Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 60

The quarantine goes at a crawl

And I miss eating out and baseball

But life is fine

As we sing “Ninety-nine

Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”

A peaceful day Sunday, almost warm. Maia got fancied up and Jenny took a video of her dancing with me and making a grand entrance in a ball gown. No Prom this year so a teacher is making a Prom video. The girl is busy on Facetime rehearsing a play with her friends. My novel has been printed out so I can make pencil corrections. I believe I’ll make my deadline in two weeks. Today we give up our semi-vegan diet— what’s the point? — and cook a pot roast. Life is good with spring on the way. People are dying but friends on the phone are very funny, almost giddy. Maybe we’re going batty. Back in my 50s I was more anxious about life and following the warnings. “Do not touch when hot.” “Sharp: may cut skin if pressure is applied. “Open with an extreme sense of foreboding.” Fearsome books about worst-case scenarios. Every week some ordinary thing was found to have bad consequences. You Google “may be fatal” and it finds 23,457,863 sites in .85 of a second, including stoop tag and Girl Scout cookies. You do a search on “therapy” and find Wounded Sons of Emotionally Distant Fathers and Anger Anonymous, for parents who have yelled at their children and Men Coming to Terms with Their Urge To Exercise Regularly.

A person is tempted to be troubled, depressed, consider the worst, and yet the quarantine feels rather restful, like the Fifties. I come from fundamentalist people who taught me to avoid the things of this world, movies, card games, drink, dancing, worldly pleasures, worldly talk. We were quarantining ourselves years ago and nobody noticed it. The habit sticks with you. I want to do wicked things but I don’t have the aptitude. This makes me think that after the lockdown ends, it will keep on keeping on. Tonight we’ll have pot roast, which Jenny hasn’t fixed in ages and my mother served every Sunday. For amusement, I do what I’ve done since I was 13 — I make up stories. Solomon said, “That which has been is that which shall be. There is nothing new under the sun.” I get a lot of pleasure out of talking on the telephone to people I’ve known for ages. We do this out of civic duty but maybe I’m entering a graceful old age and maybe I’ll go straight from the quarantine to the Home for Aged Radio Hosts. Back to the novel now. Improve the day.

The post The News from Manhattan: Monday, May 11, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Blessings on you Mother Grace

And daisies in a blue vase.

At age 97,

Ascended to heaven,

An eternal smile on your face.

She grew up on Longfellow Avenue in south Minneapolis, the tenth of thirteen children of Scots immigrants. I love the picture of her and three other girls in their teens, wearing white summer dresses, walking down a country road and being young and happy, and another of her and the handsome guy she married. She played hymns on the piano with feeling.She had a forgiving nature. She was brought up strict but she took Dad to see “Gone With The Wind” at the Anoka Theater in 1940, hang the consequences. They had married in a fever the year before and they were in love for sixty-three years. She had a light heart, she enjoyed comedians, but she once went next door and told the man she would call the police if he ever struck his wife again, and she meant it. She was a hard worker when the vegetables came ripe in the garden and the pressure cooker went all day in the kitchen, clouds of steam, as she put up canned tomatoes and corn in Ball jars with Kerr lids. After grieving for Dad, she enjoyed a trip back to Scotland and the company of grandchildren and now and then a glass of wine. When she was 96, she told me, “There is so much I’d still like to know but there’s nobody left to ask.”

What I know is that she had a good life, despite coming of age in the Depression. She loved her family, and especially her sisters, and she found comfort in the Gospel, and she found enjoyment in life.

She did not particularly relish having a writer in the family and she disapproved of the books I read and she did not encourage me to take the path I took but I found that liberating. When she and Dad told me they’d decided in good conscience not to help me with college tuition, I was grateful: it meant I was on my own and didn’t need their permission, I already had their love. I felt independent from the age of twelve on. She was ever loving and forgiving. We never argued or estrangement though there were some pained silences. I took up cigarettes at 18 and she only mentioned it once or twice, and gently. Nothing escaped her watchful eye, and I knew it, but she withheld comment. I published immature stuff that probably embarrassed her. She was not my publicist. She gave me a wonderful gift: she gave me room. When I went off to New York, she gave me a coffee cup with cattails on it and two loons on a lake and the name “Minnesota” as a reminder and I drink from it every morning. She had a strong spirit and now, as an old man, I hope to have some of that myself.

