Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 57

It’s Sunday, the fourteenth of June,

In our pandemic commune,

Three birds in a tree,

We live peaceably,

Like Maggie and Jiggs

Or the three little pigs,

Here in our Sunday cartoon,

Our dialogue in a balloon.

Three months in our apartment in Manhattan, three months without going to dinner parties and guess what? I don’t miss them. No need to make conversation, it comes naturally with this family. Meanwhile I get some long fascinating phone conversations with distant relatives. An hour with a cousin last night and in ordinary times an hour would be a major imposition but what do we have but time? Time, time, time. We talked about systemic racism and I learned a few things.

Montaigne said the most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness, which is the opposite of what I thought in my youth, but I’m adhering to it now as best I can and cheerfulness is the keynote of pandemic life, in the apartment or on the phone. No brooding, and if you must, then go in the back bedroom. Every day my daughter and I surprise each other on the terrace, one approaches the other with a pitcher of water and tries to corner the other and heave a quart of water through the air. Squealing and laughter. She squeals, I take my drenching with solemn dignity.

I’m going to work on a screenplay today. The idea came to me in the middle of the night. A Lake Wobegon story and I see John C. Reilly and Jessica Lange in the lead. Don’t postpone. Today’s the day.

The post The News from Manhattan: Sunday, June 14, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

I wrote a book in six weeks

Where normal folk turn into freaks.

There is cheese. People eat it,

Evil’s defeated,

And believe it or not, the Lord speaks.

Friday morning, the novel went off, which should be exhilarating, one would think, but I loved working on it and so it’s depressing and you go to bed and sleep. Time to get back to practical matters. Got to sell our old house in St. Paul, which has been on the market for a year. Got to break out of this pandemic quarantine. Yesterday, for the first time since February, I got on the elevator and rode down and walked across the lobby to take an elevator up to visit friends on the other side of the building. It felt like a long journey. I wore a mask for the first time and received mask instruction which is complicated and strict. Eventually I should leave the building and go for a walk, but where? What’s out there? The big question is: do we still want to live in New York? Will the city come back? When? I miss going to St. Michael’s, going to the Rose Reading Room at the NYPL on 42nd and sitting in that beautiful space with all of those industrious people working silently around me, almost all of them less than half my age. I feel at home among people dedicated to work — this transcends race and ethnicity and gender — hard workers can recognize each other and bond on that basis and the other stuff doesn’t matter so much. I miss my work life, when I went to the Prairie Home office or went to the New Yorker office and was quartered with people dedicated to the same enterprise. It won’t happen again but I miss it.

The post The News from Manhattan: Saturday, June 13, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Minneapolis, the town of my aunts,

It all comes back in a glance,

The sweet bungalows,

My good Sunday clothes,

The smell of pot roast,

My grandfather’s ghost,

Elsie and Jean

And Mother convene,

Recollecting a teenage romance.

Far, far from home, isolated in a pandemic, still working on a memoir, and that old life is quite vivid, the men in the living room, struggling to find conversation, the aunts in their glory in the kitchen, working up a perfect dinner with a fabulous lemon meringue pie and talking a blue streak about the summer of 1931 when they took the trolley up to Anoka to the Keillor farm and Elsie and Mother both were taken with young John, and the little boy sits quietly in the corner, wondering which one John will fall in love with. He is 18 and they are 15 and 16 and it is all still up in the air.

The post The News from Manhattan: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

A lie has to come to an end,

So that the damage can mend.

You know you did it,

Come out and admit it,

And you’ll be forgiven, my friend.

I was wrong about the Minneapolis police and out of loyalty to a city I love, where I grew up, I covered for it – said most cops are good, said police work is terribly hard, said young people don’t understand how complicated the world is – but the New York Times article on police unions opened my eyes, the fact that a Minneapolis alderman who stood up to the cops was punished by the police federation who refused to respond to 911 calls from his ward, says clearly that the federation is corrupt, the cops have made themselves into a mafia, and this is borne out by a talk last night with a retired public defender who said, “Cops always lie. There’s a code of silence.” And a heartfelt note from friend Jearlyn about “the talk” that black parents give their boys – never talk back to a cop or you could be killed. The protesters are right, I was wrong. My experience in Minneapolis is 150% different from that of a black man or woman. We are a progressive city only for the white majority. Some people have been fighting this battle uphill for my entire lifetime and I didn’t know it. This is a terrible failure of journalism in Minneapolis: an honest crusading newspaper should have taken this battle on. This is a moral failure that the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party is complicit in. I have no idea how the city should proceed and this is not my crusade, I’m a humorist, but I do know that this is a moment when a horrific fact – the video of Mr. Floyd being murdered by four cops in broad daylight – should lead to something good and honorable. Justice.

