Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 7

I sympathized with our President’s proposing that we run all the Palestinians out of Gaza and take ownership and turn it into a luxury resort. I’ve had crazy ideas myself but thank goodness I’ve kept them to myself. I do think a neurologist should be brought in — this sounds like global amnesia to me. Golf can be a dangerous game and you wonder if he might’ve taken a hit. The press doesn’t cover his rounds closely.

So of course everyone in the world denounced the idea, and poor Karoline Leavitt had to stand up in the White House press room and say he hadn’t meant what he said. And then, walking through a crowd of reporters shouting questions at him, the man himself did not stop to respond.

The look on his face struck me as one of confusion. He is 78, after all, and it is a stressful job, even if you do have Elon Musk, the World’s Richest Man, running the shop. At this age (I am 82) it’s not easy to maintain the air of belligerence and manly vengeance that the MAGA folks expect of him. After an hour or two of the jutting jaw and the narrowed eyes, a man feels like telling a joke.

DJT’s last joke was in 2019 when he threatened to sue Wharton School, Fordham, Penn, and his high school if any of them made his academic record public. The joke was on him. The truth is that the electorate is suspicious of someone with top grades. George W. Bush knew that and acted like a bozo although his grades at Yale were better than John Kerry’s. Kerry spoke like a graduate student and Bush talked like a guy you’d go fishing with. He won.

Kamala Harris had the disadvantage of being the child of immigrants who pushed her to excel and to speak intelligently, as immigrant parents tend to do. DJT was born rich to parents who believed he was brilliant and perfect from the day he was set in the bassinet. Thanks to his charmed childhood, he has never, to the best of my knowledge, admitted a mistake or apologized for anything. This sets him apart from the hardworking lunch-bucket backache crowd that elected him. You and I live with a raft of regrets and he knows not one. This gives the man a golden glow.

In fact, the day after Karoline tried to walk him back from the U.S. occupation of Gaza, Don put his foot down, by God, reasserting his preposterous proposal and I assume that DOGE 20-year-olds are working on a plan for clearing the debris and putting in the hotels and the spa and Palace Tinian, giant crypts for cryptocurrency, and the World’s Largest Golf Course, with 3,600 sand traps created by the Israeli air force.

The man is in his own world, promising to end the war in Ukraine on Day One, and Day One comes and then Week Two and nothing need be said. Or he could say it was only a bargaining position. Or that he was promising to go to Fort Wayne on May One, and the American people, tumbling around in the backwash of texts and posts, bulletins, streaming idiocy, hardly notice. It’s just one more blip in the data blizzard.

This did not happen back when we looked each other in the eye and talked and were able to distinguish critical thinking from chicken manure. Dwight D. Eisenhower, my parents’ favorite president, did not bring in Henry Ford to help him efficiencize the federal government nor did he promise to end the war in Korea on Day One and then claim he meant he’d cure diarrhea in Ceylon. Odd as it is for an old draft dodger to place his faith in the military to save America, that’s exactly what I do. America means more to people who’ve put their lives at risk for it, just as Christmas means more if you’ve experienced poverty. I sense a dedication to duty and a strength of character in our uniformed men and women that is missing from Congress.

We’ve seen some notable men and woman sell their souls in broad daylight recently. God have mercy on them. There are simple tests for dementia, Melania. Time to step up and do what a wife should do.

The post The Palestrump Resort and 1800-Hole Golf Course appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Long ago, when I bought a Manhattan apartment, my mother, Grace, gave me a clay coffee cup with “Minnesota” painted on it and our state bird, the loon, so I’d remember where I come from, though at age 44, it was pretty well embedded in me. In college, announcing on a classical music radio station, I managed to refit my Minnesota accent to sound educated, but I still have a keen sense of insignificance, which comes with the territory. Scott Fitzgerald and Bob Dylan are our big claims to success and Scott died young and alcoholic and Bob is famous for obscurity and Walter Mondale was the politest candidate for president in American history and the biggest loser and Bronko Nagurski was actually Canadian.

She was a good mother. She told stories about me, how when Dad went off to join the Army in World War Two, I wouldn’t let anyone sit in his chair at the head of the table. “Daddy’s chair!” I said and could be quite forceful about it. She worried about me, how I enjoyed lighting fires and how I loved to play on the Mississippi shore though I’d been told not to. She worried about drowning and about tornadoes and in the summer if a storm came up we always went to the southwest corner of the basement as authorities said to do. All except me. I liked to stand in the yard and watch the storm arrive and the branches of trees shake, hoping for the sight of the funnel cloud.

