Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 14

I spent most of last week at the Mayo Clinic back home in Minnesota, one of the friendliest places I know of, where I peed in a cup, turned my head to the side and coughed, had my eyes dilated and looked at the ophthalmologist’s right ear as she shone brilliant lights into my eyes, stripped to my shorts to be examined by a dermatologist, took a deep breath and held it while a doctor listened to my heart, was X-rayed, had electric shocks transmitted to various leg and arm muscles, and had my arm pierced and several vials of blood drawn by a man from Baghdad who came to this country at age 22 with no English whatsoever and I admired his perfect diction as he told me his story. I am not a hypochondriac so I know very little about medicine; what I love about Mayo is the humanity of it, the cheerfulness of the men and women in blue who call you from the waiting room to the warren of examining rooms. Their gentleness with the halt and the lame. The good humor. I sit in the examining chair and the ophthalmic nurse says, “I want you to follow my finger with your eyes,” and I say, That’s not your finger, it’s your thumb.” And she laughs.

I am a lucky man. Mayo has kept me alive. When I set out to be a writer, I felt obligated to smoke several packs a day and become a serious drinker, both of which I gave up long ago, but I still love cheeseburgers, so it’s a wonder to find that my cholesterol is low. My idea of exercise is walking fast in airline terminals and not using the moving sidewalks. So I’m touched to look at the echocardiogram screen and see my heart working, including the valve from a pig that a Mayo surgeon installed to replace one of mine. Its little petals flutter in stupendous synchronicity.

The clientele here includes a lot of Minnesotans my age and as I walk down the hall I see someone stop and stare at me and try to remember my name and sometimes they walk up and say, “Are you ––?” and I say, “I’m trying to be” and we talk. They know me because I was a friend of Chet Atkins and I knew Leo Kottke. I once sang “Hard Times Come Again No More” with Renée Fleming. I have hung around with famous people.

So a woman walks up and says, “Don’t I know you?” and she remembers me reciting the 87 counties of Minnesota in alphabetical order so I do it for her. I meet a man from St. Paul who fell off a 25-foot ladder but is still trying to play guitar like Leo Kottke: his ambition for thirty years has been to play “Vaseline Machine Gun” and he’s still working on “Crow River Waltz.” I meet a woman in a wheelchair who’s had some neurological adventures but is on the mend and planning to go back southwest and resume teaching Navajo children, which clearly, from the expression on her face, is her life and her joy. I sit in the waiting room and turn to the man next to me and ask, “Where you come in from?” He’s from Bozeman so we talk about the precarious business of ranching. Mortality draws us together. Nobody asks me, “What you in here for?” but we’re all vulnerable, sickness and trouble are a great equalizer of people, which makes the everyday more beautiful. A former CEO of a huge corporation sits in a wheelchair and what brightens his face is the fact that his daughter is flying in from L.A. to have lunch with him in an hour.

People come to Mayo from all over because there are great minds here, but what touches me is the steady cheerfulness of the place. The man who stands at the front door whose job it is to say, “Good morning.” The kindness. You sit in an examining room and the doctor always knocks before entering. Your eyes meet. A handshake. Before your file opens on the computer and the test results are studied, here is your chance to recite your troubles to the sympathetic ear of silence. Each one is worthy. God loves each one. Life is good and that’s why we want more of it.

The post I’m fine, thank you, and how goes it with you? appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

The rule is “Only buy oysters on the half-shell in months with an R in them,” but I took some relatives to dinner Friday and shelled out fifty bucks for a dozen shells of not much, which is truly dumb for a man my age. But it gave me the chance to quote Mark Twain to a great-niece sitting next to me at the restaurant, a smart sixth-grader: “Good judgment is the result of experience and experience the result of poor judgment,” and she laughed. She’d never heard of Mark Twain. Which gave me the chance to quote some more of him: “To do good is noble. To tell others to do good is even nobler and much less trouble.” And “Don’t let your education get in the way of your learning. I was educated once and it took me years to get over it.” I’ll bet she went home and googled him and read a hundred more quotes and learned something invaluable about sentence structure, and long after I am gone into the sunset I will have helped bestow a fine humorist upon the world. Which is a noble thing and all the result of poor judgment.

