Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 11

I walked into the Baltimore airport at 7:15 Friday morning, checked a bag, and walked to the end of the endless Boarding line, which moved swiftly back and forth between the straps, was sniffed by a dog, photographed by a TSA lady, went through the hypermagnetic sonar encephaloscanner, was declared sane, and got to a café near my gate and my coffee was poured at 7:40. A good beginning to a day.

The night before I had done my solo show at the Strand Theatre in York, PA. The stage looked big and empty and I worried that the audience would expect me to dance or do cartwheels so I did the show from the house, walking up and down the aisles, which people seemed to like. I start off by singing a prayer, an Episcopal rouser, an anti-thong song, a hymn to perseverance (“So do your work, keep going straight ahead, and you can be a genius after you are dead”), an homage to summer and a descriptive song about the journey of sperm in search of a willing egg, all from memory while ambulating in close proximity to the customers and shaking a few hands. At first I was blinded by the spotlight and had to tread carefully lest I trip and land in someone’s lap but I ascended about one-third of the way back and then I could see people so I did the show from there — 400 people could see me and for the 200 down front it was like radio.

I told them that Pennsylvania is in a tough spot, as a big swing state, and on Election Night when the state is called, the side it votes for will figure, “Well of course, but why such a narrow margin?” and the other side will despise them and never buy another Hershey’s bar ever. I announced that I was a Kamalaist because I’m tired of my gender being held responsible for leadership, it’s time for women to take their turn. This harmless joke did not land all that well, like the crowd was maybe one-third Trumpian, maybe more, and so I veered off in a patriotic direction — “We’re all Americans and we have more in common than we have to argue about” (a dubious assertion, I know plenty of Americans who, if I were hitchhiking and they picked me up, I’d ask to be let out) and I hummed a note and sang “My country, ’tis of thee” and they were all with me and it was stunningly beautiful. I don’t exaggerate. They sang softly in four-part harmony. So we did “God Bless America” and “Shenandoah” and “My Girl” and “How Great Thou Art,” which most stand-up comics wouldn’t include but I’m 82 and get to make my own rules and the crowd was touched by their own singing.

And then I went into some comical stem-winding about the beauties of old age, one being that your career is over, your ambition is exhausted, and now you get to have fun, which I proceeded to do at length, and we sang the Beatles’ “In My Life” as I exited out through the lobby.

After the show I stood out on the curb and talked to people, not about politics, though a man did point out that York had briefly, during the Revolution, been General Washington’s HQ when the Brits were in Philly and so was the de facto nation’s capital. Okay, then. But I did wonder how these good people could pass up a smart public-spirited well-spoken woman who is up on the issues for an angry real-estate tycoon who has adopted the style of a professional wrestler and who believes that an outrageous lie repeated repeatedly thereby becomes passable. The man is a living satire of male ego and blather. He is also 78 and if you read transcripts of his speeches, you think his family needs to think about conservatorship. The beloved country has a month in which to come to its senses. There is, among young men, a taste for outright fascism that we never had noticed before. Thank you, Taylor Swift. Now where is Laura Bush? Nikki Haley, time to change your mind and save your soul.

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Some lessons are best learned slowly rather than all at once, such as “Don’t attempt to move rapidly indoors in utter darkness, especially if it’s not your house.” It has led to grief for numerous persons, few of whom will ever tell you about it, so it’s a lesson you’ll have to learn on your own, which is the best way.

I, for example, have learned, “Do vigorous exercise while you still can because if you don’t, then you can’t.” Jumping jacks, for example: one day they’re a piece of cake and so you figure, “Why waste the time?” and then you try to do one and it’s very humorous. The same is true of running: one day you can lope along like an elderly but still respectable antelope and then one day strangers will stop you and ask if there’s anything they can do to help. No, there probably isn’t.

There is always an excuse for not exercising, a religious prohibition, some hereditary syndrome that makes you feel desperate when you breathe hard, an allergic reaction to your own perspiration, but these can be overcome with help. My excuse is that I hated high school phy-ed with a passion, the chin-ups, the rope climb, the running somersault, the running dive over the horse, the wrestling, the ridicule and the bullying, and I despised walking naked into a shower with other young men. I still do. After I graduated, I made it a point not to join other naked men to take showers. When invited, I have declined. If this is a favorite activity of yours, I do not judge. For some men, this may be the high point of the week. Don’t say this is self-loathing on my part because it isn’t: it’s the other men I loathe, not myself. And it’s not homophobia. I have many gay male friends and they do not undress when they come to my home. I am perfectly okay taking a shower by myself or with my wife on very rare occasions such as my 70th and 80th birthdays, the Feast Day of the Assumption in August and on October 27, the day on which Jack Morris pitched the Minnesota Twins to a 1-0 victory in the 7th game of the 1991 World Series.

