Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 75

We were wrong and we should say so

Now that the 17th is behind us, the pipes have stopped calling from glen to glen, Danny is gone until next March when the valley is white with snow, I look at my calendar and don’t see much to get excited about. Easter is two weeks away and what with church membership in decline, the day is more about jellybeans and less about the Resurrection of Our Lord. And ladies don’t wear big hats as they used to do. Memorial Day is just a long weekend and if anyone treks to a military cemetery to hear a speech honoring the sacrifices of good men, they will find themselves in a very small crowd, and that is depressing. The Glorious Fourth is a fine old tradition wherever people make the effort to maintain it, but the fireworks part is easier than the parade and the declamatory part is almost extinct. Labor Day is a big zero. Halloween used to be enjoyable but a lot of the fun has gone out of spookiness now with a demented person in the White House.

I wish we had another holiday in the fall, what with Columbus Day having fallen into disfavor due to his enthusiasm for enslaving other people and I think it should be October 14, two days later, which is Dwight D. Eisenhower’s birthday.

Eisenhower Day will be a day on which smart people can admit to their dumb mistakes. Ike was a great man about whom most intellectuals of his day were dead wrong, as two new biographies of him have set out to show. And I will take my place in a line of Democrats who can say so. I was only ten in 1952 when he was elected president but I well remember how cool it was to look down on him. That was when I discovered the meaning of “cool” — it meant unEisenhowerlike.

A whole class of very hip people mistook the pretensions of Adlai Stevenson for intellectual acuity and the plain talk of Ike for mediocrity. Comedians, poets, old lefties: they were wrong. I was one of them. My parents liked Ike so I was madly for Adlai. My naiveté diminished somewhat with age, but it’s instructive to face the truth. Also, one realizes how far the Republican Party has fallen, from the general who planned D-Day and managed the Allies to victory in Europe to the current braggart and buffoon, but that’s a lesson for another time.

It’s good to live long enough to be able to look back and see where you went wrong, not that it’ll improve your record in the future, but at least you’ll know enough to tone down the righteousness. People I know got very intense about reforming public education years ago and the words “open” and “alternative” were magical charms and now we begin to appreciate some of the benefits of the old repressive system in which children sat in rows of desks rather than around tables. I had a teacher who imposed harsh penalties for grammatical mistakes and though her and me didn’t always get along so good, I did learn from her.

I’ve been wrong often enough that I hesitate to join those who want to take Columbus’s statue down in Columbus Circle in New York, as a city commission has recommended. Also the statue of Teddy Roosevelt in front of the Museum of Natural History on the grounds that, late in his career, after creating national parks, reforming Civil Service, signing the Pure Food and Drug Act, conserving wilderness, busting monopolies, he embraced ideas about eugenics that were embraced by German fascists after Roosevelt’s time.

If you remove Columbus, then what shall we do with Columbia University? Rename it Upper West Side University? And Columbus, Ohio, and the Columbia Broadcasting System?

Columbus’s statue is on a column so high it’s hard to recognize it as Columbus, but if it’s a problem, you could simply behead him and put Eisenhower’s head on him. Same with Roosevelt.

In Minnesota, we are changing the name of Lake Calhoun, named for the slaver John C. Calhoun, to Bde Maka Ska, or “White Earth” in the Dakota language. Our way of correcting the record 150 years late. If, however, you live next to the lake and are calling 911 to say your house is on fire, you might want to use the old racist name, at least for the next fifty years or so until all the old firemen have retired.

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Too much information, baby, I love you

Stormy Daniels is going to tell her story and if it is true that she whispered in her lover’s ear to meet with Kim Jong-un and talk about denuclearization and if steel tariffs were also part of the discussion, it’ll be news for a week and then something else will come along and she will be forgotten.