When I was sad or disappointed or felt cheated of life’s pleasures, she always said to me, “What’s the matter? Did the dog pee on your cinnamon toast?” which always made me grin, the thought of our aged cocker spaniel climbing up on the table and lifting his left hind leg. It makes me smile to write it now. It was her own unique line, no other mother said it. She knew how much I loved toast with butter, sugar, and cinnamon on it. It was her line for me.

I was not a good son. A good son is one who visits his mother regularly and I was too busy to do that. I ran around a lot. Sometimes I traveled in fancy company. I was once in a movie directed by Robert Altman and financed, in part, by the Pohlad family. Carl Pohlad, the richest man in Minnesota, sat next to my mother at the premiere, and the two of them carried on an extensive conversation, which didn’t faze her a bit. I was proud of her. My mother was one of thirteen children of William and Miriam on Longfellow Avenue South in Minneapolis and sometimes during the Depression she went door-to-door peddling peanut butter sandwiches she’d made. When Mr. Pohlad said, “You must be very proud of your son,” she replied, “I am very proud of all my children,” which is the correct answer.

I have two nephews who are very good to their mother and I stand in awe of them and think, “There goes the man I meant to be.” They are polite to their father but they dote on their mother. She lives in Minnesota and one boy lives in France and the other in Vietnam but they have (1) married excellent women who recognize the royalty of the grandma, (2) produced delightful grandchildren, (3) gotten excellent jobs in law and engineering so they can afford to fly the grandma to visit the grandchildren and vice versa. I am the recipient of videos of visitation scenes and it is clear that the delight of the grandma is a factor in the production of fabulous grandkids.

I remember my grandmas as austere figures in dowager outfits whom a child was to revere and maintain silence and not be childish and not expect physical contact due to their fragility. I was to present a picture of perfect rectitude even if it wrecked me, which it sort of did. My sister-in-law’s grandkids whoop and chortle and climb all over her and it’s clear they’ll grow up to save the world and not become an old sourpuss like me.

People look at me and say, “What’s wrong?” It’s the stone face, the lowered brow, the grim affect. It was the effect of eating toast with dog urine on it. But when I take my Minnesota cup down and fill it with coffee, I think of my mother and I smile. Her 110th birthday is coming up and I should do something special in her honor, such as write something about her that makes you feel good.

The post Mother, the queen of my heart appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

Most aphorisms are self-evident, such as “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” and the one about glass houses and throwing stones and the mice playing when the cat is away and “As you sow, so shall you harvest” and as I get older, the ones about living in the moment and seizing the day and not crying over spilt milk feel very profound.

I remember a day fifty years ago when I had lunch with my hero S.J. Perelman in Minneapolis when he was to give a reading and I was to introduce him. I was stunned by admiration for his writing, such as: I guess I’m just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation’s laws.

I admired elegant wackiness, having grown up among devout Christians who even in dinner table conversation tried to sound like the King James translation. They wouldn’t have written a paragraph like his about the mad scientist if you’d gotten them drunk, sat them on a bundle of dynamite and set the timer to ten minutes. I knew Perelman’s work from The New Yorker and also from the Marx Brothers movies (great lines like “Don’t wake him up. He’s got insomnia. He’s trying to sleep it off.”). He didn’t know me from Adam or an atom-smasher. I looked at him and tried to compose a suitable compliment but nothing was good enough and then a man told him that I had been published in The New  Yorker and Perelman leaned across the table and started complaining about the magazine, its miserly payments, its confounded editing, and its clueless fact-checkers who ripped into comic fiction as if it were a doctoral thesis, and it was the ultimate honor, to be treated as a fellow working writer by the great Perelman. I was prepared to kiss his ring and he talked to me as a colleague in his line of work. The honor of equality.

His illustrious past didn’t matter, the future was unknown, but there we were, two writers having a Cobb salad and a chicken sandwich, about to go meet an audience, living in the present.

I guess I’m just an old humorist at heart. Give me a wedding chapel, a groom who forgot his suspenders and is trying to hold his pants up, a beautiful girl with last-minute trepidations, the man puts the ring on her finger as his pants drop, there is an expulsion of gas, and I care not who wins the National Book Award.

