Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 15

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.

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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.

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I blew away most of my youth writing bad poetry—long lugubrious lamentations about unbelonging in a crass uncaring commercial world of cutthroat competition that offended my delicate sensibilities—but when I hit 27 I became a grown-up, was married, had a kid, a car, a house with an address where bills were left on the Welcome mat, and I was forced to find my vocation in radio, working an early morning shift, where I learned that lugubriosity was of no earthly use to me. The audience was sleepy and not in need of narcissism. They were farmers, clerks, teachers, truckers, had work to do, and they needed something brisk to awaken them and arouse them to the prospects of the day. They needed cheering up.

My theme song was the Mills Brothers’ “Bugle Call Rag” and I spun Tex-Mex and klezmer, polkas and patriotic songs, doo-wop and bebop, jug bands and gospel quartets, tossing in a tap dancer here, a jaw harpist there, Bach, “Help Me, Rhonda,” Caruso, calypso, bel canto, singing belugas, blues guitarists, the Boswell Sisters, and now and then a poem. It started, I believe, when a man named Fred Petters from St. Cloud asked me to wish his wife a happy anniversary and I recited Shakespeare’s “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments” and I got a thank-you note from Rosemary, the wife, that suggested that children were sort of impediments but they were doing very well, thank you. So I started writing poems again, but not ones about alienation, bereavement, chaos, despair, existential fatalism, grinding hopelessness, impotence, etcetera, but jazzy ones like “My eyes get misty when I think of Julie Christie; if a man wished to be kissed he would want it to be her lips.” I had an audience, why not talk to them? I wrote rhymed metrical verse so it would grab their attention and I ventured outside standard poetic topics, love, beauty, natural wonder, blah blah blah, to outlying areas, sex, flatulence, urination, good manners, suicide, linguini, bikinis, bratwurst. I employed poetry to entertain the rank and file rather than try to impress fellow poets. It made me feel good about myself, a Sanctified Brethren boy slipping the bonds of sanctity to make people feel good.

I did radio for years and then suddenly, for no good reason, I was very old. I find that life quickens when there’s less in the tank, so you step lively, get to the point, wake up and die right. You’re too old to hold grudges or get in a fury about politics or imagine that maple syrup causes multiple sclerosis or that stepping on a crack can break your mother’s back. Past 65 it’s the age of gratitude, so seek out the beautiful, virtuous, loving, humorous, and true, and let the younger people obsess over the meaningless and the acquisition of nonsense and trash.

In 1994 I started up The Writer’s Almanac, which included a poem—Mary Oliver, Maxine Kumin, Theodore Roethke, Billy Collins, W.S. Merwin, Grace Paley, Louis Jenkins, etc., etc.—which I chose for its clarity—poems that could be grasped and enjoyed by a person whipping up an omelet with small children tugging at your pant legs— and because many stations broadcast TWA at 7 or 8 a.m., I excluded poems of dread, cynicism, agony, meditations on evil, poems about death, especially the death of small children. Too early in the morning for that. And over the years, as listeners wrote to tell me they looked forward to the daily poem, I felt I was performing a public service. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, for example, which details his miseries and regrets and then For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings that then I scorn to change my state with kings, a useful reminder in the morning while facing a difficult day: the redemptive power of love.

Back in college we never used the word “useful” when discussing The Waste Land or Berryman’s Dream Songs—we considered great art to live beyond such a mundane standard—and I pondered plenty of poetry that, I realized later, was written by poets who were falling-down drunk or batshit crazy and looking for the rat poison, and I’m sorry but you don’t go to the locked ward of the loony bin to figure out how to live your life.

In my twenties I stumbled along writing unreadable stuff and thinking of life as meaningless, which in my case was true at the time, and then I stumbled into radio and started enjoying talking to people, and, as it turned out, depression passed me by entirely, and now I could no more write about desperation than I could write about being an Alabama sharecropper locked in the Mobile jail for drunkenness and possession of a deadly weapon. I’ve never been to Mobile. I quit drinking long ago. My only deadly weapon was sarcasm.

