Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 26

The past is so fascinating to me now that I have so much of it and last Monday night at a New York nightclub I listened to a big band of men in tuxedos playing 1920s jazz that I heard when I babysat the neighbors’ kids when I was 10, which I did for the chance to watch TV, which we, being Sanctified Brethren, did not have in our home, but these were Lutherans so they did, and after I wore the kids out and got them to bed, I watched old movies about sophisticated people dancing to syncopated rhythms just like what the band was playing. My Brethren considered this music wicked, apt to lead to gin, maybe fornication, but at the age of 10 I found it joyful and I still do.

Brethren music was draggy, even the hymns about joy were sung lamentfully, and the recognition of the happiness of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Tiger Rag” and “Shreveport Stomp” was a tiny step toward independent judgment.

I want to know more about my childhood but all the people are dead who knew what was what, and they left no record. We were a happy family that kept many secrets and how does one pry open those locked doors?

I have a faint memory of my mother adding five years to my age when I was in the 3rd grade so that I could be kicked forward to 8th, which she felt was more my level. I enjoyed 8th grade though I got the nickname “Shorty” but good things happened to me, I decided to be a writer, I was too small for football and so avoided concussive injuries, I got kicked out of shop class for carelessness and was sent up to Speech where I found I could make people laugh, which opened up a career possibility.

It’s only now that I question her decision. Is it better to lose five years of childhood and gain five years of old age? I’m trying to get my head around this. I feel I grew up too fast, failed to learn simple social skills such as Cooperation and Mutual Respect, but on the other hand my 80s have been a delight and now I have a decade of fifteen and not just ten.

Thanks to COVID, I’ve had plenty of time to think this over. I sleep twenty hours a day but wake up for periods of coughing and urination and some contemplation of the question: was I cheated or am I blessed?

I’ve known the answer to that question most of my life, even in my 20s when I tried to be tragic, and I awoke on Friday morning with the blessed urge to get out of bed and accomplish things — a sure sign that Paxlovid was doing its job — and I did a couple loads of laundry, called my beloved who is in Minneapolis playing the opera, neatened up the kitchen, managed to get the duvet cover over the comforter, and resisted the urge to go back to bed so that I could enjoy being 75 now, instead of 80, a definite boost, though of course I’m not telling anyone lest I be accused of defrauding Social Security and Medicare.

Everything comes at a price: my shortened childhood made me habitually apologetic with no skill for self-advocacy. My mother felt I was precocious and this led to bad decisions on my part and serious pitfalls, but thanks to COVID, life is reduced to the bare essentials. I shall now have chicken soup for lunch. I will do a load of white shirts. I shall continue revising my next book, “A Salad of Ballads,” which comes out whenever it’s done. I will clear up some piles of my debris. I will order more chicken soup from Zabar’s Delicatessen and some kosher dills and a couple sesame bagels. I will take the shirts out of the washer and into the dryer. I will read a half-dozen dire columns about impending disasters in our Republic. I will set up the ironing board and iron the shirts and put them on hangers.

This is a very big day for me, after several days of unconsciousness. I was once a fairly popular published author and today I am an amateur housekeeper. A lonely man in quarantine, making my way independently as best I can, as we must all do from time to time.

The post What we don’t know we must invent appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

I go to the park because I don’t read the paper because there are too many celebrities to keep track of like Madonna, My Maia, Meghan Markle, Marla Maples, Mary Murray, Marilyn Manson, Marsha Mason, Marky Mark, Mike Marcus, Melissa McCarthy, Mo’Nique, Moses Maimonides, Lin-Manuel Miranda, not to mention Mitch McConnell and Miss Minnesota — the mind spins at the multiplicity of eminence and immortality that I’ve moved away from mass media and the megaworld and simply go walk in the park and admire the nameless walkers. benchwarmers, birdwatchers, ballplayers, and realize that celebrity being so widespread, it is anonymity that is special. Fame is an old story and the nameless are a delightful mystery.

It’s Central Park, 840 acres in the middle of Manhattan, land bought by the state legislature in 1856 at the urging of idealists like the poet William Cullen Bryant, designed by the landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, and the work was completed in 1876, a peaceful paradise where a person can move at a stately pace or perch in a peaceful spot and observe vegetation, wildlife, humanity, or consult the heart, whatever appeals at the moment.

