Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 64

An old man’s Sunday morning annotated

“Shout out, do not hold back! Lift up your voice like a trumpet!” said the prophet Isaiah, which we read in church on Sunday, but nobody shouted. We are flatlanders, brought up to be still and behave ourselves and listen to instructions, but if the instruction is to shout out and raise your voice, wait to see if other people do it and then, depending on which ones do, maybe do it yourself but quietly. And we are Episcopalian so what would we shout? A poem by Mary Oliver? A recipe for bouillabaisse?

I would shout, “God help us and do it soon.” I was provoked last week to wonder where I would go if Democrats hand over the White House and the Current Occupant remains for sixteen or twenty years until he’s in his mid-thirties and I thought, “Iceland.” England is an obvious choice but I don’t understand Brits when they talk and Icelanders speak beautiful English. I was in Reykjavik once, driving around, lost, and saw a large white home by the sea and walked up and knocked on the door and it was opened by the president of Iceland. It was his home. He told me how to get back to my hotel. He spoke perfect English, of course. Imagine knocking on the door of a white house and it’s opened by the C.O. The thought is depressing, not to mention his English.

But the Sunday service moved on to the confession of sins and I thought of my unfair bias against pop music of the past thirty years and the replacement of melody and harmony with rapping and tapping and my shameful bias against people with tattoos. This is wrong of me to dismiss my fellow creatures just because, on a crazy impulse years ago, they had enormous orange flames inscribed on their left shoulder. Or the young woman I saw in the grocery last week with green leaves tattooed on her neck. Just because she imagined herself as a trellis is no reason to look down on her. Someday I may be in a vegetative state myself and I hope people are no less kind for that.

I confessed this to Almighty God to Whom all desires are known and from Whom no secrets are hid, including my envy of a friend who lives in a majestic house with umber tile floors and rattan carpets atop a hill overlooking the blue Pacific, which he earned by cranking out mindless TV shows in which unattractive people snarl at each other to the accompaniment of a laugh track, which enables him to jet down to Brazil and hike into the rain forest and have more fun than I do and so I entertain hopes that he will fall off a ledge into a slough and be bitten by poisonous fish and catch a rare fish-transmitted disease that leaves the victim feeling lethargic and stupefied and for which the only cure seems to be fasting, chastity, and immersion in cold water. I imagine visiting him to express my insincere sympathy. I confessed the sin of envy but as you can see it is a continuing problem.

On my way home I remembered more sins, including a loathing of braggarts who cannot bring themselves to ever admit being wrong and a strong intolerance of ducktails on older men. I know of a man who is very committed to maintaining the swoop of hair with distinct comb tracks behind each ear, touching them up every fifteen minutes or so even though he is allegedly fully employed. I knew boys in high school sixty years ago who were dedicated to their hair but the habit tends to fade as one acquires children, wives, debts, etc. Barack Obama has zero-maintenance hair, unimpeachably so. Nobody imagines him spending time doing his makeup and sculpting his hair. The gentleman in question is also the biggest braggart in the history of America. When you hear him spout off about his perfections and you see the duck marks on his head, there is a cognitive dissonance like the sound of a stack of china dropped on a concrete floor.

Be that as it shall be, I am thinking that Iceland may be worth a look. My people left Yorkshire in 1774 and came here and it’s been good but eventually things run their course. Next Sunday in church I will say a prayer for the man and for his hair. I think baldness would be good. He is bald-faced so why not the top too?

The post An old man’s Sunday morning annotated appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

The light bulb is out and needs changing

I flew into New York last week, descending over the East River onto LaGuardia, and outside Baggage Claim I was surprised to find men and women in official yellow vests guiding us tourists toward the taxi stand, helping with luggage, saying, “Welcome to New York” and “Thanks for using LaGuardia” and “Enjoy the city.” This is not the New York that we Minnesotans expect to find, but thank goodness the cabdrivers are still genuine New York cabdrivers, surly, scrappy, contemptuous of the stupidity all around them.

In Minneapolis, the cabdriver who drove me to the airport told me, without prompting, about his brief career as a guitarist in a band, his failed marriage, the difficulty of getting back to music. Call me a cynic but it struck me as a plea for a big tip, which I, a Minnesotan, duly gave him. In New York, no cabdriver would take that tack. He is a fighter who will get you from the airport to the Upper West Side five minutes faster than anyone else could.

