Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 58

I lie on a bench by a tree

And experience infinity

With nothing to do

But look over at you

While you lie staring at me.

A blissful day in isolation, part of it on the terrace snoozing in the sun, mostly indoors working on the novel. We three ate dinner out there as the sun was setting, a cold macaroni salad with melon for dessert. A productive day with some phone chatter including a call from the amazing Nellie McKay over in the Poconos, the jazz pianist and singer (sometimes with ukulele) who is so phenomenally gifted and witty onstage. She was supposed to have been on the cruise that got cancelled March 11. I got a chance to tell her how amazing she is. Life is idyllic now that it’s warming up and the mockingbirds are nesting in the vines. At one time, that would’ve been tinged with dread that some tragedy was on the way but now I am better able to accept the idyllic. It helps to ration one’s news intake. I get up in the morning and instead of poring over the Times and the Post, I compose this little missive. Yesterday I invented a whole passage of my novel in which I reminisce about knowing F.S. Fitzgerald in Minneapolis in the late Sixties, a little digression that I feel sort of proud of and even read over the phone to a friend who called. I never do that sort of thing but there I was, doing it. That’s the sort of day it was. And now I can’t wait to get back to work. Sorry to be so brief. More tomorrow.

The post The News from Manhattan: Wednesday, May 27, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Memorial Day gives us a long weekend and marks the beginning of summer, but I remember back in my Boy Scout youth attending a service at a military cemetery and listening to a chaplain talk about men who willingly gave their lives for their country, and heard Taps played by a bugler in the distance. It was moving. Since then, however, we became aware of men who didn’t give their lives — their lives were taken from them by their country fighting a misbegotten war it didn’t know how to stop.

Even in the Good War, WWII, in 1945, preparing for the invasion of Japan, men had no enthusiasm for giving their lives. A friend of mine was in the invasion force, stationed on Okinawa, and was glad when the A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “We were cannon fodder and we knew it,” he told me. “The death toll in an American invasion would’ve been in the millions. It took a nuclear horror to break their will. What a relief not to have to do it by hand-to-hand combat.”

We spent lives heavily in Vietnam and lost the war and now we wonder, “What in God’s name was it for?” Vietnam is a major trading partner, cruise ships stop in Hanoi, Da Nang, and Ho Chi Minh City. My nephew lives in Hanoi and works in a bank there. I could call him and FaceTime if I could figure out the time difference.

I can imagine that FaceTime, YouTube, Instagram, Google, by making the world smaller, might lead to an epoch of relative international peace, and Memorial Day might become a museum piece, and if so, we might consider a Marital Memorial Day, when we honor our divorced and bring some peace to our personal lives. The current divorce rate is around 40% and that is a sorrowful thing, and just as the VFW honors the war dead, knowing how easily the living and the dead might have traded places, so we should acknowledge that marriages crash and burn for reasons not understood and blame should be withheld and peace restored.

To live all the days of your life with your best-informed critic is a heroic venture and it’s worth honoring. Respect your failures and you will more fully enjoy your success.

The MMD should be held in the spring and there should be a lighthearted lunch with exes and their families. You sit next to your ex and toast each other’s health and catch up on the latest and recognize that you launched a romance out of hopeful idealism and though it crashed, the impulse was admirable.

You’re done with the yelling, the door slamming, the lawyers. Sit down and be decent, look each other in the eye, forgive. This would be more valuable in the real life of our country than the patriotic speech and Taps and the rifle salute.

The pandemic has brought husbands and wives closer together than ever and in some states, angry men have stormed state capitols demanding that the bonds be loosened, even at the risk of death. In quarantine, men quickly realize that they married women who possess powerful corrective impulses — who rush to clean up things even before they’re spilled, who straighten and adjust and set things right that men have left askew. Women will edit your sentences as you speak, and if you pause, she will finish the sentence for you. Men are grateful for women’s corrections but it can be exhausting to be held to high standards 24/7 and so, in order to escape supervision, men take up fishing. Fishing makes no sense whatsoever, to go to great trouble and expense to catch inferior game fish when for a fraction of the dough, you can buy salmon or tuna and broil it briefly and have something fabulous. That’s why so few women fish. Men fish because women don’t. For the same reason, they go hunting, go to blues clubs, sit in crowded sports bars and play video games. These things have been shut down by the pandemic. That is why armed men have threatened the woman governor of Michigan.