I like the poem that you write as a gift to someone, such as:

This is a limerick for Jenny
Whose virtues are golden and many,
Whose faults are few,
Perhaps one or two,
Though right now I can’t think of any.

And if you’re ambitious, a poem, the first letters of whose lines spell out the recipient’s name:

Elegant, energetic, entertaining, and effusive,
Rarely repetitive and hardly ever tedious,
In every situation, she makes full use of
Comedy and command of all medias,
Always cool, she keeps turning the page,
Roving restlessly on the nightclub stage.
Happily at work while highly wary
Of jerks and opportunists, always very
Diligent in serving the sad and solitary,
Entertaining therapists with her private episodes,
Sail on, sweet soloist, Erica Rhodes.

I wrote poems for many of my doctors, including my cousin Dan who likely saved my life when he heard wheeziness listening to me tell the news from Lake Wobegon on the radio and shipped me to Mayo to get cut open and have my mitral valve sewn up. When someone saves your life, you don’t write a meditation on death. I wrote:

A diligent doctor named Dan
Is stuck with being the man
To urge compliance
With medical science
Which you won’t though you should and you can.

And recently, for Dr. John Chen:

My eye doctor, good Dr. Chen
Did magic recently when
He lasered one eye
Briefly, now I
Who couldn’t read signs
Or books or the Times
Can read them clearly again. And this, for me,
Who am literary
Makes Chen worth a poem with a pen.

I wrote my mournful poems when I was young and in good health but as I got into my sixties and had scary experiences such as seizures that sent me to a neurologist, I was forced to become an optimist.

There is a neurologist, Jim,
Whose diagnoses are grim— So he opens each visit
By asking, “How is it?”
And singing an uplifting hymn.
He gave me a pill for a start
That let me understand art.
One pill from the bottle,
Now I read Aristotle
And I think I am René Descartes.

In other words, Folks With Strokes Can Still Tell Jokes.

I departed from the poetry we studied in college, Auden, Berryman, Crane, Dickey, Eliot, et al., and toward rhymed metrical verse because rhyme is an aid to memory and I like to have poems in my head, and also meter creates an illusion of order within which loony gestures and inspirational asides have more impact.

I quit going to poetry readings long ago. Too much dramatic exhibition of keen sensitivity, too many obligatory sighs of wonderment. I much prefer laughter. Nobody fakes laughter. I give these to you in hopes that you might like some enough to read one aloud to a person sitting nearby. You just say, “Listen to this,” and read the poem and if it lands right, you’ve created a pleasant moment, and then we go on to something else.

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Congestion pricing comes to Manhattan in June, a system of tolls to reduce daytime traffic on streets that have become sluggish so they’ll start moving again and not turn into parking lots, which is a noble idea, just as no-smoking laws were back in the day: you don’t have a right to be a public nuisance. If you drive into Manhattan below 60thStreet, a license plate reader will assess you fifteen bucks, more for trucks and buses; your taxi fare will go up $1.25, twice that for Uber or Lyft, and the $1 billion collected per year will go to improve mass transit. Like most bold reforms, congestion pricing is unpopular, and New York being New York, people love to jump into the fray, lawsuits are filed, bureaucracies are denounced, families are split, lovers break up, conspiracy theories abound, the death of the city is predicted, dread mounts as June 30 approaches, and why shouldn’t I, a Minnesotan in exile in the city, not voice my concerns? I pay taxes here. I vote. Why should I be silent? You got a problem with that, pal?