I live in the present. If I were to think about the future, I’d be alarmed about the utter demise of journalism and the self-degradation that many U.S. senators are eager to accept and the use of cryptocurrency to enrich the Chief Executive by tech tycoons kicking back 20% of their federal contracts, but instead I spend the day in my laboratory experimenting to design AI software to let me chat with long-deceased relatives such as my great-great-grandfather William Evans Keillor who says, “I don’t know if this is heaven — it looks like Nebraska — and immortality is not my cup of tea but I’m getting used to it. No calendars, no clocks. The good news is that death dissolves your marriage so I’m free of Sarah and I’ve taken up with an angelic slip of a girl named Celeste who flutters about in water-wings and silk undies and instead of beans and bacon we have rigatoni with zucchini, cannellini, salami Bolognese, prosciutto, radicchio, parmigiano, pepperoni primavera, chorizo crostata, guacamole, guanciale Calabrese, pistachio pesto, and Sangiovese. We never had Italian food in Minnesota in 1880.”

He’s quite the guy. Opinionated but very witty. I told him to look up Perelman and now the two of them play canasta together. I’m living in the present, which, thanks to AI, includes the past.

I guess I’m just Elon Musk at heart. Give me an office in the White House, let the old guy revise the Constitution with the wave of a Sharpie all he likes, I will give the Nazi salute when and where I please, and when the Earth burns up, I’ll be sitting on Mars eating a Milky Way, and I care not that I’m the only human being in the universe.

The post Living in the present, a day at a time appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

I just spent a few days in Texas and had a great time — me, an old Diversity-Elitist-Iniquity Democrat, enjoying the state that gave us Ted Cruz. But it’s true. It was very congenial. I am on a new career as America’s Oldest Still-Standing Comedian and I didn’t talk politics and neither did the people I talked to. It’s easy not to, especially for us on the losing side. I’m a northerner and I believe in government because it plows the roads when it snows, and up north we don’t cancel school just because snow is forecast, which they do in Florida. This is one reason more mathematicians come from the Upper Mississippi than from Tallahassee. I also feel that when all the undocumented migrants are deported, our young college grads who majored in English aren’t going to like working in slaughterhouses or cleaning hotel rooms and we’ll find bone chips in the chicken and we’ll sleep in beds other people slept in and we’ll just have to get used to it.

I met a good many Baptists in Lubbock and Arlington and the lovely city of New Braunfels and didn’t talk politics except that I got the audience to sing “America” about freedom ringing from every mountainside. I didn’t see signs of decline in Texas nor people rejoicing at the beginning of a new golden age, but maybe I was looking in the wrong places.

I didn’t bring up the subject of Canada being the 51st state because frankly I don’t think it is. For one thing, their French is better than ours and also there is no South up North and without the South, without New Orleans jazz and Delta blues and bluegrass and Black gospel quartets and corrupt governors, men passing a bottle of bourbon around, strip-mall evangelists hollering about hellfire and the Antichrist, there is no America as we know it.

Canadian culture is of very limited range. It is missing the apocalyptic. Canada has never elected a prime minister who talked about Canadian carnage and illegal migrant Americans invading the country and who claimed to be the greatest leader in Canadian history, whom God had chosen to bring about a new golden age. That’s not them, that’s us.

The Trumps think of Canada as an extension of the USA because, being real estate tycoons, they don’t know about geography, except for Queens, Long Island, and Manhattan. And they have little experience with snow, DJT having had a limo driver since age five. He never had to stand in a blizzard by a highway waiting for the bus. The reason you never see a photo of little Donald in a classroom with other children is that one doesn’t exist: he had tutors. That is why he capitalizes so many words that don’t need capitalization. So when he talks about annexing Canada and taking Greenland and going to war for the Panama Canal, he is slightly off the mark and someone needs to point this out.

You take over Greenland, you’re going to be dealing with the Greenlandic language which comes in three discrete dialects, Kalaallisut, Tunumiit, and Inuktun, each with a few thousand speakers who are devoted to their tongue. You get involved with those people, you’ll be walking around with a Greenlandic app on your iPhone and even so you’ll be misunderstood. We’d be wise to skip this.

A war in the Gulf of America to liberate the Canal would threaten the cruise industry and also shut down the Canal itself, which would immediately raise prices on consumer goods from China.

But the real threat is a Canadian invasion.

