Columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
Life is so dear, I can’t imagine what we’ll do when it’s over. The other night I lay awake for a while trying to think of the first name of the Romney who ran for president against Obama. I remembered it was in 2012 and I ran through an alphabet of men’s names, Al and Bob and Cal and so forth, and Mark seemed to ring a bell. I remembered his dad, George, and I remembered all too well the name of the guy who claimed Obama was born in Kenya and was ineligible to be president, but the gap remained.
You lie in the dark next to the woman you love (Jenny) and resist the mounting urge to climb out of bed and google Romney and yet as you work to bring him to memory, memory goes elsewhere. I remembered seeing Jacqueline Onassis once at a New York Public Library event honoring authors, standing in a hallway chatting with a gentleman, and then noticed a shadowy gentleman 20 feet away watching her, and it suddenly hit me what a strange route her adult life must’ve been. I remembered sitting next to Michelle Obama at a dinner for Senate wives in the winter of 2008. I was the speaker and was expected to be humorous and it was highly peculiar to realize that I wasn’t going to talk about the one thing that was on everyone’s mind, including the waiters’ (maybe especially the waiters’). I couldn’t talk about it because it was too enormous, the fact of the first African American First Family in our history.
Read MoreI sat next to a woman I didn’t know on a flight from Minneapolis to New York and we fell into conversation and I got to know her. She said, “You look a lot like my father.” Quite an opener for a woman almost my age. She said he was a social worker, a good man who wanted to make the world better but he saw so much trouble that he couldn’t believe in God. “He was a man with a lot of demons.” She said, “He used to say, ‘Being your dad was the best job I ever had and I was the worst man for the job.’” Quite a start and she was only drinking mineral water. And then she said, “And he was your biggest fan. He absolutely loved your radio show.”
It gives you something to think about, being loved by a complicated man. Puts me in the same position as she. But I love that phrase, “a man with a lot of demons,” a wonderful old-fashioned way of putting it, meaning “too complicated to unravel, just respect it and give it space.”
Read MoreScott Fitzgerald would be quite disappointed that the theft of a statue of him in St. Paul was not a better story, was in fact about as dumb as a crime story can be. A 37-year-old dimwit with a drug problem swiped the figure and drove it in his Jeep to a metal recycling company and tried to sell it for scrap. He gave them his actual name. They concluded (duh) it was stolen and reported his license plate number to police who went to the dimwit’s house and found pieces of the statue. A blowtorch was in the jeep.
A statue of Fitzgerald is worth more than scrap metal. If you wanted to get a good price, you’d cut the head off and hold it for ransom. And you’d have a better motive than gaining a couple hundred bucks to feed your fentanyl habit, you’d do it to gain the attention of a woman who has slighted you in favor of a wealthy guy who can afford to take her to Greece for a honeymoon and buy her a lavish mansion on Summit Avenue overlooking the Mississippi.
Read MoreNobody asked me but I’ll say it anyway: Democrats need to find themselves a good sport for their top candidates to play so we don’t only see them standing at lecterns and lecturing about injustice and climate change and the danger plastics pose to porpoises. Hillary and Kamala could’ve beaten the yahoo if they’d only been a little less wonky, not so Brightest Girl in the Whole Class, more good-timey, with a joke at the ready, less First Class Girl Scout of the Year, more All-Around Best Friend. Either of them would’ve looked great on horseback but young brainy girls like them thought horseback riding was for debutantes. Wrong.
Golf is no good, an enormous waste of public land and an antisocial game that instills self-loathing in its practitioners. But a smart well-spoken woman in jeans and denim jacket on a handsome horse trotting through the woods, jumping a ditch, breaking into a gallop, her hair flying, says a lot about leadership and self-confidence.
Read MoreI’ve been seeing doctors lately, which is okay by me. I am a triumph of modern medicine, an 83-year-old with an adolescent pig valve in my heart and when you imagine how many pigs must’ve given their lives before science got that procedure figured out, pigs who gave up their chance at a rich full life and the pleasure of parenthood, it obliges me not to spend my bonus years watching sitcoms. But thanks to medicine, I received extra time to make several serious mistakes and have the chance to recover.