Nonetheless, I do exercises every morning and it makes me feel good. Feeling good is the point.

Another lesson to learn over time is “A feast should be taken in moderation and always followed by an effervescent sodium bicarbonate.” People, even mature intelligent people with advanced degrees, have sat down at a groaning board to platters of roasted wildlife and savory tubers, coagulated milk protein, leafy greens, cruciferous delicacies, and baked desserts, and in the joyfulness of the moment — perhaps someone has commenced from an institution other than a penal one or perhaps someone has had a memoir published or been declared innocent by a jury of his peers — the diners overestimate their capacity.

Some people experience this on a regular basis, and I understand there is treatment for it, and I also feel there is such a thing as saying, “No, thank you” and pushing the plate away. I am doing that this morning. I love steak and eggs for breakfast and I am not having it this morning. I last had it three weeks ago. I am still living.

There usually is someone who can do something better than you can and the time comes when you should let them do it. This happened to me: my wife, Jenny, took the car keys. She’s a terrific driver. The world is better without a man with poor vision careening around the roadways. I honestly believe this to be true.

We grow wise with the years: this is the theory. This year, the Year of Our Lord 2024, I suggest that you not vote for a person who is angry and saying lunatic things detached from reality and promising apocalyptic times to come. That is not for America. God has blessed this country lavishly. Brilliant immigrants have come for freedom from the fevers of Europe and the grinding poverty of leftover colonial empires, and their ingenuity and spirit and wit and their adoration of this New World have enriched us each and every one. Diversity, schmiversity, we simply are a diverse and fascinating assemblage of wonders and oddities, dreamers and floaters, 4-Hers, bellyachers, Unitarians, contrarians, librarians, egalitarians, and Wagnerians — a person walks through town and never lacks for entertainment. God bless America. He has done so before. We need it now.

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What in God’s name has happened to American newspapering? The Washington Post recently printed pictures from its 25th Annual Travel Photo contest for readers. They also published a column titled “How To Spark Joy In Your Life” and a story about the rescue of an escaped water buffalo in rural Iowa (the story said, “Water buffaloes are unusual in the area” in what one assumes was a humorous aside).

My friends, the Washington Post is in Washington to uncover corruption, malfeasance, ineptitude, and outright dishonesty. That is why God put it there. It is not there to publish photographs of Zion National Park and tell me how to spark joy in my life or cover unusual wildlife in rural Iowa. I swear to God this is the truth. God Himself will spark joy in my life if He chooses to and He can care for rare wildlife too, and if you want to see pictures of national parks, look them up online, you’ll find canyons and geysers and rock formations like you wouldn’t believe.

A man is running for President who is crazy nuts and this is what the Washington Post should be reporting front-page every day with a big headline, Don’t Vote For This Man Or Anyone Who Says The Things He Says.  

I guess newspapers feel they must compete with social media and other trash but I do not turn to TikTok or Instagram to learn about the government I pay my fair share of taxes to on an ongoing basis. I worked hard for that money and I don’t want it to all go to Kentucky just because Mitch McConnell says so. Or go to student loan relief just because somebody put a bug in Joe Biden’s ear. Most colleges are vastly overpriced for the value of the degree. We have state teachers colleges that decided long ago they were universities and the degree from one of them is just a high school graduation certificate with gold borders and a motto in Latin Nimium tu solvisti (You paid too much.). Nobody forgave my student loans when I was a student, back in the previous century. Of course tuition was extremely cheap, about $250 for an academic year and you got to be guided through Milton’s Paradise Lost and English composition and the U.S. Constitution and many other things and also attend free lectures by noted authorities and use the pool tables in the student union, all included in that one low price.