I like congestion. It’s part of city life. Why try to turn Manhattan into Minneapolis? Downtown Minneapolis is a ghost town. Walk down Hennepin Avenue at noon, you feel like the lone survivor of a catastrophe. But a taxi ride from the Upper West Side down Columbus Avenue to a 1:30 appointment on 23rd Street is very very exciting. You jump in the cab at 96th and you cruise for a few blocks and in the Seventies it becomes a dramatic slalom run. The cabbie keeps switching lanes to avoid stopped vehicles. Delivery trucks are double-parked, reducing three lanes of traffic to a single lane. Sometimes cross-street traffic blocks the intersection so you may sit through a couple of stoplight changes. Bicyclists fly past, ignoring red lights. Motorcycles thread through the jam, helmeted guys with delivery boxes on their backs, zooming inches away from your cab. If you jumped out of the cab at any point, your mangled body would lie there until the cops arrive, further tangling traffic; eventually a hearse would pull up. Other drivers would curse you as they passed. There is extensive cursing in times of congestion: English and other languages are fully employed, horns honk, pedestrians shake their fists. Diners sit in the restaurant sheds built in the parking lanes back during COVID and eat their lobster rolls and Thai chicken while inhaling carbon monoxide and paying exorbitant prices. You sit in your cab as pedestrians pass, the whole carnival of diverse ethnicities and body types. Food aromas waft from the food trucks, hot dogs, burgers, felafel, burritos. It’s the Minnesota State Fair on amphetamines. Your awareness is heightened. You arrive at 23rd an hour late — your appointment is canceled, or you’ve lost the gig, or the lady’s left the restaurant and won’t ever speak to you again — but it’s thrilling.

Back when I lived in Minnesota, I got into several romances that I later wished traffic congestion had prevented. I paid huge sums for houses that a good traffic jam, a missed appointment with a real estate agent, would’ve saved me a bundle. I made rash decisions that, had I sat stuck in traffic for an hour in the back of a cab and thought over my options, my life would be better.

I met my beloved in 1992 at Docks Restaurant on 90th & Broadway. We had lunch for almost three hours. The marriage has stood up for almost thirty years. I adore this woman, as she is well aware. I lived at 90th, she lived at 102nd. We each walked to the restaurant. We didn’t meet by way of a dating app — they didn’t exist then — I knew of her by way of her older sister who was a classmate of my younger sister. She grew up in my hometown of Anoka, on Rice Street, a block from where my old girlfriend Christine lived on Benton Street. My school choir director Ruth Hallenberg was a member of my sweetheart’s church. My eventual mother-in-law was a friend of my classmate Pete Benzian’s mother. Do you get my drift here?

The wild ride down Columbus to 23rd through single lanes between double-parked trucks with motorcycles and bikes passing may not be the road you really need to travel, exciting though it be. Your heart’s desire may be right in your own neighborhood. A pedestrian romance may be what you’re really longing for. My sweetie is a walker in the city who knows mass transit forward and backward. Case closed. Congestion for pleasure, but for romance look around you.

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I am now putting olive oil on my pancakes, in my coffee, sipping it from a wine glass, after reading that it is beneficial in holding dementia at bay. Don’t ask for proof, I believe what I want to believe, like most other people my age. I don’t want to spend my last years babbling in a seniors’ warehouse; I plan to do stand-up comedy until I’m 97 and then be shot cleanly by a jealous husband whose wife told him she wished he were more like me. A Republican husband — these guys can shoot straight — will aim his .44 and send me instantly, no mouth-to-mouth, to whatever paradise God keeps for us Episcopalian liberals. Probably a dorm where we’ll sit around and read the same copy of the New York Times over and over. No bliss, just boredom.

Do I sound demented to you, dear reader? Tell me if I do.

Meanwhile I’m alone in a New York apartment; my sweetie’s back in Minnesota, hanging out with artsy people, engaged in witty conversation over glasses of exquisite sauvignon blanc, discussing the merits of Messiaen vs. Saint-Saëns, while her pathetic pal sits worrying about going gaga while sipping olive oil.

Is this how I imagined my life would be back when I was your age, kiddos?

