Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 72

A string of blazing summer days in New York City and after the sun went down, perfect summer nights, diners in sidewalk cafes along Columbus Avenue, dogs walking their owners, and my wife walking me. “You need to get out and move around,” she says. “It’s not healthy to sit at a desk all day.” And she is right. I am stuck on a memoir I’m writing, pondering the wrong turns of my early years. How much do you want to know? Are you sure?

Manhattan is a long thin island, so we don’t need a car here, and among pedestrians, one is surrounded by good manners. Biking is dangerous. A young woman from Australia was killed Friday when she swerved on her bike to avoid an Uber driver pulling out into the bike lane and she was struck down by a truck. Her name was Maddie Lyden, she was 23, she had just graduated from college and given herself a trip to America, her dream trip. She died a mile from my apartment and I didn’t know about it until Monday.

When I moved into this apartment back in 1990, I was struck by three deaths that happened in my vicinity. A former Rockette was killed by a demented man as she walked her dog early one morning on 69th Street and Central Park. A young woman working in a Gap store on 57th was killed by a robber as she opened the door for business. A young man from Provo, Utah, was killed on the 7th Avenue B-train station platform, defending his mother against a gang of muggers. I think of the three of them whenever I pass the places where they died.

We’re interconnected here.  I sit in a café and the woman across the room tapping on her laptop may be writing a novel that will be a best-seller and here I am, trying to remember Frayne Anderson, the English teacher in Anoka, Minnesota, who gave me a copy of The New Yorker when I was 14.  A certain decorum is observed. I don’t ask her what she’s writing, she doesn’t ask me, but we’re connected. I once boarded a downtown B train and sat down and noticed that the black lady across the aisle was reading a book of mine. She looked like a lawyer. She didn’t laugh but she kept reading. It was hard watching her for fear she’d make a face and slam the book shut and I got off the train. It was 7th Avenue.

Writing a best-selling novel was once my fairy tale, but I’m over it now. I’m engrossed in the memoir. It’s my obligation, seeing as I grew up in America after World War II, when children roamed the countryside freely, no cellphones on them for their parents to ascertain their whereabouts, and we worked hoeing corn for truck farmers and learned about drudgery and if we wanted to go to town, we hitchhiked and sometimes got a ride from a drunk who was speeding and cursing his wife. I’m not nostalgic about this. I’m grateful to have survived more or less intact.

I think of the novelists I know and if I were to turn my back on the factual and think fiction I could make myself into a tragic hero, misunderstood by old friends and family, but the truth is, my life is one piece of good luck after another, the most recent being my wife of 23 years who is walking alongside me down Columbus toward Lincoln Center, setting a brisk pace. A good marriage is worth more than a best-selling novel, take my word for it, I’ve been there.

“My Fair Lady” is playing at the Center. We saw it and she said she’d like to see it again. “Fine,” I say, as I’m thinking about Maddie Lyden who was struck down on her bike one block east of here, at 66th and Central Park West. The Uber driver was careless, the truck driver was ticketed for DUI, Maddie was riding a rental bike and didn’t get a helmet.

It’s hard to put all this in one rational column, the tragedy of Maddie, the summer nights, the reader on the train, my good wife, “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly,” but now I’ve reached 750 words, my limit, and must get back to work on the memoir. That’s life in New York. Take care. Look both ways always.

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It is a beautiful summer, says I, and I cannot offhand recall any that were beautifuler, not that I am unaware of human suffering, I am aware. I have elderly friends my age who are facing dismal prognoses and friends who are sunk in the miseries of divorce and I feel for all of them but does this mean I can’t feel fresh and eager and be crazy about my wife? No, it does not.

I like to impress her, which I did on Sunday. I went cheerfully to a vegan restaurant with her — me, a cheeseburger guy, a slider guy if the truth be told — and ordered a cucumber soda, toasted tofu slices, and a kale salad big enough to feed a goat. I ate it all. She was impressed.

The world is falling apart around us, but that’s no reason to be unhappy. The world has been falling apart for thousands of years. Nevertheless, one can accentuate the positive and eat out of the goat’s feed trough. Get over yourself. Pretend to be thrilled by tofu.