A Marital Memorial Day would be a small step toward civility in this anger-riven country. The country needs to calm down and learn to speak gently. Once we do MMD, then perhaps Democrats and Republicans will be able to talk to each other. If you can make peace with a well-informed critic, what’s the harm in talking to an ignorant one?

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Every night, phenomenal dreams,

Peaceful, no violent extremes.

Long conversations

In calm situations,

Consciousness flowing in streams.

The phenomenal specificity of my dream life astonishes me. Last night, I was in Dublin and was shopping in a pharmacy for some pens and postcards and I walked around the shop several times and looked closely at the displays and saw all of the products in clear detail, names, packaging, all sorts of things, up close, and found the postcards and chose some and then bought some Sharpie pens. What an odd dream, like taking inventory. And then I was in a living room with strangers — except my friend Tony Judge was there — and listening to a Catholic from the North talk beautifully and persuasively about the Troubles and the Prots in the room listened to him. A dream in which a man spoke sensibly at length. Of course it started to evaporate the moment I woke up and now it’s mostly gone, but it was enjoyable while it lasted. I draw no conclusions except that in isolation, one still needs social life and here it is in a dream. I haven’t been shopping since January and last night I enjoyed looking for pens in a drugstore in Dublin.

Off to prayer. Make a good day for yourself.

The post The News from Manhattan: Monday, May 25, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

A writer got locked in Manhattan

And hard was the chair that he sat in

As he wrote fiction,

Prayed for benediction —

Light up your pipe and stuff that in —

It is a comic romance,

Graceful as a tap dance,

And you’ll laugh until

Your coffee you spill

All down the front of your pants.

For the first time in a long time, I have a great deal of time, and I am truly grateful. Up at 6 a.m. and the day stretches ahead. The pandemic has given me something new — the 45-minute phone call. I call up friends who live alone and they launch into ambitious monologues that go on and on and I put the phone on Speaker so if they say something I might put in the novel, I can write it down, but mostly I just listen. Sometimes I do my exercises listening to them. Cousin Elizabeth told me a story about a canoe trip down the Flambeau River on which she and others almost drowned. It was a novel in itself and she is a person who pays close attention to detail. She speaks in complete paragraphs. Her last line was, “God does not come to help us on account of goodness but on the basis of need.” Fascinating. For years I talked to people on the radio and now it’s their turn.

In this sequestered life, the imagination roams freely. Maia is busy with her friends on Facetime and Zoom, locked in her bedroom, laughing, and Jenny is running our lives and reading books and watching movies, and I migrate from kitchen to living room and back, working away. We sit in the kitchen and observe two men who live together in an apartment opposite us, facing the air shaft, who go around all day in white underpants. Why? This is our big question. Where are their pants? We speculate about them and a few other interesting people who leave their shades open and do odd things. We’re not proud of our voyeurism but not ashamed of it either.

An old friend read the memoir and said he thought I was too self-deprecating and that I should take out the chapter entitled “Disasters,” but of course I can’t. Another old friend is reading it and says she loves my aunts and uncles, which pleases me. They were separatists and avoided non-believers and so they didn’t give many people the opportunity to love them. A few weeks ago, I thought the memoir was finished and now I feel it needs another couple months of intense work. So we may extend our quarantine beyond the rest of you. The Minnesota State Fair, an annual staple in my life, has been cancelled and I’ve seen enough Fairs that I can skip one. No plans to travel until I get booked to come do a show. Time to cogitate and get to know my family.

Stay off the Flambeau River today, please. Be well, do good work, etc. Love your life.

The post The News from Manhattan: Sunday, May 24, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Day out and day in and day out

Is what quarantine’s all about.

Days are the same,

A repetitive game,

But beautiful too, there’s no doubt.

Ritual grace is the key,

Rites are what make you free.

Fill in the blanks

As you give thanks

For heterogeneity.