It was a beautiful dinner, the best I’ve been at in months, nine of us relatives around a table in downtown St. Paul, and four of us were teenagers, which taught me I’ve been spending much too much time with people my own age, and when I do, the conversation devolves to a low point — inevitably, just as if you eat dinner with four other plumbers you’re likely to wind up discussing interesting toilet problems, when I eat with old people we wind up talking about Mr. Mirage-of-Long-Ago, but Friday evening his name never came up. Not once. The closest was when I said I do my best writing before dawn.

The tenth-grader on my left talked about her sport, swimming — she does the 100-yard butterfly — and about friendship, which being on a swim team leads to, and about playing violin and places she wants to see and things she hopes to do, and the sixth-grader talked about gardening and playing cello and car trips and she laughed at many of my jokes. I quoted her a limerick of mine about the old lady of Vancouver who drank two quarts of varnish remover and didn’t get ill or vomit but still it didn’t do much to improve her. I don’t think she’d heard a limerick before so I wrote one for her:

In Scripture it says when one meeteth

Another and stoppeth and greeteth,

In so addressing

One bestoweth a blessing,

And so I say, “God bless you, Edith.”

It’s a rare reverse limerick and I’m proud of it so I wrote it on a card and gave it to her.

It was so much fun. We were at a hotel a stone’s throw from a storefront theater where I started doing a Saturday night radio show. The Mississippi was a couple blocks away and a few miles upstream, back in 1960, was an enormous parking lot where I, a college student, worked five mornings a week parking cars. It was a gravel lot for about 500 cars, with no painted lines. The traffic all came in a rush around 7:30 and my job was to direct them into double rows in straight lines, and to get the job done right I had to adopt the persona of a Nazi storm trooper, crushing free will. Democracy led to chaos, so for an hour every morning, I transformed myself into a fuehrer, which means I can appreciate what Mr. Mirage Ago has accomplished, bringing the Republican Party to heel using the same techniques I employed in the parking lot: the stone face, no kidding around, My Way or the Highway, Death To The Disloyal and All the Human Vermin and Scum who ignore me.

It’s an amazing feat, turning the party of rectitude and personal liberty into a unified body of citizens totally devoted to one man, obedient to his self-absorption. He is down on the country, has never praised his wife or intentionally said anything funny, has never hugged a small child in public. But it was so good of these young people to give their old great-uncle a big burst of faith in America’s future. I can’t wait to see them again. If we lowered the voting age to 12 and required voters over 60 to pass a history exam, I believe it’d be a big step forward.

The post A round table in downtown St. Paul Friday night appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

I went out to Colorado on Wednesday, a state I love because my great-great-grandfather David Powell went there in 1863, perhaps for the silver rush but maybe to avoid dying in the Civil War, which, if he had done the noble thing, might’ve eliminated the possibility of me. As Mark Twain said, “To do good is noble. To tell others to do good is even nobler and much less trouble.” I would’ve gone to Denver to research David’s papers — he served in the first legislature — but I had to go to Loveland. I am one of America’s few remaining octogenarian stand-ups and I was booked to stand up and do a show.

I see now that I got into this line of work when I was small, and a neighbor child informed me that I had been left on my parents’ doorstep by gypsies, along with a note, “We will return for him soon,” which he told me with such certainty that I was on the lookout for gypsies, but there were none in rural Minnesota at that time so I forgot about it. Except you don’t, really. Soon after, my mother was large with twin boys, which was all quite real and remarkable and one day in March she went to the hospital and two days later returned home with them. Nothing was said about the inception of the two and no questions were asked. I don’t recall any sex education in school. I figured it out myself from a book I found in my mother’s dresser drawer, Light On Dark Corners, which explained sexual intercourse in rather flowery terms, like you’d describe ballet or raising hydrangeas, but I got the point. But the seed of my own oddness was planted and as the two boys grew into serious responsible scholars, I took up poetry, then fiction and showbiz, and now find myself in the gypsy life of an itinerant octogenarian stand-up. My true talent is farming, I’m sure, but a child told me I was an alien drop-off and I’m still living this idea. I had to leave town because Minnesota is a Scandinavian culture and observes the Jante law, “Don’t think you’re somebody” and you are known for the dumbest thing about you — back home I am still known as Boomer because in high school gym class I was wrestling a kid and he had me locked in a takedown and I strained so hard I let the loudest fart they’d ever heard. So I had to leave town or live the rest of my life with that name. And once you leave home, you are free to pursue a career in comedy.