Timing is everything. In 1856, the tract was rocky, swampy, unurbanized, and had the legislature not moved promptly, developers would’ve figured out how to drain and level the land and the grid would’ve swallowed it and today it would be blocks and blocks of rectangles. Instead we enjoy this fabulous gift from the 19th century.

That the seed was sown by a famous poet is astonishing. Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” was his big hit; my grandma Dora knew passages of it by heart, especially his admonition to go to your grave unafraid, with unfailing trust, as one wraps a blanket around himself and lies down to sleep.

Well, they didn’t have TikTok back then so they had to do their best with what they had, such as poetry.

What they did have, besides poetry, was a sense of the common good, which New York legislators demonstrated when they bought the swamp and rocky hills and made Belvedere Castle and the Pinetum and Ramble and Great Lawn. Public parks are monuments to that sensibility, along with schools and libraries, the idea that with minimal police supervision, we ordinary folk can commingle peacefully on common ground, respecting each other’s space and dignity. I’ve sat on the benches near the reservoir where some jazz musicians like to gather when the weather is nice, a bass and sax and sometimes drums, and now and then a person has struck up a conversation with me, often starting with “Beautiful day” and then wending into something that happened yesterday or will occur soon, then maybe their life story. If you listen and respond, people will talk. It’s a city where everybody has a story they’d be glad to tell you. Notice their cane and they’ll tell you where they fell, chasing a cab, and the orthopedist that wanted to do surgery.

The daily mass killings have made plenty of people uneasy about public spaces but I live in the past, I don’t read stories about men firing assault weapons into crowds. There is nothing to be learned except that there are wackos around, some dangerous, which we already knew.

One of them was hanging out in Central Park on a December day in 1980 who’d flown in from Hawaii with the intention of killing John Lennon and waited for him at 72nd Street and accosted him and shot him in the back and killed him. He did it, he explained in order to become famous. He is still in state prison.

That corner of Central Park West and 72nd is vividly remembered by people my age and the power of the memory is not the death of a celebrity but the death of a 40-year-old man, a husband and father, a friend, a musician, robbed of his life, robbed of ten-thousand walks in the park. It’s the life that’s precious, not his fame or fortune.

The city created a memorial to Lennon in the park, with the inscription “Imagine,” after his famous song, but it was a bad idea. The park isn’t a cemetery and you can imagine on your own. You walk around and hear French and Japanese and Spanish and imagine the immigrants drawn here for centuries. You see the cellist sitting in a field playing a Bach sonata and you feel the soul of the city, wanting to do honor to greatness selflessly. You sit on a bench and someone says, “Beautiful day,” and you agree and you’re hearing a monologue about a crazy girlfriend and the treachery of e-bikes. Anyway, I gotta go. Thanks for listening. Welcome to New York.

The post A day in May sitting in the Park appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

I salute the Hollywood writers who went out on strike this past week but I can tell you that we essayists won’t be joining them. For one thing, the essay is deeply imbedded in our nation’s very identity (U.S.A.) but for another thing, a national essay strike would be like a National Husbands Day of Silence, most wives wouldn’t care and many wouldn’t notice.

The strike won’t affect me much. I grew up evangelical back when we were anti-Hollywood and if you loved the Lord you didn’t go to movies and didn’t have a TV. I didn’t set foot in a movie theater until I was 17 and went to see “Elmer Gantry,” and so my brain never developed an affinity for visual entertainment. I can’t remember movies I’ve seen, whereas parts of Ecclesiastes and Isaiah and the Sermon on the Mount, Psalm XXIII, are vivid and powerful. “Whoever increases knowledge, increases sorrow,” I read in Ecclesiastes when I was young and this turned me away from scholarship and journalism and toward a life in comedy. My wife is smarter than I am and she knows it and she is more anxious and she grieves more deeply, but when I walk into the room and pass gas, she laughs like crazy. I’m happy to oblige.

Solomon said some powerful things about the meaninglessness of life that Governor DeSantis, if he had his wits about him, would prohibit being read in Florida public schools, such as his line: the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong, or the one about Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Do we want our third-graders to carry that around in their heads?