The post The News from Manhattan: Sunday, May 10, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Why does the snow fall in May?

How did the world go astray?

Did our latitude

Somehow get skewed

And did the whole U.S.A.

Move to a region

Where they speak Norwegian?

Forstår hvad jeg siger, Norge?

A chilly sunny morning and today I send my novel off to my second reader for her take on it. I seem to be way ahead of myself on it and that makes me a little nervous, also I’m nervous about the ease of writing. I’m from the land of Lutherans: it’s not good to get too happy.

Nothing happens here in self-storage and we’re quite happy about that, meanwhile we learn about each other. I wake up from a nap feeling dreamy, my wife wakes up cranky. Her crankiness is comical and I appreciate it. She is a natural leader as an adult should be and I am a follower, as you’d expect of one who’s written so many limericks about peeing. I like to be told what to do. She worries about me sitting at a laptop for hours and says, “Stand up. March in place, hands above your head, now twist. Keep your hands up. Higher. Higher.” Meanwhile our student daughter sits attentively in her online classes and then disappears to converse with confidantes. I keep expecting to get depressed and don’t, probably because there are so many New Yorkers with desperate problems and for me, depression is only a mood. We have settled on FreshDirect as our supplier because they deliver on time and their produce is so good. We like buying from small producers upstate rather than industrial farms out west. I’m a small producer myself.

Mother’s Day tomorrow and we need to find a gift and the problem is that she has better, finer taste than we do and loves the process of shopping for what she wants and likes that deliberative process and there is no mistaking that look on her face when she unwraps the present and finds something junky. So I guess I’ll write her some limericks. I am the Van Cleef & Arpels of limericists. I once wrote:

My darling can play the viola

At the same time as she can roll a

Smoke, tell a joke,

Swim a stroke, drink a Coke

Or as some folks would say, Coca-Cola.

But the one I like better is:

I opened the VIP gate

And the man said, “Sorry, too late.

You once were VI

In days gone by,

Now you’re just P. Beat it, mate.”

And Jenny stepped up and said, “He

Is terribly VI to me.”

And she decked the guy

With a poke in the eye

And I walked in the men’s room to pee.

Why is Father’s Day so meaningless? The greeting card industry keeps trying but it’s just an embarrassment. Men are loners at heart. Lonely hunters, hikers, writers. We have a choice in life: either see or be seen. Can’t have both. If people are all looking at you, you lose the ability to observe and size up the situation. I used to be on stage and believe me, it makes you stupid. I don’t want to be up at the end of the dinner table with a big gift in front of me and everyone watching. If you want to make your dad happy on Father’s Day, just do something he’s told you to do. Be good to your friends. Don’t lie abed in the morning. The way to get something done is to do it. The way to stop doing something is to not do it anymore. If you can’t do what you tell yourself to do, it’s all over. Don’t put beans up your nose. Father’s Day is somewhere in June. It’s never too early to start on those things. I disappointed my dad badly but though he’s long gone, I’m still trying. When I married Jenny, I made him happy and also when we gave him his last granddaughter. As he lay dying, this little girl went to visit him. She was three. He lay in bed and she tossed him a ball and he tossed it back. He moved his foot under the blanket and she was fascinated by his big toe and grabbed at it and he moved it away. They did that for awhile. She hugged him goodbye. And now I get back to work. A good day to you.

The post The News from Manhattan: Saturday, May 9, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

I lie in the warmth of the sun,

No cares and no troubles, not one,

As my inamorata

Hums a Mozart sonata,

Standing naked, no clothes on her, none.