Our northern border is the least defended border in the world — some places in North Dakota and Minnesota, only a single strand of barbed wire marks it. Coyotes cross it daily, deer, bears. Canadian Mounties on snowmobiles could come sweeping across and get to Iowa before anybody would realize it and their advantage over American troops is obvious. A disproportionate number of American enlisted men and women are from southern states and have never gone into combat in cold weather. Iraq and Vietnam were hard enough, but a war in Wisconsin in February would be big big trouble.

I like the idea of knocking down windmills and drilling for oil in Yellowstone and Kash Patel will be the Greatest FBI Director in American History (move over, J. Edgar Hoover), but I’d leave Canada to itself.

The post Greenland, Panama, Canada: my views appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

I got to spend last week in California, seeing people, doing things, from Irvine up to Sacramento, and people kept trying to get me to go with them to vineyards, though I no longer imbibe. I used to and then about 25 years ago I stopped. I am capable of idiocy on my own without adding intoxication to it. And I had a two-year-old daughter and I didn’t want her to see me drunk. She and I love silliness, which is a whole other matter.

I went to Modesto, home of Ernest and Julio Gallo wine, the wine I drank in my college days, the cheap wine in the gallon glass jug. You poured it into an ordinary drinking glass and drank it with dinner and either you liked it or you didn’t drink it but you didn’t sit and discuss it. Now I have friends, bless their hearts, who are connoisseurs of wine and who employ terms like “well-structured,” “buttery,” “complex,” “nicely restrained,” “autumnal,” “jam-flavored,” and “rangy,” which strikes me as complex well-structured hogwash. I am an alien in their midst. The only wine I taste now is from the Sunday morning communion cup, and I suppose it’s complex but I simply think of it as the blood of salvation.

Well, we live in a big democratic country where people speak freely so you don’t have to go far to be an alien. I’m an alien among Gen Zers when they talk digitalese. I tune in sports talk shows on TV to enjoy watching grown men shouting at each other about a game, meanwhile the planet is heating, Los Angeles is burning, and a party has taken power whose members are forbidden to speak the words “climate change.”

From Modesto I went to Lubbock, Texas, by way of Southwest Airlines, which encourages its flight attendants to do stand-up. Landed in Lubbock, and one of them said, “Be careful opening the overheads. Luggage can shift. Shift happens.”

I went to Lubbock to do a stand-up show myself at the Cactus Theater, and standing in the lobby it seemed to me that I was drawing a Baptist crowd. I asked an usher and she agreed with me. So I worked some hymns into the show, not hard for an old evangelical like me, and when I started into “It Is Well With My Soul” and they joined in full-voice, suddenly I wasn’t an alien anymore. I was among brethren and sistren. I was instantly at home. And then “How Great Thou Art.” It was powerful. Lubbock is Buddy Holly’s hometown and they also knew “Every day, it’s a-gettin’ closer, going faster than a roller coaster” and they knew “You know my love’ll not fade away.” And it won’t. I love Lubbock and I always will and I don’t care whom they voted for in November, those people are family. Their singing was not autumnal or rangy; it was heartfelt and harmonious.

Life is good, even when we’re alienated. We Democrats got skunked and so for the next four years, we’re free to savor life itself. The victor has proudly proclaimed his contempt for our traditions and institutions, which are alien to him. His faith is in himself. Good luck with that.

I intend to enjoy defeat and go back and read Shakespeare, whom I wrote C-minus term papers about in college using terms like “well-structured,” “complex,” “buttery.” I’m going to travel to Dublin, Stockholm, Rome, where a person can become absorbed in the immediate surroundings, be engrossed in the moment. I want to hear The Marriage of Figaro again and the Fauré Requiem. I want to walk in the park with my sweetie and look at people and their dogs and the jazz musicians who congregate to jam. I want to pay attention to joyful outbursts of little kids astonished by ordinary things.

The country changes. Someday I will open the Lifestyle section of the newspaper and find reviews of macaroni and cheese (“impressive density” “refined finish,” “suave but structural”) and why not tap water (“earthy accents and savory character”). To which I say: What-EVer. I love the old hymns, face-to-face friendliness, good manners, the limerick, a walk in the park. Someday I hope to shake hands with the bishop who dared ask the Chief to show mercy in her prayer at the Cathedral on Monday.

I knew it could happen someway:

A bull rules the whole USA.

But life is riskable

And I’ll stay Episcopal

And live happily day to day.

