and I walked through the crowd during intermission and sang choruses in duet and everyone sang with us. Jenny loved it, having once played in a student orchestra under Bernstein’s direction, and his love of music was communicable and fervent and unforgettable. We stayed in the old inn in Stockbridge and often it was the last show of the season and the spirit of the crowd was powerful, their love of the place, a landmark in their lives. I’d give anything to do another show there, just to hear that crowd sing.

But one can ask only so much, and I have what I want: family, friends on the phone, the novel chugging along with metafiction intact and I’ve now written a daring passage in which God speaks to Clint Bunsen who had thought he was an atheist. Never had an atheist in Lake Wobegon before and I admire Clint for taking the leap. How do you know you believe unless you try out unbelief and see it if fits? Enter into his gates with thanksgiving and into his courts with praise and eat more vegetables and enjoy the sunshine.

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The News from Manhattan: Saturday, May 15, 2020

I must say I don’t mind this scourge

And I’m in no rush to emerge.

And sit in a crowd

And whoop and get plowed

And Sunday I wind up in church,

The minister talks

As I lie in a box

And the organ is playing a dirge.

A gorgeous Friday, almost 80, and maybe we’re leaping ahead to summer. The finch family seems to be settling on the balcony below ours though we offer plenty of cover, but parents are jittery, as we all know. When Maia was small, she had a febrile seizure and we dialed 911 and the EMTs were there in three minutes and sized up the situation and one of them explained to me that febrile seizure is common, but it wasn’t common to me, the sight of one’s rigid prostrate child stays with you for a long time. Her school has gone to great trouble to set up a good online learning program and she’s been a faithful student. Meanwhile, Jenny complains about forgetfulness, trying to make the old man feel better and I appreciate the effort but yesterday I had to work long and hard to recall the word “metafiction,” meaning a piece of fiction in which the author comments on the writing itself, abandoning the illusion of naturalism. I never did it before and think that, at 77, it’s time to venture into new territory. In the course of trying to find the word, I searched through an enormous glossary of literary terms and was stunned by how many I couldn’t define. I once taught a creative writing course but nobody would ever hire me for that now. It’s a good thing I’m retired because I am no longer qualified for employment.

It was sad but not surprising to hear that Tanglewood canceled its summer season. Prairie Home played there ever June for years, a paradise grassy slope where people sat on blankets going way back and Heather and I walked through the crowd during intermission and sang choruses in duet and everyone sang with us. Jenny loved it, having once played in a student orchestra under Bernstein’s direction, and his love of music was communicable and fervent and unforgettable. We stayed in the old inn in Stockbridge and often it was the last show of the season and the spirit of the crowd was powerful, their love of the place, a landmark in their lives. I’d give anything to do another show there, just to hear that crowd sing.

But one can ask only so much, and I have what I want: family, friends on the phone, the novel chugging along with metafiction intact and I’ve now written a daring passage in which God speaks to Clint Bunsen who had thought he was an atheist. Never had an atheist in Lake Wobegon before and I admire Clint for taking the leap. How do you know you believe unless you try out unbelief and see it if fits? Enter into his gates with thanksgiving and into his courts with praise and eat more vegetables and enjoy the sunshine.

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The News from Manhattan: Friday, May 15, 2020

I’m taking a break from the news.

It just puts a flame to the fuse.

Too much information.

Put aside aggravation.

Sing a song, give us something to use.

A sunny day Thursday, a good day to stand on the balcony and look out over the rooftops and the quiet streets and think about the world to come, the quiet life that awaits. We’re not going to be flying off to Portugal or London anytime soon. The clothes in our closet we’ll be wearing a year from now. I don’t think we’ll be going to a restaurant for a while. Young people are thinking they’ll skip fall classes rather than sit and watch lectures on a screen. When will we next go to a theater and watch people sing and dance onstage? Nobody knows.

What surprises me is how calm everyone is. Musicians who suddenly have no perceptible future choose not to anguish over it and talk about what they cooked last night instead. Human resilience. You see it everywhere. In Wisconsin, the political wars continue and the state Supreme Court opens the bars and people crowd in and to hell with the consequences, but according to polls, it’s a tiny minority that wants to defy science. The rest of us are settling into quieter lives. We’re heading back into the 1930s, which is where my parents came from, so I’m familiar with the thinking. They had rules that I, a teenager heading into the boom era, tried to ignore. One was, “Don’t think you’re better than other people because you’re not. So don’t say or do anything that might make other people think you think you’re better than they.” My generation flaunted itself and produced a whole string of performers who created a sensibility that you could buy into and be superior. The plague has brought that to a quick end. The plague is no respecter of persons. Talked to an old friend last night who acknowledged that she is seriously ill and who steered the conversation away from illness and onto familiar ground, the doings of mutual friends and their grandchildren, scenes of street life, recollections of happier days. She is my age and she sounded like my mother. Maybe we’re becoming our parents.