New York is a good place to visit when you feel the country is falling apart. On the island of Manhattan, high-rises keep rising, water mains break, rush hour is crazy, you can’t help but feel the fragility of the complexity of the place and yet people cope. They cram into subway cars and find privacy in a book or a pair of headphones. I sat next to a woman once who, I swear, was listening to Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” while looking at a solid wall of people’s legs and rear ends. Everywhere, you see the resilience of the human spirit.

The country is splintering, farmers going broke, government stewardship of the planet is a dead issue, the Arctic is melting, we’ve come to accept dishonesty in high places, and in January we watched the cruel punishment of Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr., chained to a chair and forced to listen to the Senate’s impeachment trial, like making Wynton Marsalis listen to one hundred hours of air horns. But the president won a big victory, just as the state of Kansas did in the Super Bowl, and now we move on to other matters, such as socialism: what percentage of American voters consider themselves socialist? Five? Eight? Three?

My phone rang in the cab. It was a friend I’d recently been miffed with. She said, “My kid told me a joke and I thought of you. Knock, knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Amish.”

“Amish who?”

“That’s funny, you don’t look like a shoe.”

It was the first knock-knock joke I’d heard in years: I don’t know many nine-year-olds. I am a mature American male, a tax-paying Episcopalian, and this joke kills me. It made me forget whatever it was I was miffed at her about. This is the beauty of jokes: if they’re funny, they erase bad feeling. “Why don’t Amish water-ski?” I ask. “Because it’s so hard on the horses.” She groans but she is amused.

I’m sad that the lightbulb joke has vanished in America, it was clever, often funny, but it made fun of categories of people and this was seen as offensive. How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb? (One but the lightbulb has to want to change.) Irishmen. (One to hold the bulb, nine to drink until the room spins.) Jewish mothers. (None. I’ll just sit in the dark and suffer.) Episcopalians. (None, we have candles.) Amish. (What light bulb?) Germans. (Nein.) Comedians. (This is not a joke, it’s a question.)

Trump is the first president in my lifetime who’s incapable of telling a joke, a remarkable thing about him, plus his inability to smile. When he refers to dissident Republicans as “human scum” and African countries as toilets, he’s not kidding. This is old-fashioned New York street talk. Trump is New York through and through, elected by Midwesterners who were charmed to find out that someone could talk like that and run for public office. They decided we needed an abusive leader. Meanwhile, the yellow vests at LaGuardia who said “Welcome to New York” were under strict orders from a powerful boss who can fire them in five seconds: this was not voluntary, trust me. I liked our cabdriver. He didn’t tell us about his problems, he just got us where we were going. Meanwhile, the big news is that Melania has put Trump on a diet so he loses five pounds a week. In a year, we’ll be rid of him entirely.

 

The post The light bulb is out and needs changing appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

What goes on in Minneapolis on a winter night

I drove to the grocery the other night and there, near checkout, saw a freezer case with the sign, “Artisan Ice Cubes,” a bold new step in our march toward Preposterosity. I asked the checkout guy if maybe the sign meant to say “Artesian” and he wasn’t interested. Word usage is not his responsibility. To me, artisanal ice is in the same category as organic non-GMO ice cubes. I’m a Minnesotan and I appreciate the beauty of frost and snow but an ice cube is an ice cube.

I drove home and saw a man and a woman alone together on a neighborhood ice rink, skating as a pair, side by side, arms crossed, and I slowed down to watch. He swung in front of her and turned, skating backward, holding her by one hand as she lifted her back leg and struck a pose, then they turned in a wide arc, paired up again, and did a figure eight. They were in their sixties, no longer sylphlike, and this public display of artisanal skating was very romantic. Made me think of bell-bottoms in the Seventies and Elvis’s muttonchops.

This is the spirit that draws people to the opera. We live in the Age of Numb Disbelief, but the opera is one place where the heart speaks and passion rules and Aida descends into the tomb with her lover, who has been sentenced to death; she cannot live without him so she must perish with him. Meanwhile, they sing a gorgeous long duet that if you leave early to avoid traffic, you are missing the whole point.

I come from a family of Calvinists, my wife from a family of violinists. Twenty-five years ago, she and I were living together while my divorce went through and I brought her out to Minnesota to meet my elderly parents, I the scapegrace son bringing my illicit lover, and she, whose family are huggers, walked up to my mother and threw her arms around her neck and held her close and then did the same to my father, and that was that, they loved her from that moment on. Rational discussion wouldn’t have accomplished what she did with her own warm heart. When I came home from the artisanal ice cubes, she did something similar to me and, old as I am and slow afoot, it was thrilling. The full frontal embrace of the woman you love — let’s face it — can make a man forget about Ukraine and obstruction of justice.

