Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 61

We’ve spent six weeks in self-storage,

Three people on limited floorage,

Like the three bears

Who sat in their chairs

And cried, “Who’s been eating my porridge?”

Nobody is, but one does entertain dark thoughts. I think about the symptoms of the disease, the wheeziness, the fatigue, the heaviness in the chest, and I hear myself wheeze and feel tired. But I’m a lucky man. I like the novel I’m writing and of course it’s bad luck to say so, but it’s true. It’s readable, funny in places, has a storyline that opens the door to some wild behavior, and there are no long expository sections, what I call North Dakota prose. I always said that writer’s block is the result of trying to write something that’s beyond you and maybe I was right. You start out when you’re young wanting to show off and eventually you come around to the point of wanting to be useful to the readers. Give them entertainment plus whatever rides along on entertainment’s back. I’m an old intolerant reader and I pick up books in the store and scan a page or two and set them down. Why buy a book that doesn’t give value? I read rave reviews of books and the tone of the rave tells me this is a book I’ll loathe. A strange business to be in but I’ve wanted to write since I first made my way up the stairs of the Minneapolis Public Library to the children’s reading room and there was a multitude of books spread on the tables. Unbelievable riches. I was ten.

Meanwhile, Maia is at her computer, poring over math and reading, and Madame is doing yoga in the living room with an instructor on her laptop, and the day passes profitably, the Author breaking for a nap. In the bedroom, I look in the closet and there’s my old Armani tux I bought back in the 90s for the Grammy awards. I was up for Spoken Word for a recording of Huckleberry Finn and my date Jenny Nilsson and I took the C train down to Madison Square Garden where we stood in the VIP line and then saw the heavy police guard up ahead and heard a chopper above and realized that the First Lady was coming to the ceremony, who was competing against me with her recording of “It Takes A Village” and I realized that the fix was in, the envelope had been opened, Hillary had not come from Washington just so she could watch me walk up the aisle and collect the Grammy. Her little bundle of homilies had beaten Mark Twain. I keep the tux as a symbol of injustice. I look at it now and think, “Maybe I should get a job as a waiter.”

Wheeziness and fatigue aside, my hero is Bob Altman who was 80 and rather ill when he came to St. Paul to make a movie back in 2004, suffering from bladder cancer and a transplanted heart that was giving out. Some days he could hardly walk down the aisle of the Fitzgerald Theater to shoot the next scene. I had lunch with him and asked him about WW2 for which he had lied about his age in order to enlist in the Army Air Corps and he talked about it, a kid piloting a B-17 over the South Pacific to bomb Japanese installations, how loud the plane was, how freezing cold, people on the ground shooting at you, and it dawned on me that his war experience was maybe what made him such an ornery independent filmmaker. And the man absolutely loved to work. He was dying but he said to me, “I don’t want to sit and wait for it to happen. I want to be missing in action.” And that’s how I feel. The novel is spinning along and I’ve got two musicals in fragments and there’s a Lake Wobegon movie to be made and it takes place in one day, Flag Day, and there’s a death and burial, a parade, and an impulsive wedding. It’s out there waiting to be finished. I could write it in the fall and we should shoot it next summer. I’m thinking Avon, which is near St. John’s and about the right size (1500) and has Middle Spunk Lake, but other towns are possible. I think about that when I go to bed at night, a big parade down Main Street, the two lovers marching near each other, she’s a clarinetist, he’s a clown. And then I fall asleep.

The post The News from Manhattan: Friday, May 1, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

A month we’ve been locked up, we three,

And have gotten along pleasantly,

And tried to avoid

What Sigmund Freud

Called “verklempt,” verstehen Sie?

Yesterday was drizzly and raw but still at 7 p.m. we went out on the terrace and whooped and clapped and banged on a dishpan lid, along with the rest of the neighborhood. This started out with the purpose of honoring essential workers and health care people but now it’s become simply a lovely communal ritual that we faithfully follow. The sequestered life doesn’t have enough of them. I’d be in favor of going out daily at noon and singing the Doxology but in this neighborhood the Doxology would be about as universal as the University of Minnesota fight song. A great thing about New York: everybody is a minority so there isn’t the status involved that there is in Minnesota.

