Cheerfulness preview

Cheerfulness

In Cheerfulness, veteran radio host and author Garrison Keillor reflects on a simple virtue that can help us in this stressful and sometimes gloomy era. Drawing on personal anecdotes from his young adulthood into his eighties, Keillor sheds light on the immense good that can come from a deliberate work ethic and a buoyant demeanor. “Adopting cheerfulness as a strategy does not mean closing your eyes to evil,” he tells us; “it means resisting our drift toward compulsive dread and despond.” Funny, poignant, thought-provoking, and whimsical, this is a book that will inspire you to choose cheerfulness in your daily life.

**Available in Softcover, eReader formats and soon on Audible**

1. CHEERFULNESS

It’s a great American virtue, the essence of who we are when we’re cooking with gas: enthusiasm, high spirits, rise and shine, qwitcher bellyaching, wake up and die right, pick up your feet, step up to the plate and swing for the fences. Smile, dammit. Dance like you mean it and give it some pizzazz, clap on the backbeat. Do your best and forget the rest, da doo ron ron ron da doo ron ron. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, hang by your thumbs and write when you get work, whoopitiyiyo git along little cowboys—and I am an American, I don’t eat my cheeseburger in a croissant, don’t look for a church that serves a French wine and a sourdough wafer for Communion, don’t use words like dodgy, bonkers, knackered, or chuffed. When my team scores, I don’t shout, Très bien!! I don’t indulge in dread and dismay. Yes, I can make a list of evils and perils and injustices in the world, but I believe in a positive attitude and I know that one can do only so much and one should do that much and do it cheerfully. Dread is communicable: healthy rats fed fecal matter from depressed humans demonstrated depressive behavior, including anhedonia and anxiety—crap is bad for the brain. Nothing good comes from this. Despair is surrender. Put your shoulder to the wheel. And wash your hands.

We live in an Age of Gloom, or so I read, and some people blame electronics, but I love my cellphone and laptop, and others blame the decline of Protestantism, but I grew up fundamentalist so I don’t, and others blame bad food. Too much grease and when there’s a potluck supper, busy people tend to stop at Walmart or a SuperAmerica station and pick up a potato salad that was manufactured a month ago and shipped in tanker trucks and it’s depressing compared to Grandma’s, which she devoted an hour to making fresh from chopped celery, chives, green onions, homemade mayonnaise, mustard, dill, and paprika. You ate it and knew that Grandma cared about you. The great potato salad creators are passing from the scene, replaced by numbskulls so busy online they’re willing to bring garbage to the communal table.

I take no position on that, since I like a Big Mac as well as anybody and I’ve bought food in plastic containers from refrigerated units at gas stations and never looked at the expiration date. And I am a cheerful man.

I rise early, make coffee, look out at the rooftops and I feel lucky. Today is my day. Other people, God bless them, go see their therapist. I never did. What would we talk about? I enjoy my work, I love my wife, my heart got repaired years ago so I didn’t die at 59 when I was supposed to. My dream life is mostly very chipper, sociable, sometimes I’m hauling crates of fish along a wharf in the Orkney Islands, one Orker bursts into song and we all sing together, me singing bass in a language I don’t understand, and I’m rather contented in my sleep. Why should I argue with gifts? A therapist would turn this inside out and make it a form of denial. It isn’t. I’d tell her the joke about the man walking by the insane asylum, hearing the lunatics yelling, “Twenty-one! Twenty-one!” and he puts his eye to a hole in the fence to see what’s going on and they poke him in the eye and yell, “Twenty-two! Twenty-two!” and she’d find a hidden meaning in it but there isn’t one, just a sharp stick. I’m not going to talk about my father because he’s dead and one does not speak ill of the dead, they are waiting for us and we will join them soon enough, meanwhile I feel good and thank you very much for asking. Sometimes, in church, when peace, like a river, attendeth my way, I feel actually joyful, I truly do.

I used to be cool and ironic and monosyllabic and now I’m a garrulous old man who’s about to lecture you about the importance of good manners (YAWN) and cheerfulness especially in grim situations such as 6 a.m. on a dark February morning standing in an endless line waiting to go through airport security and a TSA sniffer dog is walking along the line giving it a prison-camp feel and sleepy people toting baggage are waiting and the old man recalls pre-terrorist days when you walked straight to your gate, no questions asked, and he feels—well—sort of abused. And then a teenage girl walks past the checker’s booth to the end of the conveyor belt to put her stuff in the plastic bins and her lurching gait indicates some sort of brain injury. She seems to be alone. She also seems quite proud of managing in this situation, emptying her pockets, adopting the correct stance in the scanner, stepping out to be patted down by a TSA lady who then puts an arm around her and says something and the girl grins.

It’s a beautiful little moment of kindness. The cheerfulness of this kid making her way in the world. It reminds me of my friend Earl, who is 80 like me, who visits his wife every day at her care center and takes her for a walk, which cheers her up despite her dementia; he keeps in touch with his daughter who struggles with diabetes and an alcoholic husband; Earl is an old Democrat who is critical of the cluelessness of the progressive left when it comes to managing city government and law enforcement; but despite all this, he is very good company on the phone, never complains, savors the goodness of life.

I talked to Earl the night before the 6 a.m. line at Security and I think of him as I watch the girl collecting her stuff at the end of the conveyor. She feels good about herself and this strikes me as heroic.

So when I hear a woman behind me say, “This is the last time I fly early in the morning. This is just unbearable” (except she put another word ahead of “unbearable”), I turned and said, “Did you hear about the guy who was afraid of bears in the woods.” She shook her head. “His friend told him that if a bear chases you, just run fast, and if the bear gets close, just reach back and grab a handful and throw it at him. The guy says, “A handful of what?” “Oh, don’t worry, it’ll be there. It’ll be there.”

“Oh for God’s sake,” she said, and then she laughed. She said, “I can’t believe you told me that joke.” I said that I couldn’t believe it either. She said she was going to Milwaukee to see her brother and she intended to tell him that joke. So we got into a little conversation about Milwaukee. She said, “Have a nice day,” and I said, “I’m having it.”

It was not always sunshine and roses with me. I grew up in a small fundamentalist cult where the singing sounded like a fishing village mourning for the sailors lost in the storm. I spent years in a sad marriage eating meals in silence and wrote stricken verse and long anguished letters, had a couple brain seizures that made me contemplate becoming a vegetable, perhaps a potato, but recovered and finally realized that anguish is for younger people and now was the time to pull up my socks, so one day, having exhausted the possibilities of tobacco after twenty years, I quit a three-pack-a-day chain-smoking habit simply by not smoking (duh)—a simple course correction, the lady in the dashboard saying, “When possible, make a legal U-turn,” and I did and that turned me into a certified optimist. Smoking was an affectation turned addictive. I stopped it. A powerful deadly habit thrown overboard. I thought, “You have a good life and be grateful for it and no more mewling and sniveling.” I have mostly stuck to that rule.