I boarded a plane to Denver at LaGuardia and when the flight attendant instructed us to put our cellphones on Airplane Mode, I was engrossed in something else and somewhere over the Alleghenies my phone vibrated and the plane bounced and rolled to the left and dove, rocking side to side, alarms howling in the cockpit. Oxygen masks dropped down, women screamed, the flight attendants went white as sheets and the guy next to me who’d been looking at coital activity on his laptop yelled, “Jesus, I accept you! Take me, Lord! I am yours!” and then the woman on my right grabbed the phone out of my jacket pocket and switched it to Airplane Mode. The plane leveled itself, the masks swooshed back up, people resumed breathing. The captain came out and people pointed at me: I handed him my phone. The back of my neck got red, I could feel people staring at me, the terrorist. I could feel moral revulsion. But I was a big hit in Loveland.

I’m a historic guy. They could put me in a museum. I went to college when tuition was $71/quarter so we didn’t have to ask our parents for money so we got to go into the arts. There were no laptops, no iPhones, no Airplane Mode. I regaled the Lovelanders with stories about the Fifties, back when Minnesota winters were ferocious. I lived through the bitter winter of 1948 when the temp got down to minus 70 and many of us Minnesotans became comatose, our metabolism stopped, there was no neurological response, and a month later I awoke in a narrow wooden box wearing makeup, which I’d never worn before. It was interesting. I should’ve dressed more warmly but as someone said, “Good judgment comes from experience and much experience comes from bad judgment.” And thanks to my mistake I have experienced the afterlife and I told them about it in Loveland. Someday I’ll come to your town and tell you.

The post The bag may not inflate but oxygen is flowing appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

A glorious Friday night at the Met Museum in New York, the great halls packed with thousands of teenagers for Teen Night, admission is whatever you care to drop in the box, a couple bucks, the change in your pocket, high school kids mobbing the joint, the Picasso lady, the naked Venus, the Rodin folks, a 15th-century lady, the naked man with a sword, all looking down on rivers of youthful energy, and a teen gospel choir sings in one marble stairway and a brass jazz band plays in another and a dance troupe from India performs in a gallery — everywhere you look, something is happening. There is no dress code, nobody lecturing us on what this naked man’s nakedness means. It’s not the silent sacred temple it usually is; the kids are mingling, searching, scouting, sitting on the floors, jabbering, holding their cell phones high to take videos, the place is electric with youth. The guards, of course, are a little edgy, but I don’t see any lurking or skulking, just an incredible lightheartedness. My sweetheart is fascinated by the dancers, their ornate costumes, their quickness and balance, the chanting and drumming. I feel drunk on the happiness of the urban young amid all the antiquities. I am an antiquity myself and I realize the Met’s goal is to broaden its base by creating joy where there had only been awesomeness, but walking through the building makes me incredibly happy about the future of the country and the world. It just plain does.

I’m an old Democrat; I am descended from worriers. On this Friday I’ve read disturbing news, I’ve had long phone conversations about the unreality of American politics, about creeping antisemitism, the long shadow of authoritarianism, the health problems of old pals, but walking into the Met has blown all that away and I haven’t even looked at a Rothko or the van Gogh “Irises” — it’s simply the exuberance of youth.

It’s all the more powerful after weeks of the trial at the courthouse downtown of the Most Famous Living New Yorker, a 77-year-old conman from Queens, a humorless huckster who’s seldom seen smiling, only grimacing, and who’s never hugged a small child or petted a dog or embraced his wife or told a joke, whose campaign platform is simply, “The country is going to hell and only I can save it.”

Some of these kids at the Met will wind up in law school and get a serious education in civil procedure and come away with due respect for our system of justice: trial by a jury of one’s peers, the rules of evidence, witnesses testifying under oath aware of the penalty for perjury. The lawyers defending the Famous Man were so taught and they stand silently by his side as he bellows his contempt to the TV cameras.

I admire the twelve Manhattanites who made the daily trek, probably by subway, to the courthouse on Centre Street and walked in anonymity through the crowds of curious waiting to get a glimpse of Mr. Big. Each of the twelve, plus the alternate jurors, made their way to a back entrance to rendezvous with a court official and a couple of cops to be escorted upstairs to a dismal waiting room to sit and drink bad coffee until called to the courtroom. Each of them must have devoutly wished, in the course of the six weeks, that he or she could be rescued from this morass of haggling and droning and resume normal life. Each person who made it through the initial screening was obligated to serve — no excuses — and was paid $40 per day, no reimbursement for transportation, and was sworn to judge the facts according to the evidence, without prejudice or sympathy, following the rules of law as explained by the judge.