I felt good on Sunday because I’d been to church and a middle-aged lesbian couple walked in and sat in the pew in front of me, and I felt warmly toward them, being the high-class liberal that I am, and then they turned for the Exchange of Peace and one of them was a man. A man with a deep voice. He said, “The peace of the Lord.” So I had been extending my tolerance toward Dick and Jane, not Vicky and Jane. Interesting.

I also felt good because on Saturday I stopped to look at a yard sale and there, among all the trashy stuff, the unwanted gifts, the novelty socks, the shirt that said, “Help Me, I’ve Fallen And I Cannot Reach My Beer,” the unused exercise bike, the unread books, was a book I wrote, mint condition, unread, list price of 20 bucks, now on sale for 35 cents. I bought it, of course. An arthur doesn’t want to see a book of his go so cheaply.

It was my collection of sonnets, very intense and dense and sensitive, which had sold about 46 copies when it came out and which I wrote to shine up my reputation. I’d done a radio show for decades on which we did comedy routines that involved the expulsion of stomach gas. Juvenile humor, and yet it convulsed audiences left and right, sketches in which an actor bent over and the sound effects man squeezed the whoopee cushion and the audience fell apart, many of them expelling gases in the process.

As a man ventures into his 70s, he thinks about his legacy, and so I wrote sonnets, just as Shakespeare did, about mortality and the power of love to overcome shame and doubt, and here was my work sitting in a yard with some beer mugs and figurines, on sale for 35 cents. It was a shock.

Of course I’ve been disillusioned before — I’ve voted for Democrats, I know what disappointment is — but I took my sonnets and resolved to put aside regret, of which I have enough already. In church, we ask forgiveness for what we have done and what we have left undone and the Left Undone list is very long, but you leave it with the Lord and are forgiven and shake hands with the lesbian couple except now they aren’t. What you thought was diversity turns out to be just folks.

I am now looking for someone to give the sonnets to. It’s my birthday August 7 and my love and I are taking two young couples to dinner. This is to preclude a conversation about how lovely life was before all these passwords and people texting on their phones and posting on Facebook instead of conversing with actual people. I will let the couples draw straws for the sonnets. Instead of stewing about regrets, we can talk about the power of love. It is an old man’s privilege to natter and I intend to. I will tell them that a good marriage is worth the trouble. Nothing sweeter. Remember that not all feelings need to be aired. When in doubt, smile and say, “I love you.” And look for opportunities to amaze the other. If necessary, fry up your own words with melted cheese and eat them. It can’t hurt. This goes for gay couples, straight, curly, LSMFT, ILGWU, NFL, the whole spectrum.

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I went for a walk in the rain Saturday under a big black umbrella, which I chose over the kittycat one as being more age-appropriate, seeing as I turn s-s-s-s-s-s-s-seventy-six in a week. Cat kitsch is for teen girls, not grandpas. A black umbrella, black shoes, jeans, white shirt, tan jacket with black ink stains on the lining. I’m a writer, I carry pens, they leak. So what?

A walk under an umbrella is a form of meditation, and rain always makes me happy. I grew up out in the country and rain meant that I could stay in and read a book and not have to go to Mr. Peterson’s farm and hoe corn. Hoeing corn was the most miserable work I’ve ever done. Nothing I’ve done since even comes close. That, to me, is the definition of the good life, to have something so miserable in your distant past that you can recall in moments of distress and think, “Well, at least this is not as bad as that.”

I walked down the street past couples eating lunch in a sidewalk cafe whose awning was dripping water on one couple and not on others, and I heard the woman say, “Do you want to move?” and the man said, “It’s up to you.” She said, “I asked you first.” He said, “Whatever you want.” In other words, they were married. This was Columbus Avenue in Manhattan and clearly they were out-of-towners. A New York woman who is being dripped on would pick up her plate and say, “I’m outta here” and the man would follow.

Life is unfair: some get leaked on and others don’t, as I am well aware, being one of the lucky ones. I had a good job for forty-two years that kept me amused and required no math and no social skills, and I married very, very well. In addition to beauty, wit, kindness, and va-va-va-voom, my wife is skilled at ordinary household chores such as repairing toilet tank floats and jiggering appliances to make them work.

She learned these things (and much more) by being a freelance violinist, living on very little money in low-rent apartment buildings with no super to come upstairs and repair a faucet. Her ambition was to play Beethoven and Mozart, and along the way she picked up the skills you need if you’re going to get along without much money. Music and art schools really should offer training in plumbing and carpentry since a prime requirement for any artist is survival and it helps to be self-sufficient. She never, for example, had the money to pay a shrink and so she learned to deal with depression by taking long walks. It helps.