Life is good. Coffee has taken great strides forward. There are more fragrances of soap than ever before. Rosemary, basil, tarragon, coriander: formerly on your spice shelf, now in the shower stall. I bought pumpkinseed/flax granola recently, something I never knew existed. Can rhubarb/radish/garbanzo granola be far behind? The slots in your toaster are wider to accommodate thick slices of baguette. Music has become a disposable commodity like toilet paper: the 45 and the CD are gone, replaced by streaming, which requires no investment. Your phone used to be on a short leash and the whole family could hear your conversation and now you can walk away from home and exchange intimate confidences if you have any. The phone is my friend. I press the Map app and a blinking blue dot shows me where I am, and I can type “mailbox” into the Search bar and it shows me where the corner mailbox is, 200 feet away. I already knew that but it’s good to have it confirmed. The language has expanded: LOL, FOMO, emo, genome, OMG, gender identity, selfie, virtual reality, sus, fam, tweet, top loading, canceled, indigeneity, witchu, wonk, woke, damfino. I come from the era of Larry and Gary and now you have boys named Aidan and Liam, Conor, Cathal, Dylan, Minnesota kids enjoying the luxury of being Celtic. Girls with the names of goddesses and divas, Arabella, Aurora, Artemis, Ophelia, Anastasia. We have the Dairy Queen Butterfinger Blizzard if you live near a Dairy Queen. Unscrewable bottle caps—no need to search for a bottle opener (once known as the “church key,” and no more). Shampoo and conditioner combined in one container. The list goes on and on. We have Alexa who when I say “Alexa, play the Rolling Stones’ ‘Brown Sugar,’” she does it. I can get the Stones on YouTube but then I have to watch a commercial for a retirement home, a laxative, and Viagra. And the tremendous variety of coffee cups! We used to get coffee cups as premiums at the gas station, all the same pastel yellow or green, and now we have cups with humorous sayings on them, Monet landscapes, the insignia of your college, an Emily Dickinson poem, you choose a cup that expresses your true distinctive self. We didn’t used to be so distinct.

I am no role model, my children. I have the face of a gravedigger, I get less exercise than a house cat, my water intake is less than that of a lizard, I am a small island of competence in an ocean of ignorance, I have three ex-girlfriends who wouldn’t be good character references, and yet I feel darned good, thanks to excellent medical care. I avoided doctors with WASPy names like Postlethwaite or Dimbleby-Pritchett and ones whose secretary put me on Hold and I had to listen to several minutes of flute music. I chose women doctors, knowing that women have to be smarter to get ahead in medicine. And what Jane tells me is that your most crucial health decision is the choice of your parents and I chose two who believed in longevity so I am a cheerful man and walk on the sunny side and meet the world’s indifference with a light heart. I put my bare feet on the wood floor at 6 a.m., pull my pants on, left leg first, then the right, not holding onto anything though I’m 80 and a little off-balance and if my right foot gets snagged on fabric it’s suddenly like mounting a bucking horse, but I buckle my belt and go forth to live my life. I’m a Minnesotan and have my head on straight so I get to the work I was put here to do. Some lucky nights I am awakened at 3 or 4 by a bright idea and I slip out of bed and put it on paper. When COVID came along, I accepted it as a gift and we isolated ourselves in an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan like Aida locked in a tomb with her lover, Radamès, but with grocery deliveries, and Lulu our housekeeper came on Tuesdays.

A pandemic is a rare opportunity for a writer: I sat in a quiet room, nowhere to go, nothing to do, and I spun two novels, a memoir, and a weekly column. Most of the gifted artists I knew—musicians, actors, comedians—were out of work, whereas I, the writer of homely tropes and truisms, was busier than ever. The audience for a white male author is smaller than the state of Rhode Island but my writing is improving and I’m happy about that. My aunt Eleanor said, “We are all islands in the sea of life and seldom do our peripheries touch,” which surely was true during the pandemic but my island and Jenny’s often brushed peripheries and that was highly pleasurable and then of course there is the telephone.

I accept that I’m a white male though I don’t consider it definitive any more than shoe size is. I’m of Scots-Yorkshire ancestry, people bred to endure cold precipitation. Give us a whole day of hard rain and we feel at home. We are comfortable with silence and when we do speak, we utter short sentences rather than gusts. We aren’t prone to weeping though I sometimes do in church when it strikes me that God loves me. And when the woman I love sits on my lap, her head against mine, and says, “I need you,” I am moved, deeply. I don’t hurl brushfuls of paint at a canvas or compose a crashing sonata or write a long poem, unpunctuated, all lowercase, but I am moved. I knew I needed her but you can’t assume it’s mutual, so hearing it cheers me up. I don’t question her about the specific needs I satisfy, abstract theory is good enough.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Sage of Concord, the Champion of Cheerfulness, wrote back in the days of slavery when the beloved country was breaking in two:

Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it well and serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. Nothing great is achieved without enthusiasm.

For this and much more that he said, Emerson is the true father of his country, not the guy with the powdered hair and the teeth made of ivory and whatnot. All he said was “I cannot tell a lie” and that is simply not true. He was lucky in war, kept his mouth shut because of his bad teeth, and served as president before there was investigative journalism. I’d say he was the great-uncle of his country, maybe the stepfather. When I saw his picture next to Lincoln’s on our classroom wall, I thought he was Lincoln’s wife and not all that attractive.

When my daughter was 18, I went to prom at her school and stood in the gym with other parents as our kids processed in, boys in suits and ties, girls in prom dresses, the beams overhead and the tile walls all gay and glittery with banners and baubles, and a local rock band of codgers my age struck up “Brown-Eyed Girl” and our kids went wild, laughing and a-running, skipping and a-jumping, just like the song says, and we parents sang, “You, my brown-eyed girl, do you remember when we used to sing, Sha la la la la la la la la la lah de dah.” And then “So Fine” (My baby’s so doggone fine, she sends those chills up and down my spine). Old men with historic Stratocasters playing for our kids songs from my long-ago youth, the lead guitarist almost bald but with a slender gray ponytail like a clothesline coming out of the back of his head, playing his four or five good licks with great delight, and then My heart went boom when I crossed the room and I held her hand in mine.

This was a school for kids we once called “handicapped,” now we say “learning challenged” or “on the spectrum” but when the music played they were all equal in the eyes of the Lord. I went to public school: you stood on the corner, you boarded the bus, it took you to school. This school is one that each of us parents searched desperately for as our child sank into the academic slough. Many of the kids in the gym look as ordinary as you or me, and others are a little off-balance, quirky movements of head or arms, a speech abnormality. My heart clutches to see them dancing and I remember how shitty we were to kids like them when I was their age, it was so uncool to be seen with them and they never went to school dances, and here they were, ecstatic, including a girl injured as an infant who’s blind in one eye, walks with a lurch, one arm semi-paralyzed, and she was dancing like mad, and it struck me that jumping around on the dance floor these kids don’t feel there’s anything wrong with them. They are completely transported. Van Morrison didn’t write “Brown-Eyed Girl” as a therapeutic exercise, but here they are, dancing with abandon, and Grandpa Guitar is happy too, the wild boogying of oddballs a vision of paradise, and when the slow Father-Daughter dance struck up, I took my girl in my arms and I sang it to her, I feel happy inside, it’s such a feeling that my love I can’t hide, Oooooo.”

That’s my vision of cheerfulness. You get some hard knocks in life but you still dance and let your heart sing. I didn’t get knocked as hard as those kids did and any despair I feel is simply grandiosity: get over it.