The U.S. Senate twice failed to faithfully consider far more serious charges against this man. Between the solemnity of the courtroom and the carnival of politics, there is a vast gap. Our system of laws is basic to our way of life. You and I are aware of this every day of our lives. But millions of our fellow Americans have bought into falsehood, that the 2020 election was stolen.

Teen Night at the Met was a holiday from all that. The young people there wouldn’t have elected the Scowler to be a municipal sewage inspector. There are dark days ahead but eventually the young and curious and lighthearted are going to inherit the country and make it great and an artist will make a sculpture of Trump naked with a sword, his bare butt and belly hanging out, and that will be that.

The post Open the doors, let the young mingle among the treasures appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

I live in a New York doorman building where, I hear, a doorman has been asked by a resident to change the battery in her cell phone and by another resident to unscrew a peanut butter jar lid; both women were college graduates, both married, the first to an author, the second to a man who lectures on leadership to business groups. What this tells me, people, is that we are being overtaken by China in basic skills, and one day we’ll discover that crucial highly specialized technicians have abandoned their careers and gone into songwriting and storytelling or have opened summer camps for gifted children and that the maintenance of our nuclear arsenal has been put out for bids and that Chinese restaurants in Nebraska have been getting enormous orders for Szechuan takeout from the United States Strategic Command.

I don’t know that Joe Biden can deal with this. The Oval Office is assisted living at its utmost: the Army Signal Corps maintains the cell phones, the Secret Service unscrews tight lids, and the memo warning of the level of Chinese cable TV viewership in and around U.S. missile installations is probably on the desk of an attaché in the basement of the West Wing Annex. The ubiquity of chopsticks, the Chinese ornamentation on the Golden Arches, the addition of McWontons and McNoodles to the menu: all have gone without comment by the President.

This is the problem with a free society, which ours is: people are allowed to pursue their own whims and wishes regardless of the national interest. I, for example, pursued a career in comic fiction when America had twice as many humorists as it needed and we ridiculed national leaders, the military, law enforcement, all forms of authority, the very idea of patriotism, even the sacred institution of marriage. Our nation is under threat from insidious forces and here I am writing humorously about it. This is not good.

But one fact leaps out: Republicans won by a landslide in 2020 only to have the election stolen from them, and which totalitarian nation has the wherewithal to fill out millions of fake ballots and ship them from Shanghai to stuff ballot boxes and elect Joe? It’s the first time a foreign country has elected a President. They did it because they know the Republicans are more likely to go after Chinese agents who’ve undergone eyelid surgery and who carry the AI backpacks with headphones that provide aliens with appropriate American slang, e.g., “that dog don’t hunt” or “let’s run it up the flagpole and see who salutes” or “phony as a three-dollar bill.”

Joe Biden is a good guy but he has not defended our borders. Everywhere I look I see un-American activities. Soccer, for example. In many communities, football is being driven out by a chaotic sport of players in shorts running around in circles, kicking a ball, not carrying it. And rock climbing — where did this come from? Young people forsaking the fine structure of baseball and basketball for the pointless exercise of ascending a precipice. Our churches have been corrupted by pop music and creeping romanticism. I go into cafes and see tart instead of apple pie, no Jell-O, no tuna hotdish or mac and cheese. I know teenagers who don’t know the words to our national anthem, have never sung “My country, ’tis of thee” or “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.”

Joe would make a good mayor of Wilmington but maybe the nation needs a Great Leader. We haven’t had one since FDR. Today’s Democrats are not into Greatness, they piddle around with programs. I keep thinking, “What if Hillary back in 2016 had said she liked to grab men by the crotch and broken through her image as a 7th grade civics teacher? She would’ve won, even against the shiploads of votes from China.”

I love my building and its doormen. I pull up in a cab and a doorman grabs my suitcase and wheels it in, another doorman calls the elevator. I order Chinese food to be delivered and a doorman brings it to my door. I really need to break out of this comfortable life and walk out the door without a phone or billfold or my medications and stick out my thumb and try to make it back to Minnesota, sleeping in ditches, knocking on doors and begging for food, shoplifting in grocery stores. I’m an old man and I’ve missed out on this basic survival experience. I keep telling myself, “You’ve got to do this,” but for some reason I don’t listen.