The post The News from Manhattan: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

A man in isolation in a pandemic with his wife in an apartment is a sailor without a ship and a cowboy with no horse and I shouldn’t complain but life without complaint would be too much like church so I will. A year ago my wife and I left our 5-BR house and became apartment people because we didn’t know four other couples we wanted to form a commune with and play dulcimers and work for world peace, and it’s okay but I miss my house and feel a loss of manhood.

I once, solo, wearing gloves, carrying a plastic pail with an LP record jacket for a lid, removed a bloodthirsty bat clinging to the curtain in the family room and pounded a stake in its heart and saved my wife, who was on the balcony in a diaphanous gown looking at the moon, from an eternity of undeath. In an apartment building, the manager would do that.

In the house, I once made a risotto that my wife said was the Van Gogh “Sunflowers” of risottos, which I accomplished because she was outdoors sunning on the patio. In the apartment kitchen, I would’ve been under her close supervision and, frankly, I’ve never done well under supervision. As I write this, she is not looking over my shoulder pointing out that Van Gogh painted several series of sunflower pictures and maybe I should be more specific and say it’s the one in the National Gallery in London. The paragraph was better without that sentence, was it not?

My wife is a violinist/violist and so she believes in exact precision, whereas I am a writer of fiction and enjoy the freedom of living in our apartment here in Montmartre with a walled garden in back where I read Proust in French and have no idea who is in the White House, none, and don’t care to know. “C’est la vie,” as we c’est.

I don’t say that mine was a great risotto, but of all the men who’ve trapped a bat, I make as good a risotto as any of them, but I am a man and we don’t discuss our exploits, which is why, on last week’s Zoom call with a couple in Northern California, the two women did most of the talking, discussing their vacation plans and the doings of children, while Russ and I kept silent, as we old Navy men tend to do. Loose lips sink ships. And when we talked, we spoke in short declarative sentences. Like that one.

Russ is a mountain biker, a slight man with a will of steel whose quadriceps are deadly weapons. I can envision him going up Mount Denali with snow tires, not breathing hard, to rescue naïve climbers in shorts and sandals and diaphanous windbreakers. But did he talk about his exploits on the screen? No, nor did I talk about the fact that I wrote a novel and a memoir in the past few weeks.

The novel is in French, about me and a woman named Madeline, and the memoir covers my early years in Minneapolis when F. Scott Fitzgerald was my Scout leader (his book Boats Against the Current is about canoeing the Mississippi) and Bob Dylan was majoring in political science at the U and read me his paper on Bob LaFollette as we walked out of Folwell Hall — “How does it feel to be all alone like a complete unknown, breaking through the attitudinal bandwidth to the paradigm of proactive empowerment” — and I was about to edit that sentence when a truck went past and the term paper flew up in the backwash of wind and got scattered in the hard rain and he said, “It’s all over now” and I said, “Look, it’s blowing in the wind” and that was that. I understand he’s done well since then.

The women were talking about their kids’ social lives and I spoke up and said, “Alexa, take the ladies into the next room” and she did and Russ and I leg wrestled for a while and he threw me, two out of three, and I recited “The Miller’s Tale” in Middle English, and he recited the periodic table, and we punched each other hard in the solar plexus, and as the women came back in their diaphanous gowns, we competed for the Best Last Line. Mine was: “The winner of any contest is the historian who writes it down.” Not bad, huh?

The post How we survive in these hard, hard times appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

I awake in the morning and choose

To postpone a look at the news.

I had a good sleep

And the anger will keep

Until later, no need for previews.

This old man normally awakens two or three times in the night since I married a woman who urges me to drink more water, otherwise I’d drink less than a tree toad, but it’s no problem since I can awaken, do my business, return to the marital bed, and doze off in seconds. This is not due to a guiltless conscience, but compartmentalization: I keep guilt in a separate drawer, with the frying pans. Last night, however, was one of those rare uninterrupted nights of sleep like the ones I had when I was in my 20s and 30s, a child, and I now sit down and brew my coffee, dazed at the blessedness of sleep, how peaceful the brain is. Today is a day of work on the novel, filling in some shallow places, adding jokes, padding it a little — some parts of it need to slow down. Monday I’ll send it to my editor. Note, I say “my” editor. I’ve not met him yet but this is a personal relationship. I started out with Roger Angell at The New Yorker who was the kindest man ever, all rejections were made with deep regret, acceptances were like Pulitzer Prizes. I had Bill Whitworth at The Atlantic who was a newspaperman at heart so he was fond of fact, resistant to rhetoric. I had the great Kathryn Court at Viking who, for Lake Wobegon Days in 1984, came out and lived with my girlfriend and me in St. Paul and edited the book on our dining room table. You don’t find an editor like her today. Some editors work from home but not from your home.