My girl is a hugger and snuggler like her mother and when I put my arms around her I feel I’m hugging my aunts, who are all gone, and my mother, though she was a shoulder-patter like me. I never hugged my dad except as a small child. When my girl was three, I took her to visit my dad who lay dying in the house I grew up in, the house he built in a cornfield in Minnesota in 1947, and he was delighted to see her. He moved a foot under the blanket and she reached for it and he moved it away and she grabbed for it and it got away again. She laughed, playing this little game. She was my best gift to him, his last grandchild. He was 88, I was 55. My father who’d been through miserable procedures in ERs and said, “No more” and was waiting to die and he was pleased as could be by the laughter of a little girl. She was delighted by him. And now I’m delighted to see her dancing to the grandpa band at the prom in the gym. God is good and His lovingkindness endures for generations.

I come from cheerful people. John and Grace kept a good humor and loved each other dearly. When Dad went into a luncheonette he always made small talk with the waitress: Looks like we’re finally getting spring. We can use the rain, that’s for sure. Boy, that apple pie sure looks good. You wouldn’t happen to have some cheese with that, would you? Apple pie without the cheese is like a hug without the squeeze. The little chirps and murmurs, the sweet drizzle of small talk. He spoke it well. Mother adored comedians, Jack Benny, George Gobel, Lucille Ball. My parents courted during the Depression, married in ’37, went through the War, built a house in the country, had six kids whom Dad worked two jobs to support while Mother cooked and cleaned and slaved in the kitchen every August, canning fruit and vegetables from a half-acre garden, the pressure cooker steaming, her hair damp with sweat, and I cannot remember them ever complaining about the unfairness of life or envying the privileged who bought their produce at SuperValu. Sometimes she said Darn it or Oh, for crying out loud.

Mother did not encourage complaint—“Other people have it worse than you,” she said, referring to children in China. She also said, “If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Which eliminated journalism as a career.

She admired FDR and Eleanor because they cared about the poor. My dad felt that the WPA was relief for the lazy, We Poke Along. Their difference of opinion never got in the way of their love for each other. Sometimes I’d find her sitting in his lap, the parents of six kissing. He was a little sheepish, she was not. Once I found a sex manual titled Light On Dark Corners in their bedroom and though it was dense with euphemisms, I understood that my parents lay naked in bed and did stuff, and I hoped to emulate this someday, whatever it exactly was.

I feel good in the morning, especially since I quit drinking in 2002. (The way to do it is to do it.) I have a clear head and I light a low flame under the skillet and think of the chicken as I crack the two eggs but when I fry the sausage, I don’t think of the pig. The egg is a work of art; the sausage is a product. As a young man I wanted to make art but I didn’t want to work in the academic factory to support my art, so I chose to do radio, which is a form of sausage. I admire the egg but I enjoy the sausage more. And it makes me feel cheerful, a good thing at the start of day before mistakes accumulate. My life is a series of mistakes. It’s cold in Minnesota so I went into radio because it’s indoors and vacuum tubes gave off heart. I set out to write humorous fiction à la Thurber and Benchley and S.J. Perelman did who were like the uncles I wished I had. I didn’t write serious fiction because that’s what I’d been forced to read by teachers and it had a penal quality about it. I made these big decisions based on no information and they turned out well. I’ve enjoyed lavish freedom to do homespun narratives sponsored by Powdermilk Biscuits and the American Duct Tape Council and talk about the poet Sylvia Plath who was full of sorrow and wrath and the day that she dove headfirst in the stove, she should’ve just had a warm bath—and if it was a modest enterprise, well, it was my own choice.

I have a dark side. I do not believe in regular exercise; I believe that an exemplary healthful lifestyle makes it more likely I’d be struck by a marble plinth falling off a facade as I walk to the health club. I can’t define “plinth” but I know it would kill me. I am quite cheerful staying home and I get my exercise reaching for things on high shelves.

My Grandma Dora sang me to sleep with “Poor Babes in the Woods,” lost in a snowstorm: “they sobbed and they sighed and they bitterly cried, and the poor little things, they lay down and died”—not a song Mister Rogers ever sang. Grandma did not tell us to look the other way when she chopped the head off a chicken. Death was a part of our lives. Not many children today have observed a beloved relative swinging an axe and a headless chicken flapping around on the bloody ground. I have. You must be aware of death to fully appreciate the goodness of life.

I learned cheerfulness from my folks. They had known hard times and now having a home, a garden, a car, gave them pleasure, and they savored it. I grew up in the Fifties, when my shyness led some of my aunts and teachers to imagine I was gifted. Actually I was autistic, not artistic, but autism hadn’t been invented yet, so I had the advantage of ignorance and by the time I learned what the problem was, it was too late for remedial ed, I was in my forties, a published writer with a popular radio show.

I was born with a congenital mitral valve defect that killed off two of my uncles in their late fifties. They simply dropped dead. Had I been born thirty years earlier, I’d be dead too. The defect kept me off the football team, spared me from brain injury, and the hometown paper hired me, at age 14, to write sports and I did my best to make a mediocre team valiant in print, thus my disability opened the door to a career in fiction.

I was lucky to live in Minnesota, a state proud of its numerous colleges and its homebred writers like Sinclair Lewis and Scott Fitzgerald, proud of its work ethic and Lutheran modesty and the call to public service and not so keen about euphoria so there was no reliable criminal element to supply dope, everything we obtained in college was substandard and diluted, the hashish was full of mulch, the cocaine was half talcum powder, the cannabis smelled of Maxwell House, the mushrooms were no more hallucinogenic than Campbell’s soup, so I didn’t experience euphoria until I was 45 and had two wisdom teeth extracted and was sedated and given painkillers, a dreamy experience. If I’d experienced it when I was 21, it could’ve sent me spinning into thirty years of rehab. But at 45 you know enough to know that real life is preferable to having a headful of golden mist.

In my twenties, I considered the idea of dying young and becoming immortal like James Dean in his sports car crash or Buddy Holly in the little plane in the snowstorm or Dylan Thomas drowning in drink, dying on their way up in the world, no sad decline into middle-aged mediocrity. Maybe this morbid thought came from my Scots heritage. Bluegrass comes from Scottish balladry, songs about dying bridegrooms and the bride taking poison at the burial and throwing herself into his grave. That sort of song.

Scotland is where golf comes from, a game that shows us the worst aspects of ourselves, potato-faced men in yellow pants riding electric carts in search of a white ball in tall grass and whacking it into a body of water and cursing God’s creation and then sitting in a clubhouse and getting soused on mint juleps and complaining about the income tax.

Thank God, I realized that immortality is no substitute for life itself. I missed an opportunity at early death in 1962 when, on a straight stretch in Isanti County on a two-lane highway, I got my ’56 Ford up to 100 mph and a pickup truck suddenly eased out of a driveway up ahead and onto the highway. In a split second, I swerved to go behind him and it was a good choice—he didn’t see me and try to back up—otherwise he and I would’ve been forever joined in a headline. Anyway I’d done nothing worth immortalization, just introspective stuff—“He looked out the window and saw the reflection of his own pale face against the drifted snow. She was gone. Like everyone else.”—A few years later I almost died young again when I bought a king-size mattress from a furniture warehouse and tied it to the roof of my car with a piece of twine and it blew off as I drove home on the freeway and I pulled over and ran back to rescue it and a big rig blew past me blasting his horn. A memorable thing, the Doppler effect of a semi horn doing 70 a few feet away. In 1983 my brother Philip and I canoed into a deep cavern in Devil’s Island on Lake Superior, attracted by the dancing reflections on the cavern ceiling and paddled way in until we couldn’t go farther and then paddled out, just as the wake of an ore boat a mile away came crashing into the cavern, waves that would have smashed us to a pulp and instead we sat in the canoe and watched the waves pounding into the cavern and said nothing, there being nothing to say. And eventually I turned 50, which is too old to die young. Whenever I relive those close-call moments, all regrets vanish, all complaints evaporate. I survived to do hundreds of shows and when the audience laughs it feels like a good reason to go on living.