The impeachment of Bill Clinton was so much more appealing than what we’re seeing now. It involved temptations of the flesh and who hasn’t been there? What we have here is a drug deal. A bundle of cash for a load of OxyContin. The Clinton impeachment had possibilities as a movie musical. This one? I don’t think so.

So when I got home (where we have our own ice cube maker, which is purely mechanical, not artisanal) and the woman embraced me and held on, it put the U.S. Senate entirely out of mind and made me want to go get my skates (which I do not have) and take her to an ice rink and do some figures in the dark. I’m a Minnesotan. Wrestling with girls in the snow was my earliest erotic experience. I was nine and “erotic” was not in my vocabulary but I knew that I was tangling with a mystery that would only get more and more interesting.

This is where the word “artisan” truly belongs, with matters of the heart, not with solid water. Every romantic engagement is a work of art and craft, especially a long and happy marriage. We walk into a room to find the other and we gracefully engage. The verbal back-and-forth has a cadence and music that is unique to us. We have our private laugh lines. I stand behind her as she makes a salad and put my hands on her shoulders, my two thumbs pressing on either side of her spine, and she says, “Lower,” and sighs with pleasure. I tell her about the artisan ice cubes at the grocery and it’s of no interest to her, she is engaged with her lover’s hands on her back. I’m an old man but I am an artisan when it comes to her shoulders. Now my job is to convince her to fly away with me to England in April when daisies pied and violets blue paint the meadows with delight. I could use a delightful meadow at this point.

The post What goes on in Minneapolis on a winter night appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Some New York thoughts on solitude

I stood around looking at J.D. Salinger stuff last Friday, his old black Royal typewriter, family snapshots, and typewritten letters, at the New York Public Library, and it was a wonder to see. I’m one of the many millions for whom The Catcher in the Rye was an important book back in my teens and back then, Salinger was famous for guarding his privacy. He didn’t do interviews, was never on TV, and so was portrayed in the press as a crank, an anti-social weirdo. It’s clear from the exhibit that he was not.

He seems quite content, raising his vegetables, writing beautiful letters to his son, Matthew, studying in France, writing to an Army buddy with whom he shared a jeep during the Battle of the Bulge, writing at length to a 14-year-old reader named Laura in Huntington, WV. She had not included a return address and Salinger called Information in Huntington and got it. I speak for all his readers when I say I’m glad we were wrong about him. He was a sweet and happy man.

It did occur to me that Cornish, NH, was not a good place to live if you wanted anonymity. Reporters went to the town, talked to Salinger’s neighbors, his mailman, tried to dredge up tales about him, but if he’d stayed in New York, he’d have been better off. Anonymity is New York’s gift to us all.

I was in the library to sit in the magnificent Rose Reading Room, one of my favorite rooms in America, where a writer can sit and work at a long table under a magnificent high ceiling, in the company of a couple hundred others, most of them younger, working on Lord knows what. I’m working on a memoir, Lord knows why. Nobody bothers you there. I work until the library closes at 5:45 and make my way east on 42nd Street to Grand Central Station and down the ramp to the Oyster Bar and get a little red-checked table in the corner and order five bluepoints and coleslaw and broiled sea bass. Solitary supper, reading the paper, a great luxury.

I walk through the throng and remember when I came here with my dad in 1953. I was 11, a Minnesota kid on my first trip to the big city. I wandered away from him and it scared him, the thought that I might get lost, and he ran and grabbed my hand, and I still remember the feeling I got — that my dad loved me. He’d never say it, of course, but he did. I remember him as I walk through the station and head downstairs to the Times Square shuttle to take me to the uptown C train.

Dad was a train man and New York is a city of trains. Without the vast network of underground lines, the city would die. I like the company of New Yorkers on trains, their keen awareness of surroundings, their remarkable politeness. Once on the uptown One, I met a young guy from Texas who’d been at the same piano recital I’d been at and heard a Philip Glass sonata that sounded unGlass-like, melodic, more like Richard Strauss. We discussed that for a mile and he got off. The subway, the Rose Reading Room, the Oyster Bar — citadels of solitude. Salinger could’ve been quite happy here. I once saw Philip Roth walking in Central Park and nobody bothered him. He looked at me, I nodded, he nodded back. Who needs more?