My mother canned vegetables and put up preserves, I put up prose in essays and books. I’m a worker, and I don’t say it pridefully, it’s just a fact. I try not to think back over a long career because I’ll only remember my failures and where does that lead? Nowhere. I look ahead to a day of working on a couple books and a play I’ve started after hearing from an actor who played a cowboy in a movie I wrote. Two cowboys riding the open prairie. I wrote two pages yesterday and it made me happy. The novel beckons, the memoir needs some revision. Jenny runs our lives and keeps things on an even keel, Maia had a painful argument with a good friend and an hour later she was on the phone laughing with someone else. Life is good. Forgive us, Lord, if we do not love it enough.

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The News from Manhattan: Friday, May 14, 2020

I’m taking a break from the news.

It just puts a flame to the fuse.

Too much information.

Put aside aggravation.

Sing a song, give us something to use.

A sunny day Thursday, a good day to stand on the balcony and look out over the rooftops and the quiet streets and think about the world to come, the quiet life that awaits. We’re not going to be flying off to Portugal or London anytime soon. The clothes in our closet we’ll be wearing a year from now. I don’t think we’ll be going to a restaurant for a while. Young people are thinking they’ll skip fall classes rather than sit and watch lectures on a screen. When will we next go to a theater and watch people sing and dance onstage? Nobody knows.

What surprises me is how calm everyone is. Musicians who suddenly have no perceptible future choose not to anguish over it and talk about what they cooked last night instead. Human resilience. You see it everywhere. In Wisconsin, the political wars continue and the state Supreme Court opens the bars and people crowd in and to hell with the consequences, but according to polls, it’s a tiny minority that wants to defy science. The rest of us are settling into quieter lives. We’re heading back into the 1930s, which is where my parents came from, so I’m familiar with the thinking. They had rules that I, a teenager heading into the boom era, tried to ignore. One was, “Don’t think you’re better than other people because you’re not. So don’t say or do anything that might make other people think you think you’re better than they.” My generation flaunted itself and produced a whole string of performers who created a sensibility that you could buy into and be superior. The plague has brought that to a quick end. The plague is no respecter of persons. Talked to an old friend last night who acknowledged that she is seriously ill and who steered the conversation away from illness and onto familiar ground, the doings of mutual friends and their grandchildren, scenes of street life, recollections of happier days. She is my age and she sounded like my mother. Maybe we’re becoming our parents.

My mother canned vegetables and put up preserves, I put up prose in essays and books. I’m a worker, and I don’t say it pridefully, it’s just a fact. I try not to think back over a long career because I’ll only remember my failures and where does that lead? Nowhere. I look ahead to a day of working on a couple books and a play I’ve started after hearing from an actor who played a cowboy in a movie I wrote. Two cowboys riding the open prairie. I wrote two pages yesterday and it made me happy. The novel beckons, the memoir needs some revision. Jenny runs our lives and keeps things on an even keel, Maia had a painful argument with a good friend and an hour later she was on the phone laughing with someone else. Life is good. Forgive us, Lord, if we do not love it enough.

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The News from Manhattan: Thursday, May 14, 2020

Isolation has gone well for us.

Stay home: what’s there to discuss?

It doesn’t hurt

To be introvert-

Ed, secretive, silent, mysterious.

There are two things in the kitchen too high for my wife to reach without standing on a chair, a bread pan and a big copper kettle, and she finds me wherever I am and says, “I need you.” It’s gratifying to be needed, even if my role is small. I do empty the dishwasher when I think of it and I am sometimes useful as a comforter and a conversational partner and now and then I make her laugh, a genuine laugh not a laugh of ridicule. But this is small potatoes to my need of her. She runs our lives and without her I’d be living in a small mobile home in the woods of northern Minnesota at the end of a long dirt road with “Keep Out” signs along it and an aggressive dog and be eating Spam and beans heated in a microwave. I come from a large taciturn family of apocalyptic Christians and so I have no social skills whatsoever. When I do Zoom chats I am always astonished when my face comes on the screen. It’s a face that belongs on a magazine article about depression or the post office wall under the word “WANTED” (which she makes me feel, but in a good way). So it isn’t troubling to find myself alone in the kitchen — isolation is my natural milieu. And then she walks in and the day begins.

Watched a Zoom comedy show last night put on by Flappers, a club in L.A. You buy a ticket online and click in and there’s the comedian working in her bedroom and she can hear the audience, laughter, heckling, applause, and it’s a whole new medium. You pay $14, the comedian earns some dough, and you get to sit at home in your pajamas and laugh. What’s the problem? There is none.