I took journalism courses at the University of Minnesota in which I was required to ask questions of strangers and write down what they told me and work it into a readable narrative with important stuff at the beginning and gradually trailing off into trivia. This education led me into a six-month internship at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, a distinguished publication at the time, a mere shadow of its old self now, but never mind. I sat at the city desk, tuned to the heartbeat of a great city, thanks to my city editor, Mr. Walt Streightiff, who sat at his imperial desk in white shirt, armbands straining his sleeves so the cuffs wouldn’t be sullied by the fresh ink on the galley proofs. He wore a bow tie that he tied himself, it was not a clip-on. A clip-on would be good enough for Willmar or Faribault, not St. Paul where the great dome of the Capitol could be seen up Wabasha Street from the lunchroom where we reporters ate our midnight lunch.

The Capitol was the beat I craved but Irv Letofsky got that beat because he was suspicious of man’s wickedness. I was not; I was a Christian and assumed that others were too. Irv Letofsky, if he was a Christian, which I’m not positive he always was, he was a suspicious Christian. He did not trust public servants any farther than he could throw them and some of them were quite heavy. Irv knew in his hearrt that a politician fears nothing more than a heavy jail sentence. Ask Senator Menendez. Ask Donald J. Trump. Irv longed to send at least one city councilman to jail but he knew that Nate Bomberg would get to cover the trial so what’s the point? Meanwhile, I was stuck writing obits and interviewing minor celebrities such as Robert Frost’s daughter Leslie who is not a big name now nor was she then.

This is why I crave Trump’s defeat, so he can’t pardon himself. He must get down on his hands and knees and beg President Harris to do that. I would give anything to be there.

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The last lovely days of summer are upon us when I sit on the porch of a little white house across the river from a marina and am grateful it’s not my house and I don’t own a boat. I’m a free man. Someone else gets to clean the gutters and I’m under no obligation to rev up the outboard and take people for a ride up the river and back. I’ve been on several boat rides in my long life and several is enough, I sailed across the Atlantic on the Queen Mary II once, five days in a Hilton that vibrates, hanging out with light-headed people in spangly clothes.

The freedom to not do what you don’t like is basic in a free society. I resist hiking, boating, golfing, climbing; I prefer porching. Summer goes against my nature except when a good thunderstorm comes crashing and flashing in and I observe divine wrath hurled down upon the wicked, it satisfies the Puritan in me. I appear to be a liberal but down deep I am a man in a tall black hat with a buckle on it. And now that the party of Lincoln that was formed to set Black people free from slavery has become the party of yellow golf pants, there isn’t enough lightning to reform it.

This all began when I was a kid. Our house had Scripture verses on the walls, which made us odd, and I wanted to keep this a secret. For example, “Thou shalt not bear false witness” — I enjoyed bearing false witness, was good at it, loved books in which writers made up stuff. But when the yellow golf pants runs for President on the basis of fictions and falsehoods such that fact-checkers have checked into Episcopal rest homes, then puritanism starts to look good.

Sitting here on the porch, I look at the woman sitting ten feet away, whom I love dearly, and she smiles and asks me, “Do you notice something different about me?” A question that strikes dread in my heart.

I don’t want to say, “You got your hair done,” if the correct answer is “You had your lower lip pierced and a large wooden disc inserted in it.” But I don’t see a disc, and she has two arms and two legs and, praise God, she hasn’t shaved one side of her head and dyed the other side green. There is no Q tattoo on her arm. I’m about to say, “I notice how radiant you look,” but she puts a finger to her lips and I notice: lipstick. Pale red. Very cool. It makes me think of Katharine Hepburn who lived just up the road from this little house.

September means school and though I graduated long ago, school is never out, it goes on and on. What Mrs. Moehlenbrock expected of me when I was 12, I now expect of myself, to work up to my potential, to engage with the world, but the world passed me by long ago and in my old age I learn to appreciate small pleasures. Coffee. The river. A toasted muffin with blueberry jam. Conversation. The woman sitting next to me regales me with reminiscence of her grandparents whose porch this once was. I love her stories, I’ve heard enough of my own.

She stands to emphasize a point and I hold out my arms and she sits on my lap, my arms around her. I hold her gently, not grabbily or clutchingly but meaningfully, two independent persons in fine alignment.

When I was 12, I was a teacher’s pet, so I was a target for playground bullies. A boy told me my teeth were green and rotten and I believed him and stopped smiling. And I believed that the Second Coming was imminent and though I was a Christian I wasn’t sure that God realized that. Brother Frank could preach a sermon that made me feel like a war criminal.