The sun came out Sunday and we walked over to St. Michael’s on Amsterdam where we got married twenty-three years ago. The 10 a.m. service gave a person plenty to think about. The reading from the Book of 2 Samuel about King David seeing the naked Bathsheba and seducing her and then sending her husband into battle to die was like something right out of the newspapers, maybe involving Michael Cohen. So sad. Some would call it Fake Scripture but it made an impression on me. Same guy who wrote “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” could be a jerk as well. And then the miracle of the loaves and fishes from the Gospel of John.

So on our way home we stopped at a humongous omni-maxi-supermarket and wandered miles of aisles, looking for a few things and were stunned by the sheer variety. Loaves, for example. Rye bread but not only rye rye but eleven different kinds, plus flatbreads, round breads, yeast breads, sweetbreads, sourdough, leavened, seven-grain, breadsticks, braided, a vast breadth of breeds and brands of bread, everything but white.

And fish. Sufficient fish to feed the Finnish militia.

Which brings me to the subject of my birthday. No gifts, please. Nothing. I am giving a birthday dinner for myself and inviting four friends in their twenties rather than people my age so we can avoid the boring discussion about how beautiful life was before people went around texting on cellphones all the time. Life is good, especially when you get the misery out of the way early. Pity the child of wealth and privilege who never hoed corn. We bought four ears at the store and boiled them and ate them, salted and slathered in butter. Nothing better.

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It is a lovely summer so long as you don’t think too much about the news, so I don’t. When I was younger, I felt a duty to be informed, and now it is the duty of younger people, not me. I am trying to deal with busted zippers on a suitcase.

The suitcase itself is in fine shape, but the pull tabs are missing. To zip it shut, I must grasp the tiny slider between thumb and forefinger and ease it along the chain, which ain’t easy.

I called a drugstore and the clerk heard “pull tabs” and thought I wanted to buy lottery tickets. I called another and the lady said, “A good luggage shop can repair that for you.” I thought I’d try attaching a paper clip to each slider and the search for paper clips led me to the many miscellany dishes we have in this house and the rich assortment of tiny screws, brads, tacks, clips, nails, staples, pins, and fasteners.

My wife asked what I was looking for. I told her. She said, “I have a bunch of zipper tabs upstairs, why didn’t you ask me for one?”

“Where did you get those?”

“From Amazon,” she said.

The little bald guy who started out selling books out of the trunk of his car and now is the richest man in the world (at $112 billion) sells replacement parts for zippers. What a country. Mister Twitter, by the way, is No. 766.

That is why I’m not up on the latest in the Miller investigation of collision with the Russians. Too busy with other things.

So I packed the suitcase and we went away to a cabin in the pines to get away from everything and sit by the lake and of course you find a little bit of the everything you went there to get away from, leaks from the fridge, raccoon incursions, hot water heaters not heating hot enough, but my wife handles those things because she is half Swedish. You put me in charge of hot water and we will all be in hot water very quickly.

The cabin also serves as the family museum. Her grandpa’s helmet and bugle from World War I are hung on the wall, his vest inscribed with the battles he witnessed, the Marne, the Somme, and Verdun, which lasted almost a year and cost 700,000 casualties. A man who had seen so much death would appreciate a lake cabin even more than you and I.

His son, my late father-in-law Ray, is still the presiding spirit of this cabin. As a young man, he helped build it; and as an old man, he cut up fallen trees for firewood and climbed up on the roof to clean leaves out of the gutters. His dad sat on the front steps and smoked his White Owl cigar and his mother cooked supper. His wife sat at the piano and played songs from old songbooks.

I came here years ago as a stranger in love with their youngest daughter, and the four of us sat on the porch and peacefully conversed, feeling the breeze off the lake. My love sat next to me on the wicker sofa, touching hands, and her parents sat in a rocker and a kitchen chair. I was not out to impress them. The only really impressive thing I can do is to recite the 87 counties of Minnesota by heart in alphabetical order in less than 60 seconds. As it happens, the cabin is in Wisconsin.