And I’ve come to relish writing more and more especially after the Delete key was invented, which ranks with Gutenberg’s movable type in the annals of human progress. Back in the typewriter age we had liquid white-out but Delete enables you to remove whole pages of your own gloomy nonsense. I gave up dark writing for the simple reason that it fails to hold the interest of the writer. It’s boring.

Gloom is just like carbuncles:
Yours is the same as your uncle’s
Whereas the hilarious
Is wildly various
Like the wildlife found in the jungles.

I left Minnesota and friends and family in 2018 after Minnesota Public Radio, fearful of a shakedown scheme by two former employees, threw me out in the street, a miserable mistake on their part, and at 76, I needed to put it behind me and so we took up residence in Manhattan where I enjoy anonymity and Jenny loves the city and our daughter is nearby, so it was a smart move all around.

And when I stood in that gym watching her and my fellow autists leaping and dancing to the hits of my youth played by a man with a rope coming out of his head, it was so happy it made me cry just as I do in church when we sing about the awesome wonder of the world and the stars and the thunder O Lord, how great thou art and we old angsty Anglicans stand and raise our hands in the air at this Baptist revival hymn, we the overachievers transformed into storefront charismatics. It’s quite a sight. It happened one morning with the chorus, And I will raise you up, and I will raise you up, and I will raise you up on the last day.

It was Easter morning, brass players up in the choir loft, ladies with big hats, and when the clergy processed up the aisle, the woman swinging the censer looked like a drum major leading the team to victory over death. Resurrection is not something we Christians talk about in the same way we talk about our plans for retirement, but it’s right there in the Nicene Creed and in Luke’s gospel the women come to the tomb and find the stone rolled away and the mysterious strangers say, “Why seek ye the living among the dead?” This all hit me when we sang, “And I will raise them up,” I raised my right hand and imagined my long-gone parents and brother and grandson and aunts and uncles coming into radiant glory, and I was surprised by faith and I wept. My mouth went rubbery, I couldn’t sing the consonants. I stayed for the benediction, slipped out a side door onto Amsterdam Avenue, and headed home. Without the Resurrection, St. Michael’s’d be just an association of nice people with good taste in music but when it hits you what you’ve actually subscribed to, it can blow your head off, me the author standing and weeping among stockbrokers and journalists and lawyers for God’s sake.

This never happens at meetings of the American Academy of Arts & Letters up on 155th Street, writers and composers and painters and architects do not stand, singing, moved to tears: it simply does not happen. It happens at St. Michael’s on 100th Street. I don’t know if they do this at All Souls Unitarian over on the East Side, I think maybe they think about doing it, but hymns about inclusivity and tolerance and justice that leave Divinity out of it except as a beam of light or a rainbow or a starry sky—I’m sorry but that doesn’t make New York adults raise their arms and weep. The Lord is great indeed. He is here among us, from the public housing projects to the castles of Central Park West, amid the honking and double-parking of delivery trucks, God is here and we are His, we of the Academy and also kids on the spectrum, jumping and dancing. This cheerful thought can get you through some dark days. My mother knew deep grief when she was six years old, a little sister died of scarlet fever, and soon after, her mother died, and Grace lost the memory of her mother, couldn’t recall her voice, her manner, stared at snapshots of Marian trying to bring her to life, and it makes me happy to think of them reunited in happiness. There endeth my sermon. Go in peace.


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CHEERFULNESS by Garrison Keillor!

Garrison Keillor's newest book, CHEERFULNESS, now available.

Drawing on personal anecdotes from his young adulthood into his eighties, Keillor sheds light on the immense good that can come from a deliberate work ethic and a buoyant demeanor. “Adopting cheerfulness as a strategy does not mean closing your eyes to evil,” he tells us; “it means resisting our drift toward compulsive dread and despond.” Funny, poignant, thought-provoking, and whimsical, this is a book that will inspire you to choose cheerfulness in your daily life.

1. CHEERFULNESS

It’s a great American virtue, the essence of who we are when we’re cooking with gas: enthusiasm, high spirits, rise and shine, qwitcher bellyaching, wake up and die right, pick up your feet, step up to the plate and swing for the fences. Smile, dammit. Dance like you mean it and give it some pizzazz, clap on the backbeat. Do your best and forget the rest, da doo ron ron ron da doo ron ron. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, hang by your thumbs and write when you get work, whoopitiyiyo git along little cowboys—and I am an American, I don’t eat my cheeseburger in a croissant, don’t look for a church that serves a French wine and a sourdough wafer for Communion, don’t use words like dodgy, bonkers, knackered, or chuffed. When my team scores, I don’t shout, Très bien!! I don’t indulge in dread and dismay. Yes, I can make a list of evils and perils and injustices in the world, but I believe in a positive attitude and I know that one can do only so much and one should do that much and do it cheerfully. Dread is communicable: healthy rats fed fecal matter from depressed humans demonstrated depressive behavior, including anhedonia and anxiety—crap is bad for the brain. Nothing good comes from this. Despair is surrender. Put your shoulder to the wheel. And wash your hands.

We live in an Age of Gloom, or so I read, and some people blame electronics, but I love my cellphone and laptop, and others blame the decline of Protestantism, but I grew up fundamentalist so I don’t, and others blame bad food. Too much grease and when there’s a potluck supper, busy people tend to stop at Walmart or a SuperAmerica station and pick up a potato salad that was manufactured a month ago and shipped in tanker trucks and it’s depressing compared to Grandma’s, which she devoted an hour to making fresh from chopped celery, chives, green onions, homemade mayonnaise, mustard, dill, and paprika. You ate it and knew that Grandma cared about you. The great potato salad creators are passing from the scene, replaced by numbskulls so busy online they’re willing to bring garbage to the communal table.

I take no position on that, since I like a Big Mac as well as anybody and I’ve bought food in plastic containers from refrigerated units at gas stations and never looked at the expiration date. And I am a cheerful man...

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All I know is what she tells me

I get the news from my wife, who sits reading the paper across the breakfast table from me and tells me what I need to know, ignoring much of page 1 and picking out the story of the Italian Jews who were sheltered in Catholic monasteries in spite of an anti-Semitic pope and saved from the Holocaust and the story about Florida’s war on undocumented workers, which deprives Floridians of a ready workforce to help clean up the wretched mess after a hurricane and the pictures of beautiful colorful clothing worn by Sudanese women even during their cruel civil war.