But you grow up and experience the generosity of this world. Justice prevails, at least it tries to. I got a good college education on the cheap. The world is full of fascinating individuals who are here for our appreciation. Highly educated people tend to treat you with respect, which is rather stunning. Society will try to do the right thing by you. And this woman will accept my love. So what’s your problem, Mister? Enjoy the day. All of it.

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I swear I never thought the day would come when I would arrive for a summer weekend at a rural paradise and suddenly be in a panic that I may have left the charger for my hearing aids at home in the city. I never thought I’d see that day but now I have. I once was young and gay, not gay in today’s sense but what we meant back in 1962, and I could hear a pin drop and now I couldn’t hear a bowling pin if it dropped on my head. I suffered this plague for you, my beloved radio listeners. In your service, I turned the headphones up high because, being young and gay, I felt that music needed to be LOUD to be a full emotional experience, that the body itself needed to vibrate vigorously. I was wrong. I know that now and now is much too late.

At any rate, I did not leave the charger at home, it was simply in a secret compartment of my briefcase, the sort of place one might keep nuclear secrets if there were such a thing, so I wore my hearing aids to dinner at the neighbors’ and so I could understand them to the extent that language is part of understanding. Otherwise, it would’ve been like an evening among the Sanskrit-fluent and I would’ve had to maintain a facial expression of comprehension and curiosity and this is no easy matter. My facial muscle memory is a scowl learned in my fundamentalist youth. It’s hard to overcome the influence of Jeremiah at the age of 82.

I do not understand the neighbors, actually, such as why their summer house has LANDSCAPING and LAWN ORNAMENTS. A summer house is for relaxation, it isn’t to demonstrate craftmanship. You are supposed to sit on the porch and read Proust, you are not supposed to create a home that Proust would’ve envied.

And I don’t understand why a copy of Foreign Affairs sits on their kitchen counter. In the den, out of sight, yes. In the kitchen? People are eating in the kitchen. Foreign Affairs is the diplomatic version of the prophet Jeremiah. He said, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” Foreign Affairs says pretty much the same thing except for real. Ukraine and Gaza are sort of covered in the newspapers but terrible things are happening everywhere, so much so that you don’t want to know about it. Let Antony Blinken know about it. This is why foreign policy is a minor footnote in our presidential elections, somewhat less important than bike lanes or prayer in public schools — can students in English be assigned books in which prayer occurs even if the book is clearly labeled Fiction.

The reason the candidates don’t discuss foreign policy is that they don’t want to scare you. And what would really scare you is how little one of them is even curious about foreign policy and the very good chance that he might be elected president of the most powerful nation on the planet. If you knew, you would want to form your own nation, just as the Danes and Finns have done.

So I made the mistake of asking the woman of the house why the Foreign Affairs, expecting her to say, “Oh, that’s his mishegoss” — she’s Catholic but we all love Yiddish, it really brightens up a sentence — but no, she reads it, she’s in the investment business (I thought women were more noble than that, busy curing cancer and starvation, not hiding income in offshore shelters.) So she starts telling me what she’s recently read in Foreign Affairs and in twenty minutes she cast a dark shadow over the entire evening, which had been all gaiety right up to that exact point.

There were humorous hosts, excellent pasta, fine wine, a lively salad, a beautiful one-year-old boy who really pays attention to people and I swear he is grasping the emotional richness of language and he is eager and ambitious to talk, the child’s proud parents, my own dear wife and daughter, plus me, a published author, and yet in twenty minutes of international trouble spots — she did not leave out many areas, maybe Monaco, maybe Lichtenstein — the effect was to put us all in a blue funk. I tried to lighten the mood with a harmless joke and it wasn’t harmless. It made fun of third-grade teachers, most of whom are probably female, an oppressed lot. So we went home.

Don’t listen to anything about foreign affairs. If someone tries to tell you, take off your hearing aids.

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I am still working full time at the age of 82, which sometimes gives me pause and I wonder, Why? I’ve had a rich full career. I sang on the Grand Ole Opry once. I played Radio City Music Hall, riding up on the stage elevator accompanied by Chet Atkins and Leo Kottke. I once made a movie in which I was kissed by Meryl Streep. Only on the cheek, but still. A portrait of me once appeared in the Seed Art exhibit at the Minnesota State Fair, my face done with seeds, mostly wheat, some corn. I am one of the best limericists in America (There was an attractive stockbroker who beat everybody at poker. Her dress was revealing and also concealing the ace of hearts and the joker.) How much does a man need before he decides it’s enough?