There is way too much information out there. It is filling our heads with sawdust and getting in the way of our direct experience of the world. For example, the fresh snow in my front yard, the birch trees, the bright winter sky, like so many bright winter skies going back to when I waited for a school bus under one when I was 13. On my front step is this morning’s paper and if I pick up the paper and open it, the school bus disappears. Either I can read about Stormy or I can see this day for all that it contains.

The past is still present all around us and the news does not prove otherwise. I wouldn’t have said that when I was young and scuffling for attention, but now I live on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi and the interstate and watch the daily struggle for prominence, the horns honking, the fists shaking, the Lexuses and Audis competing for an inside lane from which to ace out the Chevys and arrive at their reserved parking spaces three minutes earlier. I sit up here like a marsupial in a persimmon tree, observing the male elk bashing each other bloody, and I glance at the paper where President Nebuchadnezzar says once more that he is a genius, and then move on to what’s real: our family and friends, the ambitious young, the elders sliding with dignity into oblivion.

I went to my friend Leon’s art show Saturday and was stunned by his extravagant genius. I only know him from having had lunch with him regularly; he doesn’t bring paintings to lunch. My people are Yorkshiremen and lowland Scots; his are Ukrainian. If my people took brush and paint in hand, we would paint walls, whereas he and his people paint horses, curtains and windows, the faces and forms of beautiful women, lush plumage and vegetation. Some of the work contains glitter. My people would never put glitter on anything; they’d remove any glitter already there. What’s my point? It’s that our lunches are about news and meanwhile he’s made his life into art and with art, the past lives on into the present.

I’ve been making notes for a memoir and discover oddly that my clearest memories are of beloved teachers and relatives, lucky accidents, wonderful trips, magical places. The gloomy periods of self-pity tend to vanish, the breakups and defeats, the manuscript lost in the Portland train station, the easy pop flies I dropped, the stories rejected. I spent two years once on a novel that nobody liked except me and now I can’t even tell you what it was about but I can close my eyes and relive a hard-hit ground ball down the third-base line that I caught on the first bounce backhanded, braced my right foot, and threw to first, nailing my uncle Don by two steps. I was 14.

Life is a comedy. I wasn’t brought up to think so but it now seems evident by what is remembered, what has disappeared. Watergate is dead matter, a dim mist of images and transcripts that only a dozen historians care about, whereas the musicians in my backyard on a summer night in 1973 are very clear, sitting in a gazebo, fiddles, guitars, mandolins, a concertina, a cardboard box for a drum, someone blowing on a beer bottle. The sun went down, we lit a fire, children who are now middle-aged parents roasted wieners and marshmallows, and the music played on and on, old tunes that if you didn’t know them were easily picked up. And after enough beers, we put down the instruments and sang Beach Boys songs, Supremes, Shondells, Temptations, Drifters, songs everybody knew the words to—“My Girl,” “I Think We’re Alone Now,” “Save the Last Dance For Me”—and the neighbors came out and stood in their backyards and listened. It’s all still there somehow. Clouds of cigarette smoke in the air. We were venturing into our 30s, our prospects uncertain, singing “Baby, don’t you know I love you so, can’t you feel it when we touch,” and I hear it still.

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Press firmly and I’ll go away

The beauty of Facebook, to my way of thinking, is the ability to unfriend people and make them disappear from your life. I wish we had a button on the steering wheel of our car that would do that. The people in the red car waiting to enter the parking lot at the concert Sunday who didn’t understand the basic principle of Taking Turns: one click and they go back where they came from.

Unfriending is completely wonderful, even though it goes against what we learned in grade school about trying to get along with Everybody. A noble ideal, but past the age of 12, you’re allowed to be selective. I’m 75. I’m there. The ladies whooping and yelling at the table behind us at the café on Sunday night are not friends so it’d be hard to unfriend them, but still. A man tries to listen to a quiet conversation through the screeching of idiots on their fourth glass of Merlot giving idiocy a bad name and suddenly monastic life seems very appealing. I’m just saying.