It’s not a partisan newscast, it’s humanistic, it’s not about issues but about people, which makes me think she should run for president, which would be good for the country — Mexico is going to have a woman president, why should we lag behind — and I do believe her style is a winning one. My mother was a conservative but she loved Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt because she felt they cared about people. Joe Biden’s trip to Maui to commiserate with fire victims by reminiscing about the time he almost lost his Corvette as a result of a kitchen fire — dumb, dumb, dumb, Joe — why did Jill let you say that stupid clueless thing? A Corvette is not the equivalent of someone’s home, Joe. Who is briefing you for these appearances? Fire him.

I haven’t mentioned candidacy to Jenny because I know she’d say, “Get real. No way.” And also because I have no wish to be First Gentleman. I have a good career as an octogenarian stand-up and after forty years imprisoned in the blue taffeta skirt of public radio, I can finally go out on stage and speak my mind. I’m not about to give that up to become a smiling nonentity, a piece of furniture, which is what a political spouse needs to be.

I’m not willing to give up the luxury of free speech, not even for the good of the nation, and I do think a Jenny presidency could be just what the times demand. She’s never held office, which means she speaks clear English, no b.s. She comes from a very tight family and she values this highly. She has experienced poverty. She has seen mental illness up close. She has made a life in music, playing in orchestras, under the baton of all sorts of conductors, which enables her to read character and distinguish true leaders from egotists. Sitting in the string section, she knows the difference between “painful,” “passable,” and “passionate and profound.” Music is a public service and like other public services, health care, education, law enforcement, legislation, it has the power to change people’s lives for the good. This is the purpose of it and it has little to do with charisma, PR, and the conventional wisdom, and the murmurs of the media.

But this horse is not going to run, so that’s that. So rather than accompany my wife on the campaign trail, standing just behind her and to the left, maintaining appropriate facial expressions, careful to avoid nasal excretion or outbursts of methane, I am writing a musical, which is a crazy thing for an old man to do. The chance of my writing a hit musical is less than the chance of my winning the U.S. Open, but so what? Success is not what old age is about; it’s about having a good time. This musical has stuff in it that won’t be found in The Lion King or Chicago, such as an excellent duet about making love.

Dogs mate and cats mate,
Even older couples copulate.
Let’s us unite and get tight.
People driving through drive-throughs mate,
Even folks with high IQs mate.
Let’s undress and coalesce.
Episcopalians of course mate
Even if it’s not right.
And there are Quaker women
Who have ten Mennonite.
Folks who make headlines mate,
Where no one can see.
And porcupines mate,
Very delicately.
It’s a delight to unite,
When push comes to shove, let’s make love.

A First Gentleman wouldn’t write a song like that and it’s nothing you could sing on public radio and even if I finish the musical it’ll never get produced. Too outdated. But hopelessness is no problem for people in my age bracket. It’s just good to be busy. I hope Joe is enjoying being Leader of the Free World. But if my wife takes him on, he’ll have to get smarter quick.

The meeting will come to order (bonk bonk)

Any American who saw Jim Jordan, the alleged chair of the so-called House Judiciary Committee, on TV Wednesday could’ve been charged with contempt of Congress for his harassment of Judge Merrick Garland, an excellent legal mind and dedicated public servant, Mr. Jordan being a bully and a hack from a gerrymandered district in Ohio who got his law degree from a church school in Columbus and never took the bar exam. He was a champion wrestler in the featherweight class and though heftier now, maintains his featherweight status. He never held a job but went straight from college into politics. Interviewed in 2018 and asked if he’d ever heard Donald Trump tell a lie, he said, “I have not.” He has been called “nuts” by Lindsey Graham, who knows about nuttiness. He voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election and then sent a note to the White House asking for a pardon in the event he was prosecuted. Ten days before leaving office, Mr. Trump gave Jordan the Presidential Medal of Freedom in a closed-door ceremony. He appeared before me Thursday under an independent subpoena issued pursuant to 515.2 U.S.C. and I hereby read into the record his testimony:

ME: A whistleblower has submitted a detailed firsthand account of you beating your wife and I ask: when exactly did the beating cease?

HIM: I wish to say that —

ME: Answer the question, Yes or No.

HIM: If I may, this is a —

ME: Let me ask this: when did you discontinue your use of fentanyl and was your dealer not a man named Guido who ran a shoeshine stand outside a porn shop?

HIM: I have no idea —

ME: Was it recently or are you still using?

HIM: If you’ll please allow me —

ME: Look at this photograph of a crippled dog: did you kick the dog or did you instruct someone else to do it and are you familiar with animal cruelty statutes in Ohio?

HIM: I don’t know exactly —

ME: When President Trump urged Americans to take disinfectant by injection as a cure for COVID, did you do as he told you to do?

HIM: If you will permit me—

ME: I yield to the gentleman from Oklahoma.

ROGERS: There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you. If all politicians fished instead of speaking publicly, we would be at peace with the world. That’s why I love dogs: they do nothing for political reasons.

ME: Thank you. The HJC is the best show on television and it is predicated on the assumption that 51% of American voters have the intelligence of an adolescent Hereford and they take yelling and smirking as evidence of high principle whereas studies show that only 31% of the voters are certified idiots. I yield to the gentleman from Baltimore.

MENCKEN: Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses. If a Republican had cannibals among his constituents, he’d promise them missionaries.

ME: The HJC hearing Wednesday was viewed by only a million or so, most Americans having work to do, but it was fascinating to watch elected representatives work hard to create an elaborate distraction about Joe Biden’s wayward son even though Garland had given a Trump appointee the powers of a special prosecutor and there was no issue but the representatives created the sound of conflict by rapid-fire questioning. I ask unanimous consent to enter into the record —

EDITOR: Without objection, so entered.

HIM: What is Hunter Biden’s shoe size?

GARLAND: I do not —

HIM: Were his footprints not found on the floor of the Biden garage next to the deep freeze where bundles of hundred-dollar bills were packed into a Ukrainian ukulele in the vegetable tray? Yes or No?

GARLAND: With all due respect —

HIM: And is it not true that Hunter Biden discarded his illegally obtained pistol into a dumpster where it could’ve been found by a ten-year-old child and used to carry out a mass slaughter in an elementary school?

GARLAND: I’m sorry but I am — ME: I recognize the gentleman from Missouri. TWAIN: There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress. It has a kindly feeling for idiots, and a compassion for them, on account of personal experience and heredity.

Thank you, Mr. Twain. The column is adjourned.

Sing on, dance on, good eye, ain't you happy

A good week is a good week; let smarter people deal with the debt ceiling crisis and popularity of authoritarianism, my week began with a happy Sunday in church with a lot of blessing going on — sprinkling the schoolkids, the choir, the congregation — and our rector looking joyful as she marched around casting holy water on people — I thought she might like to use a squirt gun or a watering can or the sprinklers in the ceiling. Her sermon cautioning against perfectionism was, for want of a better word, perfect, and we sang a lively Shaker hymn —

O brethren ain’t you happy, ye followers of the Lamb.
Sing on, dance on, followers of Emmanuel,
Sing on, dance on, ye followers of the Lamb.

which for an old fundamentalist brought up to believe that rhythmic movement of any sort is wickedness incarnate, was rather exciting. And we confessed to a whole new set of sins such as wasting the earth’s resources, treating its inhabitants unjustly, and “holding future generations hostage to our greed,” which immediately made me feel bad about Medicare, and we admitted to not observing our kinship with all of God’s creatures, which seemed to say we’d now embark on a vegan diet, which I’m not yet ready to do, I’ve given up pride and greed and envy but not the bacon cheeseburger.