The truth is that I have nothing else to do, no hobbies, no interest in travel, I have no social life because my friends are all in bed by 9 p.m., so I keep working. I know that a man with time on his hands can easily go wrong, even an Episcopalian like me. I could easily drive up to the drive-up window and tell the teller to empty her cash drawer and take the dough to Memphis and find a gin-soaked honky-tonk woman who’ll take me for a ride across her shoulder or, as an alternative, I can write a novel, which is what I was doing this morning.

Does the world need more fiction? Probably not, so long as Donald Trump is running for office. But a writer gets engrossed in a story and although my novel is set in a small town in Minnesota, I stuck a Trumpian character in it and he’s such an absolutely beautiful beautiful guy, completely authentic, an amazing character in every way, that thanks to him I think this is going to be the greatest American novel since Moby-Dick and millions and millions of people are going to buy it. I am already in touch with movie producers. The Marxist Woke DEI critics aren’t going to like it but it’s a beautiful beautiful book. I’ve shown it to dozens of top English professors and they all say the same thing. That it’s beautiful.

Otherwise I am simply trying to mind my own business and be ever grateful for the good things of life. Last Tuesday evening, sitting on a balcony looking out on rooftops of Manhattan, I remembered the time I dashed out onto Interstate 94 to rescue a new mattress I had tied to the roof of my car with twine, and it had blown off the roof due to the aerodynamics of driving 65 mph so I stopped the car, jumped out as my dear wife screamed, “What are you doing?” and hauled the mattress off the highway and got to hear close-up the Doppler effect of a semi air horn passing at high speed a few feet away. Very few persons have had the privilege of hearing that, the 150 dB cry of mortality passing.

It’s an experience that is still quite vivid in my mind: I forget what I ate for breakfast — there’s nothing memorable about bran flakes — but I remember clearly the time I almost sacrificed my life for a mattress. Furniture stores deliver mattresses. Rope would’ve been a better choice than twine. It would’ve been smart to take side streets home rather than the interstate. The sound of “What are you doing?” would’ve been a good cue to stop and reconsider doing it.

I was 56 when I ran back and rescued the mattress and if the semi had hit me as I was doing that and distributed me along the roadside, it would’ve erased some wonderful years, my daughter’s growing-up years, a great deal of fun in the show business, a bunch of lighthearted friendships, and now I can see what a lucky man I am, having outlived Hemingway by twenty years and Buddy Holly by sixty. What brought it to mind was the long blast of a semi horn on Columbus Avenue.

I was sitting on the balcony, trying to describe to a friend the beautiful feeling of focus I get when I walk out to a microphone in front of an audience. Out of the mishmash of life, suddenly there is clarity. The mattress slips off, I hit the brakes, open the door, she yells, there’s a blast of dB and a whoosh, and here I am, still standing.

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I flew to Minnesota to have my eyes looked at and coming into TSA territory, approaching the magnetometer, I waited for the agent to point at my shoes and yell, “Are you over seventy-five?” and give me the pleasure of saying, “Thank you very much. I’m eighty-two.” Simple vanity on my part. But she didn’t and it struck me as an insult, the assumption that elderly people are incapable of acts of terrorism using explosive footwear. I’m no engineer but I think that by googling “incendiary soles” I could figure out a way to make my sneakers deadly.

But now it seems TSA has changed its procedures and those of us with medical implants such as my pacemaker/defibrillator must be patted down by an agent, and so I was and it made me feel important again, a potential threat to national security. I’m not a convicted felon like Whatsisname but I like to imagine I have felonious potential and being patted down by a man with a badge came as a distinct honor. A person incapable of causing trouble is ready to be packed off to Shady Acres to sit at a table and do jigsaw puzzles.

The agent put on blue plastic gloves so as not to pick up any lethal germs from my clothing and he patted me down with the backs of his hands, first front, then back, from top to bottom, and he instructed me to part my legs so that he could pat me down there, which reminded me of my old pal Arnie Goldman who married Pat, an Australian, and whose Army sergeant said, “Nothing makes the privates so happy as a pat from down under.” Arnie was a college pal and he died years ago and I remember him with pleasure. But I also think about what sort of crime I might commit.