I did a Zoom chat with two poets who’ve written poems about the pandemic. It was good, if I say so myself, which I just did. No admission charge. I’ll do it again. The pleasure of conversation is very striking to a guy brought up taciturn. You start to think that other things —- ballet, opera, dining out — can wait, but what’s crucial is social contact and maybe when it resumes, we’ll look at it differently, be more grateful for it, take more chances. I might be convinced to tell the story of the girl who, when we were in the fifth grade, challenged me to wrestle, and I did and I was content to have her sit on top of me, and thus I learned that I was hetero. Wrestling with boys was sort of terrifying. Well, now I’ve gone and told it. I hope she’s okay wherever she is. In Morning Prayer today, we recited: “Enter his gates with thanksgiving; go into his courts with praise, give thanks to him and call upon his Name. For the Lord is good his mercy is everlasting; and his faithfulness endures from age to age.” Have a joyful day.

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The News from Manhattan: Thursday, May 13, 2020

Isolation has gone well for us.

Stay home: what’s there to discuss?

It doesn’t hurt

To be introvert-

Ed, secretive, silent, mysterious.

There are two things in the kitchen too high for my wife to reach without standing on a chair, a bread pan and a big copper kettle, and she finds me wherever I am and says, “I need you.” It’s gratifying to be needed, even if my role is small. I do empty the dishwasher when I think of it and I am sometimes useful as a comforter and a conversational partner and now and then I make her laugh, a genuine laugh not a laugh of ridicule. But this is small potatoes to my need of her. She runs our lives and without her I’d be living in a small mobile home in the woods of northern Minnesota at the end of a long dirt road with “Keep Out” signs along it and an aggressive dog and be eating Spam and beans heated in a microwave. I come from a large taciturn family of apocalyptic Christians and so I have no social skills whatsoever. When I do Zoom chats I am always astonished when my face comes on the screen. It’s a face that belongs on a magazine article about depression or the post office wall under the word “WANTED” (which she makes me feel, but in a good way). So it isn’t troubling to find myself alone in the kitchen — isolation is my natural milieu. And then she walks in and the day begins.

Watched a Zoom comedy show last night put on by Flappers, a club in L.A. You buy a ticket online and click in and there’s the comedian working in her bedroom and she can hear the audience, laughter, heckling, applause, and it’s a whole new medium. You pay $14, the comedian earns some dough, and you get to sit at home in your pajamas and laugh. What’s the problem? There is none.

I did a Zoom chat with two poets who’ve written poems about the pandemic. It was good, if I say so myself, which I just did. No admission charge. I’ll do it again. The pleasure of conversation is very striking to a guy brought up taciturn. You start to think that other things —- ballet, opera, dining out — can wait, but what’s crucial is social contact and maybe when it resumes, we’ll look at it differently, be more grateful for it, take more chances. I might be convinced to tell the story of the girl who, when we were in the fifth grade, challenged me to wrestle, and I did and I was content to have her sit on top of me, and thus I learned that I was hetero. Wrestling with boys was sort of terrifying. Well, now I’ve gone and told it. I hope she’s okay wherever she is. In Morning Prayer today, we recited: “Enter his gates with thanksgiving; go into his courts with praise, give thanks to him and call upon his Name. For the Lord is good his mercy is everlasting; and his faithfulness endures from age to age.” Have a joyful day.

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The News from Manhattan: Wednesday, May 13, 2020

How long will this corona stay?

I’m sleeping ten hours a day.

How long will I be

Writing limericks daily

When I don’t have much left to say?

It’s a useful time when people learn what keeps them going in stressful times. Family, conversation, books, jigsaw puzzles, work — life is reduced to basics and you get a new view of your own life, uncluttered. Conservatives have been campaigning against a powerful federal government for decades, and now they’ve found the perfect way to prove their case: elect a world-class fool to the presidency. His comments yesterday were the stupidest of any president in my lifetime. The emperor is naked and the country will get through this by individual enterprise and ingenuity and leadership on the state level, which is what conservatives have been saying for years. The White House is a joke and the reporters in the briefing room may as well be writing about squirrels in the park.

I come from anxious people and quarantine offers a life without anxiety. I am not going to die from this and be buried wrapped in plastic and instead of pallbearers, a fork lift. It isn’t going to happen that way. I’m married to a fabulous woman and I have a happy daughter who falls apart laughing when she catches me out on the balcony and throws a glass of water at me. I assumed I’d get a dark neurotic daughter who writes angry incomprehensible poems and instead I get one who screams with laughter when her dad has wet pants. I’m writing a funny novel and it’s going to come out in September because my people found a daring publisher who wants to take me on and maybe do the memoir too. My friend George read the first fifteen pages of the memoir and gave me the first glowing compliment he’s ever given. The man is from Schenectady, a very rough town where kids learn to curse by the age of five, and he is an agnostic and he is 85 and has seen everything and is not easily impressed, but he told me over the phone that he loves me. I was shocked and had to go lie down. If a Schenectadian is willing to express same-sex affection, either he is on powerful medication or you’ve done something worthwhile. A happy day to you. Spring is on the way.

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