Seclusion is a new experience, which is odd for an old man — to have a new experience. I thought I had seen everything. The rhythm of a day passing that is pretty much the same as the one before and the one to come. You focus on the beauty of the ordinary. Work, coffee, the family jokes, the daughter’s wild laughter at night FaceTiming with pals, the mother’s reading habits and jigsaw puzzles and her vigilant care of the rest of us. I miss the subway, the Rose Reading Room at the library, miss eating lunch in the Oyster Bar, and hope all those will come back someday, but meanwhile seclusion reduces life to the most basic and that, for a man of 77 who had a lucky life, is gratitude. It’s been drilled into us since childhood to be grateful to be Americans — well, now the country is a mess, and I’m grateful for scientists who are going at the problem, grateful for the press that is striving to give us the big picture, and grateful for the people who are showing up for work every day. Today is drizzly but the sun will soon shine again and we’ll have the enormous pleasure of eating lunch outdoors. After that, we’ll wait to see. Goodbye, April, hello May. Thanks for the month and may we be ever mindful of the needs of others.

The post The News from Manhattan: Thursday, April 30, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

A pandemic day spent with Jenny.

Worries? I can’t think of any.

The coffee is strong,

We all get along,

And tonight we’ll have sausage and penne.

Another day in 12B. What can I say? I’m losing count. I think it’s been six weeks and I think we’ll be here all summer. So far, self-storage goes well. If I were young, I’d be unhappy and for good reason, but every morning I wake up grateful that I don’t have the virus. I can’t remember another time when I’ve been so aware of health. I’m old and rickety but I’m not dying. I walk into the next room and there is my wife and I reach over and touch her. I touch her ten or twenty times a day, but who’s counting? Back when I had a career, I seldom did that. My daughter says, “Give me a hug” and I do. She says, “Make me laugh.” The way we do this is to step out on the terrace and she throws a bowl of water at me which puts her in stitches. She bends over and howls. Her old man with a big dark spot on his pants. The comedy of incontinence. I don’t laugh because I’m Calvinist but I love when she does. As Emily Webb says in “Our Town,” “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.” But sitting in New York sunshine with my hand on her knee, I try to realize it. I had some good phone conversations, two of them with fellow writers who’re looking for ideas and I gave them excellent ideas for two books, slender comical novels with a clear story line. I am not vaguely encouraging, I am very specifically encouraging. Both of them said they are going to get to work. That’s good. I am old but I still have some marbles. Suddenly we have a great deal of time. So we may as well use the time well. My LW novel is spinning along. It’s sort of delicious to return to the town after three years away. Every morning I pray for the afflicted and those who care for them, for those who’ve died and their families, and then I pour a cup of coffee and go to work. It is a time of the simple virtues, gratitude, affection, work, friendship, and let’s not forget coffee.

The post The News from Manhattan: Wednesday, April 29, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

The sun shines in New York and if this is our reward for goodness, then I plan to be good more often. Cold and drizzly yesterday, a good day for writing, so I did. A therapist comes to Lake Wobegon and talks about self-actualization and getting beyond social facades to finding new modes of communication. Meanwhile, the Norwegian bachelor farmers persist in their MAGA hats and bumper stickers “A Man Has The Right To Be Wrong” and “The Best Gun Control Is To Use Both Hands.”

In our isolation in 12B, conversation comes to be the beauty part of the day. Had a long talk with Jenny in which she recalled her teenage years as a violin student at Interlochen and Meadowmount and Curtis in Philly, the fun of it and the idealism and the hours of practice. Jenny at 17 was utterly different from me at 17, a loner, confused, vague ambition to be a writer, no discipline whatever. She feels lucky about it all, strange as it may have been. Had a long phone conversation with cousin Jan recalling our aunts and also her daughter Shannon who died young in 2004. Cancer. Shannon sat in the doctor’s office, waiting for the verdict, and wrote on a card the hymn, “When peace like a river attendeth my way and sorrows like sea billows roll— whatever my lot, Thou hath taught me to say, It is well, it is well with my soul.”

I got to read some of the novel to a friend in the hospital who laughed heartily, maybe not the best thing for someone with gall bladder problems. Jenny laughed even harder. I’m on track to finish it in a month, knock on wood.