I’m nobody who’d be intending to blow up a plane or demand that it fly me to Iran. No, I’d only hijack a plane so I could grab a microphone and lead the passengers in song. In my old age I’ve become passionate about the emotional benefits of group song. I feel that my generation is the last who know the words to great songs and when we’ve departed the planet, nobody will sing “Auld Lang Syne” or “America the Beautiful” or even “Happy Birthday to You,” they’ll just switch on Google Choir and hold up their phones and fifty phones will sing “God Bless America” in unison.

I love the old Republican hymn from back when the party was dedicated to liberating Black slaves from a lifetime of humiliation and drudgery in the cotton fields, and now and then I find an audience that knows the words, including “the watchfires of a hundred circling camps” and “evening dews and damps” and “the dim and flaring lamps,” and when a thousand mature Americans raise their voices together about the truth marching on, it gives you hope that indeed truth is on the march and facts matter and certain people did say what they said even if they now deny it. Journalism that aims for honesty is a foundation rock in a democracy and those who denigrate it need to have a flaring lamp stuck up their rear end.

Back in the Sixties we sang “We Shall Overcome” and of course we didn’t overcome, as we realize now; a New York real-estate developer came along who represents every single thing we ever set out to overcome and he is riding high on his water buffalo, but there is still hope.

I write this sitting in the waiting room of an ophthalmology clinic in Minnesota, listening to the screams of a terrified child as a nurse puts drops in his eyes. It tears at your heart. I pray that the boy will use his eyesight to accomplish great things, art, science, literature. I pray for the schizophrenic granddaughter of my dear friend who died last week, that God comfort her and grant her a good life in this beautiful world. I pray for Kamala and her joyful campaign crisscrossing the blessed country. And I pray for her opponent, that the bone spurs that exempted him from the draft spur him in a miraculous moment to tell the truth and confess his sins, his hundreds of thousands of lies, and spare the nation four years of unnecessary suffering. Thank you, Lord. And put this confession on YouTube so we can watch it over and over and over.

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I was in a flesh-eating mood last Sunday and so I and two other cannibals headed for a steakhouse in Midtown Manhattan –– my beloved, the vegetarian, was up in Connecticut so we were free from moral censure –– and we found a joint on West 52nd with tables out on the sidewalk so we sat there.

The carnivore section of the menu was extensive and the prices were stunning. The Japanese Wagyu steaks cost more than my quarterly tuition at the University of Minnesota back in 1961. I am often shocked by prices these days –– Tootsie Rolls were penny candy when I was a kid and now you pay $72.99 for a box of 36 –– but I stifle my shock at high prices, not wanting to seem out of touch or sound like a cheapskate. So I bit my tongue and ordered the 10 oz. Wagyu medium-rare, meat from highly sensitive cattle who are given emotional therapy and massaged daily and fed kale and arugula and mushrooms and are not slaughtered but anesthetized.

It was a lovely summer evening, watching the people passing by. This is the beauty of outdoor dining in New York: the constant floor show. Here, individuality is allowed to blossom fully, even extravagantly. You watch harmless crazy people, tattooed ladies, kids who are creating a gender all their own, elderly adolescent men like Donald Trump, it’s a show.

My steak arrived and I hated it. It was tender to the point of being gelatinous. It was rare, not medium rare. It wasn’t chewy, as steak should be. It was sort of like eating raw liver. But when the waiter came by to ask if everything was okay, I said, not wanting to be a complainer or seem unworthy of this great delicacy, “It’s wonderful.” Other Midwesterners have this same problem. Hauled to the gallows to be hanged for a crime we didn’t commit, asked by the hangman if the noose is too tight, we’d say, “It’s just fine. Very comfortable. And if you don’t mind, please don’t offer me a last cigarette, I quit smoking years ago.” Self-advocacy was not taught in the Anoka, Minnesota, public schools back in my day. We were taught to be grateful for what we had.

I paid for the dinner, a sum of money I associate with first-class round-trip airfare between New York and L.A., and I went home, fell into bed, woke around 3 a.m. feeling an urgent need for Alka-Seltzer. I took two tablets, which helped. Around six, I took two more. I felt queasy most of Monday, was okay by Tuesday.