A cold wet Wednesday with something similar forecast for Friday, and a warm sunny Thursday, like melted cheese between two slices of stale bread. My love read some of my novel and pointed out a logical glitch and I rewrote it and it led to something finer and funnier. This is the story of my life: out of mistakes come many good things. But how would you advise this in a graduation speech? So I’m glad I don’t do graduations anymore. I gave twenty or thirty of them and that’s enough. How many times can you say, “Be true to yourself” and what does it mean anyway?

I decided when I started writing a memoir that it would not be a book of complaint. The world is full of books about victimhood and doesn’t need any more. Besides which, I was lucky. I came along before political correctness. I loved talking about Lake Wobegon, stories about ordinariness, about weather and the movements of birds and small creatures, the appearance of a porcupine, a bear, the crankiness of old men, the rearing of children, the celebration of national and religious holidays, the ritual of praise and the earnest beseeching, the mystery of God’s perfection watching over so much human weakness. The tragedy of success: you raise your kids to be ambitious and the result is that the town loses its best products and they wind up faraway, hardly recognizable, your grandchildren are strangers. The small town is rule-bound, authoritarian, and there is a natural urge toward urban laxity but with city life comes anonymity. The News was easy to listen to, there was no overarching story, it was mostly impressionistic. The ordinariness of a Minnesota small town meant the lives of white people and Lake Wobegon was untouched by white guilt that gave us the tyranny of political correctness, by which the apparatchiks of corporate and academic America tell you which boxes to check. Nobody will ever be able to do a show like that again. But it’s the ordinariness that binds us to each other, raising children, loving nature, being productive, are not ethnic- or race-specific. It isn’t the colors of the faces in the pictures that matter so much as the sheer humanity.

That’s what I love about this pandemic, the ordinariness of the days. No big plans, no big occasions. We three in 12-B lead the same life day after day. The beauty of coffee, of a hot shower, of waffles. Last night’s meatloaf supper was superb, a big deal. The 7 p.m. Upper West Side ovation, the phone calls, the Uno game, the tenderness between us.

The post The News from Manhattan: Friday, May 8, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

I am loving the simplified life,

Just me, my daughter, my wife.

I do not demand

A big marching band,

Just a tuba, a drum and a fife.

I’m writing a limerick that’s clean,

Nothing crude or obscene,

No vomit, no mess,

Just pure happiness

I do not have COVID-19.

A half a block from here, people are running in Central Park and across the park is the Metropolitan Museum and two blocks away is the subway stop where the C or B trains will take you to Times Square or you can switch to the Broadway local at Columbus Circle and go to Lincoln Center, and I must say I am not tempted to go to any of them. Jenny is, I’m not. You don’t think of New York as a place to seek the simple life — you’re supposed to go to the Catskills for that or Vermont — but here it is, finally, in my old age, a life that is utterly simple, a family of three in isolation for six weeks, a blue sky this morning, each of us occupied with our own business, good phone conversations with friends, and I’m 22,000 words into a novel. Most of life has come to a pause and I don’t miss it. We had a calm discussion of what happens in the event of my death, a sensible thing for a man of 77. Meanwhile, I had a long conversation with a man of 85 and I made him laugh his head off twice. Three or four empty months ahead, maybe more, and I intend to make them productive. A new life lies ahead and I’m eager to see it. I truly feel that the majority of the American people believe in civility and the common good. God bless the little farms upstate that are shipping our food to us. The sun is shining, the family in 12-B is feeling contented and lucky.

The post The News from Manhattan: Thursday, May 7, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

There was a young girl of Eau Claire

Who was careless and so debonaire,

She did not pee

Like a girl, vertically,

But could aim up high in the air.

She had a fly in her drawers

And loved to go walking outdoors

Around the golf course

And pee with great force

And cry at the golfers, “Up yours.”

Back in my youth I tried to be adventurous, or appear to be, and showed my independence with a big beard and a literary manner and hanging out in the Mixers bar with writers, but now the pandemic has shown me my own love of the routine. It takes great self-discipline to be independent and I don’t have it so I need restrictions. I wake up, write a letter to the world, then go to work on a novel. I write in the kitchen or the living room. The family awakens, we have breakfast, Life is much the same day to day. We don’t leave 12-B. There is the neighborhood ovation at 7, then supper, and I’m in bed by 10. No urge to travel. Jenny is the nutritionist, the trainer, the shopper, and the first reader. I hand her a chapter of novel and I sit and listen to her laughter two rooms away. It is reward enough. I feel cleansed by the lockdown.