Now if I were writing a movie and not an essay, someone would’ve been shot by now, or a crazed elk would be approaching a Girl Scout camp, or a crazed real estate magnate’d be running for president, but it’s an essay and so calm reason prevails. I look around me here on Manhattan Island, which, if this were a movie, would be riddled by gunfire, buildings aflame, gang warfare, but instead normal people are out walking with small children and stopping at the ice cream truck and couples sit at outdoor cafes, talking. My wife is out there walking and I await the sound of her key in the lock.

In Ecclesiastes, I read: “Live joyfully with the wife whom you love all the days of your vain life which He has given you under the sun, all your days of vanity; for that is your portion in life, and in the labor which you perform under the sun.”

I spent decades in the vanity of ambition and then I met this one woman and now the beauty of marriage dawns, that if one falls, the other will give a hand to the fallen, and we lie together and keep each other warm, and this sweetness between us is utterly ordinary, a sweetness shared by millions of others. This is one thing that Hollywood has a hard time portraying, marital peace and mutual pleasure, those unexpected moments when I sit looking at the screen and feel her hand on my shoulder. I know this touch by heart.

It’s not the “Is this dandruff?” touch or the “I threw this shirt away a week ago, what’s it doing on you?” touch or the “Do you realize we’re leaving for dinner in fifteen minutes?” touch, it’s the touch that says, “You’re my man, you make me happy just sitting there.” Her hand rests on my shoulder, maybe she touches my hair or puts her cheek next to mine, and it’s clear as day, no need for underscore or dialogue. You can depict this in an essay. I just did. And most of my readers recalled that moment in their own experience. I wish they all could but some of them are too young.

We essayists are paid less than a mediocre minor-league second baseman earns but we accept this. Some people can earn truckloads of dough by peddling blatant falsehoods. So what? Says Solomon. “What has been is what will be. There is nothing new under the sun.” But he’s wrong. There is.

Falling in love is nothing new, a million songs’ worth, all the same, but this unexpected touch and the sudden proximity of the beloved and the wordless exchange of knowledge — your presence makes me happy — do you know what I mean? I hope you do — it’s forever new.

The post Why I am not joining the strike appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

I remember when I was six and was allowed to do dishes with my older brother and sister while Mother cleaned the kitchen with Lysol: it was a ceremony, a step into maturity, being entrusted to handle the family china, a mark of maturity for a little boy, and, busy, crowded around the sink, we talked a lot, a big pleasure in a family in which children were not encouraged to speak up. And I made my brother and sister laugh, describing my teacher’s upper arms that bounced as she wrote on the blackboard, that we named Hoppy and Bob, and also when I said that Washington looked like Lincoln’s wife. To think I could amuse my elders was a real spark of self-esteem.

I chose my parents for their persistent faith and their love of work, not for personal charm, and it was a good choice. They also gave me a fine sense of impending disaster and a few weeks ago it came true and I lost my balance and suddenly became a physics experiment, but only my left knee was bashed, no marbles were lost and the antique crystal vertebrae of my lower back were not cracked, and I haven’t been shipped off to a rehab prison to play Bingo and sing along with Gladys at the Hammond playing from the Sunshine Harmony songbook.

No, I limp around and do my work and brush away sympathy and I was astonished today when I came across the online résumé of the worst boss I ever knew, a miserable misfit who combined cluelessness and arrogance in a uniquely toxic way, and here he had the gall to write about himself as a “thought leader,” “visionary,” a “transformational” manager — Joe Blow dressing up as John the Baptist. The man had the vision of a demented mole. What he considered transformation, most people would call demolition. The yo-yo took full credit for the accomplishment of hundreds of dedicated people. There is no word for sheep manure this deep and dark.

Brazen fools like him are multiplying like feral cats in the ranks of management and when I read about gigantic layoffs at Facebook and elsewhere, I’m assuming that skilled workers take the big hit and the executive yahoos hold on to their credenzas and keys to the executive john and think about the transformation of their golf game.

That’s why I’ve adopted a new habit of complimenting people for goodness. I compliment the fruit stand guy on his bananas and buy a bunch and he smiles. I tell the waiter that the green curry is of primo quality. I thank my haircutter for making me look a distinguished author and she is pleased.

I’m at the age when you see the insides of more than your share of health clinics and some are like walking into a meat warehouse but when I walked into New York Presbyterian the other day and then the Hospital for Special Surgery, I was struck by the extraordinary kindness of everyone — even the security woman welcomed me like a friend and the receptionists and the guide who took me back to an examining room and the tech who did the exam — it really knocked me out, me a Midwesterner, this being New York — and I found Lillian the supervisor and told her what a wonderful place this is: “Most people walking in here are having a bad week and the kindness and good manners of this place mean So Much. Thank you.”