I get along pretty well with people who disagree with me. Republicans, for example. Here in the coffee shops where I hang out in St. Paul, Minnesota, Republicans are as rare as Lithuanians. If you met one, you’d have questions to ask: why do they dislike their Baltic neighbors so much, what do they eat for breakfast, what words do they have that are hard to translate into English? You wouldn’t try to talk them into being Latvian.

My friends tend to be Old Left humanists who are religious about recycling and yoga and holistic medicine and kale and not so much about the Lord God, so it’s thrilling for me to have coffee with an evangelical and hear Scripture quoted. I would never unfriend anyone for that, any more than I would depants them or tie their shoelaces together.

I have more trouble with people who agree with me than with those who don’t. Progressives, bless their hearts, can be very righteous about inclusivity and diversity, welcoming those who are different from us, which we learned in the fourth grade, and one listens and nods and dares not say that, in any workplace, for any serious business, it is crucial to have a reject button and the opportunity to unhire.

In fact, I have unfriended the president of the United States. This is possible in a democracy. He is a crass unprincipled Democrat posing as a Republican and I don’t need to read about him every day. I’ve seen his act with the dog and hoop and ooga horn, and I don’t learn much from repeated exposure. So it’s gone. Any headline with his name in it, I delete.

The speeches at the Oscars Sunday night seemed directed at the president who likely was watching old golfing videos of himself. It was odd: the director who said, “I am an immigrant” and was roundly applauded for it—the movie business was founded by immigrants from eastern Europe. Film is international. Applauding a guy for being from elsewhere strikes me as self-congratulatory. Or applauding for women as a gender. I worked with Allison Janney and Meryl Streep; they are the best. They don’t need to be recognized as Leading Tall Persons of America. They’re good, period.

I’m an old liberal like most of those people and I love movies and I’m sad to see the art form dying, as attendance fades and theaters close and a generation loses its fondness for the big screen. Small screen is not an art form, it’s an industry. If your iPhone video amuses you, bravo, but you cannot be absorbed by it as people are by the big screen. End of sermon.

Enough about employment practices: talk about making great movies that people will drive a few miles and sit in a theater to see.

As an old coot, I am a member of a disadvantaged minority in America and if you gave me an Oscar, I could give a speech about how diminished mental capacity should not be used as an excuse for not hiring us and I could ask all the nominees over 70 to stand up and take a bow, and if I did, you would look at your beloved and say, “Hand me that remote, love. I’ve heard enough of this old gasbag.” And you’d click the mute button. And you’d be so right. Maybe not correct, but right.

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What’s that shaking in my pocket?

There is a power imbalance between the president of the United States and me, and so I am loath to criticize him lest he smack me down. Same with my mayor and city council, who could, if I offended them, send dump trucks full of snow and make a mountain at the end of my driveway and I might spend hours shoveling it and then collapse with a major coronary. So I am going to write about telephones instead. With all due respect to you in the telephone industry.

I left the house the other day and forgot to take my phone with me and it was a strange experience. I felt incomplete. I discovered that there are few pay phones around and not so many wall clocks in public places. But going around de-phoned, there is also a pleasant sense of freedom, of disconnect, without the thing in your pocket ready to call you to attention. The phoneless man feels a freedom he gave up back in the Nineties.

The benefits of phonedness are many. I love my family and friends and their unexpected texts and calls. It is pleasant, while driving, to hear from an old classmate and reminisce about Mrs. Moehlenbrock writing vigorously on the blackboard, teaching us cursive writing back in third grade. The phone is a tool for lovely dreamy conversations. It also enables me to snap a picture of my wife reading the paper under a lamp beside the fireplace and text it to our daughter far away at school. And the Guiding Voice in the phone that tells us to turn left in 600 feet is a boon to marriage, eliminating the need for guidance from the passenger seat and allowing us freedom to observe the landscape rather than watch for street signs. As for the news bulletins, one may as well know what’s up as be in the dark and wonder.