We attended a Zoom wedding in Minnesota last night, sitting on our couch in New York, and Jenny was moved by it, the vows, the preacher’s homily — when he said that compatibility is something you work toward, not a pre-existing condition, she said, “Yes,” which gave me pause since I remember feeling compatible from the first time we met in the spring of 1992. Lunch at Dock’s seafood restaurant on 90th and Broadway. She lived on 102nd. She did most of the talking. That hasn’t changed. I was relieved. Taciturnity is a privilege and I cling to it, as a writer. I need to think. For me, thinking and talking don’t go well together. Last night, in the kitchen, talking to my old pal Pat Hampl in St. Paul, Jenny was making bread dough, and listening to Pat on the speakerphone talk about her brother who had overcome severe learning handicaps to become a highly skilled dental surgeon, J kept breaking in with her own thoughts and corrections and finally sat down and talked to Pat while I held the phone. I held it for about ten minutes and then I said, “You two ought to get together sometime.” I walked away. They continued. I didn’t mind. Finally, Pat asked if I was still there. I was and we said goodbye. I wish this would happen more often.

Off to prayer. Blessings on all.

The post The News from Manhattan: Saturday, May 23, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

I love to meet people on Zoom,

You can speak very boldly, ka-boom,

Be frank, let her blow,

Forty minutes or so,

Then sweep them away with a broom.

I pick up a cellphone and talk

For half an hour as I walk,

And I exercise

While I socialize,

I’m an intellect and I’m a jock.

A day of triumph for Jenny yesterday — she baked bread and it came out beautifully. She was haunted by old bread-baking failures and intimidated by her Swedish grandma’s baking, but finally broke through and now her self-esteem has risen a notch. I used to fly around the country doing shows and staying in nice hotels and now, thanks to the plague, I get to observe my true love close up. She’s a reader, a musician, a woman with many close friends, an art lover, but the other day she admitted to me that she loves a clean kitchen. She loves to cook. The bread-baking was a big challenge and she was proud that she succeeded. My staunch urban feminist wife has secret hausfrau leanings. We’ve had cleaning ladies forever but she takes pride in her ability to clean a bathroom floor and do it very very well. I should not be divulging this to you and if you tell her I will never speak to you again and I will put your name into my novel in a way you’ll regret. Loose lips sink ships.

People are suffering around us and I know it. A long talk with an old friend who is isolated at home alone and he launches into a long story that doesn’t seem to have a point or an end, and then he admits he’s not seen anybody for a week and his mind is “going wild” — news that a high-school classmate and good friend is in an old-folks warehouse in Minneapolis, penniless, with signs of dementia, and what can one do? She was a small-town intellectual and a good person and now she’s going into the dark for the long goodbye. An old friend went into that dark last week. I’d known her since 1976 and she was lively and sassy and full of enthusiasm and I saw her a year ago and she was friendly but she had no idea who I am. Now she’s gone. I’m at an age when part of one’s day is taken up with mourning. It’s just how it is.

The novel is whistling along and September is the pub date and I’m thinking maybe in spring 2021 I can get back to doing shows so that leaves a gap of six months that I need to plan for. This Wobegon novel has been so much fun, I should write another. Maybe Donald J. Trump moves to town. He got drubbed in November and his empire crashed in the recession and he’s under threat of prosecution from a dozen eager lawmen and people are writing vicious salacious memoirs about him and he comes to the Little Town That Time Forgot to be forgotten and gets a job pumping gas and is completely happy in a cabin by the lake. He takes up fishing. He gardens. His problem is that his father was born before he was and his father left him all that money and put him in a bewildering NY social circle and LW is what he was meant for. He becomes a nice guy. He gains quite a bit of weight. He stops coloring his hair. He changes his name to Danny Trondheim. He’s unrecognizable as a former POTUS but he confesses to me, his confidante. He is who he is, forgetful, small-minded, vain, but he makes a good gas jockey. He has no regrets because his memory is poor. He loves being a nobody, it’s what he was meant for.

Time for Morning Prayer. Today is Friday. Make it good.

The post The News from Manhattan: Friday, May 22, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Who knows what the future will bring?

Will we rise? Will we fall? Will we swing?

Whatever our fate,

Let us sing as we wait,

“I’ve got the world on a string,

Sitting on a rainbow,” sang Frank.

I’m in luck, I got love in the bank.

I’m in the right place,

The wind in my face,

And plenty of gas in the tank.