A true New Yorker would’ve rejected the steak. He would’ve raised his voice to the restaurant’s manager. He might’ve posted devastating reviews of the restaurant using the phrase “food poisoning.” Did I complain? Are you kidding? Who do you think I am?

I am a Minnesotan and I take this experience as a lesson. BE WHO YOU ARE, NOT WHO YOU AREN’T. I have rolled into many a drive-up window under golden arches and ordered a double quarter-pounder and a medium vanilla shake and was perfectly happy with it. Why ask for more? I used to live in a mansion in St. Paul once owned by a lumber baron; now my sweetie and I live in a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. It suits us. The mansion obligated us to hold big parties and me to wander through the crowd being charming, but I am a recovering fundamentalist and charm is a language I’m not fluent in.

On Tuesday, I went to LaGuardia to fly home to Minnesota and standing outside Terminal C, I had an illuminating moment. Back in college, I was an ambitious guy, wanted to be a writer, a great writer like Liebling and Wodehouse and Perelman, meanwhile I put myself through school working as a parking lot attendant, handling the 8 a.m. rush, directing cars to park in double straight lines, yelling at the independent-minded, bending drivers to my imperious will to achieve maximum efficiency, and as I watched the young guys in yellow vests directing drop-offs at Terminal C, I realized that maybe traffic control was my true vocation. I was good at it. I really was.

I don’t know what traffic controllers at LaGuardia earn but my guess is that I wouldn’t be paying round-trip first-class airfare for a piece of meat, I’d be riding the subway out to Rockaway and stop at a burger joint and get me a double quarter-pounder and that’d be just fine by me.

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When Mr. Trump goes down to defeat in November, after he’s done complaining about the rigged election, the unconstitutionality of Biden’s withdrawal, the AI enlargement of Harris’s crowds, the oppression by the Fake News, he will finally turn his attention to the creation of the Trump Library, two words that do not sit comfortably together, and my guess is that he will designate Mar-a-Lago as the site for the government to maintain and for him to have the right of residency. A special wing will be created for the public display of top-secret documents.

He will, of course, want to control the narrative of the Library, choose the historians who will be in residence there, so it will proclaim his Greatness and the Tragedy of his Unjust Defeat and the Meaning of his Martyrdom. There will be a great deal of Capitalization of Key Words at the Library, and in the Portraits of Himself will be no flaws of pigmentation nor strands of hair askew. The Faithful will come to the site and Rededicate themselves to the Great Cause. But eventually they will all die off and one day a young executive will take charge and she will ask herself, “What do I do with this trash heap?”

And then, once more, America will need to deal with the delicate issue of what to do with historical relics from shameful periods of the past. Other nations deal with this; we are not alone. Brussels is full of magnificent buildings paid for by Belgium’s vast profits from the African slave trade in the Congo and elsewhere. Same with London. Outside of Berlin is the enormous moldering estate of the late Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s right-hand man, which the stigma of fascism and the Holocaust has rendered unusable. Germans simply want it to disappear and eventually it will but not nearly soon enough. Some great architecture was accomplished during the Nazi era and was preserved, but people had to pretend not to know they were once decorated with swastikas. In America, some statuary and memorials honoring Confederate heroes have been quietly removed. The statue of the old imperialist Teddy Roosevelt on horseback has been removed from the steps of Museum of Natural History in Manhattan and shipped to North Dakota, which doesn’t want it either.

History is a complicated business. There are high plateaus and also a good deal of swamp. The Little Bighorn battlefield in Montana was preserved in honor of General Custer who there gave his life along with his men of the Seventh Cavalry, a sacrifice that no longer strikes anybody as noble. What is the good of preserving an enormous site of military stupidity in an unjust cause? The granite monument on Last Stand Hill was put up in 1881, five years after the debacle. In 2003, a monument was erected to the Lakota, Arapaho, and Cheyenne who wiped out the arrogant jerk and his poor soldiers. Tourists still come to look at this, but why? It’s a dishonest historical site: the reason for its existence is a piece of trivia, a few hundred white guys on horseback thought they could spook a few thousand Native men and they were dead wrong about that. But the larger context of the story is lost. The real enemy wasn’t the Seventh Cavalry but the smallpox and other diseases that Europeans brought to the Great Plains that decimated the tribes. The whole wretched mess should be torn down and the land set aside for the instruction and practice of Native religion, the sweat lodge, the Sun Dance, the quest for visions and dreams, the worship of the Creator.