On the other hand, I think back to Grandma’s kitchen with the wooden box on the wall with the mouthpiece, the earphone hanging on a cord, the crank on the side, which you could jangle to get the operator, Miss Loucks, who would connect you to your party. We seldom jangled it. The phone was for serious business, to call the doctor or the fire department. It was not for idle chatter. Chatter happened after supper, if company dropped in, and we sat around the table and people reminisced and a little boy scooched up close to Aunt Ruth and listened hard.

I have such clear memories of that kitchen, the smell of bread dough, the clucking of chickens at the door, the smell of ash in the woodstove, the reedy tenor voice of my uncle Jim saying grace over the lunch. Why is that kitchen of 1948 so vivid to me and the kitchens of later years so vague? Could it be the absence of electronic gizmos competing for our attention? I do not know.

I do know that back in my working days, I used to unplug the phone. Anyone who called got a busy signal and there was no answering machine. This did not strike me at the time as unfriendly. Later, I had a studio in the woods, a rectangle on stilts, a big window looking into the trees, and spent whole days there, phoneless.

So how did I become so addicted that I pat my pockets ten times a day to make sure it is there, and when it dings to let me know there is a message waiting, why do I leap up like a laboratory rat to open it? If William Wordsworth had owned an iPhone, would he have written “my heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky”? No. His heart would’ve leaped up when he heard the phone ding. If he beheld a rainbow, instead of writing a poem, he’d snap a picture and text it to someone with the message, “Look wassup.”

There is an imbalance of power between me and the phone and I am going to reset the balance by turning it off for a few hours every day out of respect to the urgency of other senses such as the sight of my wife and the touch of her hand in mine, snow crunching underfoot as we walk, breathing the thrilling arctic air. The phone is only a tool, like a screwdriver. No need to make your life revolve around a screwdriver.

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Firing 30 rounds at a wedding cake

We’re all waiting patiently for the Supreme Court to decide the Colorado wedding cake case, whether a baker can be required to bake one for Adam and Steve––as he’s baked them for Solomon and his 700 wives, though the baker says his religious beliefs tell him homosexuality is an abomination unto the Lord.

As a legal issue, this ranks rather low. Most people I know are capable of purchasing a cake icing pen and writing “Congratulations, Adam and Steve” on a cake, rather than making a federal case of it. But okay. There it is.

Meanwhile, a kid walks into a high school in Parkland, Florida, with an AR-15 and shoots up the place. The same people who defend the baker’s right not to make the wedding cake argue that the kid was entitled to buy an assault weapon, no questions asked, and to carry it on his person as he waited for school to let out.

To most of us, this makes no sense at all. Those of us who mingle with the general population and use public transportation now and then are fairly well accustomed to the presence of gay persons in America. Gayness is no more remarkable than having brown eyes. What’s weird is to see someone carrying a gun who doesn’t have a badge.

The statistics are clear. Hunting used to be an ordinary ritual and it isn’t anymore: about 6 percent of the population hunts. This is about the same as the percentage of Christians who believe the Second Coming will occur in their lifetime.

If you believe that, then politics has no meaning to you. If the world is about to end, then what’s the point of higher education or scientific research or long-term investment? Why have babies?

About 3 percent of the population owns half the guns. Think on that for a moment. Now we are talking about true weirdness: men who are fascinated by weaponry and feel good about owning an arsenal. Deer hunting is about tracking an animal, getting in position for a good shot. You don’t fire 30 rounds to bring down the deer. You don’t go to a shooting range and fire a hundred rounds at a paper target. Now we’re talking about men who simply love to cradle a semi-automatic in their arms. They belong in Wyoming. Florida is too heavily populated for that.

To the overwhelming majority of Americans, it would feel exceedingly weird to be led down to the basement by a nephew or cousin and shown his armory of AR-15s and pistols. You would not feel good about coming back to that house, any more than if he had shown you his pornography collection or his secret shrine to the heroes of the Confederacy.