I went to the ER once, about a year ago. My right knee hurt so that I could hardly put weight on it. I took a cab to Mt. Sinai St. Luke’s on 114th. I took a number and waited. The ER was crowded with anonymous people, most of them in worse shape than I. Three hours later, I was X-rayed and after a short wait, a doctor told me nothing was broken, I was okay to go. She was kind, thoughtful, friendly, and I looked at her name tag and decided to invade her privacy. I asked her to pronounce her name, she did, and I wrote:

The ER doc Elise Levine

Is dealing with chaos just fine;

Your calm expertise

And kindness, Elise,

Bring the Upper West Side some sunshine

In the shadow of St. John Divine.

Nobody had written a poem for her before, she said. She was touched. I thanked her and walked home. The beauty of solitude is that it makes each encounter so memorable. Dr. Levine, the music student from Texas, my dad taking my hand.

The post Some New York thoughts on solitude appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

The art of love in the far North

Winter is a thoughtful time. Snow falls in the trees and my natural meanness dissipates and the urge to bash my enemies’ mailboxes with a baseball bat. I put fresh strawberries on the cornflakes and taste the sweetness of life. I speak gently to the lady across the table. Marriage is the truest test — to make a good life with your best-informed critic, and thanks to her excellent comedic timing, we have a good life. My third marriage and this year we ding the silver bell of twenty-five years.

America is the land of second and third chances, not like Europe. We have remedial colleges for kids who slept through high school. In Europe, the system is geared toward efficiency: it separates kids by age 12 into Advanced, Mediocre, and Food Service Workers, and once they assign you to a lane, it’s hard to get out of it. In this country, if our children are lazy and undisciplined, we try to see signs of artistic ability. We put them in a fine arts  program. They spend three years writing weird stuff and get an MFA and you drive through McDonald’s and the young people fixing the Egg McMuffins are poets and songwriters.

It’s a land of high hopes, thanks to the Atlantic and Pacific that serve to isolate us from reality. Our ancestors were happy to escape the zeal of revolutionaries and the madness of despots and come to America and work like draft horses, hoping their children and grandchildren would have an easier time of it. And we do. Fifty years ago, when we referred to “homosexuals,” it sounded like people suffering from a condition that required treatment, but when “gay” became common usage, it changed everything. How can you be opposed to happiness?

For an old man, there aren’t many second chances, but we still hope for them. I miss my youth, the buzzin’ of the bees in the cigarette trees near the lemonade springs where the bluebird sings, and now the bee population is down, the smokes are gone, lemonade contains dangerous additives, and when did you last see a bluebird? In my youth, men worked on their cars, changed the oil and the spark plugs, replaced the fan belt, and other men gathered, squatted around the car, and talked about manly things. The driveway was their territory. This is all gone now. Cars can’t be repaired by ordinary people with ordinary tools. Men have been forced into the living room, which belongs to women. They say, “Take your shoes off” and you have to do it.

The country is falling apart. There are new food allergies every week so we can’t have dinner parties anymore unless we limit the menu to locally sourced artisanal lentils. And people who come for dinner spend the first half hour talking about how long it took to get here — rush hour is horrendous, three and four hours, so people email and text behind the wheel, even shave, and do makeup, change a shirt, put on a tie, nobody dares tailgate because they’re steering with their knees so traffic moves even more slowly. Online medical education means someday we’ll go in for a tonsillectomy and come out missing our left lung. The Boeing debacle means we can only ride Airbuses now, planes designed by engineers who eat mussels and wear silk scarves. And Washington — Mr. Trump wouldn’t have been a capable water commissioner in a midsize city but here he is, running foreign policy based on phone conversations with Tucker Carlson. Republican politics is based on the imminence of the Second Coming: if Jesus doesn’t descend within three years and take the Republicans to heaven, they are going to be in very deep waste materials.

But hope remains. People still fall in love. I know millennials who are crazy about each other and don’t try to hide it. The country is on the skids but still I see people going to the trouble of seducing each other. In Minnesota, this is done by owning a snowblower and going to the home of the person you adore and blowing the snow, and if he or she (or they or we or those) is receptive, they will invite you in for a bowl of homemade chili. I don’t know what Californians do but in the north, it’s very simple. Snowblowing followed by chili. Chili with ground beef or chicken in it. What the heck — take the risk. Veganism can wait until after marriage.