No, I thought I would grow up and be distinguished — I got an honorary doctorate long long ago, and okay, it was from a little Lutheran school in Minnesota, but still. I looked good in the gown and a professor with a genuine doctorate read the citation, which made me sound like a combination of Jonas Salk, Will Rogers, and St. Julia the Uncomplaining. I never won a literary award but Stephen Sondheim once walked up and told me he enjoyed my limericks. Modest man that I am, I didn’t even snap a selfie of us. I was interviewed once on the BBC and I don’t mean the Boston Boys Club, I mean the one in London with the ladies and gentlemen with the excellent accents, accents unavailable to the son of a postal clerk in Anoka, Minnesota.

I was forced into hard labor when I was ten years old, sent to the cruel Fred Peterson, a farmer just west of us, where I slaved in his cornfields, hoeing endless rows in the blazing sun, and then picking the corn, and then picking his potatoes, a heavy burlap bag over my skinny shoulders. My back is still stooped from the weight, and when I go over to someone’s house for dinner, I notify them that if corn or potatoes are served, I am likely to be violently ill. As a result, guess what: I’m never invited. I long for a cheeseburger but I pull up under the Golden Arches and smell the french fries and I am blinded by tears and have to lie down with a cold compress on my forehead.

It happened back in the Fifties, long before young people were allowed to choose their gender, and I was forced to be a man even though I didn’t understand football, didn’t care for dirty jokes, had no interest in cars or guns or poker, had no taste for beer, and I have been stuck in this gender ever since. Men avoid me, and I try to be friends with women and they mistake it for flirtation and turn away in disgust. It’s a sad story and do I complain? No, I feel gratitude. I was forced to be grateful when I was a kid. I was fed wretched food and Mother said, “Children in China would be grateful to have that macaroni and cheese.” And look at what happened to those Chinese children. They’re grown up and wealthy and have advanced electronics and it’s not a democracy so they don’t have to deal with politicians.

No, it’s been a hard life and I didn’t mention the time I was kidnapped by coyotes. But I’m grateful. I tell myself, “It could be worse. I could get old and lose my mind.” The other day, I forgot the word “cognitive” for hours, I thought, “Alert? Informed? Awake? Attentive? Cerebral? Incognito?” The very word for the skills I’m scared of losing. And then I made a salad with olive oil and vinegar dressing and the word came back. It wasn’t the vinegar. It was the olive oil. I read that somewhere. Maybe a newspaper, maybe online.

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Whenever I open an egg carton, I think of the chicken at work in the factory, creating this elliptical work of art onto a conveyor belt, to be stolen away, and then the hormones in the chicken feed kick in and the process of creation repeats itself, sort of like me and limericks: I write a good one and it stimulates the next limerick and pretty soon I have a hundred of them, which I could collect in a book but won’t because very few people appreciate limericks — women do not, because so many cruel limericks have been written about women, and when men read a limerick they think, “I could’ve done better than that,” being the compulsive competitors they are, and meanwhile here I am with this work of art in my hand.

Minneapolis is great. Have you seen it?

The streets go from Aldrich to Zenith.

It’s the birthplace of Prince,

Than whom no one since

Has been any hipper, I mean it.

The city is good for the sickly.

The streets are numerical, strictly,

And alphabetical

All so that medical

Teams can get to you quickly.

I handed this to a friend — I’m in St. Paul, as I write this — and he said, “Nice,” and handed it back. It’s a useless work of art, not like the egg, which, in addition to being a source of life, is also good in cakes, omelets, Egg McMuffins, nog, and so forth. But at least that limerick is factual and provides information about the street system of Minneapolis and it honors Prince. Not like —

A lady who lives in Vancouver

Drank two quarts of varnish remover

And did not get ill

And vomit, but still,

It didn’t do much to improve her.

There is no such lady and the reader knows this immediately, even before getting to the varnish remover. It’s fiction, which I’ve devoted a good deal of my life to, though I come from a family of farmers, engineers, teachers, caregivers, people who sought to be useful citizens and not merely decorative. Why did I make up things instead of learning to fix things?