This tiny, tiny minority is what resists the idea of taking a closer look at young Mr. Cruz before he is sold an AR-15.

I’m not so concerned about Adam and Steve. Gay America has power in the marketplace. The baker who won’t make a cake for them is headed for unemployment. In Oklahoma and Texas, Adam and Steve can simply walk into a bakery with an AR-15 over their shoulder and ask for a cake and probably the baker will reconsider his religious objections.

I’m more concerned about schoolkids. Kindergarteners all over this country now know the meaning of “lockdown” and “active shooter” and have gone through drills to prepare for the eventuality. In the America I grew up in, school was unlocked, and we thought about history and poetry and didn’t listen for big boots in the hall. The horror visited upon the families of Parkland is a horror we have come to accept. The deaths of our young, due to the political cowardice of the middle-aged, is a slash of shame on the name of America.

I give up on my generation entirely and the one after us, but it’s encouraging to read about teenagers in Florida and elsewhere who are prepared to make an issue of this in November. Good! This is a way to learn something about democracy you won’t learn by reading about the Constitutional Convention of 1787. The younger generation has gotten a bad rap, going around with wires in their ears, tattoos on their necks, iPhones in their faces, but if they showed up at campaign rallies with signs that said, “Stop Killing Kids,” it would be a step toward maturity. The first rule of politics: stand up for yourself. Time for the 97 percent to make their feelings known.

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Time passes, lovers still welcome

Back at Benson School, Mrs. Moehlenbrock had us make valentines for everyone, no exceptions. You couldn’t just write them to Eloise and Marlys, you had to give them to Daryl and David too, the boys with red knuckles from pounding on other boys. In the fourth grade, love was universal, not selective, and nobody should feel less loved than anyone else, though of course we knew otherwise.

So we sat at our desks and pasted red hearts and golden ribbons on construction paper and wrote “Be my Valentine” on each one, though the concept of being Daryl’s valentine was impossible to grasp. But so was the idea of Judy and Rochelle being my valentines. They were popular, athletic, smart, neat of dress, and out of my league.

I was a bookish kid with wire-rim glasses, the last kid chosen in softball, a boy the girls avoided at the square dance. I sort of assumed I’d grow up to live alone in a small green trailer out in the woods with only a radio and a dog for company. Somehow, it didn’t turn out that way. I danced through a series of romances, four or five, more than strictly necessary, and then in the spring of 1992 in a seafood restaurant on Broadway & 90th in New York, it happened for good.

I was 50, a faded writer, the solemn-faced host of a radio show, and she was a classy violinist, 15 years younger. I knew her older sister in St. Paul who told me that someday I should look up Jenny and I did and we sat at lunch and talked for almost three hours. We married a couple years later. Our little girl came along in 1997.

The conversation was like a long violin/bassoon duet, lovely string passages and baritone honks. We hit it off from the start and never wondered if one was right for the other or why. I still feel that way, talking to her. She is a lively woman of strong affections, sociable but very independent thanks to her years as a freelance musician in New York. She decided to make music her life when she was 14 and she stuck to it and when she was broke and feeling low, she dealt with it by taking long, long walks around Manhattan, a slight young blond woman in a warm coat, hands in her pockets, observing city life. Instead of curling up in a dark corner, she ventured out to look at a world full of curiosities, every block with something odd and arresting to show you.

Smart girls had always appealed to me; romance began with conversation. I first fell in love with a woman who sat at a piano and played the Bach French Suite No. 6 and the glory of it was light shining in the murk of the ordinary, but after we married, she was attacked by her own perfectionism and gave up the piano, and the light went out. My love for Jenny sprang from admiration for her bravery and steadfastness. I never could’ve ventured out on the hazardous path she followed. I’m a fugitive by nature, an observer, averse to danger. When I married her, I hitched my wagon to a BMW and climbed into the passenger seat and buckled my seat belt.