Another sunny day. The mockingbirds seem to be making a home in the vines on the wall of our terrace. Two red finches too and maybe a couple of bluejays. We don’t put out birdseed for fear of attracting pigeons who tend to be bullies. Anyway, there’s plenty of food around. The novel is racing along and every morning I’m awakened around 5 a.m. by new ideas — this morning, I awoke thinking that a Norwegian bachelor farmer in Lake Wobegon is struck by a cow’s tail during milking and there’s fresh manure on the tail and in that minute he decides to sell the farm and go for an ocean cruise and he makes a life out of that, Mediterranean, Baltic, Pacific, Caribbean. Brilliant idea. I plan to finish it in three weeks. When you’re 77, you don’t take long views. Writer’s block is for kids in their twenties — I’ll be blocked when I die and that’s soon enough. I grew up on 77th Avenue North in Minneapolis so this is a magical year for me. Maybe it’s the end of my writing career and now I’ll get into yoga and baking and take ballroom dancing lessons. The pandemic has been good. I don’t kill time, I don’t watch movies or read books to keep busy. I love the sameness of the days. Up for morning prayer and to write a limerick and post a journal. Maia awakens and comes in and has breakfast, then calls her friend in London. I write. There is the beautiful moment when Jenny steps into the room and we embrace. There is a nap. We have dinner and hold hands and say table grace, something we never did regularly before but quarantine needs rituals and prayer is a good one. Also the 7 p.m. neighborhood racket, everyone sticking their heads out and whooping and clapping. I go to bed early. In this strange new life, my dream life has come to life, long elaborate dreams. Last night, J and I, along with our friends Jon and Marcia, went to a mysterious stone castle which turned out to be a prison and there I was reunited with a son I didn’t know I had, a teenage boy, very quiet, fearful, hesitant to leave the institution, and he and I walked together and then we threw a ball back and forth, and that pleased him. And now I shall get back to work.

The post The News from Manhattan: Thursday, May 21, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

I’m taking hydroxychloroquine

Which makes me attractive and thin,

It’s good for the skin,

The jawline and chin,

And sometimes I chase it with gin.

And when I win

I’ll stand up and grin

And the good life will start to begin.

Sunny yesterday and pizza for supper and afterward I took a pitcher of water out to the terrace to water some plants and Maia snuck up behind me with a glass of water and I turned and we pitched water at each other, convulsions of laughter — her laughter, not mine, I don’t laugh, as you well know. I was brought up Calvinist and still am.

Then had a nice long conversation with a friend in Connecticut who is enjoying gardening, thrilled with it, and solitude. His line of work, show business, is shut down for the foreseeable future and he’s intrigued by the idea of doing a stage show at a drive-in theater, but is in love with plants and fighting off the deer and the groundhog who are watching the crops.

My first reader sent a long detailed report on my Wobegon novel, which actually is a novella trying to add weight, and it’s the sort of editorial report I wish I’d gotten on my previous books in their adolescence, very specific, more of this, less of that, cut here, move A to B. Something about my Calvinist demeanor makes people think I know what I’m doing, but every writer needs an editor. Just as every incompetent man needs a capable partner, someone who can read a printer manual and figure out how to make it do somersaults. When you are falling in love with your lover, you should be thinking about mechanical aptitude and electronics and plumbing. My wife corrects my grammatical mistakes which I make deliberately so I know she’s listening.

And now it’s time for Morning Prayer, and then a day of writing. Is it okay to petition God to make me funny or would people laugh? Have a fine day.

The post The News from Manhattan: Wednesday, May 20, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

In Wisconsin the barrooms are packed

With citizens in close contact,

In joyful defiance

Of medical science

Which they would deny is a fact.

They’ll take home the virus

To Gladys and Cyrus

And see if the old folks get whacked.

Sunny in New York this morning so already it’s a good day. Met a man online yesterday who’d been a sheepherder on the Snake River, a carnival barker, a forest firefighter, an artist’s model, a farmworker, actor, politician, and an Army lieutenant in Vietnam, and a woman, the daughter of an Air Force master sergeant, who’d lived in a dozen places including Spain, France, England and North Dakota by the time she was twenty, and they made me feel immature and inexperienced by comparison. This is the price you pay for finding your vocation early, you miss out on living. I grew up cautious, eager to find a safe place in the world, and now, during the lockdown, there’s plenty of time to think about it. My grandsons are thinking about college in the fall, not sure they want to spend time taking online courses, and surely it would be better for them, on the whole, to work in a carnival or fight fires or herd sheep, but I’m not sure those jobs are available. And should a grandfather suggest such things? Nonetheless, it’s true. My college education was mostly a waste, as I look back on it, though it seemed logical at the time. Seven years in the wrong harness.