I flew off to Minneapolis to attend a Twins game and stayed with my beloved in a hotel that used to be the Milwaukee Road depot where, when I was 18, I took the Hiawatha train to Chicago solo, a big step toward independence and sophistication. The old train shed still stands and I walked under it and recalled the tweed sport coat and chinos I wore, the knapsack I carried, the pack of Marlboros in my pocket. But that was then and this is now.

Minneapolis was my big city as a kid growing up among the truck farms to the north, and at the age of 10 I rode my bike into town past the manufacturing plants that have been converted to condos and through the red-light district, which is now respectable, to the public library and big rooms with long tables piled with fresh new books and if that doesn’t make you want to be an author, then what will? I mostly love the changes and ignore the rest.

At the game I sat next to a true Twins fan named Alex who gave me the lowdown on various players and yelled the right things — “Looked good to me!” at the ump who’d called a strike a ball and “Good eye!” at a Twin who let Ball 3 go by and “Throw him the meatball!” at the opposition pitcher who had an 0-2 count on a Twins batter.

It was a big pleasure, the proximity to genuine fandom. I’m old and out of touch. I paid $45 for a Twins cap: in my mind, it should’ve been $5. The Kramarczuk’s bratwurst stand doesn’t take cash, only credit cards. I don’t get it. What country is this? But I bought one, with kraut and mustard. I’m not used to the raucous music blaring every half-inning though it thrilled the row of girls ahead of us who stood up, hips shaking, arms waving. I come from the era of intense silence. I may be the only person in the ballpark who remembers the fall day in 1969 when Rod Carew got on base with a double, took a big lead, stole third, and the fans sat transfixed in silence, knowing he might do it, wishing he’d do it, and then he did it — he took a daring lead off third and dashed home and slid under the tag and we jumped up and yelled, “YES!” We didn’t need the Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” to rouse us, the feat of stealing home was enough. I can still see it in my mind, his perfect timing, the headlong slide.

But there were three triples hit that day, a classic exciting moment, the ball hit to a far corner and perhaps bobbled, the fleet runner dashing, the base coaches windmilling him on. It’s still clear in my memory, and so is the Shaker hymn, which I hope the choir does again someday and if they start dancing, I’ll join them. And someday I may bring a little pipette of water so that if the rector blesses us, I can bless her right back. And bless you, dear reader. Here comes the meatball.

Waking from wacko dreams to think clearly

Never mind what you’ve been taught, some problems have simple solutions. The cure for bad habits — lying, for example — is to stop doing it. Don’t waste a psychoanalyst’s time trying to discover the underlying causes of lying — the basic cause of lying is stupidity, or arrogance, take your pick.

And then there’s the problem of Supreme Court ethics and justices accepting valuable perks from billionaire pals, which may lead to a conflict of interest or the appearance of one. The simple answer is to raise their salaries: a quarter-million a year is not nearly enough to support a Supremacy lifestyle in D.C. There are psychoanalysts who earn more than that. Raise the salary to a million-five so Clarence Thomas can afford to charter a jet and not be indebted to a robber baron. Require the justices’ clerks to spend two years as public defenders before they shop around for fancy jobs with big firms in 15th-floor suites with big walnut credenzas.

And the unprecedented dilemma of a presidential candidate under multiple indictments and his trials possibly delayed until after the election: the answer is to break precedent and conduct a single trial on national television with the entire adult population empaneled as a jury. Let the nation hear the evidence and render a verdict. Then hold the election, and if he’s a convicted felon, send in a substitute.

I came up with these ideas at 4 a.m., which is when I do my best thinking and thank goodness I’m a writer so my business hours begin upon awakening and sipping my first cup of coffee. I think everything would work much better if everyone woke up at 4 and spent a few hours thinking, then went to the office at 9 with good ideas. Work until 2 and go home. Nothing good happens after 2 p.m. You know it and I know it.

Waking up at 4 a.m. is my idea of “woke,” not the stuff and nonsense that goes by that name. I’m not that brand of woke, Bud, and that’s no joke. It’s all smoke and a whole glossary of gelatinous phraseology by which the dreamers in our midst rain fire down on behalf of victims of yesteryear while ignoring the cruelties of today under vicious tyrants whose victims head for — guess where? — America to find decency and to survive, meanwhile the dreamers give the bullies of the right a dead horse to beat and thereby elect officialdom to enthrone tycoons and beat the peasantry into submission.

America is a good country that’s provided hope and sustenance to countless refugees. I take an Uber car and the driver is usually Hispanic or Muslim, often with limited English, but thanks to GPS they can navigate and earn decent money. I encounter workers every day whose English is limited, who may well be refugees, and whatever life they make here is a vast improvement over violence and starvation back home.

I do my best problem-solving after waking from wacko dreams in which tall pines fall and comets crash as fierce carnivorous beasts clamber out of the stormy sea and I ferry a band of foreign orphans across a raging river to a safe haven. I wake from this drama feeling cleansed of all anxiety, and anxiety — dread, the yips, creeps, sense of malaise, call it what you will — is the enemy of clear thinking. My dear mother was a worrier and she never left the house without imagining she had left a faucet running, the oven on, a door unlocked, and so she sat in church contemplating grim scenarios of flood and fire and robbers when she should’ve been praising God for His watchfulness over us.

In her old age, Mother lightened up a great deal and put her worries aside and when she was 94 I put her aboard a flight to visit Scotland, her ancestral homeland, and she, a formerly fearful flyer, was lighthearted as a schoolgirl. She suffered some hard blows, the deaths of beloved sisters, the death of her oldest son, Philip, the loss of her husband, but these troubles seemed to rid her of anxiety. She adopted the wisdom of old age — when your time is running out, why waste it on worrying about what might happen, enjoy each day as it comes — and now that I’m old I’ve adopted it too. I wake up at 4 a.m. and I am truly grateful. I plan to go to Scotland in the spring. Why not? Let’s go.

A Prairie Home Companion An Evening of Story and Song Humor Love & Comedy Tour Old Friends Poetry Prairie Home Christmas Show Solo Songs Stories The Gratitude Tour
Schedule

September 28, 2023

Thursday

8:00 p.m.

Crest Theatre, Sacramento, CA

Sacramento, CA

Garrison Keillor brings his solo show to Sacramento, CA. Poetry, Limericks, Sing-Along and the News from Lake Wobegon

buy tickets

September 29, 2023

Friday

8:00 p.m.

Cerritos Performing Arts Center, Cerritos, CA

Cerritos, CA

Garrison Keillor brings his solo show to Cerritos, CA. Poetry, Limericks, Sing-Along and the News from Lake Wobegon

buy tickets

September 30, 2023

Saturday

8:00 p.m.

The Coach House, San Juan Capistrano, CA

San Juan Capistrano, CA

Garrison Keillor brings his solo show to San Juan Capistrano, CA. Poetry, Limericks, Sing-Along and the News from Lake Wobegon

buy tickets

October 1, 2023

Sunday

7:30 p.m.

California Center for the Arts, Escondido, CA

Escondido, CA

Garrison Keillor brings his solo show to Escondido, CA. Poetry, Limericks, Sing-Along and the News from Lake Wobegon

buy tickets

November 20, 2023

Friday

7:30 p.m.