The post A nation under threat, a man incapable of action appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

I spent 12 hours in a New York ER last Saturday and upon discharge was given ten pages of test results and now I have more information about myself than I know what to do with. I went into the ER on my own steam, by taxi, no siren, because I had experienced a few surprising memory lapses (name of principal physician, name of building I reside in, what I did the previous week), blanks that a few minutes of research could’ve filled in, but my love was alarmed so I left the West Side where the novelists live and went to the East Side where the neurologists practice, where they put me through CT, MRI, had me follow their finger with my eyes, and now I’m feeling fine, thank you, but now I must look at long diagnoses of lobes and fissures, global this and that, and the word “transient” bothers me. I know they don’t mean it this way but I imagine myself with baggy pants, holes in my shoes, holding a wine bottle, the kind with a screw top, and I don’t drink.

There was no intracranial hemorrhage, praise the Lord, and I do wish that a neurologist or a physician’s assistant had written “patient was focused and well-spoken and presented a chronic sardonic sense of incongruities that brought care providers to the verge of amusement,” but I will take what I can get, which was discharge and a cab ride home.

“For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow,” said King Solomon in the Book of Ecclesiastes, and that was even before neurology came along to put more salt in the soup. It is a dark book, Ecclesiastes (“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity…. there is nothing new under the sun.”), and so we skipped it in Sunday School in favor of Jesus gathering the little children into His lap and saying, “Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven,” thus putting His stamp of approval on immaturity.

Ecclesiastes is not a book for a man my age to be reading, all about the meaninglessness of life and how your hard labor is in vain: I believed in the meaninglessness of labor back in my teens and twenties and then found a vocation and have been happier ever since. I much prefer the Song of Solomon, the bosomy passages, the banqueting, the beloved and all her delights, I’d walk a million miles for one of her smiles, she’s the jam on my toast, the one I love most, so help me, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

You can’t tell me the guy who wrote “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” was the same guy who wrote, “Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm, for love is strong as death, jealousy is fierce as the grave.” And indeed I look in Wikipedia where they say it weren’t so, that Solomon was tenth century B.C. and the book came out seven centuries later. I will leave this to Jewish scholars. We Christians don’t buy into meaninglessness; we believe we are candles in dark corners, some brighter than others.

I once wrote good obituaries for the St. Paul paper and I like to think that some of them were pasted in scrapbooks and now a teenager is reading them with interest, learning more about great-great-grandpa Al. I once did an early morning radio show and provided cheerfulness to grad students coming off three hours of sleep to go to the 8 a.m. seminar who then went on to fine careers in botany and biology.

I did a live show on Saturdays at 5 p.m., which many young couples came to on their first date, their parents being fans of mine let them borrow the car, so it was a safe date, better than ingesting unlabeled drugs on the riverbank and skinny-dipping while semi-conscious, and those couples were bored to tears by my nonsense but those marriages have now extended into happy grandparenting and I take some credit. I dare say my couples turned out better than George Carlin couples or Black Sabbath couples or couples who jumped straight in the backseat and were parents before they could vote. I did what I could for my team. I ran the race though I walked the last couple of miles. I left the faith or thought I did but the faith didn’t leave me. I married Jenny and she loves me even in my current condition. The defense rests.

The post I rise to testify in my own defense appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Memorial Day and the old folks come
And stand in the sun feeling sad and dumb.
The boys in the ground—there are so many,
They’re eighteen, nineteen, maybe twenty—

They just moved out of a boy’s bedroom
And went to war, now they lie in a tomb
Old people come on Memorial Day
And people speak but what’s there to say?
The dead would trade it all for the chance
To find a girl and ask her to dance.

Ticonderoga, Hamburger Hill,
Young men marching out to kill.
Manassas, Shiloh, Chancellorsville,
They fell down and they lie there still.

World War I: they picked up their arms
And marched to Ypres and the Battle of the Marne
Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele, the Somme,
Midwestern boys far from home.
On ninety acres near Ardennes
Five thousand 162 men
Who left the U.S.A. to strike
Down the wickedness of the Third Reich.

Eight thousand near Henri-Chapelle,
Outside London, in northern France,
Lie men who served their country well
And fought to liberate foreign lands.
On land and sea, in the air they fought,
Landed in France, advanced to the Rhine,
Ferocious battles along the line.
In a terrifying moment, died
And now they lie in a narrow lot,
Head to foot and side by side

Far from Ohio, New York, P.A.
And now their families are fading away,
And memories fade,
And how many visitors come around
To visit this or that burial ground?