Everybody’s worried about the future of the performing arts, which have always been the subject of worry going back to the Renaissance, but the pandemic might well have a cleansing effect too. The old established organizations have all gone corporate, are top-heavy with management, all have an Executive Vice-President for Marketing and a V-P for Branding, each of whom has a staff of twenty, and nobody knows exactly what they do except hold meetings, meanwhile the troops, the artists, musicians, dancers, are living like peasants. The pandemic is likely to wipe out the mahatmas and maybe the whole organization goes to the graveyard, meanwhile the young and enterprising will get their shot. One can hope.

The pandemic is a great revelation of who is most needed in our society. We should learn from it and change our lives accordingly. And now I see that in writing this missive, I’ve missed Morning Prayer again. May the Lord grant you a peaceful contemplative day and keep you close to your loved ones and make you ever mindful of the needs of others and find your own usefulness, even if it is only writing a cheesy limerick. Amen.

The post The News from Manhattan: Wednesday, May 6, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Six weeks of self-isolation

Feels like a lovely vacation.

Goodbye to bad news,

Cars, wearing shoes,

No deadlines, just procrastination.

Goodbye to the tumult and whirl,

The sizzle, the swim and the swirl.

I’m happy to be

Living simple and free

With my hand on the knee of my girl.

A chilly day, Monday, a good day for a writer. I got good work done, watched Jenny make stir fry, and said, out of the blue, “I think I will look back on this self-isolation as one of the happier times of my life.” She agreed with that. The 7 p.m. neighborhood ovation was lighter due to the chill but it’s good to be aware of our neighbors. We live within ten feet of a family whose TV screen we can see but we can’t see them and we have no idea who they are. Across the airshaft is an apartment with two men who spend a lot of time in their kitchen in their underwear. We’re an intimate part of their lives but we don’t know them. Only in New York. But we’re still friends with our old cross-the-hall neighbor from West End from twenty years ago. Most people in our building are gone, staying with relatives or living at summer homes in the Catskills or up in Maine. Jenny’s family has a cottage on the Connecticut shore and that is tempting to her. I’m quite satisfied here. The novel is at an interesting point. It’s set in modern times but it’s taken on shades of the 19th Century and last night I had a long elaborate dream about it. I can’t remember dreaming about Lake Wobegon before, ever. I’m happy to be engrossed in this. Engrossment is a rare thing, ask anybody. But this has to do with this monastic life. Either you bear down and focus or you go crazy. We’ve not left 12-B in six weeks. Spending six weeks in close contact with Jenny and Maia feels like the greatest privilege. Joyce Carol Oates is right: the biggest problem for a writer isn’t talent or lack of it, the biggest problem is being interrupted. I’ve gone through long periods of faithlessness, skittering around like a water bug. After six weeks of isolation, I feel wedded to these people and to my work and I need nothing else. I pray for the sick and the needy, the essential workers, and I also thank God for the blessings of pandemic.

The post The News from Manhattan: Tuesday, May 5, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Spring is here at last in our northern latitude and that is the news that transcends all other news. It arrived Sunday and we observed it by enjoying our first outdoor meal on our New York balcony, sitting in the shade of a potted tree, with two vegan-leaning friends and in their honor there were no 32-ounce prime ribs, but rather a green salad and a bean salad, both excellent, and oatmeal cookies. The sun shone down and we heard a finch singing nearby who apparently is thinking of moving in with us and raising a family so we must now buy some thistle seeds, which finches like and pigeons do not. We prefer finches, they sing, and they’re beautiful in the morning light. Pigeons are just rats with wings.