I am very fond of doctors. Competence is admirable, especially when it’s for your own personal benefit. I like to write limericks for them, such as the neurologist Matthew Fink:
Read MoreI dreamed about my Grandma Dora the other night and told her about my vision problems and she said, “There is no cure for carelessness. You should’ve taken a good brisk walk every day and you couldn’t because you lived in the city. But you inherited good genes from me and my husband, thanks to which you have practically no anxiety and sleep well and wake up fresh. So what if you see double and can’t read small print? Do your best with what you have.”
Grandma was a seamstress who made her own elegant clothes. She and her twin sister, Della, were Western Union telegraphers, and Grandma also taught school and was a pre-suffrage feminist, and then she married Grandpa who was a better reader than a farmer but adored her, and she bore him eight children whom she loved dearly and believed could do no wrong. She admired technology and science and looked forward to progress on all fronts. I think I take after Grandpa and luckily avoided farming and took up broadcasting. In that line of work, you give the weather, you don’t depend on it.
Read MoreI did a show Saturday night singing duets with a tall woman and was so fascinated by the perfect harmonies on the Everlys’ “Let It Be Me” that I forgot to take an intermission until almost two hours had passed and I saw elderly people my age dashing in panic up the aisle to empty their bladders, a weird feeling, to create something so wonderful you wind up torturing people, sort of like painting a mural so beautiful people gaze at it and don’t notice the stairs and fall and break an arm.
I was a writer for years but dreamed of being a singer and now here I was singing good tenor to a fabulous soprano, meanwhile hundreds of people were hoping not to wet their pants. An out-of-body experience for me, a physical reality for them.
Read MoreI paid a visit to new parents last week, their first child, a 90-day-old girl, and it brought back memories of my own fatherhood — ignorance, dread, fear of dropping the child or over-swaddling it and cutting off oxygen to the brain and leading to drug abuse and years of treatment — but what astonished me was the calm of these parents, their confident pleasure, their mastery of the situation.
These two had studied up for this. They used terms like “cognitive stimulation” and “maximization of proactive engagement.” They kept a chart recording her versatility skills — vocal intensity, 2.4, and analysis/synthesis, 1.3 — intent on giving the infant the best possible start in life and nurture her individuality while also preparing her for the collectivist constellations of the high-tech life ahead. Back in my fathering years, I just hoped not to burp my baby too hard and cause disorganized thinking.
Read MoreMy neurologist says I have multifocal cerebral infarcts primarily cortically based and a narrowing of the left palpebral fissure, and yet I clearly recall the screech and rumble of the big yellow streetcars along Bloomington Avenue in Minneapolis in 1947, the jingle of coins dropping into the farebox, the clang of the conductor’s dishpan bell as the motorman swung the big wooden handle and the streetcar rolled down the street toward downtown. I was five years old. I remember standing up on Sunday morning and reciting my Bible verse in front of forty people. And I remember the coins in my fist that I stole from Mother’s change jar in the kitchen and walked down the alley between the rows of little white garages to 38th Street to the luncheonette.
A man held the door open for me and I said, “Thank you very much.” I had eighteen aunts and so I had very good manners. I climbed up on a stool at the counter, and the cook said, “What do you want?” and I said, “A cheeseburger with ketchup.” I put my 50 cents down on the counter. I heard a man a few stools away say “Goddamn it to hell,” which I’d never heard before in my life. The cook was smoking a cigarette, and the smell of tobacco smoke was new to me as well. He set the burger down on a white plate and I said, “But I wanted cheese.” And then I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Dad. He pushed the plate away and led me out the door. I said, “But I paid for it!”
Read MoreThe Delta jet landed at Minneapolis-St. Paul so lightly that it didn’t disturb my handwriting on a postcard — I wrote “I am coming to reacquaint” and the wheels touched down between the c and the q, no squish or squiggle. On the way out I saw the captain, slim, tall, neatly pressed, the picture of cool competence, and I said, “Beautiful landing” and he said, “Thank you, Mr. Keillor.” I love coming back to Minnesota where I was a local celebrity for a few years and where people still know me.
I never intended to be a celeb, I intended to be an important writer but I had a wife and child and needed to earn a living. So I did a radio show for forty years, not realizing what a beautiful thing it is to have people walk up smiling and say, “I know you!” and the doorman in the homburg at the Hotel St. Paul who asks how I’ve been and really means it or the woman in the lobby who walks up and says, “Would you mind if I give you a big hug?” and does.
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