The fact is that when I was a kid in Minnesota, struggling my way through six-foot snowdrifts to school, long before lightweight down coats were invented — I was an 82-pound fourth-grader wearing 42 pounds of heavy woolens and corduroy, and one day I was caught by a pack of coyotes who carried me away to their den where I remained for several years and learned their language of growling, snuffling, snorting. I, being prehensile, was sent into the henhouse to snatch chickens, while the others distracted the farmer’s dog, and I bit the chickens’ throats and bled them dry and carried the bodies back to the den where we ate them raw.

I was rescued by hunters and returned to my parents who had recovered from their grief and didn’t know what to do with me. I relearned English and I regained a semblance of good manners, though even now, years later, I sometimes urinate on the bathroom floor to mark my space against intruders, which upsets my wife and so does my habit of woofing in my sleep and sometimes I’ve smelled feathers in my sleep and attacked my pillow and chewed a hole in it, so we switched to foam rubber.

I’m in a therapy group, Hominids Undergoing Manifest Animalist Natures, and we have formed a very tight pack, meeting in a nearby park, and sometimes I get into conversations with dogs, some of whom believe their jailers are in touch with life on other planets and that an invasion by Martians, Venusites, and Jupiterians is imminent, and they live with relentless dread. Dogs are not nearly so bright as coyotes though the two languages are similar. Coyotes sing, they like to look at the stars, they tell stories; dogs are hostages to the approval of humans and without the pat on the head, the snuggle, the treats, the “Good dog,” they are bereft. I am more like coyotes. I stay centered by writing limericks and praising the Lord, no matter what other people think. I look up at the stars and I sing:

I sing to the stars and Infinity,

And God who made everything in it, He

Created the frame

And is not to blame

For my sins of gross masculinity.

I trust that after I die

I will fly to His arms in the sky,

And if it’s not so,

I’ll never know.

I could worry about it, but why?

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April was an awfully good month for me, so good that I’ve been walking around St. Paul, looking up into the branches of trees, making sure there isn’t an anvil roosting in one of them that’s waiting to fall and kill me and thereby serve justice. I’m a happy old man in love with my wife and in touch with good friends and I’ve been on the road doing good shows at which, among other things, the audience sings beautifully some songs they and I have known by heart since we were in grade school and now, on top of all this, my book Cheerfulness, in which I attempt to defend the title attitude against our present Age of Dread & Gloom, has gotten a long, intense, brilliant review by Meghan O’Gieblyn in Middle West Review, the spring issue. Only a fellow writer can know what this means. A lot.

I’m still writing books but haven’t been reviewed by anybody in ages, maybe because I’m an Old White Male and our time is up, or maybe I’ve written too many books, and I’m okay with unreviewing — going way back to Veronica Geng’s caramel custard review of Lake Wobegon Days in the New York Times in 1985, the reviews have been warm and sweet, which is nice for the publisher but for me, the hardworking writer, are unremarkable, like a friend’s cat climbing into my lap: not the equivalent of good conversation. But O’Gieblyn’s essay is a brilliant and engaging piece of work and I feel honored that she went to so much trouble. It pleases me that she quotes funny lines from the book and not pretentious ones: she could easily have used my own words to make me look like a hack and a bore. She does use the word “schtick” in connection with my radio monologue, but I don’t mind: in stand-up, schtick is simply useful, like the handheld microphone. She says that my willful optimism seems somewhat strained at times, and she writes, “There is, alas, no shortage of holes in the book’s logic that could be exploited by an attentive critic”and she goes ahead and sticks her finger in some of them, but she also says, “It’s hard not to conclude that Keillor has reached the sunny equanimity of enlightenment.” (I’ve made it as hard as I could, Meghan.) And then she says, “The prose throughout the book is both sharp and buoyant, and often arrives, somewhat unexpectedly, at profundity.” I was aiming for buoyancy. Profundity is well above my pay grade; it’s Ms. Gieblyn’s territory, not mine. To me, this sentence from a writer so sharp as she is worth more than any prize given by a committee. “Sharp and buoyant” is a nice phrase for promotion, but what makes it meaningful to me is the brilliance of Meghan O’Gieblyn.