I was there to show them that I can converse in a quiet civilized way, not lecture or harangue or belabor, avoiding long digressions, bald-faced lies and outright heresy. I did this. I fit in. It was a lovely evening. We covered a lot of ground, mainly history, personal and national, but also music and art and some botany, my weak subject — I only know birch trees and tulips and maybe spruce — but I nodded, smiled, and soon we were off that and onto Cars We Have Loved and then trains.

This is what lake cabins are for. You can swim or canoe or hike if you like, but quiet reflective porch conversation, the dialogue of gentle people, is what we’re here for. Oddly, the subject of No. 766, our Chief Expletive, never comes up. He is not a cabin sort of guy. The reflection he loves is his own. The man is not connected to the soul of this country.

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I am having a beautiful summer and I don’t know why — after all, I am a liberal Democrat obliged to be concerned about the oppressed, the underpaid, the critical shortage of honeybees, greenhouse gases, plastic waste on the ocean floor, meanwhile right-wingers in giant pickups with Confederate decals on the bumper and rifles in a gun rack in the cab go merrily along without a twinge of guilt, and now apparently so do I.

I read the newspapers, and there was our man in London hobnobbing with the queen at Windsor Castle and exulting in it — “We had a great feeling. I liked her a lot. She is an incredible woman, she is so sharp, she is so beautiful, inside and out.” — which echoed what he’d said about U.K. manufacturing: “They have product that we like. I mean they have a lot of great product. They make phenomenal things, you know, and you have different names — you can say ‘England,’ you can say ‘U.K.,’ you can say ‘United Kingdom’ … the fact is you make great product, you make great things.” And they have a great queen and she and he had a wonderful tea together and the tea was tremendous and so were the scones, inside and out.

That’s how I feel this summer, very happy, though I’m a Democrat and know I should be troubled.

One reason for my cheerfulness is that I’ve stayed indoors except for walking to and from the car. I’ve preferred the indoors since I was a child but was shamed into taking long hikes in the woods because, as devout Christians, we should look upon nature as God’s handiwork, the trees, the birds, the firmament, the whole thing, but now that I’m 75 I just do as I wish. Indoors is where the coffeemaker is and my laptop computer. It’s where one finds a nice clean toilet rather than a public restroom that looks like Paleolithic people have been using it to eviscerate their goats.

A second reason is that I’m in the midst of writing a book. Work is a necessity of life. Retirement can be fatal.

Another reason for my cheery demeanor is that my wife is the critic in the family; she has better taste and discernment, she talks out loud to other drivers on the road (“If you’re going to turn, turn, bozo.”), she casts a critical eye on architecture (“That’s not a church, that’s a warehouse”) and the clothing of passersby (“Look at that man and promise me you’ll never wear a bright orange shirt with a blue tie and white polyester slacks”), and she is absolutely right on the mark. This leaves me free to coast along in easygoing contentment.

This weekend we were in Greenville, S.C., where I enjoyed phenomenal shrimp and grits, great iced tea, incredible company, and a beautiful hotel, beautiful inside and out. We attended a birthday party. There were other people in attendance who may not have been liberal Democrats, just as in any large group you may find people who don’t love grand opera or haven’t read Proust, but in my current live-and-let-live mood, I didn’t bring up the subject. And at the end of the day, my wife and I saw an ice cream stand and walked up and stood in line at the counter. An enormous pickup truck went by, tailpipes roaring, bumper stickers proclaiming the driver’s loyalty to the Confederacy. Fine by me. The war ended a hundred and fifty years ago, but if it’s that important to you, bless your heart. We ordered our ice cream, vanilla and Moroccan mint for her, caramel with hazelnuts for me.

It was only ice cream, but it took my mind off whatever may be happening between Putin and our man in Helsinki, whether Putin has our man’s credit cards and car keys, or just his Twitter password — that ice cream gave me a good feeling. The product was phenomenal, so good I thought maybe the cows were English or British or from the U.K. or all three.

I ate my ice cream slowly. Scripture says, “Whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God,” which is an extremely high standard of behavior, but I did my best. My wife sat next to me, her thigh against mine. I thank Him for her, for the firmament, and also for caramel ice cream. If it be His will, I intend to have a hot fudge sundae tomorrow.

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What a glorious summer. Sunny skies and idyllic summer nights and then we had that ferocious heat wave to prevent us from going camping. When it’s 100 degrees in the North Woods, only demented people would be camping, and if you weren’t demented when you pitched your tent, you soon would be. If you love campfires, you can download a video of one. You know that, right?

