Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 60

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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The News from Manhattan: Wednesday, May 12, 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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A few words while I wait for her to come in

I married a perfectionist and am glad for it especially during this pandemonium or pandora or veranda or whatever it is we’re going through these days, even my dream life is clearer, more detailed than in normal times, which now are only a memory, those evenings when we ate dinner in a crowded restaurant and sat in the tenth row of a theater and packed into a crowded train to go home.

She is a violinist, dedicated since her teen years to perfection, practicing many hours a day so that she could play in a string section and not stand out as an individual. I am a struggling writer for whom individual identity is crucial. She sat in an orchestra wearing black like all the others, suppressing the urge to wear a tiara with flashing red and green pulsating lights. I sat in a café, in a red T-shirt, corduroy jacket, jeans, boots, smoking a Gauloise, a Panama hat on the table, writing on a yellow legal pad, something original. It was a café (actually a cafeteria) patronized by engineering students and I was the only Gauloise/Panama person there. The others lived in a world of correct answers and I lived in a forest of wild surmise.

Had I not married the violinist, I’d be in a hospital, trying to breathe, having refused to self-isolate because I hate the term, I prefer the term “drift.” But thanks to her attention to detail, we live with our daughter in a clean apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and haven’t ventured outdoors, except to step out on the balcony, for two months. She is more sociable than I — most musicians are, having a common exclusive language — and so she misses the street life more than I do, but she studied up on the situation — a strange and dangerous contagion, an elderly and careless husband — and saw what needed to be done. And so I find myself in a quiet room with an empty schedule, an ideal life for a writer.

If I taught Creative Writing now, I wouldn’t be encouraging wild originality, I’d be teaching people to keep an orderly house and a spotless kitchen, hang up your clothes, and defend against interruption. A cluttered desk is a prison cell; a life of confusion is a dungeon.

The argument these days between Opening the Doors and Maintaining Quarantine is the argument between ignorance and knowledge and ordinarily I’d go with ignorance but I have a manager who is in for the long haul. She misses her work, playing in a pit, two feet away from two other players, a soprano and a tenor onstage singing Puccini passionately and projecting thousands of saliva droplets with every fricative, but she knows that people shouldn’t die from opera, only in it, so life is rearranged.

And so, when she wakes up in the morning and appears in the doorway of my quiet room, I hold out my arms and she sits on my lap and puts her head on my shoulder. We live day by day. All the big bets are off. The calendar is empty. The canvas chairs on the balcony that I was always too busy to sit in now have occupants. I look at the planter with the herbs my violinist has planted, an orchestra of mint and marjoram, cilantro, basil and rosemary, who will wind up in a stir-fry or what we in Minnesota used to call “hotdish” before we went to college. It’s the middle of May, a chilly spring, you can count the warm days on your left hand. But if the sun shines, even the low 50s are good enough.

Old man in a black winter coat looking out on the rooftops of New York, and a slim blond with violin scars on her jaw, and we talk about the boxes of useless unused stuff in closets that should be dealt with, and it brings to mind a fit of shelf-clearing years ago, an old unread book I opened and found, pressed between the leaves, a piece of yellowed handstitching: “Elizabeth Crandall is my name And America is my nation. Providence is my home And Christ is my salvation When I am dead and in my grave and all my bones are rotten, if this you see, remember me, when I am quite forgotten. 1845.” A fellow writer, long gone, and the thought isn’t original but the stitching is perfect. The perfection is stunning.

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The News from Manhattan: Monday, May 11, 2020

The quarantine goes at a crawl

And I miss eating out and baseball

But life is fine

As we sing “Ninety-nine

Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”

A peaceful day Sunday, almost warm. Maia got fancied up and Jenny took a video of her dancing with me and making a grand entrance in a ball gown. No Prom this year so a teacher is making a Prom video. The girl is busy on Facetime rehearsing a play with her friends. My novel has been printed out so I can make pencil corrections. I believe I’ll make my deadline in two weeks. Today we give up our semi-vegan diet— what’s the point? — and cook a pot roast. Life is good with spring on the way. People are dying but friends on the phone are very funny, almost giddy. Maybe we’re going batty. Back in my 50s I was more anxious about life and following the warnings. “Do not touch when hot.” “Sharp: may cut skin if pressure is applied. “Open with an extreme sense of foreboding.” Fearsome books about worst-case scenarios. Every week some ordinary thing was found to have bad consequences. You Google “may be fatal” and it finds 23,457,863 sites in .85 of a second, including stoop tag and Girl Scout cookies. You do a search on “therapy” and find Wounded Sons of Emotionally Distant Fathers and Anger Anonymous, for parents who have yelled at their children and Men Coming to Terms with Their Urge To Exercise Regularly.

A person is tempted to be troubled, depressed, consider the worst, and yet the quarantine feels rather restful, like the Fifties. I come from fundamentalist people who taught me to avoid the things of this world, movies, card games, drink, dancing, worldly pleasures, worldly talk. We were quarantining ourselves years ago and nobody noticed it. The habit sticks with you. I want to do wicked things but I don’t have the aptitude. This makes me think that after the lockdown ends, it will keep on keeping on. Tonight we’ll have pot roast, which Jenny hasn’t fixed in ages and my mother served every Sunday. For amusement, I do what I’ve done since I was 13 — I make up stories. Solomon said, “That which has been is that which shall be. There is nothing new under the sun.” I get a lot of pleasure out of talking on the telephone to people I’ve known for ages. We do this out of civic duty but maybe I’m entering a graceful old age and maybe I’ll go straight from the quarantine to the Home for Aged Radio Hosts. Back to the novel now. Improve the day.

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