She writes, “In the age of doomscrolling, eco-anxiety, and runaway AI nightmares, truth on which our fractured polis seems to agree is that the world is going to hell, cheerfulness has become an unmistakable symptom of self-delusion, willful blindness, or blithe ignorance of one’s privilege.”

I beg to differ with the fractured polis. Delusion, blindness, ignorance are three monkeys I’ve known from time to time, but when I stand and sing bass with a couple thousand people in Spokane or Boise or Burlington or Bethesda, singing from memory, no googling, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” including the watchfires of the camps, the dews and damps, the flaring lamps, it would be willful ignorance not to be cheered truly and deeply. And to be scrutinized closely and praised by a fellow professional means everything. The respect of one righteous person is worth more than a silver chalice from the Federation of Associated Arts Organizations.

And as if that’s not enough, the Avon, Minnesota, Chamber of Commerce has invited me to be Grand Marshal of a parade on June 15 celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Lake Wobegon Trail, a 65-mile biking/hiking trail on the old Soo Line railbed. I will be there, marching. I will also stand up in the Avon Amphitheater and talk about Lake Wobegon, my hometown, which is supposedly nearby. There will be a craft fair, petting zoo, 5K Run/Walk, turtle races, fishing contest, beer garden, and a Food Court serving sloppy joes, corndogs, cheese curds, and pork chops on a stick. Fireworks at dusk. There will be a booth where I will sit under a sign, “Tell Your Story To A Novelist,” where people can come and whisper a story to me and I’ll try to put it into my new Lake Wobegon book. More novelists should consider doing this sort of thing.

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I went out West to Idaho and Washington to do my show in Boise (soft s) and Spokane, and was surprised by how vibrant, bustling, handsome both cities are, and walked out onstage and sang Van Morrison’s “These are the days of the endless summer, these are the days, the time is now” and they seemed to like it okay, so I hummed a note and they sang “America the Beautiful” with me and then we did “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” for the Republicans in the crowd and they sang it full-out, four parts, and then, for contrast, “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” and we were on our way.

It’s an age of dread, the news perpetually discouraging, TV and media merchandising ugliness, and either you join the Greek chorus of gloom or you go with the American choir of cheerful resolve, and I choose cheerfulness. I am capable of dismay: I’m dismayed by the Working From Home syndrome that is leaving our big office buildings half empty. I call up an office to get answers to difficult questions and I hear Death Chute singing “Vanilla Windows” and a guy says, “Yeah?” and a dog barks and a woman yells, “Put it on headphones!” This is what Allied Federated has come to. I’d prefer to get a woman named Mildred who is an authority on health coverage and who is looking at me across her desk. But never mind me, I’m old.

There is plenty to be gloomy about. Friends of mine are nearing the end, going through the Seven Stages of Dying: Dismay, Distress, Dread of Cheerful Visitors, Demanding More Drugs, and Delivery Into Divine Paradise, Discovering They’re All Catholics, Devoting Oneself to Daily Rosary Recitation. All the more reason to love jokes. Half of all people are below average and we are the ones who really appreciate a joke. Of course, men and women are different. Men pass gas more than women because women talk more so the pressure never builds up. Except for one of our ex-Presidents. Such a talker. He should pay himself hush money.

My darling daughter loves jokes, especially the anthropomorphic — Why do gorillas have large fingers? Because they have large nostrils. I hope to introduce her to the knock-knock joke, such as “Sam and Janet” Who? “Sam and Janet Evening” or “Eskimo Christians” Who? “Eskimo Christians and I’ll tell you no lies.” Most of the knock-knockers have departed this world but the jokes still work.

There are jokes in Holy Scripture: “Whoever increases knowledge increases sorrow.” That’s a joke — a scream at one time. They heard that and the pomegranates came out their noses.

Solomon said, “The thing that has been is the thing that shall be, and the thing that is done is that which shall be done: there is nothing new under the sun.”

Joke.