This may strike you as Goody Two-shoes but I say it’s important, in the midst of so much hubris and balloon juice, to pay tribute to genuine goodness. And now I even compliment myself a little. As a Christian I avoid pride but every morning I rise painfully on my battered left knee and, all by myself, hobble on a cane to the bathroom, shower, dry off, shave, dress, and attach a complex four-strap knee brace, and I congratulate myself.

I miss my wife who is far away, playing viola in an opera. Rehearsal was going badly under an abusive micro-managing maestro who made Mozart miserable but who then left abruptly and was replaced by an anxious sub and my wife went out of her way to compliment him.

She’s been a transformational visionary in my life and she is also a good person. Violists don’t get the big head like some violinists do; they know their role, which is to support. They sit in the pit playing their part and when the Mozart flows like the Mississippi they float along happily in it and don’t imagine they created this. That’s how I feel on good days: we’re all in this together, getting it done.

The post It’s a good time, there’s none better appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

When you bang up your knee so it swells up like an elephant’s and it brings tears to your eyes to take a step, the orthopedic guy gives you a knee brace to wear requiring four straps to be wrapped tight around the leg and hooked and held tight by Velcro strips, a piece of equipment that I, a professional humorist with less mechanical ability than the average primate, need to remove every night when I go to bed and reattach in the morning. My wife could do this in a jiffy but I made her go to Minnesota to play the opera (she’s a violist) because I love her and because I don’t want her to see me as a pitiful helpless wretch. You understand.

Why should two people be miserable? One is enough.

This week of struggling with the knee brace has changed my life forever. I used to want to be hip and cool and now I just want to be capable. I got wildly lucky finding this woman and she was okay with my being a writer and so she handled all the mechanical stuff — violists have better digital skills — and I sat at a screen and typed. But this week I had to shape up. There are men living in group homes for the immobile because they couldn’t master the knee brace.

New York is a destination for men seeking gender fluidity, you see them in the park wearing skirts — not bearded Celts in kilts but slim sensitive cosmopolitan men with unique pronouns and I think “Okay” but gender fluidity isn’t important for a man with a bum knee. Hydration is important and also urination, and for that you need to walk around.

So this week I discovered that I can be a guy. I thought, “A guy can figure this out. Enough about sensitivity. Be a guy and get the job done. Take out the dead rodents, reach way up and get the casserole down off the high shelf.” And I did.

I grew up among guys in Minnesota, standing around and not talking about our feelings and we never discussed gender. It simply was what it was. But this week I accepted that I am a guy. I can do what needs to be done. I can fasten this crazy thing around my knee.

Women have no equivalent for “guy” — “girl” is close but no cigar — and it’s unfair and I’m sorry about that. Women are locked into womanhood whereas Guy is a very easygoing style of masculinity. You belch and pass gas, snore, pick your teeth with a thumbnail, urinate from a standing position, have a team you’re loyal to, and you’re capable of taking care of stuff. Women are under tremendous pressure to overachieve now that they’ve been liberated for all these years and when they go into formerly masculine fields like ferryboat captain or civil engineer or president of the United States, they have to be not just competent, they have to be Joan of Arc. Guys are not held to the same standard.

Joe Biden is a guy and a good one. He’s not a Mister Marvelous superhero like the man with the ducktail, able to leap over lost elections in a single bound, but his heart is in the right place and you feel like he’d be good to sit down and have a burger with. Joe could figure out a knee brace if he had to, he wouldn’t need to call in somebody from the deep state.

There’s great freedom in being a guy. This is not about conformity. Some guys use power tools, own guns, have gotten into bar fights, have hairy chests: I don’t. Due to my evangelical upbringing I don’t do profanity well and the big famous forceful obscenity I never use because it sounded fraudulent, effete, ephemeral, the two times I used it, but I’m still a guy and at hockey games when Minnesota scores, I bellow and it’s not an ironic bellow, it’s a heartfelt Beowulf bellow. And every morning I put on my knee brace. I figured it out and did it. Solo.

Mr. Marvelous is crazy. Us guys know that and so Joe is going to win this thing. My copy editor, a woman, tried to change that to “We guys” but it’s never been We Guys, it’s Us Guys, me and him and you and you. Let’s figure it out and get it done.