The post A wonderful night in Lubbock appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

When you celebrate the 50th anniversary of something in your own life, it tells you that you’re older than you thought and that career change is no longer an option, much as you wish you’d gone into software design so you wouldn’t have to ask children how to reformat a page on your laptop, but okay, longevity is what we were going for, right? It’s why I stopped smoking. I was a chain-smoker because I thought that’s what writers do and then I saw them dying off in their forties and fifties. I wrote mostly about existential grief, but when I married and had a kid, I had to get a job and I got one in radio because it was the 6 a.m. shift and there were no other applicants.

It took me about five minutes to figure out that listeners didn’t need to hear about grief at 6 a.m., they had their own, so I got into comedy. I grew up evangelical, which is a solemn thing so I seldom smile and therefore TV was not an option but I wanted to be useful so I did radio and fifty years later, strangers come up and say, “I listened to you during a hard time in my life so thank you,” and to me, this is endlessly amazing. And that’s the story of my life.

I’m 82 and I still work full time because if I didn’t I’d suffer anxiety about Washington and what’s the point of that? He’s our first convicted-felon president and nobody knows who might deter him from making it a lifetime appointment so why should I waste my declining years in anxiety? I’m in the DEI woke left wing and that’s trouble enough; I need more silliness in my life, not anguish — I did anguish in my twenties. Enough. Now I write:

There was an old man from the prairie

Determined to laugh and be merry,

And write light verse

And never curse

Not even when necessary.

I worked like a crazy person back in my middle years to make up for an intelligence deficit, doing a radio show, trying to be an author, and I had to give up watching TV for about forty years, though I loved TV, and so I have no idea who the celebrities are anymore and I’m still stuck in the old culture when we kids of blue-collar parents aspired to attend symphony concerts as a sign of social mobility and now those days are gone forever. Now you can imagine Hulk Hogan becoming Secretary of Education — confirmed narrowly, but confirmed — and deciding to deny federal money to any school system requiring attendance beyond the fifth grade. Not saying that’s a bad idea, just noting the change in the country. And war with Denmark has not been ruled out, at last word.

But it’s none of my business. And I’m not saying that taxes aren’t exorbitant in the upper brackets and need to be brought down to one or one-and-a-quarter percent or that Medicare and Social Security aren’t a waste of public funds — let the kids take care of the old people, everybody has a spare bedroom or a sofa bed, no reason for the enterprising to look after the laggards. If you want universal health care, apply for Danish citizenship and learn to pronounce the ø and enjoy herring on toast (ristet brød) or become a Brit and learn to misspell “labor” and “neighbor.”

Ignorance has been a fine strategy for me. I speak English and once knew the difference between “that” and “which” and tried to explain it to others but that is a hopeless cause, which I’ve now abandoned. Nuts to which. Nuts to science. The country has voted against it and in favor of setting up oil wells in national parks until the fuel runs out and the sky is dense with smog and we have July all year round and cities are burning and New York is a few skyscrapers sticking up out of the Atlantic. I favor diversity but only in Kansas City. For me, it’s reclusivity.

I sit at my desk and write about cognitive dissonance. A psychoanalyst pal told me realize that all the bric-a-brac of Freudian analysis means little, that you simply listen sympathetically and offer common sense advice such as “Don’t give up.” (I think she called it “creative dissonance.”) Maybe voting for a felon is also cognitively dissonant, but I’m not there yet and wouldn’t know about that.

The post Fifty candles on the cake, must be a mistake appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

For the first time in living memory, I was the only passenger in a TSA security line at a major airport — Tucson, noon on a Friday, a time you’d expect Arizonans to be heading for Nome or Juneau for a weekend of darkness, but no. I wended back and forth in the maze of barriers and the guy at the conveyor seemed happy to see me. I zipped on through and counted 15 uniformed men and women defending the country against one octogenarian liberal who’s never owned a gun, hasn’t fired an explosive in fifty years and then only a few bottle rockets, and arrived at my gate two hours early, and celebrated by buying a latte at a coffee stand that offers tables and chairs.

This is a great boon to authors, having a table in an airport to set the laptop on, and few airports offer them for free, not realizing that most Americans over forty are authors or thinking about becoming one. You have to buy a latte or else pay exorbitant fees to join a club and sit among software executives. I leave a $5 tip for the employees who clean the tables. And when people open up a conversation and ask about my line of work, I don’t say I’m an author because they’ll say, “I’ve been thinking about writing a book myself.”