Don’t get me started on this subject. America is a land of great cities, dozens of them, and each one has nice hotels and fine restaurants, and by “fine restaurants” I mean ones with napkins and restrooms and hand sanitizer. Campers eat with unwashed fingers in a cloud of flies and mosquitoes, some of whom carry dreadful diseases and it’s impossible to tell which ones. And let us not even mention Lyme disease. Perish the thought.

It makes a person appreciate summer more when you’ve had a miserable winter, so I’ve got that going for me. Dismal dark cold days for which there are no useful pharmaceuticals, depressed Democrats around you, and then a day of freezing rain, which, thanks to the ice in the downspouts, drains through your dining room ceiling while you are at yoga and you come home from two hours of humiliation in the company of slender millennials to find your antique table covered with wet plaster. That is what you need in order to fully appreciate July.

Of course it helps to be married to the right person. Early in the courtship stage, the subject of camping, canoeing, rock climbing, needs to be brought up, right after sexual preference and before religious beliefs, if any. I met my wife in New York at a restaurant. She was not wearing hiking boots, she didn’t smell of insect repellant. We’ve been mostly quite happy ever since. She is a runner but I can deal with that. She runs, she comes back, she doesn’t need me to run with her. I stay home and read great American novels.

There are not many great novels about camping, except for Grapes of Wrath and Red Badge of Courage, and in neither book is camping done for pleasure. The campers were fleeing the Dust Bowl or they were pitching their tents at Chancellorsville, preparing to die. Nothing recreational about it.

Why have practically no great works of art come out of the camping experience? Name one Beethoven symphony, one Van Gogh painting, one Shakespearean sonnet inspired by a week cooking over an open fire and sleeping on stony ground. You can’t name one.

Answer: because camping is about boredom. The campers I know are your usual left-wing environmentalists who are in a daily fury reading the newspaper and seeing those names in the headlines, Pruitt, Giuliani, McConnell, Pompeo, Pence, Ryan, Stormy Daniels, Cohen, Manafort, and the one that rhymes with “hump,” and they decide that two weeks’ backpacking on the Appalachian Trail will clear their minds and when they return, they are very subdued. Ask them about the hike, they’ll e-mail you photos, many of the rear end of the hiker ahead of them. A week on the trail is a refugee experience and most hikers decide that having a coffeemaker and innerspring mattress is more important than ideology. It’s the truth. Offered the choice between a two-week canoe trip and becoming a Republican, I’d choose door number two. A liberal Republican, but still.

I’m sorry you asked me how I feel about camping. I would’ve written about the trade war with China instead, something of real import in our lives, but instead you get this harangue. I apologize. But I was a camp counselor once, in charge of a dozen teenage boys, taking them on canoe trips, all of them suffering the fear of snakes, severe constipation, hearing tall trees falling in the night, one of which might have your name on it. Those boys would be in their early sixties now and I’ll bet not one of them has occupied a sleeping bag since then.

As I write this, I am sitting in a cabin by a lake. It is surrounded by woods but there is a screened porch, a refrigerator, a flush toilet and toilet paper. On that canoe trip with the boys, we ran out of toilet paper and one boy used leaves instead. There is a particular brand of leaves that does not make good toilet paper. I hope he is all right. Thank you for listening. Have a nice day. Stay home. Be happy.

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I was in Vienna with my wife and daughter last week and walked around the grand boulevards and plazas surrounded by imperial Habsburg grandeur feeling senselessly happy for reasons not quite clear to me but they didn’t involve alcohol. Nor paintings and statuary purchased with the sweat of working men and women. Nor the fact that to read about the daily insanity of Mr. Bluster I would need to learn German.

The sun was shining though the forecast had been for showers. I was holding hands with two women I love. There was excellent coffee in the vicinity, one had only to take deep breaths. Every other doorway seemed to be a Konditorei with a window full of cakes, tarts, pastries of all sizes and descriptions, a carnival of whipped cream and frosting, nuts and fruit. A person could easily gain fifty pounds in a single day and need to be hauled away in a wheelbarrow.