The post The beauty of being a guy appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

The writing life is such a good life that I’m grateful all over again that I paid no attention in 11th grade Chemistry and didn’t become a pharmacist and got kicked out of Industrial Arts for being careless with power tools and was sent up to Speech and LaVona Person and recited original limericks for Oral Interp and made the class laugh and thus went down the literary highway. And now I’m hobbling with a cane after a bad fall, one more excuse to not go out to big fundraising dinners but stay home and work on a screenplay. I’m on page 38 and already there are three funerals, it’s a sure hit, a comedy, I need to have my tux let out for the awards ceremony.

Everyone has their story and mine is that fall. I was walking into a recording studio in Midtown and didn’t see a step and stumbled and crashed. My own fault. Banged up the left knee but a man doesn’t write with his knee and the pain of putting weight on it only highlights the great good luck of my life starting with this long marriage to my friend and lover who, thank God, is back in Minnesota, rehearsing for an opera, and not here worrying about an old man with a bad limp.

Plus which, I didn’t bang my head so I can still recite Shakespeare’s sonnet about getting old, ending with the lines, “This thou perceiv’st which makes thy love more strong: to love that well which thou must leave ere long.” So true, so true. Past 80, the days become so beautiful, even a day on which you fall. Miss Helen Story, my old English teacher, adored Shakespeare and thanks to her, I was given him on a plate, so it saddens me that liberal arts colleges are in decline and kids are denied poetry in favor of computer science, it’s tragic.

Computer science, my darlings, is a skill and it keeps changing as technology speeds ahead and so majoring in computer science is majoring in obsolescence, but “That time of year thou mayst in me behold when yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold, bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang” is art and pure perfection, and you, my dear child in an English-speaking land, have a sacred right to know it.

Someday a genius will come up with a computer that can sing and dance and complete your sentences and talk you out of your misapprehensions and the genius will rearrange the QWERTYUIOP keyboard and everyone over the age of 40, unable to retrain, will fall into obsolescence but poetry will endure, such as Bill’s Sonnet 29, “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state,” in which two-thirds of the poem is devoted to his grievous troubles and then the poem remembers you, the loved one, “for thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings that then I scorn to change my state with kings.”

Friendship is what it’s all about, especially when you’re old.
The young are hip and wildly funny and in tune with the times and admired by thousands of followers but when you get old and boring like me, Mr. Jerry Attrick, you appreciate your old friends more and more. I leave Ukraine and the warming oceans and the fever of Christian fascism to smarter people and I call up friends and say, “How are you doing?” and we reminisce about life’s ups and downs and I tell the story of the luxury home I once rented for a few days in January in Utah and one cold morning went out the door to soak in a hot tub and heard the door click behind me and realized I was naked, had no key, no cellphone, and I got a sheet of blue plastic off the woodpile and wrapped it around me and walked barefoot down a gravel road hoping to find friendship from strangers. It took awhile.

That day I found out what Okay means: it means having shoes on and not having to ring doorbells while half-naked in winter to ask a stranger to please phone the rental agency to send someone with a key. For thy sweet love remembered is to me fantastic and I forget I’m naked in this piece of plastic.

The post That cold day I was naked in Utah appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Think things through. If you quit exercising because you feel good, you’re likely to take a fall and get injured and feel worse. If you fall in love with a married person, you’re likely to have a guilty lover. If you let your life go to pieces, you’ll be too depressed to do anything about it. In the end we live on trust, so don’t look too far ahead, take it one day at a time.

Every day, try to make a little progress; forward motion is good for the soul. Recently, I bought postage stamps online at USPS.com and it made me happy, skipping the line of cranky people waiting for half an hour behind the gentleman who’s sending money orders to Sumatra, Samoa, Szechuan, and the Czech Republic, and wishes to insure each one, and when you finally arrive at the embittered old crone behind the barred window and ask for a sheet of the Railroad Stations stamps, she snaps, “We’re out of that,” and suddenly your life seems meaningless and absurd — no, instead of that, I sat in my kitchen and filled out an extensive form, including a password with a capital letter, a numeral, a punctuation mark, and an Urdu character, and the answers to three security questions — my favorite hobby (writing), my first girlfriend (Corinne Guntzel), and what she saw in me (pure wit and raw sex appeal), and there it is, no need to leave home and run the risk of being killed by an e-bike.