Her parents met at the University of Minnesota: Orrell knocked on the door of a rooming house to ask about lodging for her brother and Ray came to the door. They discovered they were both serious pianists, and off they went. My parents met at a Bible conference north of Anoka: John was a farm boy and handsome as a movie star; Grace was a city girl, lovely and longing to leave home. Those two marriages were for a lifetime and both got sweeter as time went by. And so does this one, as it ventures on. We lead quite different lives and look forward to reconnoitering so we can tell what happened and who said what. Your lover is the person you want to know everything about you, hoping the good outweighs your sad and tedious faults.

I sympathize with couples who struggle but I am more interested in the ones who grow closer, a triumph over the laws of natural decay. Christine and Ross, Linda and David, Dan and Isabelle, Libby and Lytton, Laura and Rashelle, Doug and Sheri, Mike and Lisa, Amanda and Patrick, Thomas and Morten. Forgive each other every night and start over in the morning. Be beautiful.

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Columnist recuses himself

A guy has got to sympathize with Congressman Devin Nunes, whose name will forever be on the secret Nunes memo released last week, claiming that the Mueller investigation is a Democratic plot.  It reads like a very long tweet that someone wrote with his thumbs on a tiny keypad. It gives columnists one more 2×4 to whack him over the head with.

I am not that sort of columnist because I have made grievous mistakes myself, unlike George Will or David Brooks. Butter does not melt in their mouths. You could put a quarter-pound stick in either of them and it would be perfectly hard hours later. Me? No way.

I’m a columnist who cannot be trusted to replace an air filter in my car or change the oil. You would not leave small children with me for more than an hour; I’d be capable of sitting down at my laptop and not noticing the kiddos ingesting dead rodents and poison sumac.

A guy like me, who put so much faith in Vitamin E for so many years and who organized a trip to the Norwegian Arctic one January to see the Aurora Borealis and all we saw was low cloud cover and steady rain, is not in a position to make fun of Nunes.

The way I see it is, I’m grateful there are so many people smarter than I and what more can I say? I come from a line of Keillor men who suddenly dropped dead of heart failure and thanks to a great many brilliant people in the medical sciences, I have not. I have thought about them often since the summer of 2001 when Dr. Orszulak, in a chilly room full of blueish light, opened my chest and sewed up the mitral valve in my heart. This was after several months of severe fatigue and breathlessness from climbing short flights of stairs.

A few years later, after a minor stroke, the blood thinners arrived. A few years later after that, after EMTs had to be called to restrain an old man who was out of his mind, the anti-seizure pills came to pass.

I’m fine, now. When I go to the Mayo Clinic, where all these blessings were bestowed, I feel as the medieval pilgrims felt who arrived on foot in Jerusalem. I return there this week to be sedated and lie very quietly as an opthalmalogist fixes the cloudy lens in my right eye. If, afterward, I have visions of Peter, Paul and Moses playing ring-around-the-roses, I will not be alarmed.

When I was 28 and 29 and 30, of course, I was deeply dissatisfied, even bitter sometimes, having to arise at 4 a.m. and drive to a monotonous ill-paying job I did not care for while my unique talent went unrecognized. I sometimes sat up late at night, medicating myself with Irish whiskey, and nursed feelings of betrayal and hopelessness. And then suddenly my unique talent was recognized and I was in serious trouble.

Talent is mostly an illusion and a person has to work extremely hard to maintain that illusion. And so I did. I hardly remember my thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties; I was working all the time and the rest of the time, too. Other men and women lived the same story.