What makes me happy in a foreign city, though, is the fact that, surrounded by so much that is unfamiliar, the familiar leaps out at you. The pastries reminded me of my Aunt Elsie, the best baker in the family, and the perfection that she put before us at Sunday dinner. The horses hitched to the carriage waiting to carry tourists along the boulevards made me think of Uncle Jim who was farming with horses into my childhood and who took me haying with him and hoisted me up onto Prince when I was six, my face pressed to his black mane, arms around his powerful neck. Uncle Jim said he couldn’t afford a tractor, which maybe was true, but he loved his horses, and I felt privileged to help him bring in hay. And the Habsburg grandeur reminded me of the grandest office I ever had, which I occupied for a couple years while working at the easiest and most pointless job I ever had.

It came with a title, “Public Affairs Director,” and the office had a fourteen-foot ceiling and a view of manicured lawn and a building with white Greek columns; it was a featherbed, a sinecure, a well-paid full-time job I could manage in about ten hours per week, and after a few years I had the good sense to quit and find a small dim office and a sixty-hour job that lit the fires of ambition.

The lesson that year was: stay awake. Fifty years have passed and it sticks with me.

The Habsburgs imagined that the majesty of their palaces meant they were smart, even invincible. They also imagined that marriage to close relatives would make them even smarter. So when their archduke was assassinated by a Serb, they declared war on Serbia, and Russia came in on Serbia’s side, and Germany on the Habsburgs’ and soon everyone was in, and the Austrians put on their pointy helmets and mounted their horses and rode nobly into battle against powerful artillery and aircraft and thus were crepusculated, which so embittered Corporal Hitler that he set out to do it all over again. Between the Habsburgs and the Fuehrer, the 20th century was soaked with blood. This is the footnote to the grandeur of Vienna: beware of gold ceilings and marble floors and people who love to put on military parades.

It’s much cheerier to have a piece of apple strudel and remember my favorite aunt. She grew up motherless in a stringent Calvinist home during the Depression and against the odds, she retained a girlish sense of delight to the end of her days and she expressed that delight through her affection for family and love of stories and jokes and also with frosting and angel food.

On our last day in Vienna, my ladies and I sat in the Café Mozart, behind the opera house, near an old Habsburg palace, and enjoyed a plate of sausages, not the wurst I ever had, and coffee after coffee, and apple strudel mit Schlag, lots of Schlag, and more coffee, and then, in honor of Aunt Elsie, a slab of chocolate cake with white frosting and a mound of gelato beside. It violated all standards of moderation but we did it unanimously and felt delighted.

Grandeur is as grandeur does. Let other tourists peer up at the ceilings, listening to a guide, and I will experience Vienna my own way, thinking of my cheery aunt who defeated glumness and severity by creating extravagant desserts.

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I missed out on the week our failing president, Borderline Boy, got depantsed by the news coverage of crying children he’d thrown into federal custody and a day later he ran up the white flag with another of his incoherent executive exclamations, meanwhile the Chinese are quietly tying his shoelaces together. Sad! I was in London and Prague, where politicians talk like grownups and not like the slowest reader in the seventh grade. Nobody over here asks about him: they can see that he is insane and hope he doesn’t set fire to himself when small children are present.

I landed in London feeling ill and was hauled off to Chelsea hospital where a doctor sat me down and asked, “Can you wee?” I didn’t hear the extra e so it was like he’d said, “Can she us?” or “Will they him?”

“Do you mean, Can I pass urine?” The doctor nodded. I said, “Yes.” Then he asked, “Do you mind if I feel around your tummy?” I haven’t had a tummy since I was 7, only an abdomen, but okay. It was all very efficient and friendly, with men and women in blue scrubs busying to and fro and I had perfect faith in the place: the problem was trying to understand the varieties of English spoken. Great Britain includes pockets of unintelligibility, not to mention people from all over the Empire and Europe, and it gives an American from the Midwest the strange sensation of hearing human speech that you know is English but you don’t understand it. You can say, “Pardon me?” only so many times and finally you say, “I guess so” though you don’t know if you’ve agreed to a frontal lobotomy or to wee in the bottle in front of you. Exciting stuff.