I am in favor of convenience. My cellphone is a loyal friend; when the train is late, when the prescription isn’t ready, I can read news bulletins, text my daughter, call my wife and leave a lusty voice mail.

Convenience is why Jeff Bezos will soon own the solar system. Everything is there at the Amazon website, books, beer, a bag of groceries, a car, a corner lot in Coronado, and my password (FoxNews787m) is easy to remember, and so I give them my business and they’re killing neighborhood retail and so I walk past empty storefronts with “For Rent” signs, and it’s too depressing to go for a walk, so I don’t, and I lose core strength and trip and fall and bang my left knee, and I hobble around with a cane, an object of pity. I have sheets of Railroad Stations stamps but I lost my address book years ago, I only have email addresses. In my loneliness, I fall in love with Juanita Bono the cleaning lady and her husband, Jorge, comes after us and she is weeping (¿Dios mío, cómo pude ser tan estúpida?) and I don’t speak Spanish so I’m lonelier than ever and I go back to Minnesota where it’s snowing in April and I move into my sister’s basement.

Think things through: that’s my point.

We live by trust, as I say, and I discover that all those portfolios of financial information and insurance policies that I, who don’t have an MBA, couldn’t understand one sentence of, but nonetheless signed my name and date and returned in the envelope provided — over the years I surrendered the entirety of my assets to my beloved wife and I do remember her address, which is the one that formerly was mine, and I sit down and I write her a letter in ink, in my own legible hand, “My beloved, I am the victim of a dark conspiracy between Jeff Bezos and Joe Biden and possibly Jimmy Buffett and Joan Baez and John Wilkes Booth and somehow, I don’t know how or why, they’ve robbed me of every last penny but the loss of material possessions has shown me that you and you alone are my all and everything, and before I go to the railroad station and lay my head on the tracks and let the 5:19 pacify my troubled mind, I want you to know that,” and I put a Grand Central Station stamp on it and mailed it and days later my cellphone rang — it was down to 1% power — and it was Jenny, telling me to come home, all was forgiven.

Which is why I’m launching this GoFundMe campaign. If you could donate $20 to help pay for my reunion with my beloved, I’ll give you a “Think Things Through” T-shirt. I can take cold cash, credit cards, PayPal, or a pound and a half of marijuana. Thank you for listening. Your generosity has restored my faith in humankind.

The post Don’t ignore this. It’s important. Read all the way to the end. appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

It’s weird for a guy from the Sixties to read about my beloved Minnesota on the verge of legalizing marijuana, allowing possession of a pound and a half for people 21 and over, opening an agency to license shops, setting an 8% sales tax, erasing the convictions of old dopers. When I was in college, I went to parties where people sat in dim apartments, doors locked, an eye out for the cops, the Grateful Dead on the turntable, and illegality was a big part of the appeal. We were rebels in the cause of higher consciousness. But Minnesota lacked the reliable criminal element to supply quality reefer and our stuff was like mulch and the euphoria was mostly the stupefaction you get from holding your breath; we would’ve gotten more euphoria by riding a good roller coaster. The big thrill was looking around the room and wondering who might be an undercover cop.

I’m not opposed to legalization; I think it’s crazy to lock people up for wanting to be stupid, and if your doctor prescribes marijuana, goody-gumdrops for you, but when I smell marijuana smoke, I get away from it as quickly as possible before some pothead on a skateboard and wearing headphones comes crashing into me. Getting high lowers alertness.

Go back and read Beat poetry written in dim smoke-filled rooms and most of it is less interesting than the average computer manual. Allen Ginsberg was a very sweet man and I went to a couple of his readings and learned that it was good to sit near the exit, that 15 minutes of Allen chanting was sufficient. I preferred beer parties, which often led to hilarity and camaraderie and guys singing surfer songs and “The Sloop John B” and “I Saw Her Standing There,” whereas marijuana led to pretentious inwardness and contemplation of oneself as a rainbow or a rubber duck or rhubarb.

This is an old man talking and my experience tells me that introspection is shortsighted and that the great thing is to make yourself useful to other people. I saw an ophthalmologist last week whose waiting room was full of rambunctious kids and who does surgery to repair crossed-eyes and it was clear how much she loved kids and their noise and it was the happiest waiting room I ever was in.