First, they ask, “Where you from?” and I’ve learned not to say, “New York City” because it obliges them to talk about horrible criminal acts committed in broad daylight by homeless illegal migrants from Nicaragua, so I say, “Lincoln, Nebraska,” and that’s the end of it. Once someone mentioned their admiration of Abraham Lincoln, but mostly they say, “What’s it like there?” and I say, “Fabulous. I’d never live anywhere else.” And then they ask what I do for a living.

I’m an author of fiction so there are various ways I can go with this. Sometimes I’m an Anglican priest but I can also be an English lit professor or a proctologist and usually I’m safe from further questioning. If they happen to be Episcopalian, then I’m a member of a secret priestly order that lives in a monastery in Montana. If they happen to be an English teacher, I talk about J.F. Powers. I used to know Jim Powers and I admire his work, Morte D’Urban and Prince of Darkness, but I invent a whole series of baseball novels he wrote about Babe Ruth touring with an exhibition team, the Sorbitol All-Stars during the winter, traveling around South America. I’ve never set foot in South America so it’s fun. I have never run into a South American, thank God.

Nobody ever shows the slightest interest in proctology. They just avoid shaking hands.

Other people who travel for a living complain about it but I love it especially now that I’ve become unknown. I used to be a semi-celeb back in the Eighties but my audience has mostly drifted into dementia and they travel only with caregivers and under sedation, so it’s a whole new opportunity for me.

The people I meet have no idea I’m a Marxist-Communist so they’re curious which side of the political eclipse I fall on, neo-fascist or Deep State, and I like to play with them. They ask, “So what did you think of the election?” and maybe I say, “I was in China the whole time and I’d like to talk about it but I can’t because I’m wearing a heart monitor that a State Department computer has control of and there’s a list of 47 words that if I utter any one of them, my heart stops and I fall unconscious into your arms.” Or I can say, “I have a rare mental deficit that left me illiterate and so I only watch Fox News. It’s all I know.”

But in the Tucson airport, nobody said hello so I had to be simply who I am, no relief, just one more aging has-been who once played the Hollywood Bowl, Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, and now I’m playing senior centers and rehab facilities, singing some, telling old jokes, but also doing blood pressure and neck massages and upping people’s liquid intake. You do what you can for people. Once dementia has set in, there’s not much demand for fiction: life itself becomes fiction.

Which makes me wonder about what I’ve been telling you. Which is true, which is false. I leave it to you, I gotta plane to catch. See you later, alligator.

The post One more day, one more airport appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

I once, in Detroit, discovered I’d left my anti-seizure meds and blood thinner back in New York and needed to step into a drugstore and negotiate with a pharmacist for an emergency refill. He was dubious about emergency meds, wanted to see a prescription or at least an empty bottle, but a lady pharmacist recognized my voice from the radio, having been a fan of my show, and she also was his boss so thanks to a long radio career I was spared a stroke or a heart attack that morning.

Life offers us magical connections, which astonish us and for which we are grateful. I loved that show, did it for forty years, and it was all because my fundamentalist family refused to buy a TV back when everyone was getting one so I was left with a Zenith radio and listened to the last of the old radio shows, Fibber McGee and Gunsmoke and Fred Allen, which I loved, and twenty years later I launched a show with cowboys and a detective and small-town folks in it, and enough time had passed so that it was considered a novelty, not an imitation, and suddenly I had a career, one I never planned on.

My hero John Updike liked the show and even sent me a fan letter — to be praised by a man I revered was a tremendous shock — and he snuck me into the American Academy of Arts & Letters, of which he was president, and I went to the ceremony up on 155th Street and stood among my betters and behaved myself and tried to look distinguished.

I do believe, though she will deny it, that my Academy membership was one reason my beloved decided to marry me, not that I went around wearing a badge, but I invited her to an Academy dinner and Calvin Trillin came over and said hello, which impressed her, and also David Sedaris and Francine Prose and Jane Smiley. And Philip Roth was there, the author of Goodbye, Columbus and Herzog. He didn’t say hello to me but he said hello to John Updike who said hello to me. It was only one factor in her decision, there were others — good looks, correct pronunciation of difficult words, good manners, the fact I was infatuated with her — but being an academician set me apart from other guys from Anoka, Minnesota.