So on one day at the end of May
We pause and think of what we owe
To those who lie here row after row
Who fought for freedom long ago.

Iwo Jima and Normandy,
Anzio and the Coral Sea,
The Battle of the Bulge, the Korean War,
Pork Chop Hill, the Chosin Reservoir,
Loc Ninh, Dak To, the siege of Khe Sanh,
The Tet Offensive and the battle of Saigon:
Young men running and young men fall,
Their names are inscribed on a long stone wall.

Iraq, Afghanistan, again and again,
The story repeated of elderly men
Wary of appearing weak,
Needing heroic lines to speak,
Sent the soldiers out to die,
Leaving the mothers and sisters to cry.

Tragic mistakes were made, it’s true.
Generals sent young men to do
What shouldn’t be done,
What couldn’t be won.
At a terrible cost,
The mission failed, young men were lost.

History will not ignore
The screw-ups that are a part of war.
Presidents, senators, leaders will be
Closely examined by history,

And on 9/11 in the terrible hours
When the fires burned in the twin towers
Men and women of the emergency force
Came racing through the downtown streets,
Cops and firemen and EMTs
Dragged equipment through the doors
And headed for the upper floors.
Knowing this was no accident.
Up the smoky stairs they went
With every reason to assume
That this building would be their tomb.
And those who suffered and fell will be heard,
And history will have the last word.

But all we say on Memorial Day
As bells are rung, hymns are sung,
Flowers are brought and strewed among
The stones and crosses in this yard,
The graves of those who did their part.
All we say is, it breaks your heart:
They were so young.
They were so young.
They were so young.
They missed out on so many years

So after you decorate the grave,
After the speeches and the tears,
Enjoy this land they died to save.
Enjoy your life, see your friends,

Put the hamburgers on the grill,
Toss a salad, eat your fill,
Let the festivity commence,
Take a walk, go for a run,
Let jokes be told and songs be sung,
Do the things they would’ve done,
Those who died too young.

Copyright 2024 Garrison Keillor

The post THEY WERE SO YOUNG appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

I had a long talk with my friend George Latimer, the mayor of St. Paul, last Monday, which went on for 54 minutes, which is a long time for a dying man, but Mayor Latimer is quite feisty at 88, has been in and out of hospice a few times so his intentions aren’t clear, and he was very funny, which is how I want to be when I am dying, should this ever occur. Though he left office in 1990, I still think of him as mayor because he is memorable. He won office despite being short and Lebanese, which some voters misread as “lesbian,” and is a native of Schenectady, which is not in Minnesota nor even near it, but he could talk like a bartender, speaking with great conviction while taking both sides of a question so as not to disrespect those who disagree and elaborating on the complexities so thoroughly that you forgot what he had said. And St. Paul was in rough shape at the time and why would you impose the mayorship on a friend? So we elected an out-of-towner. In St. Paul, you’re not a full citizen unless your grandmother was born there. From the mayorship, he descended into a spiral of deanships and professorships, board memberships, various eminent vacancies, and ten years ago St. Paul’s downtown library was named the George Latimer Library, which led many people to assume he was dead. He called me last week to tell me, in his own words, that he was not.

We agreed that the world we knew is slipping away. We were troubled by the Minnesota Republican convention the previous week at which their apparent presidential nominee said he’d won the state “by a landslide” in 2020 and the Republicans applauded even though he’d lost the state by roughly 230,000 votes, a margin that’s hard to ignore. In his speech, he said, “No matter how hateful and corrupt the communists and criminals we are fighting against may be, you must never forget … this is a nation that totally belongs to you. It is your heritage.” They paid $500 apiece to applaud this bilge.

Times have changed and I know it because I have children, one born in the olden days and one in modern times. One was born before seat belts, when a child might ride standing up in the front seat next to Daddy as he drove 75 mph across North Dakota, and one rode in a podlike car seat belted in like a little test pilot. One grew up inhaling secondary smoke and the other in a house in which nobody ever smoked though sometimes a guest lurked in the backyard like a Soviet spy and lit a cigarette to notify his criminal confederates that he had the secret papers in his possession. The younger one’s rearing was guided by a ten-foot shelf of books. The older one was raised by pure chance.