And now the luxury of being 75 (thank you, Dr. Orszulak) and having no schedule at all except what my wife invents for me, which is the luxury of the level perspective. I live on the prairie, which I love, on a bluff overlooking the upper Mississippi, a few miles downstream from where I grew up, skating on the river with my jacket held out for a sail and the wind pushing me under the Beltline bridge toward the towers of Minneapolis. I was free then and I am free now. I have plenty of time to read the paper. I follow all the columnists the way I used to follow Skeezix and Dick Tracy and Little Iodine. After the eye is fixed, my wife says we’re going to New York. Later this month, I plan to board the Southwest Chief in Chicago and ride west across the plains and the Rockies and Sierras to Los Angeles.

The difference between thinking about the Nunes memo and two days on the Southwest Chief is the difference between potato chips and Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” Read it sometime. It’s a great book.

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Garrison’s response to Jon McTaggart’s letter of Jan. 23, 2018

Jon McTaggart’s letter was in response to a blizzard of listener anger, all of it richly deserved, after MPR expunged shows that people loved. And listeners smelled a rat. Listeners know me far better than MPR management does and they know I’m not abusive. Management, when it heard a complaint back in October, did not have the good manners to call me, a part of MPR for fifty years, and sit down with me face-to-face and talk about what had happened. If they had done that simple courteous thing, this all would’ve been avoided. Instead, they have been duplicitous from first to last, starting with how they began their Potemkin“ investigation”  up until the very moment when they issued a letter in the midst of mediation where we had agreed to not to make any public comments.

How to respond to so many untruths in a short space?  The woman who complained was a friend, had been hired as a free-lance researcher, an employee of mine, not MPR’s, working a job that she did from home by email. I hardly ever saw her in the office. Our friendship – which was mutual, reciprocal and respectful — continued in frequent emails about our kids and travel and family things that continued to my last show and beyond. She signed her emails “I love you” and she asked if her daughter could be hired to work here, and so forth. She still features “A Prairie Home Companion” prominently on her Facebook page.

Her complaint was drawn up by her attorney, a highly selective and imaginative piece of work.  MPR depended on the complaint, it never spoke to the complainant.

If I am guilty of harassment, then every employee who stole a pencil is guilty of embezzlement. I’m an honest fiction writer and I will tell this story in a novel.

I’m a writer and I have better things to do than fight with a committee of faceless people who are in a panic.  And I’m glad not to have any connection with an organization that operates like that.

 

For general information, contact Katharine Seggerman at garrisonassistant@gmail.com.  For media, contact Linda Berg at likeberg220@gmail.com.

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The beauty of competence

TV ratings for the Grammys were down 24% this year, which is no surprise whatsoever. About 19 million Americans watched the show, about the same number as resist the idea of renewable energy. Three-and-a-half hours is a long time to watch a bunch of extremely cool people in dark glasses shooting angry looks to the camera, and when the prize for Best Song goes to one that begins:

Hey, hey, hey

I got a condo in Manhattan.

Baby girl, what’s happenin?

You and your ass invited

So gon’ and get to clappin’

—I’d rather turn the thing off and dive into a good book. Having a condo in Manhattan is not in the same league with “I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day” or “I’ve got my love to keep me warm,” and most men would not tell their love to get her ass over here. It isn’t going to happen, and if it did, there’d be some slappin’. Nor do most men go around bragging about the size of our junk, other than the president.

Sour grapes? Maybe so. I was up for Best Comedy Album once and they gave it to George Carlin. I was up for Best Spoken Word once and went to Madison Square Garden and saw all the plainclothesmen around and realized that, if the author of It Takes A Village had gone to the trouble of flying up from Washington, then she’d get the prize, and she did. She did not say, “It’s such an honor to be nominated along with such well-spoken people as Garrison Keillor.” Nope. And that’s okay.

I’m 75 and that is too old to be disgruntled. Some of my peers are in care centers, waiting for the girl to come with the meds. At any moment, I could join them. And so I am not going to do any whingeing about being overlooked in the parade of awards, I am going to be grateful for what I have—my desk, my gas fire, my laptop—lest my bad attitude attract the Evil Eye who is responsible for handing out thromboses.