I was 50 when I met her. I had had two marital learning experiences and was ready for the grand finale. By sheer good luck, I had outlived Fitzgerald by six years, Buddy by 28, my cousin Roger by 33. Talk about terrible luck: he had dived off a boat to impress a girl he had a crush on, forgetting that he couldn’t swim, unaware that she wasn’t attracted to boys. Back then, “gay” simply meant “lively and vivacious.”

It’s bad luck to say it but I say it anyway: I’m the luckiest person you ever knew. I was brought up by fundamentalists who spent a great deal of time in Jeremiah and Isaiah but I made a career as a humorist. In high school choir, Mrs. Hallenberg asked me and a few others to only move our lips, please, and not sing. Despite a strict upbringing, I’ve written dozens of pretty good limericks and a few excellent ones, including:

There was an attractive stockbroker

Who beat everybody at poker.

Her blouse was revealing

And also concealing

The Queen of Hearts and the Joker.

And now today, my flight out of JFK was delayed and I missed my connection in Salt Lake City and had to spend five hours waiting for the next flight to Tucson and in that time, I wrote this column and I also discovered the best macaroni and cheese I’ve ever had in my life. Macron à la fromage.

Every mishap leads to good fortune. And so I conclude that there is no reason to plan ahead, scope things out, seek recommendations. I met my beloved because her sister was a classmate of my sister and I ran into her one day and when she heard that I lived in New York, she said, “My sister lives in New York” and I said, “Oh, really?” and it was the luckiest Oh, really of my life. Good things come in threes. Everyone is the judge of their own good luck. Nothing bad but what there is some good in it. God never shuts one door but what He opens another. If ifs and ands were pots and pans there’d be no trade for tinkers. What else can I tell you that you don’t already know?

The post Sitting in an airport, thinking about luck appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

When Chip Carter spoke about his father, Jimmy, at a memorial service in Atlanta and told how, when his dad noticed the boy got a poor mark in Latin, Jimmy studied Latin so that he could teach his son, I recognized a standard of fatherhood a good deal higher than my own and I felt bad for a moment until I recalled that it wasn’t my father’s level of fatherhood either. He was a father of six kids and I recall that when I got a C in math, it was my problem and he didn’t get involved.

That was the advantage of growing up in a big family. An only child was under tremendous pressure, observed closely by mom and dad, expected to excel in scholastics and also deportment and personal charm, whereas I, the invisible middle child, was free to lie in a dark space under the basement stairs reading adventure fiction by flashlight.

Jimmy’s trademark was honesty, and as a boy I managed to avoid that as well. When people asked me, “How are you?” I said, “Fine.” “How is school?” “Good.” Telling the truth only led to more questions. We lived near the Mississippi and Mother was fearful that one of us might drown and so I learned to lie when I’d been swimming in the river and this facility has served me well in adult life. A friend brings her wild misbehaving grandchild to visit and I say, “She has so much energy.” A niece introduces me to her gloomy fiancé with eye makeup and an aluminum sport coat, I tell her “You look so happy.” A friend wants me to read his nephew’s poetry and I say, “It’s very engaging.” The kid is 20. He knows how to put a couple dozen cryptic lines on a page that defy interpretation and I don’t want to use the term “monkey manure” and thereby lose the friendship and “engaging” is not what I’d consider praise, nothing that might lead the kid to waste his twenties writing the unreadable.

I expect honesty from my cardiologist and from my sweetheart. I married her for her honesty. I know she loves me and she won’t let me leave the apartment with my fly open or a blob of toothpaste on my cheek. I also recognize a certain narrowing of her eyes when she looks at me in company and it says, “What you just said does not represent you at your best.” Time to correct myself.

I’m a grown-up and I don’t need praise though a historian whose work I admire sent me a fan letter that meant the world to me, but I don’t need more. Some books of mine got fervent praise, others tepid, but none of it made a big impression on me. Praise drifts around like spritzes of aromatic cologne but what matters is the love of rewriting and re-rewriting and revision of the re-rewrite, and then the revision of that, and so on. Professional violinists I know love daily practicing. They return to the Brandenburg No. 6 as a fresh challenge though they’ve been there dozens of times. For a writer, nothing is ever finished. I never read a book of mine after its published because I’ll find flaws in it that can’t be fixed. Too late.

There’s no sense in looking back. You’re always standing on the verge of something new, something you expect to be the best you’ve ever done. If you didn’t think so, why bother?

