Nonstop, Minneapolis-St. Paul to New York

I sat next to a woman I didn’t know on a flight from Minneapolis to New York and we fell into conversation and I got to know her. She said, “You look a lot like my father.” Quite an opener for a woman almost my age. She said he was a social worker, a good man who wanted to make the world better but he saw so much trouble that he couldn’t believe in God. “He was a man with a lot of demons.” She said, “He used to say, ‘Being your dad was the best job I ever had and I was the worst man for the job.’” Quite a start and she was only drinking mineral water. And then she said, “And he was your biggest fan. He absolutely loved your radio show.”

It gives you something to think about, being loved by a complicated man. Puts me in the same position as she. But I love that phrase, “a man with a lot of demons,” a wonderful old-fashioned way of putting it, meaning “too complicated to unravel, just respect it and give it space.”

It’s a reward for a broadcasting career you don’t anticipate when you’re in the middle of it — the unexpected intimacy of a stranger — and she told me more, how he had the job of child protection for a time but it was so ugly so often, so painful, and they switched him to adult protection: looking after the elderly who wish to stay in their homes although they’re terribly vulnerable and less able to deal with emergencies, more apt to ignore them.

We talked about her heroic mother and I wondered about the demons but she didn’t offer details and then I said that I have a demon of my own. It’s one that’s not susceptible to reform. I regret my neglect of my aunts and uncles and teachers as they got older and faded and passed away, because now that it’s too late, I realize I’ve lost my history and it is irrecoverable. Especially the aunts: they knew what preceded me and how I came into the world, my parents’ passion for each other, their early religious experiences, the dilemmas they faced, the family rivalries, a large basis of my individual being. I did not invent myself by reading a book. I came from a people and I need to know them. Otherwise I am just one more chocolate chip cookie coming off the assembly line.

My uncle Don was a big hearty man, a passionate Packers fan and also a dedicated Bible scholar and a devoted husband who cared for Aunt Elsie at home through the course of her last devastating illness. At the funeral he told me, “Her sisters were surprised that I took care of her. Of course I took care of her. I loved her.” Elsie was tender, beautiful, gracious, very funny, forever welcoming, an ambitious cook, and he loved her and cared for her to the very end of her misery, not trusting her to strangers. But after Don got old and slow and unsteady, he found a rest home far away where he could go about the business of dying, and I never saw him again.

My demon, I guess, was ambition. You taste some success, you play the Orpheum, then it’s the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, then Radio City Music Hall, then Tanglewood and Wolf Trap, and then the ultimate, the Minnesota State Fair Grandstand. As a kid I sat in the stands and watched stock car races; as an adult I stood on a stage and sang “Hello, Love.”

I didn’t tell my neighbor all that; she had fallen asleep. But I could’ve told her much more easily than I could tell the relatives. We were not confiding people, by and large. I believe my father told me exactly one secret in his life: that while stationed in Manhattan during World War II, a man in uniform working in the Army Post Office, he had accepted free tickets to Broadway shows and had enjoyed them. (We were Plymouth Brethren who avoid worldly entertainment, preferring the joy of the Scriptures.) This is not what I’d call a close relationship.

And now I have told you, my friend. The woman is still asleep. The plane is descending toward LaGuardia and Manhattan, the scene of his sin. We have demons. They seem to diminish in old age. The future is the right direction. Let’s make it better. Thanks for listening.

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