I am a middle child, the third of six, and like other middle children, I accept being overlooked and require no special attention whatsoever. I appear in only a handful of the thousands of family snapshots. I remember Mother lining the family up and handing me the Kodak and saying, Here, take a picture of us and that’s why I’m missing. I wound up in New York because my dad forgot me here on a family trip in 1953. We were at the Empire State Building observation deck and the elevator was crowded and Dad said, “We’ll wait for you in the lobby” but they forgot. Somehow I made it on my own in the big city, thanks to my lack of pushiness. I just waiting for good fortune to shine and it did. This calm even-tempered disposition is what a person needs in a pandemic. I’ve been waiting all my life for self-isolation. I sit quietly at my laptop and am no problem to anyone. Other people are getting all hot and bothered about the lockdown and not me. It’s a big opportunity. Today will be beautiful. Make the most of it. Do your best. If you felt a boost at 8 a.m. EDT it’s because I prayed for you.

The post The News from Manhattan: Tuesday, April 28, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

I shouldn’t be sitting reading stories about victims of the plague but I do and a great one was in the Sunday New York Times, by Pam Belluck, an epic about a healthy young father of three, 49, struck down hard and suddenly by COVID-19 who was kept alive on a ventilator for a month by doctors at Massachusetts General and almost given up for lost, but somehow, by extraordinary means and technology and dedicated doctors and God’s mercy and a visit from his wife who sat and held his hand for three hours when he seemed to be a goner, he came back to life, and in the online edition of the Times, there’s a video of the hospital staff in blue scrubs lining a hallway and applauding as the gentleman is wheeled out of the ICU. I don’t cry easily but it brings tears to my eyes.

This is the heart of the coronavirus story, not the briefings, not the demonstrations at state capitols, but the heroic work of medical professionals to spare us the miseries of this defiant disease. The Belluck story is a work of narrative art. It should get a Pulitzer Prize.

I’m 77, safely sequestered in a New York apartment under the supervision of my wife who intends to keep me around, so we stay put. The medical troops are doing their duty, and we the people assist them by staying out of harm’s way. Men and women are riding the subway into Manhattan in order to do the essential things to support life, bring in groceries, deliver them, take away garbage, run the hospitals and clinics, provide security. When the pandemic is over, our society will need to stop and think about who is essential and why should the delivery truck driver earn a tiny fraction of what is paid to the Executive Vice President for Interactive Synergy & Proactive Metrics?

It’s been said a thousand times but nonetheless: the nation is in unknown territory. Truly. Nobody knows. The disease is not running a predictable course. Social distancing helps but it is revolutionary and now comes the counterrevolution. Washington is adrift. In a rational world, Mr. Trump would announce that he is canceling his reelection campaign so that he can focus on the job at hand, the two missions are incompatible. Nobody thinks he’d do that. Reimpeachment is not in the cards: is sheer incompetence a “high crime and misdemeanor”? The Founders didn’t anticipate this; they associated narcissism with royalty, not democratically elected leaders.

The White House is not sympathetic to the plight of the Postal Service because Mr. Trump never wrote a letter in his life and put it in an envelope and mailed it. The New York transit system is billions in the red but he’s never ridden the subway so it doesn’t matter. He has run the pandemic response as a reality show off the top of his head, with no acknowledgment of the deaths and suffering it’s caused because it isn’t real to him.

He is, however, friendly to us Christians though he himself could not recite the Lord’s Prayer if you offered him a million bucks. But a goodly percentage of Protestants are Republicans, so he favors us, and nowhere in America are our people being burned at the stake. The judiciary is being repopulated with men who might well favor mandatory memorization of Bible verses in public schools. This would not do much to stop the virus, but it might be enough to reelect the man.

My parents fell in love in 1931, at the start of the Great Depression, and neither had any money so they waited it out, he working on the farm, she as a caregiver in Minneapolis, and five years later, they married in a fever and started a family. It was not easy, but it was familiar ground: you worked hard, were frugal, and when necessary you leaned on your relatives. Neither of them recalled the Thirties as a time of suffering. It was what it was and you did what needed to be done, and they were young and in love.

This is different.