Which makes adulation of a president as a monarch so weird and to see his election or defeat as a tidal shift in the nation — e.g., the myth of the New Frontier despite Kennedy’s having been elected with a tiny 118,000 vote margin out of 68 million cast. The lives of his family were warped by that myth. Jimmy Carter escaped that. He was defeated and returned to Plains with his wife, Rosalynn, to the small ranch-style home they’d built in 1960. The two of them worked as volunteers building houses for Habitat for Humanity. He taught Sunday School, took up good causes such as human rights and the campaign to eradicate Guinea worm disease, and, as their son said in his eulogy, when one of them was hospitalized, a bed was brought in for the other to sleep in the same room. Historians will do what they will, but the man managed to live his own life as who he was, not as a bird in a silver cage. May angels bear him to his rest.

The post A good man gone to glory appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

One man can do only so much and rather than deal with the prospect of war with Panama or Denmark, I’ve decided to think about winter, seeing as I’m spending a couple weeks down South and feel guilty about it, as I well should. It was bitterly cold when I left New York and when I got in the cab to go to JFK I was wearing no overcoat, no scarf or gloves, and the cabbie looked over his shoulder, wondering if he was going to have to contend with a lunatic. Meanwhile, dear friends of mine in Washington, D.C., employees of the deep state, are dealing with a blizzard, and friends in Alaska are living in darkness, and up in Toronto when Justin Trudeau announced his resignation as prime minister, he was brief; it was freezing, he didn’t want to be seen speaking in a pitiful trembly voice.

I’m 82 and so the prospect of a war of annexation with Canada doesn’t affect me personally, but I’d only point out that Republican states (PA, MI, ND, MT) with thinly defended borders would be easily invaded and if the war extends from January 20 into February and March, the wily Canucks may have some advantages. And when we win and our northern border extends deep into the Arctic, federal officials from Florida may be flying to the far reaches of Manitoba and be unable to play golf for extended periods of time. Just saying.

As a Minnesotan, I believe winter is a crucial part of growing up; it teaches you how to be happy under adverse conditions. Florida is fine for the sickly and delicate and those nearing the end of life’s journey, but the Lutheran Church should open dozens of winter camps for young Floridians to experience sleeping in a tent when it’s ten below zero, as I did when I was a Boy Scout. You lie in a close cluster of other Scouts, toasty warm but exhaling frost, and having eaten a hearty meal of mushroom stew and roasted squirrel, you face that inevitable moment when you must venture out alone and move your bowels. You don’t want to do it but you must. You drop your trousers, grab hold of a tree, squat and do your business, cleaning yourself with leaves, making sure they’re not poison ivy. You remember this for the rest of your life.

Winter is a pleasure, if you know what to do. You wear a scarf and gloves when you go out to play pond hockey and you keep warm by playing vigorously. Your face feels the chill, you breathe freezing air, but you are quite happy dashing around. The goalie needs to wear a heavy coat but you don’t. It’s exhilarating. Poets get awfully cold, sitting in a snowdrift, pen and paper in hand, and so most winter poems are about death. But runners do okay, snow shovelers, trash haulers, and of course old men who sit by the fire drinking ginger tea and reminiscing about their youth are just fine.

Winter is an excellent time for the young. The old people stay indoors but the young go out to wait for your school bus on minus-20 mornings, and you feel liberated. Snow is falling, headlights appear through the haze, you crouch in the ditch with a big snowdrift as a windbreak. The bears are hibernating, the timber wolves live farther north in tall-pine country, but there are coyotes around and of course snow snakes, so you learn to fend them off.

The best defense against coyotes is to crouch low and bare your teeth and make a low chuffing sound like a stallion makes, and the way to defend against snow snakes is to use foul language, which was a valuable lesson for a good Christian boy like me. “Heck” and “darn” and “shucks” and “dadburn it” will not get the job done, you must venture into the dark corners of the English language. I am an old man who never employs profanity, as my friends know very well, but in defense of my wife and daughter against vicious arctic reptiles I am prepared to go all the way.

I worry about children growing up in Florida, whether the year-round relaxation may leave them incapable of self-defense if the vicious Danes should attack America’s soft underbelly, spreading poisonous pastries to knock off the unsuspecting, in cahoots with maniacal Panamanians wielding pans of pernicious fishes from their isthmus. And let Mexico keep the gulf. We have golf. That’s enough.

The post Please be hesitant, Mr. President appeared first on Garrison Keillor.