This novel has come so easily and quickly that I’m going to miss writing it. It came quickly because we were quarantined and I had no interruption, Jenny and Maia were self-sufficient. And yesterday I started to think about writing another book after I’m done with the memoir which is almost done. It’s the greatest pleasure to have work ahead, waiting. Other people do the jobs I was suited to do, drive bus, wash dishes, punch tickets, and somehow I lucked into a literary career. Every time a word eludes me and won’t drop, I imagine dementia is ahead, but it hasn’t happened yet. So now, to work. The Tangerine Spleen is on his own today, I can’t be bothered. Enjoy the day.

The post The News from Manhattan: Sunday, June 7, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Saturday, June, no baseball,

Maybe no Series next fall,

So I’ll write fiction,

Avoiding addiction

To opioids or alcohol.

I’ll still have ice cream, but that’s all.

A perfect summer morning in New York, sitting outside with my love, discussing world issues so as to get those out of the way, the pandemic, the shops out of business, the anger in the streets, the insane fool in Washington, the 50% of the population who worship him no matter what he does, and now that’s done and we can go about what we’re here for, which is to live our lives to the fullest extent and be grateful for it all. I wish I had three ears of fresh sweet corn for the three of us, that’s all I’d need. Someday.

The post The News from Manhattan: Saturday, June 6, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

The world is falling apart but my niece has sent me pictures of her, her friends, people from her church, cleaning up along Lake Street in Minneapolis, something that distinguishes a Minneapolis riot from one in Chicago or Philadelphia: when the arsonists leave, the brigades of nice people come in to tidy up.

Say what you will, but this is our neighborhood and we don’t accept trashiness, we believe that clean streets, nice lawns, well-kept houses, bring out the goodness inherent in humanity. My aunts believed that, my mother, my grandma. Men with incendiary devices come through and torch businesses, a library, a police station, but the women will have the last word, count on it.

I have learned this during the almost three months of quarantine: woman rules the roost and man is a detriment to be tolerated. We’ve been isolating in a two-bedroom apartment and she has gotten very strict about squalor. She holds up a pair of black underwear she found on the couch. It is a large pair with a slit in front. I weigh 220 pounds, she weighs half of that. “Whose is this?” she asks, rhetorically.

She knows that I, like other men, have strong latent bachelor farmer tendencies. I set something down where it doesn’t belong — a magazine on the floor by the toilet — and minutes later, you’ve got papers strewn on the dining room table, a sinkful of dirty dishes, bedsprings in the front yard and an old rusted-out Chevy up on blocks, a refrigerator and two rusty sinks in tall weeds. It starts with one magazine on the floor and your life descends into chaos. Without a woman to hold up the underwear and say, “Is this yours?” it’s all over, goodbye Information Age, we’re back to Bronze.

She is tough. Man is a hunter: give me a rock and I’ll go out and bring home my kill and skin it and roast it over a fire. She leans toward veganism. So my meat ration has been cut to a tenth of what it once was. I used to travel for business and wake up in a hotel, having hung my breakfast order on the doorknob the night before, and in comes the waiter with coffee, an 8 oz. top sirloin, two eggs fried over easy, a breakfast that prepares a man to go out and vanquish the Visigoths. No more. In my vegan prison, it’s wheat cereal with some blueberries. She loves lentils, quinoa, green leafy things, stuff that cattle eat.

“It’s good for you,” she says and of course she’s right and that’s the irritating part. She wants me to do sit-ups and jumping jacks and stretching, she encourages me to join her in yoga with her YouTube instructor Adriene. I don’t do yoga, I’m a guy. Some male persons may do it but guys don’t. What’s His Name doesn’t do yoga with Melania and neither does Joe Biden with Jill, and if either one were to be photographed in black tights doing Ardha Chandrasana, he would no longer be eligible to become Leader of the Free World. The LOFW plays golf. He doesn’t kneel or squat, he swings a club and sends a missile flying with deadly accuracy.

Before the lockdown I went to an office and was consulted by employees who offered their suggestions, which, wisely, I took, with minor revisions. I wore a suit, sometimes a tie. I had a role. Now my usefulness is limited to reaching the copper boiler on the top shelf and bringing it down and then, later, putting it back up. Height is my main asset, not experience. Sometimes I unload the dishwasher. Once in a while, if the sky turns black and bolts of lightning appear to the south and the wind moans in the weatherstripping and she becomes anxious, she turns to me for manly reassurance, though I know less about meteorology than the average medieval peasant did, but I put my hand on her shoulder and say, “It’s okay. Only a storm.”