I am a Democrat — I gave up communism back in 1982 when I quit smoking — but I am wary of liberals and the hesitations they imposed upon us, the box of razor blades with the warning, “Sharp: may cut skin if pressure is applied.” The warnings on wine bottles: “May have serious consequences in your choice of romantic partners.” Boxes of butter that say, “You know this isn’t good for you and yet you do it anyway.” There is an obsession with syndromes and disorders among liberals, short people become “vertically challenged” and “overlooked” and programs are created to guard against self-minimalization by requiring schools and restaurants to provide stilts.

I think of it as Creeping Unitarianism, the love of organizations like Anger Anonymous for parents who have yelled at their kids, which lets you form committees and subcommittees and hold meetings and conduct research. And Men Coming to Terms with Their Maleness, in which guys sit in a circle of folding chairs and talk about how happy it made Mom to see her boy grow up big and strong and how this made them insensitive and tyrannical and they must now regain vulnerability and learn to weep in front of other men, which they attempt to do every other Wednesday night in a Unitarian church basement near you. I am all in favor of this so long as I’m not required to participate.

In addition to communists and criminals, the Democratic opposition includes many Christians and crossword puzzle workers, and those Minnesota Republicans know that. I know they know it. I wish they hadn’t clapped. Long life, George. Ten more years and you’ll be almost done.

The post appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

I went into a Manhattan ER last Saturday out of concern about incidental memory loss (name of primary physician, for one, name of building I live in, a vagueness about the previous two weeks) and if you need an ER, Manhattan is the place to be. My sweetie was in St. Paul playing viola in an orchestra. I took a cab, walked in the door of New York-Presbyterian, and a few minutes later I was peeing in a plastic container and ten minutes later a neurologist was asking me what year it is, what date, date of birth, name of spouse or loved one and had I recently ingested marijuana or cocaine or anything of the sort, and the answers were 2024, May 18, 8/7/1942, Jenny Lind, and no and no. (Had this been Fargo, North Dakota, she might’ve asked for the name of my wife and left off the “anything of the sort” but this is New York and there are all sorts of that sort of thing.

It’s a fascinating drama, beepers beeping, pagers, men and women in blue quickstepping about their jobs, the occasional wacko screaming, the various souls you and I have no wish to deal with, but what is most dramatic is the kindness, the sheer kindness, the unrelenting gentleness and politeness, the doctor’s gentle pat on the shoulder when the interlocutory is done. Do they teach this in Med School? I guess so. Everyone, even the orderly who pushes your gurney, tells you their name and calls you by name. Nobody is anonymous. A woman is crying in the next alcove: a nurse says, “I’m coming to help you, dear.” The woman says she is in terrible pain.” The doctor is on his way, sweetheart.” Two doctors query two young men about drug usage — marijuana? coke? — and the young men hesitate and the doctors say, “I’m not here to judge. Was it meth? Was it fentanyl? Do you not know?”

I am not in pain, thank you, but memory loss worries me because I am in the business of doing unscripted monologues from memory in front of paying audiences, sometimes for two hours and if I can’t do that anymore I’ll have to go to Shady Pines and play bingo. A woman wheeled me into X-ray (it’s called Imaging now) — “I have a very poor self-image,” I said so she’d know that I’m funny and my life is worth saving. She laughed. She was Black, with a definite French accent. “Haiti,” I said. “Oui, monsieur,” she said. I asked if life will ever get better in Haiti. She said, “I hope so. It is a very beautiful country.” Black/French accent — Haiti: I seize the chance to demonstrate brain function. I tell my orderly, Raphael, “This is an exciting place you work in.” “Every day, something you’ve never seen before,” he says.

But in the midst of my vagueness, I have a clear memory of the novel I’m writing, a novel that thrice in the early morning hours, I’ve awakened with clear ideas about, one for the general structure, then that it’s a novel about a happy marriage, and then a clear vision of the ending. This hospital is going into that novel. People need to hear about kindness happening in New York.

And then around midnight a woman walked in, a civilian, no blue on her except her eyes. She was a Unitarian minister, making rounds, saw my name and remembered a column I wrote back in the Bush era saying what a terrible mistake the Iraq War was. My one good protest column and she remembered it all these years later. I told her I’m Episcopalian and that I’ve read Emerson and decided not to come forward. “We never give up hope,” she said. “This building, the George F. Baker Pavilion — he went to my church, so you’re one of us,” She was very funny. She said, “We think of Episcopalians as people who write thank-you notes after orgies.”