Highlands PAC, Highlands, NC

Highlands, NC

Garrison Keillor brings his solo show to Highlands, NC. Poetry, Limericks, Sing-Along and the News from Lake Wobegon

buy tickets

November 29, 2023

Wednesday

7:30 p.m.

Honeywell Center, Wabash, IN

Wabash, IN

Prairie Home Holiday with Garrison Keillor, Heather Masse and Richard Dworsky comes to brings a show full of great music, stories and a sing-along to Wabash, IN.

December 9, 2023

Saturday

8:00 p.m.

Town Hall, New York City

Town Hall, New York City

A Prairie Home Companion’s 50th Anniversary Tour comes to Town Hall in New York City with Elle Dehn, Heather Masse, Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks, Rich Dworsky, Sue Scott, Fred Newman and Tim Russell.

January 11, 2024

Thursday

7:30 p.m.

Ryman Auditorium, Nashville, TN

Nashville, TN

A Prairie Home Companion’s 50th Anniversary Tour comes to Nashville with Heather Masse, Christine DiGiallonardo, Rich Dworsky, Sam Bush, Stuart Duncan, Sue Scott, Fred Newman and Tim Russell.

January 13, 2024

Saturday

7:30 p.m.

McCain Auditorium, Manhattan, KS

Manhattan, KS

A Prairie Home Companion’s 50th Anniversary Tour comes to the McCain Auditorium in Manhattan, Kansas with our favorite regulars, Rich Dworsky, Sue Scott, Tim Russell and Fred Newman. Additional guests to be announced.

February 23, 2024

Friday

8:00 p.m.

The Grand 1894 Opera House, Galveston, TX

Galveston, TX

A Prairie Home Companion’s 50th Anniversary Tour comes to the Grand 1894 Opera House in Galveston, TX with our favorite regulars, Rich Dworsky, Sue Scott, Tim Russell and Fred Newman. Additional guests to be announced.

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The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, September 26, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, September 26, 2023

Today is the birthday of American composer and musician George Gershwin (1898), whose lyrical and jazzy pieces, like Rhapsody in Blue, “Summertime,” “I Got Rhythm,” and “Embraceable You,” have become part of the American Songbook and influenced musicians like Charlie Parker and Janis Joplin. Gershwin and his brother Ira wrote the music for popular shows like Porgy and Bess (1935) and Girl Crazy (1930), which made Ginger Rogers an overnight Broadway sensation.

Read More
The Writer’s Almanac for Monday, September 25, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Monday, September 25, 2023

It’s the birthday of American novelist William Faulkner (1897), who once said, “If I had not existed, someone else would have written me.” Faulkner was famously snippy, and had a long feud with Ernest Hemingway, which started when Faulkner said: “Ernest Hemingway: he has no courage, has never crawled out on a limb. He has never been known to use a word that might cause the reader to check with a dictionary to see if it is properly used.” Hemingway retorted: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”

Read More
A Prairie Home Companion: Sept 30, 2006

A Prairie Home Companion: Sept 30, 2006

Our classic broadcast comes from a 2006 show in Montana. with singer-songwriter Stephanie Davis, acoustic duo Growling Old Men, singer Prudence Johnson.

Read More
The Writer’s Almanac for Sunday, September 24, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Sunday, September 24, 2023

Today is the birthday of American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896), best known for novels like The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender is the Night (1934), which came to epitomize the Jazz Age and “The Lost Generation.” Fitzgerald was a constant reviser and fond of keeping notebooks, in which he separated ideas under three headings, “Feelings and emotions,” “Conversations and things overheard,” and “Descriptions of girls.”

Read More
The Writer’s Almanac for Saturday, September 23, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Saturday, September 23, 2023

Today is the birthday of activist, politician, and newspaper editor Victoria Claflin Woodhull, born in Homer, Ohio (1838). In 1872, she became the first woman run for the presidency of the United States. In an address to Congress, she once said, “I come before you to declare that my sex are entitled to the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Read More
The Writer’s Almanac for Friday, September 22, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Friday, September 22, 2023

Today is the birthday of English scientist of electromagnetics and electrochemistry Michael Faraday, born in London (1791). His research on the magnetic field around a conductor carrying an electrical current laid the basis of our understanding of the electromagnetic field. He made some of the most major discoveries in physics. Albert Einstein kept a picture of him on his wall, along with a picture of Isaac Newton.

Read More
The Writer’s Almanac for Thursday, September 21, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Thursday, September 21, 2023

It’s the birthday of H.G. Wells, born Herbert George in London (1866). He is the sci-fi writer most known for The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and War of the Worlds. Wells wasn’t the first to write about time travel or alien invasions, but his brand of sci-fi was uniquely realistic. He wanted to make the made-up science as believable as possible. Wells called this his “system of ideas” — today we would call it suspension of disbelief. Wells said: “As soon as the magic trick has been done the whole business of the fantasy writer is to keep everything else human and real. Touches of prosaic detail are imperative and a rigorous adherence to the hypothesis. Any extra fantasy outside the cardinal assumption immediately gives a touch of irresponsible silliness to the invention.”

Read More
The Writer’s Almanac for Wednesday, September 20, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Wednesday, September 20, 2023

Sept 20 Today is the birthday of American poet and essayist Donald Hall, born in Hamden, Connecticut (1928), who once said, “Every good poet in the world has written only a few terrific poems.” When he was 89, he no longer wrote poetry. “Not enough testosterone,” he said. Instead, he turned to prose: his last book is a collection called Essays After Eighty (2014). Starting the book was simple. He said, “One day I looked out the window and began writing about being an old man looking out the window at the year going by.”

Read More
The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, September 19, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, September 19, 2023

Today is the birthday of essayist Roger Angell, born in New York in 1920. His mother was The New Yorker’s first fiction editor, and his father was an attorney and leader of the ACLU. (His stepfather was E.B. White, author of Charlotte’s Web.) He’s most well known for writing essays about baseball, and he’s the only writer who was elected to both the Baseball Hall of Fame and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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The Writer’s Almanac for Monday, September 18, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Monday, September 18, 2023

It’s the birthday of movie star Greta Garbo (1905). She was born Greta Lovisa Gustafson in Stockholm, Sweden, and was best known for her sultry voice, sharp cheekbones, and sullen demeanor. The Guinness Book of World Records named her “the most beautiful woman who ever lived” in 1954. Film critic Kenneth Tynan found her beauty so intoxicating he sighed, “What when drunk one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober.”

Read More
Writing

All I know is what she tells me

I get the news from my wife, who sits reading the paper across the breakfast table from me and tells me what I need to know, ignoring much of page 1 and picking out the story of the Italian Jews who were sheltered in Catholic monasteries in spite of an anti-Semitic pope and saved from the Holocaust and the story about Florida’s war on undocumented workers, which deprives Floridians of a ready workforce to help clean up the wretched mess after a hurricane and the pictures of beautiful colorful clothing worn by Sudanese women even during their cruel civil war.

It’s not a partisan newscast, it’s humanistic, it’s not about issues but about people, which makes me think she should run for president, which would be good for the country — Mexico is going to have a woman president, why should we lag behind — and I do believe her style is a winning one. My mother was a conservative but she loved Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt because she felt they cared about people. Joe Biden’s trip to Maui to commiserate with fire victims by reminiscing about the time he almost lost his Corvette as a result of a kitchen fire — dumb, dumb, dumb, Joe — why did Jill let you say that stupid clueless thing? A Corvette is not the equivalent of someone’s home, Joe. Who is briefing you for these appearances? Fire him.