The post The art of love in the far North appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Man of the North finds bliss, becomes incoherent

My family and I are at a swimming pool under the palm trees behind a pink stucco 1929 hotel in San Diego, my wife reading a memoir, my daughter swimming laps of alternate crawl and butterfly, and I am trying to think of what one can say about blissfulness other than that, for a Minnesotan brought up on the principle of “It could be worse,” blissfulness comes as a major surprise, like weightlessness. The hotel looks out on the Pacific, a beach where sea lions fraternize and waves crash on the rocks. As I ate my oatmeal on the balcony this morning, a seagull landed on the railing and cocked his eye at the raisins on the cereal so I tossed him one and he caught it. This almost never happens back on the frozen tundra where nature makes serious attempts to kill us. In paradise, it’s Live and Let Live.

My family was evangelical and believed in the imminence of the Rapture when the Lord would appear in the air and we would rise to meet Him and ascend into glory, but we were simple Midwestern people and had no clear idea of glory. It certainly didn’t resemble Anoka, Minnesota. We knew that much.

When I was a kid some relatives moved to California and sent a Christmas card with a picture of an orange tree in their backyard and we didn’t understand how they could bear to live so far from us. They visited us in June, in their pastel outfits, driving cars with enormous tail fins, Lutherans who’d become Universalists and then Theosophists and (who knows?) maybe nudists and meanwhile we endured the cold, the flatness, the oceanlessness, the angry theology, the merciless scrutiny of neighbors, and they sat in San Diego feeling wonderful. I felt contempt for them and looked on snowbirding as weakness of character and the first sign of dementia, but here I sit, under a white canopy, feeling happy.

What I like is that it’s my wife who lobbied for a California winter break and it’s she who chose this perfect hotel. It’s all her doing. She knows it and I know it. I like the feeling of being well cared for. I was the boss of a business for a while and it’s nice to have the big office with the walnut credenza but then you realize that you are the focal point of everyone’s unhappiness, their bouts of depression and boredom and back pain are due to you, Mister Big, and you retire and accept the plaque and then comes this beautiful surprise: your wife loves you and wants you to be blissful.

Blissfulness is a simple matter for a Northerner. You go to a place where you can eat lunch outdoors in January and that does it. The shock of pleasure drives other stuff from your mind — the federal deficit, the Ayatollah’s plans for revenge, the Iowa caucuses, the immolation of eastern Australia — and you sit and write a poem. Not a great poem — those are written by tortured pre-suicidal people — but for one written by a blissful guy, it’s okay.

Oh if you could only see us

Eating fresh tortillas

With salsa and guacamole,

Feeling blissful, even holy,

Here on the patio,

Stunned by the absence of snow,

The sun is out, the patio is crowded.

It is paradise no doubt about it.

Whoever we are, Lutherans, Catholics, Presbyterians,

We are sharing a paradise experience.

Blissful now but eventually hapless:

Thursday I return to Minneapolis.

The sky is bluish blue. A waiter stands ready to bring me a drink, but a glass of wine would be too much, push me right over the edge, I’d start singing “What A Wonderful World,” people would edge away. We’re twenty minutes from Mexico, the carnitas burrito I had for lunch was the best ever and the guacamole too, we’re surrounded by Latino courtliness and affability, my daughter’s butterfly is excellent, my wife loves that I am, thanks to her, so happy.

I sit here, under my canopy, blissing out, and as a true Minnesotan, I suspect that joy goeth before a fall and that a cerebral event is a few hours away, one so extraordinarily unique that it will be named for me, and after my fifty years as a hardworking writer, my name will come to stand for numbness and memory loss. It’s okay. God bless you all. Carry on the work you were put here to do. Some January, sit by a pool in the sunshine but don’t feel you need to write about it, I already did.

The post Man of the North finds bliss, becomes incoherent appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Wave your arms, kick your feet, do the 2020

I don’t do New Year’s Eve anymore because the parties never were that much fun and we wound up trapped in corners in the usual intense conversations (kids, schools, political lunacy), and some people drank too much and forced the rest of us into a guardianship role and the sheer awkwardness of telling an old drunk to let his wife drive him home, and so the party ended with us wondering: why do we not know how to have a good time? White liberal guilt? The inbred gloom of northern people? Too many books one has read and is eager to quote? Lack of dancing skills?