Isolation due to pandemic is a great boon to thoughtfulness. You’re home, free of the usual routines, and for once in my life there’s plenty of time to think. I think this is good. At 7 p.m. last night, we went out on the terrace to join in the Upper West Side jubilee and stood there dinging and whooping and clapping and Jenny was overjoyed to see the Indian family (from India) on their terrace in a building a hundred yards west of us. They haven’t been seen for months and there they were, waving and whooping, the parents and grandma and the kids whom we’ve seen grow up to teenagerhood. She’s never met them, doesn’t know their names, but feels an attachment. Saw them once on the street and felt too shy to walk over and say, “Hi, we live just east of you and we’ve been observing you for ten years.” But there is nonetheless a social bond. As there is daily at 7 p.m. Some trumpets play from distant balconies, an undercurrent of applause, whooping and clanging and dinging, a daily statement of solidarity. “We’re still here.” Thank you, Lord, for Tuesday the 19th and let us enjoy it as we can.

The post The News from Manhattan: Tuesday, May 19, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Jenny cut my hair yesterday out on the balcony in the sun and she kept laughing as she did, which doesn’t instill confidence to hear your haircutter laugh, but at least the hair stays out of my eyes and the worst part (she says) is in back, and we’re in isolation so who cares, and at my age I’m not applying for a job, so it’s rather immaterial. If I wanted to do something wild with my hair, dye it deep purple with bright green stripes, now would be the time to do it, but I lack the motivation to be colorful. I’m a writer and an observer and you can’t see the world clearly if other people are staring at you: it’s see or be seen.

Hair was crucial in the 10th grade, 1958, when you had greasers like Trump and jocks with crewcuts and farmboys had shaggy hair and we cool guys aimed for an Ivy League look. My dad cut his sons’ hair and he was a carpenter and not so keen about fashion. I told him, “Short on top but with a part, a little longer in back.” Coolness was the point of it, blue button-down shirts, khaki pants, loafers, white socks, but now I have no clue about what’s cool, if anything is, and coolness is no longer a factor in my life. I’m old. The first section of the paper I turn to is the obituary section. People I know keep showing up there.

I went away to the U aiming to be a writer so I majored in English, not knowing how much I’d come to hate it. I wanted to be F. Scott Fitzgerald and my teachers were his mortician. The English Department was across the street from the Institute of Technology and we writers loved to look down on the engineers. They wore the wrong color shirts with plastic pocket protectors and high-water pants with belts hitched way up under their rib cage and half-rim horn-rimmed glasses and short nerdy hair whereas we had long majestic hair and we wrote dark incomprehensible poetry. If I ever felt miserable about having to write a paper about Dryden or Coleridge or Milton, I just crossed the street and mingled with engineers, their slide rules in a holster on their belt, a race of dullards without a single amazing and original thought, and it gave me the arrogance I was looking for.

I think of this now as I consider what engineers have given the world, such as this little gizmo the size of half a sandwich that is always near me, a telephone that is also a camera, encyclopedia, newspaper, calendar, compass, weather monitor, phone book, and twenty other things I’m not aware of. Quiet studious men from the world of numbers changed the world in some wonderful ways. Bill Gates does not appear to spend a great deal of time worrying about his hair. Mark Zuckerberg has hair like a skullcap. Facebook is my link to family and friends. The nerds who invented Google gave a great gift us old people who forgot what “postmodern” means and can’t remember the year Rod Carew set a record for stealing home base and Google will find it for you: he stole home seventeen times. Seven times in 1969 alone.

Nineteen sixty-nine was an enormous year in my life. I was 27 and had a baby boy and needed to get serious and instead of finishing a novel that nobody would want, I got a job in radio doing the early morning shift and I shifted from tragic self-awareness to humor because that’s what people needed on a dark winter morning and that was when I started to feel useful and that’s when you find your vocation. And hair has nothing to do with it.

I write this on a laptop hooked up to a printer with an instruction manual written by engineers for other engineers, people who whizzed through college courses that to me were a solid brick wall, so it’s unreadable for me. Imagine if all your cookbooks were in French and you had to call one of your few Francophones in order to make pancakes. But never mind. Thank you, Nerdland, for the laptop and the phone. I could live without them but it wouldn’t be nearly so much fun. I apologize for looking down on you for your bad hair.

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