I went to see her about my double vision, which caused me to take a bad fall and bang up my knee and have to walk around with a cane. When I walked into the waiting room of laughing children, I felt a sort of blessedness, and then she put me through the eye-chart drills and I looked at a light (which I saw as double) and she experimented with strips of lenses to make two lights one, and pasted a plastic prism on my right lens that made the world clearer, and now I can walk down the street and see the world whole.

The world is as beautiful as ever though we live in a strange time of outrageous political fevers, a dysfunctional Congress intent on partisan thwacking while basic governmental obligations go unaddressed because they don’t make lights flash and bells ding. House Republicans seem focused on paranoid conspiracies, compared to which, Richard M. Nixon was an honest and upright public servant worthy of having a statue of him in a public square.

If I thought ahead ten or twenty years, I could easily despair for the country, but at my age one lives in the present and so the encounter with the ophthalmologist looms large in my experience. She is smart and funny and kind and she accomplishes good in this world and I doubt that she got there by having out-of-body experiences. She paid attention in school and somehow became fascinated by the human eye and attained skills to make a huge difference in the lives of little kids.

Clarity. I am grateful for it. I don’t need head trips or expansion of consciousness. The best minds of my generation were not destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked angelheaded hipsters looking for a fix, some of them became heart surgeons and ophthalmologists and thanks to them I walk in the park and look at the beautiful people and love America for the goodness and fascinating varieties of individualism all around. Thank you, Dr. Science.

The post A pound and a half? Really? Why? appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

It was good to see clips of Joe Biden being welcomed by big happy crowds in Ireland, grinning, shaking hands, posing for pictures, kissing babies, quoting Irish poets, busy being beloved by all who waited to see him. Obama knew a degree of belovedness, thanks to his wife and daughters, and Reagan’s sunny disposition was well-received, but the White House hasn’t seen much outright love in my lifetime, which you could argue is proper in a democracy, for people to be wary of great power, but it strikes me as sad, walking around Central Park on a paradise spring day, the cherry trees in full blossom, a jazz trio playing under the trees, Frisbee players playing pickle in the middle, yoga folks striking poses, softball games, a runner pushing his little daughter in a cart, dog walkers, so much public happiness, to think of the cloud of bitterness over this generous country.

How many of these walkers and runners believe that the Illuminati use vaccines to cause autism, that the government is withholding the cure for cancer as a favor to Big Pharm, that a federal research facility in Alaska is engaged in mind control, that Bigfoot is drinking the blood of small children in Roswell, New Mexico, and that the shots came from the grassy knoll and not the School Book Depository?

Not many, I would guess. The constant social interactions of urban life tend to erode the sharper edges of lunacy. There may be secret QAnon cells in brownstone basements in Brooklyn but the Qs need to ride the B and C trains with the rest of us and the gentle jostling and the respect for each other’s space must give them a sense of being part of a civilized whole. I grew up among fundamentalists who taught us to avoid unbelievers — alienation being necessary to maintain our worldview — but it was not possible to maintain this. We weren’t shepherds, we were shopkeepers and shipping clerks, we needed to exercise good manners and engage in amiable small talk, and these daily details turn out to be as important as overarching ideology.

Progressives portray us as an oppressive racist society, okay, but don’t forget the young Black Chicago pianist Fred Jones who converted to Islam in the early Fifties and changed his name to Ahmad Jamal and became a titan of cool jazz for decades. I’d propose that Jones becoming Jamal, though done for religious reasons, was good for business: America is curious about Otherness, the Unlike, and a white pianist named Arnold Johnson, playing the same notes, might easily go unnoticed.

The paranoia of conspiracy theories strikes a person as perverse when you look back at the Depression my parents went through, or visit the Tenement Museum in New York or Ellis Island and get a glimpse of what immigrants found when they arrived. Farm life in New England in the 19th century was so miserable, men by the thousands flocked to seaports to sign up for whaling expeditions. Dressed in oilskins, they stood aboard the ship in heavy seas and hacked the blubber off the monsters as they were hauled up and threw it in an oven to cook down into whale oil, the deck slippery, blades honed razor sharp, men sliding around as the ship pitched and rolled, and if one slid overboard he was likely eaten by sharks. The smallest man on the crew was lowered into the whale’s mouth to harvest the baleen to make buggy whips and corset stays. It was no work for the faint of heart.