Comedians have been feasting on this man. The Clorox/UV episode of the Trump show was huge on social media. But we’ve come to a strange new place where the president isn’t funny anymore. Government is failing. People are dying. Comedy is at the heart of being American. Where do we go from here?

The post So where do we go from here? appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

One benefit of pandemic lockdown is the irrelevance of the calendar and another is the discovery of interactive electronics, as for example when I tuned into Morning Prayer on Zoom and there I was with other parishioners in little boxes and I was asked to read from the 15th chapter of John, a shock since I was lurking in my pajamas, unshaven, holding a cup of coffee and looking for milk to put in it. So I Googled the chapter and read it, where Jesus commands, “Love one another as I have loved you.” And another benefit of lockdown is that you feel that commandment in your heart. I didn’t feel lovable myself but I do love the two I’m locked up with and friends I talk to and the Upper West Side of Manhattan at 7 pm every day when everyone sticks their heads out and whoops and claps and beats on pans.

Somewhere in my teen years I learned a song that went:

When you’re all dressed up with noplace to go,

Life seems weary, dreary and slow.

Oh how my heart has bled for the times I’ve said

When I’d no place to go unless I went back to bed….

It’s been a long hard life and whenever I go

To that faroff land where the violets grow,

There’ll be a big white stone and written below:

He was all dressed up with noplace to go.

But we did go someplace yesterday, a number of them, in fact. Morning Prayer, and then there was the Met Opera gala which streamed online, opera stars performing into laptops in their own homes in Wales, Sweden, Vienna, New York, Chicago, all over, which was glorious and strange, big voices in small rooms. I recorded a reminiscence with the Prairie Home cast of Fred, Tim, and Sue. We three watched a house concert live-streamed from Brooklyn, Aoife O’Donovan and her husband Eric and his brother Colin, which was beautiful.

Somehow, the performing arts need to revive from this pandemic and revive soon. Their absence only goes to show their necessity. The love of art lifts us all out of the pale ordinary. It is liberating of the spirit. We are not defined by the jobs we work at or by our age or by social class. I don’t deny that there is a class structure but when I go to the Met and see “Marriage of Figaro” we are all united, the janitor and the barista and the big shot. And remember the best seats in the house (for music) are the cheapest. When you walk out of a great show, you feel a love of your fellow humans just as Jesus commanded — it may only last for a few hundred feet until someone steals your cab or you miss the uptown C train by five seconds, but you do feel that love. I come from the Midwest where we hesitate to express that love, but we still feel it. Sports is about formalized hostility and the arts performance is about celebration of humanity. Be beautiful. Rise and shine. God bless you and yours and your coffee.

The post The News from Manhattan: Sunday, April 26, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

The sun shines, it’ll be warm today. Glorious. The simple life continues and I am thinking it may go on longer than we realize. A gorgeous supper last night, salmon wrapped in parchment paper, done perfectly by Chef Jenny, and Maia had FaceTimed herself into exhaustion and fallen asleep so we sat and talked about the future. It’s going to be a long long time before people will want to crowd into rows of seats to watch a show. We’re so lucky to have lived through a period of rich variety in the arts, Broadway, all the great orchestras, the boom in opera. That great night in the Garden when Paul Simon sang to a packed house for almost three hours. That’s gone now. Be glad you got to see it. “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Sweeney Todd,” Renee Fleming in “Der Rosenkavalier.” We heard that from the cheapest seats at the Met, we could reach up and touch the ceiling, and the sound was fabulous. A new era lies ahead and we won’t be going to restaurants evidently, we’ll eat small meals at home and talk to each other. People are still as funny as ever. The tidal wave of jokes about Clorox yesterday and the injection of disinfectants: when did the entire nation laugh at the same thing like that? So the man thinks stupidity is the same as sarcasm. What can you say? So there’s a lot to be said for isolation and simplicity. I come from taciturn Midwesterners who believed that discussing our miseries only makes us feel worse. One era ends, and we make the best of what is ahead.