Prague is a city that rewards walking, the touches of beauty everywhere, ornamental plasterwork over doorways, painted window frames and eaves and shutters. It is the most beautiful city in Europe if you ignore the blocks of Stalinist apartment prisons, and it escaped devastation in World War II because it was handed over to Hitler without a fight and Allied bombers didn’t bother with it: appeasement and insignificance worked to its advantage. After the fall of communism, a generation of young Czechs set out to see the world and we managed to snag two of them, Kaja and Katerina, to be nannies at our house in St. Paul. They were cheerful, reliable, curious, good company, and now they’re mummies themselves. We joined them for a picnic in Stromovka park on Sunday, enlivened by small children, including a six-month-old whom I got to walk around with and sing “Old Man River” to and “Shenandoah” and “Shall We Gather By The River?” as her eyes got narrower and narrower. Something narcotic about the baritone voice when singing about rivers.

I feel gratitude to those two ladies who did our family so much good, but I wasn’t about to stuff big banknotes into their sleeves, besides which I don’t know what the Czech crown is worth, 10 cents or a dollar, so I simply wrote them limericks. Not many Czech women have an original limerick written on their name.

There was a young lady named Katja

Snuck up behind men and yelled, “Got ya!”

They weed in their pants

And she clapped her hands

And said, “Look what a lesson I taught ya!”

The jubilant humorous Kaja

Likes to get dressed up and tie a

Ribbon of bangles

Round each of her ankles

And boogie to Handel’s “Messiah.”

Next week we fly back to the U.S. and back to Border Boy who has the courage of his hallucinations. He drives a car at high speed while blindfolded, with lighted cigars in his ears. The car is not in gear, but the act is thrilling anyway. His campaign speech in Duluth was finely tuned to please those who kneel at his feet and its effect on the actual physical world is less than zero. Stuff comes pouring out of the man that was never discussed by highly paid consultants around a table. It’s stuff that yells well and the guy knows his acoustics and where to find the echo.

He proves that the country can survive just about anybody in the White House. He’s probably the worst in history, worse than Wilson or Hoover or Tyler, and still we are thriving. Go see the world. Just remember to come home by November.

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A man in love needs to think beyond his own needs and so I took my wife across the Atlantic last week aboard the mighty Queen Mary 2 for six days of glamor and elegance, which means little to me, being an old evangelical from the windswept prairie, brought up to eschew luxury and accept deprivation as God’s will, but she is Episcopalian and grew up in a home where her mother taught piano, Chopin and Liszt, so my wife appreciates Art Deco salons and waiters with polished manners serving her a lobster soufflé and an $18 glass of Chablis. If Cary Grant were to sit down and offer her a Tareyton, she’d hold his hand with the lighter and enjoy a cigarette with him.

We eased away from the dock in Brooklyn and sailed past the towers of capitalism and Miss Liberty and under the Verrazano Bridge and around Sandy Hook out onto the vast inhospitable ocean, sitting on deck chairs with blankets over our legs. My wife looks as if she were born to this way of life; you’d never guess she’s from Minnesota.

The cruise business is booming as a way to see the world while sleeping in one bed and not having to pack your clothes every day. What QM2 offers is something more. It’s the last of the great transatlantic ocean liners, a slender ship, and its selling point is a style of life. An enormous dance floor with a first-rate dance band playing foxtrots, tangos, waltzes, and cha-chas, and the floor crowded with dancers in tuxedos and gowns, expressing their inner elegance. The songs are not about rebellion and being true to yourself, but about the nearness of you, being unable to take my eyes off of you, fascination, walking hand in hand, side by side.

Ballroom dancing is a vanishing culture. If someone came to Minnesota and asked me where they could foxtrot to a live band, I wouldn’t have a clue. There are music clubs where people in their twenties can jump around in the dark to hip-hop and punk, but ballroom dancing is not about self-expression, it’s about two people making each other feel graceful. It’s a conversation. The tango has parameters. So does the mambo. But within each dance is a whole stylistic vocabulary of dips and turns and spins, kicks and bows, hands outstretched, a shimmy shimmy shake. The handsome crooner sings: “Music and passion are always in fashion at the Copacabana, the hottest spot north of Havana,” a song out of the deep archive, but the dancers take to it like fish to water, old coots and grandes dames, the limber, the arthritic, the expansive, the conservative, all dancing to the same rhythm but in variant styles.

Everyone has had a life — captain of industry, civil engineer, investment banker, p.r. exec, trial lawyer — but none of that matters now, as the band swings into “I get no kick from champagne, mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all, but I get a kick out of you” — the dancers are all united in courtship, the men in black-tie uniformity, the women individual, in a gala performance that seems to be vanishing from the world.

