Garrison Keillor's Blog, page 77

Riding on a bus in the middle of the night through Iowa, South Dakota, Nebraska, it’s impressive, the sheer volume of traffic, hour after hour. Tanker trucks and semis and auto carriers, thousands of tons of goods moving to market, like a train of ants carrying leaves to their anthill. Out here, you don’t see the “American carnage” referred to in the inaugural address back in January. Evidently the speaker who portrayed the country as a beached whale and a victim of international conspiracies has now fixed the problems and we’re booming again. Good.

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My wife has gone East for a couple weeks and now there is nobody to say, “You’re not wearing that tie with that shirt, are you?” Nobody to point discreetly at her left nostril and hand me a tissue. Nobody to remind me of the name of that woman with the glasses (Liz) whom I ought to know — I told my wife, “Her and me went to school together” so that she’d have the satisfaction of saying “She and I.” “No,” I said, “I don’t think you went to our school.”

Read the full column at the Jamestown Sun’s site →

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So. We have a vulgar, unstable yo-yo with a toxic ego and an attention-deficit problem in the White House, and now we can see that government by Twitter is like trying to steer a ship by firing a pistol at the waves — not really useful — but what does it all add up to? Not that much, if you ask me, which you didn’t, but I’ll say it anyway.

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At the age of 75, I’m coming to realize that I may never know for certain what happened to Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, on their round-the-world flight that disappeared in the South Pacific in July 1937. I have been in love with her forever and it’s painful to have no resolution, only the same old theories. Like Hansel and Gretel, who disappear into the woods and some think they got baked by the witch and others think they were deadly allergic to gingerbread containing glutens. I like to think Amelia was rescued by Howard Hughes and lived with him secretly at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, had a child, and gave him up for adoption by my parents, John and Grace Keillor, in Anoka, Minnesota, but it’s a theory based on alternative facts and has been suppressed until now.

Read the full column at the Washington Post’s site →

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The big news last week was that giraffes and lions are approaching extinction because we humans are turning their habitat into farms and senior high-rises. I read the article and of course thought of the lion who killed a giraffe and brought the corpse back to the den and his wife said, “You can’t leave that lyin’ there,” and he said, “That’s not a lion, it’s a giraffe.”

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We rode in a plane, a taxi, a train and a ferryboat, all in the first few hours. The plane landed with a bump and a screech at LaGuardia, the taxi was driven by a dark-skinned man in a turban, on the train we heard Spanish, Korean, Arabic and English, and the ferryboat cruised close by the Statue of Liberty, as we tourists took pictures of each other, the Manhattan skyline for backdrop, and the Staten Islanders sat glumly, enduring the boredom.

Read the full column at the Washington Post’s site →

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We rode in a plane, a taxi, a train and a ferryboat, all in the first few hours. The plane landed with a bump and a screech at LaGuardia, the taxi was driven by a dark-skinned man in a turban, on the train we heard Spanish, Korean, Arabic and English, and the ferryboat cruised close by the Statue of Liberty, as we tourists took pictures of each other, the Manhattan skyline for backdrop, and the Staten Islanders sat glumly, enduring the boredom.

Read the full column at the Salt Lake Tribune’s site →

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Went in for eye surgery the other day, which reminded me of an old wheeze of a joke, which I told to people as they prepared the prisoner for execution: A man walked by the insane asylum and heard the inmates shouting, “Twenty-one! Twenty-one!” They sounded ecstatic, and he stopped to have a look. He put his eye to a hole in the fence, and they poked him in the eye with a sharp stick and yelled, “Twenty-two! Twenty-two!”

Read the full column at the Washington Post’s site →

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A splendid week in Norway and now it’s good to be back home, driving around town in my old beat-up Volvo and listening to The Drifters. Norway is a land of bicycles and public transit, lean healthy long-legged people striding up into the hills, but I love my car where I can add a bass vocal to “At night the stars they put on a show for free, and, darling, you can share it all with me.”

Read the full column at the Chicago Tribune’s site →

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I am a registered liberal who mostly toes the party line, but I am not devoted to the idea of big government. I loathe the law in New York state requiring gas pump nozzles to not latch. This means that I must stand beside my vehicle, holding the nozzle lever open, instead of latching it and walking into the gas station to use the john which, if you’re an older male and hear gushing liquid, you feel a powerful urge to do, so thanks to legislative overregulation, I am on the verge of humiliating myself.

Read the full column at the Washington Post’s site →

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