Spring, glorious spring. It is the Resurrection of Our Lord, a time of transcendence, and tomorrow I shall have my hair cut by my wife, beauty parlors being closed here still, not that beauty is what I’m after, just respectability. Sunshine is the cure for a good deal of what ails us — we know this now after six weeks of lockdown. I sit in the kitchen and agonize about the economy, politics, the demise of the performing arts, and then around noon I step outside and sit in the sun and suddenly I am not a citizen or a consumer or a performer, I am a mammal, along the lines of a muskrat or raccoon, a mammal who owns an apartment with a balcony where I am safe from predators and food is delivered to me regularly — in other words, a zoo mammal.

We discussed this over Sunday lunch, whether we will, when the All-Clear sounds, return to our busy lives, fly hither and yon, attend meetings, eat at restaurants, and we all thought, “Maybe not. Maybe the raccoon life is what we wanted all along.” Thoreau built him a cabin in the woods and raised beans and wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” I think he could’ve done better in an apartment building with a doorman. In his cabin by Walden Pond, Henry was pestered by curious townspeople who wanted to know what he was out there for. A doorman guards against interruptions. Henry said, “Life is frittered away by details.” A pandemic reduces those details to the basics.

What we’re missing is a lawn and as a Minnesotan I miss that. Mowing was my first useful occupation and it organized my mind: you could think dreamy thoughts but still you kept to the lines. Going back and forth, back and forth, on a rectangular lot was what led me to be a writer: it’s really the same thing, except at the end, instead of a bag of clippings, you have an essay.

I went away to college to escape from lawn mowing and to become a writer, and then I fell in love with a girl whose parents owned a house with an extensive corner lot, and I courted her father by mowing it. I was twenty, my writerly pretensions competed with the pretensions of others, and lawn mowing brought me down to earth, and rather than launch a novel that struggles with man’s fate and maybe woman’s too, I set out to do what I’m doing now, writing in gratitude for a spring day.

We spent three hours at lunch Sunday and not once did we talk about the guy with the hairdo. We talked about children, about the goodness of our lives, about the odd beauty of a prayer healing in the Episcopal church. You associate prayer healing with men in cheap suits who handle snakes and whoop and yell, but in the Church of the Wing Tips it’s a simple moment when you go forward and a deacon hears your concern and lays hands on you and prays. It is sweet and mysterious. We attend church online now and pray for the sick and those in need, of whom we all know many. It is a deliberate and essential part of life, prayer.

Meanwhile, we sat in the spring sunshine and were healed of humorlessness and narcissism and anxiety about the Dow Jones. And now I pray for you in Arizona and Texas and Florida, languishing in 100-degree heat. Come north. Life is good.

The post A simple lunch outdoors, a major occasion appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

We lie in the sun on the terrace

And hope that the neighbors compare us

To Helen of Troy

And a handsome playboy

Who flew in from London and Paris.

A historic day, Saturday: our first outdoor meal of the season, the three of us around a table, and the President Of Twelve-B who has strong vegan leanings relaxed her principles and fixed hamburgers and cole slaw, so it was perfect, sun shining, a light breeze. And to add to the festivity, at the end of the meal, Maia took her glass of water and drenched me with it and I played my part, great aplomb, no reaction, went on with the conversation, and when she turned away, I doused her. I love to hear her laugh, she does it so beautifully.

The novel has come to the point where I need to print it on paper and get out scissors and cut it into chapters and reorganize it. I’ve added an outlaw country singer to it and a bacteriologist and a Norwegian bachelor libertarian.