The textbook pattern of the dance is only the entry point, and within each form is a whole vocabulary of variations, a bounce, a twist, a kick, a spin. To find freedom of expression within a form is one of the chief pleasures of life.

My wife loves all this and I love to be her consort. We hike around the promenade deck, one-third mile, the Atlantic sliding by, we dress for dinner, we go dancing. A man needs to extend himself when called upon.

I chatted with the singer between sets. Michael Burke. He’s Irish, young, rock ’n’ roll is his natural style, but he is very convincing as a crooner. He has seven sisters in Ireland and so he needs no home of his own, he sings on ships and when he needs a month off, he picks which sister to lodge with. This man knows about family.

As for me, a week on the ocean dancing with Madame has changed my view of things. Self-expression is fine for other people, but not for me. Freedom is much overrated as an experience. Harmony, love, closeness, adoration are to be preferred.

The post Man takes wife to Europe by ship appeared first on Garrison Keillor.

A man in love needs to think beyond his own needs and so I took my wife across the Atlantic last week aboard the mighty Queen Mary 2 for six days of glamor and elegance, which means little to me, being an old evangelical from the windswept prairie, brought up to eschew luxury and accept deprivation as God’s will, but she is Episcopalian and grew up in a home where her mother taught piano, Chopin and Liszt, so my wife appreciates Art Deco salons and waiters with polished manners serving her a lobster soufflé and an $18 glass of Chablis. If Cary Grant were to sit down and offer her a Tareyton, she’d hold his hand with the lighter and enjoy a cigarette with him.

We eased away from the dock in Brooklyn and sailed past the towers of capitalism and Miss Liberty and under the Verrazano Bridge and around Sandy Hook out onto the vast inhospitable ocean, sitting on deck chairs with blankets over our legs. My wife looks as if she were born to this way of life; you’d never guess she’s from Minnesota.

The cruise business is booming as a way to see the world while sleeping in one bed and not having to pack your clothes every day. What QM2 offers is something more. It’s the last of the great transatlantic ocean liners, a slender ship, and its selling point is a style of life. An enormous dance floor with a first-rate dance band playing foxtrots, tangos, waltzes, and cha-chas, and the floor crowded with dancers in tuxedos and gowns, expressing their inner elegance. The songs are not about rebellion and being true to yourself, but about the nearness of you, being unable to take my eyes off of you, fascination, walking hand in hand, side by side.

Ballroom dancing is a vanishing culture. If someone came to Minnesota and asked me where they could foxtrot to a live band, I wouldn’t have a clue. There are music clubs where people in their twenties can jump around in the dark to hip-hop and punk, but ballroom dancing is not about self-expression, it’s about two people making each other feel graceful. It’s a conversation. The tango has parameters. So does the mambo. But within each dance is a whole stylistic vocabulary of dips and turns and spins, kicks and bows, hands outstretched, a shimmy shimmy shake. The handsome crooner sings: “Music and passion are always in fashion at the Copacabana, the hottest spot north of Havana,” a song out of the deep archive, but the dancers take to it like fish to water, old coots and grandes dames, the limber, the arthritic, the expansive, the conservative, all dancing to the same rhythm but in variant styles.

Everyone has had a life — captain of industry, civil engineer, investment banker, p.r. exec, trial lawyer — but none of that matters now, as the band swings into “I get no kick from champagne, mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all, but I get a kick out of you” — the dancers are all united in courtship, the men in black-tie uniformity, the women individual, in a gala performance that seems to be vanishing from the world.

The textbook pattern of the dance is only the entry point, and within each form is a whole vocabulary of variations, a bounce, a twist, a kick, a spin. To find freedom of expression within a form is one of the chief pleasures of life.

My wife loves all this and I love to be her consort. We hike around the promenade deck, one-third mile, the Atlantic sliding by, we dress for dinner, we go dancing. A man needs to extend himself when called upon.

I chatted with the singer between sets. Michael Burke. He’s Irish, young, rock ’n’ roll is his natural style, but he is very convincing as a crooner. He has seven sisters in Ireland and so he needs no home of his own, he sings on ships and when he needs a month off, he picks which sister to lodge with. This man knows about family.

As for me, a week on the ocean dancing with Madame has changed my view of things. Self-expression is fine for other people, but not for me. Freedom is much overrated as an experience. Harmony, love, closeness, adoration are to be preferred.

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