Eighty-one is a joke. I used to be cool but I got over it. Now I work at staying upright. I’m a stand-up comic, one of the oldest in the trade. I have a poor sense of balance, double-vision, a pig valve in my heart, but I gave good value out West and in the middle of my Spokane show, there was a medical emergency and I saw EMTs attending a woman and I got the audience to sing “It Is Well With My Soul” quietly and “We Shall Overcome” — could Jerry Seinfeld have done that? No, he would’ve said, “I came here to kill but I wasn’t thinking it’d be YOU.”

It was not a New York crowd. Lots of hefty gals and men with big beards. Maybe they had AR-15s in the pickup, had driven into town from their concrete blockhouses in the woods with freezers full of fresh venison where they wait for the Revolution. But I gave them a good time.

(So Ole took his boy deer hunting and as they snuck through the woods, Ole said, “Son, this is your first deer hunt, an important time in your life, marking your passage into manhood. Do you have any questions?” And the boy said, “Yes. If you die of a heart attack, how do I get home?”)

And the morning after Spokane, I sat down to breakfast at the hotel with six people who’d been to the show and their three little kids and we talked about everything under the sun for two hours and also about the afterlife. It was a delight. When members of your audience want to have breakfast with you, you know you did a very good show.

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This is not a sermon, just a fact: since I cut out alcohol 22 years ago, I’ve often awoken in the middle of the night with beautiful ideas, which is a golden gift for a writer, better than emeralds. Tuesday night, for example, I woke at 3 a.m., next to my sleeping wife, arose, dressed, slipped out of our hotel room in Minneapolis, and sat in the lobby with my laptop and started writing a book with a ten-word title about happiness. I’m a happy man, I am qualified. Last week I did two shows, just outside D.C. and in Vermont, two serious locations, and I made those people laugh so hard, they were glad they’d brought an extra pair of pants. I went to Minnesota hoping to solve a Medicare problem that I’d spent years on the phone about, listening to mind-numbing music on Hold, waiting to talk to a clueless functionary working from home, TV blaring in the background, dogs barking, and in Minnesota I went to an office, sat across the desk from a human being, the way we used to do, and he solved it in a matter of minutes. And he thanked me for my patience. Life is good.

I’ve been waiting a long time to become as old as I am and it was worth the wait. You couldn’t pay me enough to go back to being young again. I did dumber things than you’d think possible for a university graduate. That’s why I excused myself from the jury — paying off a porn star and claiming it as a business expense? Heck, I’ve made accounting mistakes, too. But — this is the beautiful 3 a.m. idea — you’ve got to have some disasters, the kind you walk away from, to notice the bluebird on your shoulder. My disaster was a series of falls I took while walking around Manhattan. I’m 81. I used to have a good jump shot from the free-throw circle, I have hit for extra bases in softball, but that was a long time ago. Now, as I walk through LaGuardia, men driving passenger carts stop and offer me a ride. I decline. They say, “Are you sure?”

I fell twice crossing 89th Street, once in the middle of the street, once at the curb. I misjudged the step, crashed down on my hands and knees and chin, and once I walked into a tree branch on the path around the Central Park Reservoir and got plonked on my keister, and each time strangers rushed to my side to ask if I was okay and I said I was and jumped up but now I see these falls were a turning point in my life. Once you come crashing down, there is no longer a need to have a smart opinion about everything; you’re simply part of the human race. Your job is to be a biped rather than a quad. As Scripture says, It is God who has made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.And so long as you can stand up and baa, you can do comedy. I have a good sense of sentence structure and my vocabulary is exemplary. Thanks to my aunts Elsie and Margaret, I speak clearly. They listened to me recite my verse in Sunday school and said, “We could understand every word.” From Ephesians and Ecclesiastes to stand-up comedy is a hop and a jump.

Life is so enjoyable once you no longer need to be cool. Once in an ER I sat in a curtained alcove in a blue gown and my undies and was closely examined by a neurologist who wrote something on her clipboard and I asked to see it and she gave it to me. It said, “Very pleasant 80 y.o. male, tall, well-developed, well-nourished, flat affect, awake, alert, and appropriate.” It described me so well, especially the “awake, alert, and appropriate” but I took exception to the “flat affect” — I felt euphoric. The embolism had landed in a rural grassy part of my brain, far from the bustling neuron metropolis, and when I considered other possible outcomes (O.P.O.), it was exhilarating.