And that is what makes quarantine bearable, putting my hand on her shoulder. We’ve been locked up together for a long time and whenever I walk into a room and see her, I put my hand on her shoulder, her back, I kiss her hair, I know this woman by heart. For her sake, I eat lentils and quinoa instead of muskrat or wild boar. She runs the house and I get to put my hand on her shoulder. It’s not a bad deal.

The post How we live in these troubled times appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

When I was 16, some friends and I formed a basketball team and we arranged to play a team at the Phyllis Wheatley Settlement House on the North Side of Minneapolis. We went and found ourselves surrounded by black faces for the first time in our lives, a minority of white teenagers playing against boys who were bigger, faster, better players than we, and it was scary. We got our pants beat off us but the other team was polite and we shook hands afterward, but nonetheless we were shaken. We came from a small-town high school with one black boy, Lincoln Berry, who came from an evangelical family and played piano. Being minority whites was scary.

Racism comes from fear, including the fear felt by white men. It is the result of limited experience, the result of segregation. It changes over time but slowly because it isn’t an intellectual fear, it comes from narrowness of experience. It can’t be talked out of you, you have to live the life.

I went away to the U of M where African students were plentiful and you’d sometimes see African men and women walking through campus, speaking beautiful French, since they came from French colonial Africa, which was an astonishing sight to a Minnesota kid. But they were more serious students than we, and our habits of separation persisted. I never met African-American folk from north Minneapolis at the U. Never. College was where I made close friends with Jewish kids — that barrier was crossed in my youth and crossed swiftly and easily — but I was never thrown in with black people except in the civil rights movement, which at the U of M was quickly overshadowed by the anti-war movement.

Our righteous anger at the Vietnam war led to the end of the military draft in 1973, a profound change in male society. For our fathers, military service had been a near-universal experience, a profoundly democratic one, in which (especially after the military was desegregated in 1948) young white guys from small towns were thrown into close contact with black urban America. Society became more stratified as a result of the volunteer military.

The liberal progressivism of my generation in Minneapolis is a rather thin aspirational ideal not based in real life experience and that’s why the city I love is burning, people living in dread, as the result of having tolerated a police force that has its own code and doesn’t live by our ideals. (Maybe our ideals don’t translate into law enforcement, I don’t know.) I don’t know anybody in law enforcement. My friends are writers and musicians. I only know a couple of people in the military. This isolation is changing in the generations behind me, but the change comes slowly.

Meanwhile, there are angry forces in society that thrive on chaos and thanks to social media, they are able to rally each other. Anger does not change the fear that lies behind racism.

The burning and destruction happened in the neighborhood beloved to my mother’s family, thirteen kids grew up not far from there, around 38th and Longfellow. I walked those streets as a kid, our Sunday School was in the neighborhood. I pray that peace returns. This pandemic has isolated people and maybe that was a factor — schools are our most basic democratic institution, followed by grocery shopping and sports, the bus system, and your early work experience. That’s where real change occurs, not in righteous pronouncements like this one.

The post The News from Manhattan: Friday, May 29, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

We sat outdoors for a meal

Which is, as we say, Quite The Deal,

To sit with our friends

As the sunset descends

And talk about things that are real.

What’s real is work and love and it’s work that we talk about — bad luck to talk about love — and two people at the table are musicians and out of work, and one is an investment fund manager, which involves specialized vocabulary, and one is a writer who’s talked for a living and is trying to retire, so the conversation ranges widely, most of it optimistic. Supper is a meatless hot dish. Dessert is fresh fruit. We look out over New York rooftops and talk about future travels (uncertain) and the underpants men in a nearby apartment and books and the Minneapolis cops who murdered a handcuffed man. A summer night in the shade of a small tree. I want to write a magazine piece about my teachers who made a difference in my life. I want to write another Lake Wobegon novel, having almost finished the current one. I want to get out and do shows again someday. I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t work. The manager says, “I wouldn’t either.” So on we go. Got a magazine rejection today but it doesn’t matter. I can hear my daughter singing in the next room. My wife is restless, tired of the pandemic, but now and then, three or four times a day, she comes over and puts her arms around me and her head next to mine and that counts for everything. Everyone I know is pretty much in the same boat: nobody is exercising their freedom to crowd up against strangers. So much is strange in this lockdown but the overriding fact, to a Minnesotan, is that it’s summer at last, we’re eating outdoors, and we’re all in this together. Meanwhile, I hear word that my church will not open for public services probably until Easter, 2022. Have mercy, dear Lord.

The post The News from Manhattan: Thursday, May 28, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.