Fatigue struck me Saturday, which is a symptom of COVID so of course I was uneasy, but it also brought back a memory of Benson School when I corrected Billy Pedersen who had pronounced the word , fat-i-GEW, and he couldn’t believe it should be fa-TEEG but I told him so with such authority that he believed me and we became good friends from then on. He went on to a distinguished career in mental health and I did whatever it was I did and we still talk regularly. He went to Yale but he still admires me, thanks to my command of fatigue. It’s odd that I did shows for decades and some decades, such as the nineties, I have no memory of shows at all, but I do remember the lunch at Dock’s seafood restaurant in 1992 where I first met Jenny Nilsson who now lies on a terrace with me. And I remember Estelle Shaver our teacher in first grade who had me stay after school and read aloud to her, which was remedial help but which she presented as me entertaining her as she graded papers, so instead of shame I felt honored. Bill the janitor walked in the classroom and she said, “Listen to him, Bill. Doesn’t he have a wonderful voice?” From such a teacher, one gets more than basic literacy. I marched onward in school with a sense of being someone special. She was an old lady in 1948 so she is long gone from the world but she is clear in my memory. Our teachers at Benson stayed in the classroom during recess, they didn’t supervise our play, and so you had the beautiful civilization of the classroom and you had brutal bullying and unabashed cruelty and violent games of Pom-pom-pullaway in mid-morning and after lunch. You got to see both sides of human nature.

Jenny is working on her third or fourth puzzle and it’s the hardest yet, a soft romantic painting of shadowy women, dark colors, hard to see at first glance where the pieces should go. I took one look at it on the coffee table and lost all interest immediately, whereas she finds it intellectually stimulating. The woman’s patience is astounding. Today will be more of the same, but our neighbors Richard and Gretchen will come for a late lunch outdoors, a big event for us, a social occasion. They have a car and sometimes leave the building and go over to New Jersey so they’ve been out in the world. We know nothing but the doings of 12-B. Nobody knows how long the pandemic will go on. Nobody talks about the president anymore. For all we know, he and Kim-jong Un may be golfing in Scotland. Nonetheless it looks to be a sunny day, the day which the Lord has made, so let us be glad and rejoice.

The post The News from Manhattan: Sunday, May 3, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

We’re in fear of the coronavirus,

Fearful that it might expire us.

Thank God we’re retired

And cannot be fired—

If we were, nobody would hire us.

Friday, May Day, rain in the morning, then it cleared up and we got to sit outdoors. The novel is now at 13,000 words and speeding onward. I feel somewhat younger or limberer thanks to the President of 12B (POTB) who had me do some brisk walking, stretching, bending, squatting. I was doing some stretches in the kitchen and she said, “Stick your butt out,” something she’d never said to me before. When I met her, she was a violinist but her true calling is leadership, not following a man in a tux with a baton. Nothing escapes her eye, and she is devoted to the welfare of each of us whether we like it or not. Every novelist needs a worrier to deal with the real world, and that’s her. She’d make an excellent V-P nominee but we have no interest in living in Washington or traveling around in a black limo. Usually she makes dinner but she was exhausted so the novelist did, a great opportunity, and it turned out okay, a chicken stir fry with brown rice and chopped veggies. A simple meal, and we’ve come to love simple meals, so much so that we think our restaurant days may be behind us. We FaceTimed with the London branch and they do well though the college guy is exhausted from doing online classes on American time and thinks that if this continues into fall, he may take a semester off. Fine by me. The guy is much too devoted to studies and needs a gap in which to hang out in bars and betting parlors and pick up a prole point of view. I suffered badly from my college education until I was 27 and got a job in radio doing the 6 a.m. M-F shift and at that hour, people don’t want irony or metaphor from you, they have plenty of their own — they want HOPE, so that’s what I tried to provide. This was revolutionary to me, the idea of usefulness.

The sun shone at 7 p.m. for the daily neighborhood ovation. And Maia snuck out with a bowl of water and threw it at me, which gave her immense joy. I hear her laughing at night, talking to friends, but this was explosive laughter, and I felt I was fulfilling a fatherly role, object of amusement. Early to bed after the nightly Uno game, and thus another day passes. Today will be warm and sunny, what a blessing. Back before the pandemic I was blasé about all sorts of things and now a simple meal and the prospect of a spring day is thrilling. This must be what God has in mind. In my Lake Wobegon novel yesterday, I thrust an atheist yesterday. There never had been one before, except for the Norwegian bachelor farmers and they were just contrarians. This is an honest-to-God atheist. I’m going to play with him a little and eventually he’ll see the light. Maybe a bird will speak to him, or a birch tree, something springlike. God bless you today.

The post The News from Manhattan: Saturday, May 2, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.