So I feel awakened, more alert to the beauties of life, and the appropriate thing is to write about them. I don’t need to fall down again or be examined by a neurologist. I need to go do my work. I retired years ago and I’ve been busier ever since. Gotta run. Bye.

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School choice — the right of parents to get state subsidy of the private education of their kids — was not around back in my time, my dears. Rich people could send their heirs to Foxcroft to be taught table manners and a privileged accent and the rest of us got on the bus and went to P.S. 101 and learned to scrap for what we wanted. We got mac and cheese for lunch and the rich kids got pasta à la fromage, so we learned to accept our lot while many rich kids wound up in expensive psychiatric retreats weeping about their narcissist parents who left them in the care of cruel nannies. I feel lucky to have avoided that.

And now conservatives fear their children coming under the influence of liberal teachers and being taught bad things about colonialism — and progressive parents want their kids to avoid football culture and the teaching of aggression and want to send Prairie and Sierra to Chamomile Academy where parents sit in the bleachers watching soccer games and shouting “Be gentle!” and “Respect each other’s differences!”

Myself, I have a bias in favor of public education because that was my experience. I came from very exclusive fundamentalist evangelicals who looked down on Methodists and Lutherans as Scripturally off-base, so when I left home and walked into public school, I found myself among — O my gosh! — Catholic kids, boys who took the Lord’s name in vain and told dirty jokes, girls who hung out with those boys. A nice Christian boy felt rather lonely at times.

But when it came to my own kids and grandkids, I remember the basketball coach who also taught geography and who’d never been anywhere and the planet held no interest for him. He assigned us to read the outdated geography textbooks as he perused the newspaper sports section. What a pitiful schlump he was. I’d pay money so my progeny could avoid him.

It’s a beautiful world, this Creation, and our kids have a God-given right to be awakened to it and a light switched on in their brains.

That is the great gift of May in the North, when we slip out of our cloistered lives and sit outdoors and look at each other. In winter, we read the news and complain about the cruelties of the world, but in good weather we can perch like poultry in a farmyard and observe our democratic civilization.

This is a beautiful feature of Manhattan, the proliferation of squares and plazas for people to perch or promenade in and escape from regimentation and the tyranny of social media. I pity the tourists who flood into Times Square, aka Garish Ten-Story Video Billboard National Park, a tourist concentration camp where people from mid-America are pestered by panhandlers in superhero costumes and acquire a lifelong loathing of the city, whereas if they walked south to Madison Square on 23rd Street and sat and looked up at the handsome 1902 Flatiron Building, they’d learn something about the city. You sit on a bench and people pass and if they pause, you can talk to them. It’s the theater of democracy, and it’s very civil. Nobody has posted a sign here, Your considerate behavior is appreciated, politeness is enforced by the power of the New York Stare and maybe a muttered “Get over yourself.” Back in the Midwest we lack that sarcastic stare; you step on our foot, we say, “Excuse me.” And there’s not dependable public transportation, just 16-lane freeways. So our plazas are deserted.

Social media can be ugly; mania thrives in the dark, rats and hairy tarantulas live inside your laptop. Yes, there’re billions of bytes of info, but we need the up-close for our own humanity. Face-to-face decency is at the heart of democracy. We need to talk respectfully to each other. I sit looking up at that skinny triangular tower and a man and woman sit down a few feet away; he’s wearing a sweatshirt with a big TEXAS on it and I say, “How’s the city treating you?” They’re teachers at a Baptist school. I grew up evangelical. It’s their first time in New York. Their daughter lives here, wants to take up acting. There’s plenty to talk about. They both attended public schools but now they worry about bad influences. I understand. It was good to meet them. This is why people wear clothing with writing on it: it’s an invitation to conversation.

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