The correct answer is No. 4, the inability to dance gracefully with a partner. Jitterbugging and fox-trotting and waltzing were slighted in our curricula in favor of math and science, and how many people can whoop it up with algebraic geometry or number theory? So the party drags and guests wander from room to room with plates of raw vegetables and hummus, glancing at their cellphones, wishing they were elsewhere. No doubt about it, dancing is the key to a good time and the great dance tunes of our youth, like “Brown Sugar” and “Brown-Eyed Girl” when we used to sing, “Sha la la la la la la la la la la te da” led to some fine solo shimmying but that was long ago and we were twistier then. Past the age of 40, you feel self-conscious slipping and sliding alone, whereas when the band strikes up “I Saw Her Standing There” and two jitterbuggers make eye contact and hit the floor for the step-and-hop-and-step-and-hop and quick quick and dip and kick, you’ve got two people having a big time, no gin needed. I’ve seen people polka to “Purple Rain” and look good doing it.

In my high school years, phys-ed class included a few weeks of ballroom dancing but we were too young to appreciate it. The waltz and fox-trot were old dances and we favored the twist. But the twist faded like snow in April while the classics prevailed and there are, you must admit, few things so simply transformative as slipping into the arms of another — your wife, your mother-in-law, the cleaning lady — and moving gracefully in conjunction. It dispels gloom and redeems you from show-offy self-righteous conversation, which is what four-fifths of all conversation is about. Just shut up and be beautiful, swing and sway and smile at your partner, and bow and say, “Thank you.”

The problem, as it so often is, is individualism. If everyone at the party could jitterbug adequately, the party would take off for the moon, but my generation resisted universality, thinking it was regimentation, and opted for uniqueness, which doesn’t exist, as you find out around the age of 40. Being Yourself is a dead end. Every rat who sees the cheese on the little metal flange with the fancy wirework around it thinks he is the first rat ever to come upon such a treasure. It’s a waste of a perfectly good rat.

Someday before I leave the earth, I want to throw a party that people remember with pleasure long afterward. No need for a extended eulogy at the funeral, just stand and say, “Remember his birthday two years ago?” and sing, “You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain, too much love drives a man insane” and everyone jumps up and dances, arms in the air. David danced and leaped before the Lord, willing to look foolish in his praise, and why shouldn’t we? There is a mysterious chemical link between dancing and hopefulness. Jump up and down and swing your arms for a while and you’ll discover it.

I am hopeful about 2020, no need to brood over the past. I’m old and have more regrets than Amazon has fulfillment centers. So what? It’s a New Year, one named for clear vision, and after all the hogwash and chicanery, America is ready to embrace common sense. When the LFW (Leader of the Free World) takes TV shills as top advisors, you know it’s time for new furniture. No need to wear a button on the lapel, but in November, we will vote for someone who doesn’t insult us ten times before breakfast and then we’ll grab each other and dance. Sha la la la la la la la la la lah de dah. You read it here first.

The post Wave your arms, kick your feet, do the 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Suddenly, once again, good Lord, it’s Christmas

Coming through airports this week it struck me how kind everyone was, ticket agents, TSA people, cab starters, and then light dawned: it’s Christmas. Charles Dickens had a big impact on the world and so did Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart, not to mention St. Luke. I stood in a long winding line in LaGuardia and sensed no impatience; the TSA guy even smiled and asked how I was. And when I lost my ticket in Atlanta, I walked to Gate T7 and asked an agent and she made me a new one, no problem.

“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” said Blanche DuBois, and when I add to that the kindness of aunts and schoolteachers and the four men, Warren, Barry, Marvin, and Bill, who hired me despite lack of qualifications, then I feel I’ve had a Christmas of a life and if the plane from Atlanta had been struck by a giant meteor, nobody should grieve for me. But we landed and my bag arrived and when I told the security man at Baggage Claim that I’d lost my claim check, he shrugged and waved me through.

And so we Christians needn’t feel sheepish about the shepherds and angels. The day is a lavish gift, even if it comes with some wretched songs, the one about the rum-pum-pum-pum for one and others involving bells jingling that make you want to sue the radio stations. The beauty of the day is its story, however one chooses to read it.

It all happened back in zero A.D.

Two folks in trouble due to pregnancy.

She lay him in the manger

And she wanted to lie down

But shepherds and wise men

Gathered around.

A few slices of bread

Would’ve pleased her

But they only brought spices,

Frankincense and myrrh.

They stood around singing,

These clueless men.

She thought, I’m never gonna do

Another virgin birth again.

Skip the adoring, be astute.