I’m an Episcopalian and I think I could profit from a few months dancing and sweating out on the Plains, dreaming. I’ve had dreams of miserable times in my own life, marital miseries, fascistic periods when I threw myself militantly into realizing my vain ambitions and abandoned spiritual wakefulness entirely. The Little Bighorn would be a national spiritual park meant for people of all colors and religious beliefs or unbeliefs to gather on the prairie and attempt to rediscover the best parts of themselves and let those bloom and bear fruit and the crappy stuff wither away.

As for what to do with Mar-a-Lago fifty years from now when Trump is long forgotten, I take no position. The number of lies he’s told has surely passed a hundred thousand and is close to two, maybe three. Any statue of him is a waste of good marble and that’s the truth.

The post Looking ahead down the road a ways appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

It was rousing, even riveting, to watch the glorious art of public speaking come bursting out alive at the Democratic convention in Chicago, never mind your political persuasion — to hear the English language crackle like fireworks in the cadence of great gospel preaching — and here in the age of social media, influencers, memes, to see one speaker after another light a fire under that enormous crowd and bring them to their feet, roaring, arms upraised. Churchill would’ve been cheering, Teddy Roosevelt raising a ruckus, William Jennings Bryan shouting Bravo.

The Democrats could’ve called off the convention; they’d already phoned in the roll call and given Kamala the nomination. But this one was worth the trouble.

Nobody could ever claim that AI pieced this big sweaty raucous circus together from old Bears and White Sox clips, it was by God real, the two nominees, the two ex-presidents, and the one who stole the show, Michelle Obama. You had to get tears in your eyes to see the close-ups of Black women, the pride gleaming in their faces when she lit into Trump: “Most of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward. We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth. … If we see a mountain in front of us, we don’t expect there to be an escalator waiting to take us to the top. No.” And then came the punchline, snatching up Trump’s line that illegal immigrants are taking “Black jobs”: “Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those ‘Black jobs’?” The roar that followed was like a hurricane.

Millions of Americans adore Donald Trump for his outrageousness, the man is without precedent in history, and his people love seeing him wing it for an hour or more, riffing on the Deep State, the stolen election, the flood of crazy criminals flowing across our borders and the elitists destroying the country, an hourlong rant that drives fact-checkers crazy, but the man can’t tell a joke to save his life and he never came up with whiplash punchlines like the escalator on the mountain and the affirmative action of generational wealth. Those are classics, they’ll live on YouTube forever.

Michelle, where have you been all these years? Thanks for coming to the party. Don’t stay away too long. We need you.

I’m an old man and I worry about our kids sitting in isolation in front of a screen wandering in the underground caverns of the internet. I believe in big public events. I go to downtown Minneapolis and am stunned by the loneliness everywhere. Thank goodness for the Minnesota State Fair, ten days during which you can wander through Horticulture, the Hippodrome, Home Activities and the hog barn and get up-close encounters with Minnesotans.

I keep a clear memory of the Beach Boys playing the Fair ages ago and ten thousand Minnesotans entranced by surfer songs about good vibrations and excitations, the high male harmonies and images of ocean waves as we stood under the prairie sky and caught a whiff of the cattle barn nearby. You had to be there.

I remember standing in a crowd of five thousand who came to hear Robert Frost after he’d recited a poem at the Kennedy inauguration in 1961, and there he was onstage at the U of M, bushy white hair, looking out at us and speaking from memory, “Whose woods these are I think I know, his house is in the village though; he will not see me stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow.” At the end, he exited down the aisle where I stood and passed within three feet of me. I could’ve touched him. I still sort of think I can.

It’s beautiful to reach the age of 82 and remember those crowds I’ve been in. An enormous tabernacle at the Methodist camp in Ocean Grove, New Jersey, and thousands of people singing “It Is Well with My Soul.” The Grateful Dead playing a ballpark in St. Paul, Midwestern hippies singing along on “Brokedown Palace.” I don’t claim to be an opera aficionado but I remember “A View from the Bridge” and “Der Rosenkavalier” at the Met when the audience was utterly enthralled and me too.

I’m writing this in a New York apartment but it makes me think maybe I should fly out to St. Paul and walk into the Dairy Building and look at the sheep while I’m at it and stand in line for the Skyride. I’m sitting here looking at a screen; I need to get out and mingle with humanity.

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