My people were devout Christians who believed that Satan was loose in the world seeking whom he might corrupt but they didn’t see government as being in his employ. They weren’t paranoid; they believed in the power of the Word.

Scripture says to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and to love your neighbor as yourself, and this is clear as can be walking around Central Park among the cherry blossoms, the runners, the families — you notice how a little kid dashes away from his parents for about twenty feet and then turns to check their whereabouts. They are the center of his world. My sweetie and I hold hands, we’re a part of this enormous tract of goodwill in the middle of Skyscraper National Park. People in South Dakota may imagine New York as a hellhole of violence and corruption, and if this gives them comfort, fine, but we’re here and it’s April and everyone in our sight feels lucky to be here together.

The post A walk in the park in April appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Over at my church last week we celebrated the risen Lord and the promise of our own resurrection and in my friend’s Unitarian church they heard a sermon about recycling, but despite this difference we get along very nicely — and why? Because we’re older than we were. The pride of possession of the Truth diminishes; the urge to share the sunshine succeeds it.

And a day later I made my annual pilgrimage to Rochester, Minnesota, where I was twice resurrected as my congenital heart problem was fixed when heredity said I should drop dead but instead here I am, having my say. Gratitude is the prevailing attitude at my age. My older brother went skating, slipped, banged his head, and died at 71; he was five years older than I and now I’m nine years older than he; it could’ve happened to me and it didn’t. He was a good man and I am a fly-by-night operator and his demise obligates me to be a better man than I know how to be. So I’m trying.

Mayo put me through the tests, then sedated me to do some electrical work on the defibrillator implanted in my upper left pectoral, which, if my heart stopped at your dinner table during a discussion of hush money paid to a porn star, an electric jolt would bring me back to life. The surgical team ran into problems inserting a wire and five hours later I awoke in the hospital in a state of stupidity and they explained what the problem was, something about a vein, or perhaps personal vanity, and there I was, an invalid, wires attached, feeling like a failed experiment.

I revere Mayo, a place where two surgeries, one to repair the mitral valve, one to replace it, gave me two excellent decades I had no right to expect, and I remember the air of competence and intense concentration among the team in white and blue scrubs in the OR, no small talk, no false moves, and because Medicare paid sixty-some thou for each procedure, I feel obliged to go on being useful in any way I can. Modern health care has made me a person of privilege.

There are progressive zealots among us who scorn me as a privileged person, the people who want to rename the Jefferson Memorial the Sally Hemings Acknowledgement and get National Public Radio to change its name to Inter-relational Public Radio because the word “nation” evokes the evil of nationalism and the racism in our nation’s history, but those projects are amusements, and I’m in the amusement business myself so I don’t object.

The real idealists are the ones who teach third grade, which is hard work and carries with it the possibility of making an enormous difference in people’s lives, just as Mrs. Fern Moehlenbrock made in mine. She let me spend recess in the library so I could read Dickens and it changed my life. Changing NPR to IPR is like renaming Little Falls Great Falls, it doesn’t affect the water flow.

A medical clinic is where it all happens. I see old people facing their mortality with good grace, I see to my amazement that guys can master the art of nursing, the delicacy, the empathy, the soulfulness of caregiving, something I never thought possible.

And I sit with my doctor who’s looking at the chemical analysis of my blood and urine tests, and he reports that my cholesterol level is a small fraction of what’s normal, my level, me, a man who lives on bacon cheeseburgers and onion rings. There is injustice in the world and some of it is in our favor.

Yes, gratitude is the prevailing attitude at my age, far ahead of confusion or dread. I haven’t been angry for years. Mortality is all around us, which makes each day beautiful. Sitting in a waiting room, I imagined making a museum of my boyhood in the mid-20th, the old school desks with iron scrollwork on the sides, the Regulator pendulum clock on the wall, Mrs. Moehlenbrock, her upper arms jiggling as she wrote sentences on the blackboard. Uncle Jim’s hayrack and his team of horses, his Model T, the outhouse. Riding my bike into Minneapolis, I passed massive printing plants, a slaughterhouse, warehouses, a sawmill, they’ve all been renovated into offices where people look at screens and never make anything tangible. I am privileged to tell the story.

The post A few thoughts about privilege appeared first on Garrison Keillor.