Bring some chocolate and a basket of fruit.

Thirty years ago I was the guest speaker at a Sons of Norway Christmas lutefisk dinner in Minneapolis and so was obliged to eat some, a pale gelatinous slab of former fish that looks like jellified phlegm and tastes like your mouth washed out with Hi-lex, but you eat a slice of rye bread, which acts as a plug to keep it down, and chase it with a shot of aquavit, which kills the taste. I did it because I wanted to make a good impression, but I don’t care what people think anymore, which is the beautiful part of getting old. You have the luxury of editing, dialing everything back, turning down the volume, eliminating the excess. And you discover that less truly is more.

You discover that you can sit in a quiet room and look at a small tree hung with white lights and the Ghost of Christmas Past will bring scene after scene, the wretched lutefisk but also the backyard skating rink and snow descending in the dark, Mother at the piano, the smell of gingerbread coming out of the oven, the games of Rook and Flinch and Pit, the dining table with all the extra leaves in it and Aunt Elsie and Uncle Don and Donnie and Bruce, and Mother slicing the bird even as she quietly disparages her own cooking, and the fabulous gift of a model gas station with crank-operated hoist and gas pumps, so perfect it’s a wonder I didn’t take up auto mechanics as a career.

All I need for Christmas is Christmas Eve in church, holding a candle, singing “Silent Night” a cappella in the dark with the others, walking home through the city, and waking up in the morning with my wife and daughter. Three gifts apiece, one useful, one odd but interesting, one ridiculous. Dinner is nice. We can make it at home or if we go out for a McTurkey sandwich, that’s okay too. Then we get out the board games. A pot of Christmas tea. Nothing more is needed.

Thank you, stranger, for your kindness. Stay warm, keep a candle in the window, be cheered by the visiting spirits, and enjoy your tea. All is calm, all is bright, shepherds quake at the sight.

The post Suddenly, once again, good Lord, it’s Christmas appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Thoughts from the back row of the memorial

I learned a new word last week: “anonymized.” It means just what it says, “made anonymous,” and was used in reference to government reports obtained by the Washington Post that contained truthful revelations about our 18-year war in Afghanistan that the government was lying to the American people about while spending a trillion dollars to achieve something that nobody in the Pentagon could quite define.

My uncles, may they rest in peace, would not have been surprised by the Post’s story. Their regard for generals was low, based on their own military service, and their opinion of politicians lower: they associated high office with adultery, alcohol, and bribery, end of discussion.

My generation, on the other hand, got inspired by movements — civil rights, women’s equality, antiwar, environmental — and various attractive speakers back in the days before the twittering began, and so we became idealists. Back in the day, more than once, I myself stood in vast crowds of people singing, “All we are saying is, Give peace a chance.” The words don’t make sense, but we sang with great feeling.

The revelations about the trillion-dollar war briefly gained the front page and then faded. Our government had knowingly sent men to die in a losing cause and refused to admit it. A few thousand voters in Florida in 2000, aided by the Supreme Court, had changed the course of history. President Gore might’ve paid attention to the melting of Greenland and spent the trillion on solar power, but that is mere history, so the adventures of Mr. T resumed domination of the airwaves. The man, clad in leopard-skin tights, now climbs the high tower of impeachment where, to the astonishment of the crowd, he will dive into the water tank of the Senate and emerge triumphant.

So my generation comes to disillusionment late, whereas the uncles settled into it in their twenties, ignored Washington, worked on their houses, raised kids, went fishing, grew excellent tomatoes, listened to ballgames on the radio. Mr. T is a shock to people my age and the shock doesn’t wear off. When you see him in the driveway with the Washington Monument in the background, you can’t help but compare the two men, and it’s a steep decline.

I felt better Sunday when I attended a memorial service for a friend my age who grew up Jewish in an Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, learned to mind his manners, did well in school, went to Brooklyn College for $15 a semester, got into law school on a scholarship. He got a job in a law firm, hated it, took a government job, thought about going to grad school to study philosophy, and to earn his tuition money he drove cab for a while. “The hardest job I ever had,” he told me, but he loved talking to the passengers in the back seat. Everybody had a story and he buzzed around the city and heard some good ones.