The memoir went off at 5 pm and now I’m on the novel. With a musical lurking in the works. Got nothing but time on my hands so might as well get something done. Doing a ZOOM with the PHC actors today, talking about old times, and want to do a comedy show soon and a call-in. We in isolation hear stories about weirdness out in the world, masked people in grocery store aisles, silence, separation, but here in 12B it’s remarkably cheerful. Chicken stirfry tonight, and a brisket tomorrow. The coffee is good. At 7 pm the neighborhood will open up their windows and cheer. Love to all, improve the day.

The post The News from Manhattan: Saturday, April 25, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

It is drizzly today and today I shall take a deep breath and click Send and 125,000 words of memoir go off to my agent. A large day, the end of months of obsession, and now I’ve promised myself that I shall resume the agility exercises I’ve abandoned, and keep myself from sliding into utter decrepitude. I’ll also put the novel on the fast track and hope to finish by the end of May.

I seem to have most of my marbles and so I’d better use them. Half of all people are below average and after a month of isolation I am pretty sure I’m below the line and in the red zone but for 77 I’m okay. I’m not complaining, I agree with Solomon that knowledge tends to bring unhappiness. Look at the scientists in the White House, they’re miserable, but the Big Guy is perfectly happy winging it and the other day he suggested maybe we could try injecting bleach directly into the body, see what happens with that. Meanwhile, I am content, self-isolating in New York. People come to the city for the excitement but it’s good to take a break, not go out to dinner and then the opera or a play, but stay home with Jenny and Maia and play Uno. Others are doing likewise. The city that never sleeps is now rather drowsy, or so I hear. Young men are drag-racing on the West Side highway, there being no traffic in their way. Theaters are dark for the foreseeable future and I imagine the 20-year-olds who were majoring in theater or music are maybe switching to real estate or social work. I saw a virtual comedy show, three comics in their own apartments performing to a laptop or a cellphone, and it was very good, not the same as going to a club, but the chips and dip were free and we were barefoot. It was a good evening. We had scallops and beans for supper and as we were putting dishes in the dishwasher, I emitted a very long fart that had intonation and inflection and was on the verge of articulate speech and it was followed by a punctuation fart. Jenny laughed like crazy, even harder than at the comics.

When you marry someone, you should think of the possibility that the two of you might be quarantined someday and make sure you marry someone with a good sense of humor.

I miss the people, of course. The street face of New York women that is the facial equivalent of a wall. The New Yorkers who go around with imaginary friends who they’re not getting along with. The dogs dragging their owners along. But that will all come back someday. Restaurants probably won’t. Showbiz? Hard to tell. The horses who appear every year in “Aida” may be looking for other work. As I sometimes say to my wife, I’m glad I lived when I did. The Eighties! The Nineties! The Aughts! I’m a lucky guy, I have no ambition and I love to work. It’s like the Big Guy, he has no idea what he’s doing but he loves the briefings, the mansion, the limo, the big plane, all the men with curly wires in their ears. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, as Solomon said, but here in 12B we have no complaints. Bless you all.

The post The News from Manhattan: Friday, April 24, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

It’s spring but New York spring isn’t like Minnesota. I walked to Benson School when I was a kid and saw the squished bodies of frogs on the pavement and a boy told me they died because they were mating. He said, “They were excited about having sex.” And once I saw a gopher crushed. Gary Gopher looking for Glenda. This was sex education back in rural Minnesota: Love & Death, one leading to the other. In New York, it’s different. You go for a walk around the block and you get absorbed in the passing faces and you step off the curb and hear a yell and a delivery guy goes by full-speed eight inches away, so close you smell the shrimp in garlic sauce. You almost become the frog and you weren’t really in love at all. Oh well. Everyone makes their own happiness, everyone will get their share of sorrow. I came to New York when I was 27, hoping to get a big writing career, which never really happened so I went into radio instead, and now that’s done, and suddenly the pandemic comes along and illuminates the whole situation. At Jenny’s insistence, we stay in 12B so that no bicyclist can run me down. I look back at a long career with some crazy periods when I was hardly ever home and now I’m home all day for months. The ambition that drove the craziness is utterly gone but I love the work more than ever. It’s a feeling I’ve never known before. Every morning, to get up and sit down and write, working on three books and I don’t really care if any of them gets published. Same with the musical I’m writing. (When will there be musicals again? Nobody knows.) It’s very satisfying. I feel liberated, while staying in the apartment. No TV, no radio, just a book now and then and conversation with wife and daughter. Someday, someone will write a horror novel about the pandemic but mine would be a pastoral romance. Jenny is now talking about planting basil and oregano, maybe garlic on the terrace. Meanwhile, we eat healthy meals and my jeans are getting looser and I need to wear a belt. I think she hopes to make me a vegan by the end of May. Meanwhile, I got up early today and found a sirloin in the fridge and am now about to enjoy my first steak-and-eggs breakfast in months. I have a secret stash of licorice in the back room. Her job is to worry about the plague and mine is to write a novel about Lake Wobegon, meanwhile our daughter keeps the phone lines humming. The old man is so superannuated, he was thrilled to do Facetime yesterday with London and no long-distance toll charges. What happened to the cord on the phone??? Who is Alexa? Amazed that I click on Print and two rooms away the printer goes into action. A monitor beside my bed transmits my heartbeat to Minnesota where a computer monitors it for arrhythmia. One marvel after another. Blessings on your day.