“That’s high church; I’m low church.”

She said, “Just don’t kick the bucket because if you die in the George F. Baker building, you go to a Unitarian paradise and that’s a series of committees planning paradise and designing the gates and deciding who all will speak at the dedication.” I said, “You identify as Unitarian and you took the hormones but underneath you’re Episcopalian.” She reached down to pull up her skirt but she was wearing jeans.

She said, “You’re quick. You ought to go into radio or something.” I said, “God bless you.” She said, “I’ll tell her you said so when I see her.”

And now I’m back home, feeling fine. Not a bad column for a demented man. Don’t send flowers. But be kind to any Unitarians you meet. Google “Unitarian jokes” and keep one on hand. Every thirty or forty years there’s a new one but they love them all equally.

The post Losing my mind in New York and then finding it appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

The geomagnetic storm caused by solar flares that hit Earth last week and triggered the Northern Lights and threatened to disrupt telecommunications and knock out power grids made me a little paranoid, sitting in a 12th-floor apartment in Manhattan, imagining my laptop computer getting fried, smoke pouring from the keyboard, and my novel-in-progress turned to ashes as well as my entire life’s work, leaving me to spend my remaining years in regret, but perhaps not many years would remain, perhaps the flares (which emanate from a sunspot 17 times the size of Earth) would also trigger thermonuclear war and within three hours Earth would be just another roasted planet like Mercury and Venus.

I worried about nuclear war as a child. In grade school, we practiced ducking under our desks in case of a nuclear attack but it only made us question the intelligence of our principal, Mr. Lewis. A nuclear bomb makes a deep crater, and ducking under a desk doesn’t change that nor is it protection against radioactive dust clouds. I’m sure the danger of nuclear war is very real and the prospect is horrendous but how long can you go on worrying over it? You move on to other things such as the prospect of electing a 78-year-old con man from Queens to high office. Didn’t we do that already? Why would we try it again?

We live in an Age of Disgruntlement and when I dine with grumpy people, I listen to their gripes and when they stop to take a breath I talk about the great progress made in my lifetime, which of course irks them no end. For one thing, the cash card. We used to go into the bank and hand a check for cash to Mildred the teller with her pert hairstyle and starched blouse, her specs hanging on a chain around her neck, and she’d wrinkle her mouth and peruse the check, questioning the wisdom of handing you money, and eventually she’d count out your thirty dollars and say, “Now don’t go spending it all in one place.” And now there are ATMs everywhere you look and you slide in the card and get $300, no look of disapproval.

The laptop computer. You can throw away all of your old 45s, the old hits are all on YouTube, you just type it in the browser and you’ve got Danny and the Juniors singing “Let’s go to the hop (Oh, baby), let’s go to the hop (Oh, baby).” The iPhone. You forget who Natalie Wood’s costar in “Splendor in the Grass” was; no need to agonize over it with other seniors and ruin your lunch at Burger King, you just pull out your phone, google, and of course it’s Warren Beatty. William Inge wrote the screenplay, the movie is set in Kansas, the title comes from Wordsworth. Next question?

Thanks to modern electronics there is probably no need to ever leave your room ever again. Have the deli send over a Reuben and onion rings, order a bottle of vodka from Acme Liquors. Everybody delivers, even proctologists — just FaceTime him, drop trou, and sit on the phone, it’s called a butt call. You can get the news from the QAnon website, listen to the Ronettes, Marvelettes, Brunettes to your heart’s content. You can even do your job from home. Live your life in your PJs. You can talk to yourself, just as I’m doing now.

I’m a writer, working solo in a quiet room but I dread isolation, and the beauty of life in New York is that I can walk out on the street and be in a flow of people, board the subway and experience diversity for real. If someone looks at me, I can talk to them. A flock of high school kids — “Where you off to?” They’re going to MoMA, to see Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night. I step into a coffee shop, buy a tall latte, pay for it, put a tip in the tip jar, and the guy says, “Thank you, my friend.” Which makes me unaccountably happy. Van Gogh painted the night sky while in an asylum, shortly after he cut off his ear, a year before he committed suicide. No need to tell the kids all that. Enjoy your day, kids. Look at the Monets too. Walk tall. Don’t duck. Be beautiful. Let’s hop in the van, oh, baby, and do not drive too slow. Step on the gas, man, and make this van go.

The post How I survived the solar flares and stayed sane appeared first on Garrison Keillor.