I’m grateful for everything, even this cup of dandelion tea, a pleasant vegetal experience, drunk as I sit before the gas fire, gas that probably comes from the Koch Brothers who did so much to elect Jabba the Hut to the White House, but I don’t need to talk about that either.

My parents John and Grace knew nothing of dandelion tea. They regarded dandelions as a curse and a nuisance. Never mind that dandelions are God’s creation and God is incapable of error. They were loyal to Lipton’s tea because it sponsored Arthur Godfrey on radio every morning. Arthur was warm and amiable and when he spoke about Lipton’s, he made it sound like the source of true happiness. We knew that Jesus Christ, not Lipton’s, is the source, but we were human and not immune to commercial blandishments. So we dug up heaps of dandelions to throw away and paid good money for inferior tea.

Dandelion tea is evidence that a deadly enemy can become a friend and a comfort, which I wish were more generally true. I’ve been fighting infestations of millennials and now I wonder how they would taste if I boiled them in water. By “millennials,” I mean self-obsessed persons who make small occurrences into major crises. It’s no problem for me—my women friends are all over fifty and I love them all, we talk our heads off, nothing we say is a problem. We wouldn’t know how to piss each other off even if we wanted to. Seneca said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, then it doesn’t matter which way the wind blows.” In other words, Attitude without Smarts is a dead end. And Smarts without Humility is just Aggression by another name.

I was going to go have lunch with three of those friends on Monday and my car wouldn’t start. I called a tow truck and he came right away, a young guy who was eager to solve the problem, opened up the hood, put the cables on the battery, started her up. Calling a tow truck to jumpstart your car is embarrassing in Minnesota, it means that you don’t know your neighbors, nobody you could call up and say, “You got jumper cables in your trunk, could you come over?” My friends are writers, they turn their phones off during the day and write memoirs.

I drove the car to my neighborhood garage where, in short order, a mechanic discovered that a malfunctioning lock on the trunk was draining my battery. Amazing. It’s like a boil on your rear end being the cause of your migraine. But he fixed it. A friendly young man who took pleasure in solving a problem and did not make me feel stupid for needing his help.

It is inspiring to find competence and we are surrounded by it. I called 911 once and a gang of firemen EMTs were at my door within minutes and hustled in to deal with my semi-conscious young daughter and explain to me, the panicky father, that this was a febrile seizure and she would be just fine. I’ll never forget them. My ophthalmologist, who looks in my eyes with a scope and tells me they look fine and will see even better when I have a cataract removed, is a woman to whom I entrust my future as a writer. The trust is not misplaced.

I had a writing teacher in college, Bob Lindsay—an ex-Marine, bald, with a dent in the top of his head—who had a rule: every day, there was a writing assignment, and if you misspelled so much as one word, your grade would be an F. We were all writers, full of ourselves, eager to show off, and his rule was outrageous to us, but Bob was a Marine and believed that pain could change minds. We had a great deal of attitude but he gave us a competence. After Bob’s class, I was a copy editor for the rest of my life, able to look at my outpourings and catch misspellings, fix the grammar, cut out unnecessary verbiage, substitute the exact right word for its third cousin once removed.

I wanted to be thought gifted, but competence was within reach and so I took that. And now I am trying to be competent at the job of being a lighthearted old man. It never was my ambition before, but now the opportunity is upon me and I am slowly learning.

The post The beauty of competence appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

It’s Thanksgiving. Be happy.

For evolution, the Constitution,

And the ATMs of banks,

The Times and Post and the whole West Coast,

I want to give sincerest thanks.

A Mozart sonata, my inamorata,

And a first-rate BLT.

For Silverman (Sarah) and the Obama era,

I give thanks most thankfully.

I’m a fraud, a fake, a big mistake, a creep.

I’m over a barrel but I care a lot for Meryl Streep.

Read the full column at the Grand Forks Herald’s site →

The post It’s Thanksgiving. Be happy. appeared first on Garrison Keillor.