The post The News from Manhattan: Thursday, April 23, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Yesterday was cold and rainy in New York but today the sun is bright. We are so ready for spring, but as my auntie used to say, “If wishes were horses then beggars would ride and the world be drowned in a sea of pride.” She also said, “If ifs and ands were pots and pans, there’d be no trade for tinkers.” And, “In silk and scarlet walks many a harlot.” My family was big on discouragement. My doctor in Minnesota called yesterday to say that the Pacemaker monitor that sits by my bed in New York reports that I’m basically okay, so that’s good. He asked how I feel. “Fine,” I said. I’m a Minnesotan, brought up not to complain. I could’ve said, “I donno.” Or “Fine, whatever.” I was going to ask him if he thinks it’s okay for me to take up drinking wine again, considering the meds I’m on, but I didn’t because I don’t feel a big urge to. I thought of it Sunday night, thinking about Jesus healing the blind man by spitting in the dirt and making some mud and putting it in the blind man’s eye, and I wondered, “Is that where the saying ‘Here’s mud in your eye?’ comes from?” I guess it does. Anyway, I quit drinking in 2002 because I was consuming alarming amounts. I hated the idea of AA so I just stopped and that turned out okay. Drinking made me gloomy and sobriety made me light-hearted and it still does. I do slightly miss the evening ceremony, though. I broke my sobriety one time, on my 70th birthday in 2012, when I bought a bottle of 1942 Bordeaux for a pretty fabulous price and opened it — the cork sort of disintegrated — and poured glasses for my friends and me, and it was a pretty dreadful dull wine. But of course it was wartime in France and they had other things to think about. These pandemic days, staying put in 12B, not going out to eat, eating modest meals, we’re sort of enjoying the simple life. I ventured into extravagance in my 40s, to get the taste of my parents’ parsimony out of my mouth. They were depression survivors and considered it immoral to spend too much for things. They loved the free pens the bank gave away even though those pens wrote rather scratchily. I only buy Pilot or Uniball pens, good quality, but I honor my parents’ economy by writing on the white cardboard sheets the dry cleaner puts in my shirts to keep them flat. This makes me feel virtuous. I may write a sonnet for my wife if I feel I have a good one in me but I’ve written many for her in the past that were good and I’m not sure I can meet the standard. Poetry is a mating behavior — they say home improvement is too, but I’m not equipped for that. This year we observe our 25th anniversary. The marriage feels solid to me, mainly because I’m crazy about her, but the isolation together puts it to the test, and I know of marriages that have broken up on account of poor grammar or the failure of one spouse to use coasters. Bachelors can snore to their heart’s content, go downstairs in the middle of the night, fix a steak, have a whiskey, go pee in the sink, no problem. Marriage holds us to a higher standard. And I lack the wherewithal to be single. A few years of bachelorhood and you’d read about me in the paper: “AUTHOR, 80, DIES OF CLUTTER IN HOUSE COLLAPSE.” So I shall put these breakfast dishes in the dishwasher, sweep up the muffin crumbs, pour myself another cup of coffee, and get to work.

The post The News from Manhattan: Wednesday, April 22, 2020 appeared first on Garrison Keillor.