That convinced him to go back to lawyering. He worked for the Legal Aid Society, defending the indigent, many of them too dumb to succeed at larceny. He took a job as secretary to a judge who needed serious assistance. This gave him the confidence to run for a civil court judgeship. He won and embarked on a long judicial career, winding up a state judge in the Bronx with an office on 151st Street overlooking Yankee Stadium. True to his Brooklyn upbringing, he never passed through its gates, and true to his education, he faithfully served the people of the Bronx and the laws of the state of New York. He loved his wife, Eleanor, Italian food, jazz and blues and classical music, books of history, and he regarded public service as a high calling.

The Founders envisioned the Senate as a high calling to form a body of individuals of independent mind and conscience and at times it has been and at other times it’s held more than its share of seat-warmers, ward heelers, and errand boys. The advance signals from Mr. McConnell and Mr. Graham say clearly that the fix is in. Honest corruption, in full public view, saves a great deal of time. The water tank will be forty feet deep and the leopard-skin tights will contain a parachute.

So be it. But corruption at the top means the national good depends on dedication in the middle. He was a good man. Fifteen million more like him can save the country.

The post Thoughts from the back row of the memorial appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

So much one can live without and should

I keep unsubscribing from junk mail and it seems that the simple act of unsubscribing opens the sluiceway to even more junk. I get offers to pay cash for my current home, to consolidate my debt, to save up to 50% on things I don’t want, to get a credit card for people with bad credit, a hair implant, introduce me to other lonely people, and so forth.

So I keep clicking and praise God for the Delete key, the invention of which ranks with Gutenberg’s movable type in the annals of human progress, not so much for eliminating junk mail as for eliminating one’s own dim-witted writing. Back in the typewriter age we had erasers and liquid white-out and so-called “Lift-Off Tape” or correctable ribbon, which was okay for fixing a misspelled word, but Delete enables you to remove whole pages of pretentious garbage from your writing such as the passage about the privilege of washing blackboards in Mrs. Moehlenbrock’s fourth-grade classroom at Benson School, which I just deleted here and unless I click on “Undo delete” which I will not do, you need never read it.

The urge to expunge is a powerful thing, admit it. A year ago, my wife and I moved from an enormous house to a 2 BR apartment and disposed of a dumpsterful of memorabilia, most of which we’d forgotten we had, and truckloads of comfy furniture that went to a charity that sets up young folks for housekeeping. I expected it to be painful; it was exhilarating — throwing out all of my college term papers so at last I can forget that young man.

At this moment, one-third of America wishes it could cleanse the nation of another one-third. One of the thirds possesses most of the guns and I am in the unarmed third that wants to change “manhole” to “maintenance aperture” and Indiana to Western Ohio and pays extra for non-GMO bottled water. It’s the gunners vs. the correctionists.

There is another third, sometimes called “moderates,” and I wrote a paragraph about them here but I’m deleting it now because it is bound to offend everybody.

The third I belong to wants America to be Scandinavia. I lived in Copenhagen for a couple years and doubt that Americans will take to herring as a main dish or become a nation where even conservatives are liberal and everyone rides a bicycle and wears a poncho in a bright primary color. Our bike lanes in America are primarily for young men delivering pad thai to your home. Nobody I know uses them.

The gunners own the middle of the country and the correctionists live in reservations on either coast and the middlings keep their heads down and observe radio silence.

We live in bubbles, and for me, the remarkable thing about the House Judiciary Committee hearing last week was the chance to hear an articulate and well-reasoned argument that disagreed with my own point of view. A person should have this experience more often.

Four law professors sat at the witness table and one of them, Jonathan Turley, argued against impeachment, that the process is moving with undue haste and has not established a solid foundation for such a radical act. I listened to him in wonder. The Republicans who should’ve been making the argument have wandered off into berserk corners and Professor Turley did their work for them as the other professors sat nearby and listened, no sneering, no insults. (For credibility’s sake, he had to aver that he hadn’t voted for Trump and didn’t agree with him.) But his testimony was so dramatic, it inspired death threats against him and his family. This is what we’ve come to in America. Respectful disagreement is in short supply and aggressive stupidity is running wild.

Well-reasoned disagreement is one of the chief benefits of a good marriage. I married, as you did, for affection and humor and to have someone to be naked with, but in addition I got a debate partner who knows more about the real world, having lived in New York — a violinist so she knows how to focus, has experienced poverty, has excellent social skills, and is deeply moved by Beethoven and Mahler and Puccini. Once I got mixed up with her, I was done with marital tragedy, Ibsen, O’Neill, all that, and part of a comedy dance team. I could say more but I would probably need to delete it.

The post So much one can live without and should appeared first on Garrison Keillor.