Read More

The meeting will come to order (bonk bonk)

Any American who saw Jim Jordan, the alleged chair of the so-called House Judiciary Committee, on TV Wednesday could’ve been charged with contempt of Congress for his harassment of Judge Merrick Garland, an excellent legal mind and dedicated public servant, Mr. Jordan being a bully and a hack from a gerrymandered district in Ohio who got his law degree from a church school in Columbus and never took the bar exam. He was a champion wrestler in the featherweight class and though heftier now, maintains his featherweight status. He never held a job but went straight from college into politics. Interviewed in 2018 and asked if he’d ever heard Donald Trump tell a lie, he said, “I have not.” He has been called “nuts” by Lindsey Graham, who knows about nuttiness. He voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election and then sent a note to the White House asking for a pardon in the event he was prosecuted. Ten days before leaving office, Mr. Trump gave Jordan the Presidential Medal of Freedom in a closed-door ceremony. He appeared before me Thursday under an independent subpoena issued pursuant to 515.2 U.S.C. and I hereby read into the record his testimony:

Read More

Sing on, dance on, good eye, ain’t you happy

A good week is a good week; let smarter people deal with the debt ceiling crisis and popularity of authoritarianism, my week began with a happy Sunday in church with a lot of blessing going on — sprinkling the schoolkids, the choir, the congregation — and our rector looking joyful as she marched around casting holy water on people — I thought she might like to use a squirt gun or a watering can or the sprinklers in the ceiling. Her sermon cautioning against perfectionism was, for want of a better word, perfect, and we sang a lively Shaker hymn —

O brethren ain’t you happy, ye followers of the Lamb.
Sing on, dance on, followers of Emmanuel,
Sing on, dance on, ye followers of the Lamb.

Read More

Waking from wacko dreams to think clearly

Never mind what you’ve been taught, some problems have simple solutions. The cure for bad habits — lying, for example — is to stop doing it. Don’t waste a psychoanalyst’s time trying to discover the underlying causes of lying — the basic cause of lying is stupidity, or arrogance, take your pick.

And then there’s the problem of Supreme Court ethics and justices accepting valuable perks from billionaire pals, which may lead to a conflict of interest or the appearance of one. The simple answer is to raise their salaries: a quarter-million a year is not nearly enough to support a Supremacy lifestyle in D.C. There are psychoanalysts who earn more than that. Raise the salary to a million-five so Clarence Thomas can afford to charter a jet and not be indebted to a robber baron. Require the justices’ clerks to spend two years as public defenders before they shop around for fancy jobs with big firms in 15th-floor suites with big walnut credenzas.

Read More

The gift of Miss Helen Story, remembered

The time I have spent looking for my glasses — over the 70 years since I got glasses in the fourth grade, it must add up to a couple thousand hours, roaming nearsighted from room to room, bathroom, bedside table, desk, kitchen counter, coffee table, maybe six months of eight-hour days — a person could train for a triathlon in that time, find a cure for foot fungus, write a memoir — and yet, looking back over this endless series of ridiculous frenzies, I see how what a classic comedy it is, the half-blind man searching for his sightedness, and how can the regular reenactment of comedy do anything but make a man cheerful? I ask you.

Add to this my other blunders, stumbles, screwups and snafus in family life, professional career, political path, real estate — good Lord, the majestic apartment on Trondhjemsgade in Copenhagen that I bought, 13-foot ceilings, elaborate molding, a view of Ørstedsparken, you could’ve entertained royalty in the dining room or negotiated the union of Denmark and Sweden — I quit my radio show at the peak of its popularity and took my Danish wife to live in splendor and sit with her friends speaking my kindergarten Danish — my mind boggles: What was I thinking?

Read More

Looking forward to September 13

It’s been a busy summer for this old retired guy due to the fact that it takes twice as long to get half as much done due to voice-activated Google, which means I can say, “How exactly am I related to Katharine Hepburn?” and the computer screen does some backflips and flashes the answer, “You and she are descended from Elder John Crandall, 1618–1676, Westerly, Rhode Island,” which I have known for years but it makes me feel good to see it again, given the fact that by the age of 81 a man has accumulated a truly stunning list of mishaps, bungles, fiascos, and debacles, all of which are unaffected by dementia but shine bright and clear, warning buoys on the reefs of despair.

Google is a marvel and also a pernicious addiction. Back in the day I focused on the work before me, the sheet of paper in the Underwood typewriter, and didn’t follow the whims of curiosity because it would involve hauling down Webster’s Third Unabridged or the Encyclopedia Britannica or World Almanac, but now if I’m curious I can instantly find out what year Buddy Holly’s plane crashed (1959) or which popes fathered children (many) or who was the first daredevil to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel and survive (a schoolteacher, Annie Edson Taylor, in 1901 at the age of 63), none of which have anything to do with the project at hand.

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As I keep telling myself, life is good

The birth of the spotless giraffe at a zoo in Tennessee, the only known one on earth, is important news to those of us who grew up as oddballs, seeing the spotted mama giraffe nuzzling her child, remembering the kindness of aunts and teachers who noticed our helpless naivete and guided us through the shallows.

And then there was the story of the cable car in Pakistan that lost a couple cables and dangled helplessly hundreds of feet in the air with terrified children inside. A nightmare in broad daylight. A rescuer harnessed to the remaining cable had to bring the children one by one to safety.

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The short walk from altar to apartment

I prefer not to write about politics because I find people’s stories about personal experience more interesting than their opinions about what’s wrong with America, which tend to be secondhand or thirdhand.

And absurdity doesn’t interest me. You have an ex-president running for the White House who may be headed for a federal facility other than the White House unless he can win the election and pardon himself, meanwhile his leading opponents in the primaries go out of their way to avoid criticizing him and they focus on the legal problems of the incumbent president’s son.

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Crossing the flats, looking for mountains

In homage to my ancestor David Powell, I rode a train across Kansas heading for Colorado, his goal in 1859 when he left Martha Ann and the children behind in Missouri and headed for the gold rush. Kansas is a state of vastness, some of it seems undisturbed since David rode across it. Here is a little farm near the tracks with no neighbor for several miles. A good place for an introvert like me. I could tow a trailer out on the treeless prairie and pull the shades and sit there and slowly go insane, buy a couple rifles with scopes, and yell at the TV about government oppression.

David was an extrovert. He was a leader of his wagon train and organized the lashing of wagons together to cross the rivers. He hunted antelope with the Arapaho and traded with them. He arrived in Colorado too late to get rich and instead sat in the territorial legislature and helped draft a state constitution. At age 62, an old man in those times, he settled in Kansas and wrote to his children: “I built a house 21r x 24r, one-story of pickets, shingle roof, 6 windows and 2 doors, divided and will be when finished one like my house in MO. Dug a well 20 feet deep, plenty of water, and put up a stable for 10 head of stock, covered with hay. We have done very well with oats and I have 25 tons of timothy hay, not yet sold. I am very comfortable, the times are fair here in Kansas, we are all well except for a touch of influenza. Our love and best wishes to all, yours affectionately.”

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Out with the old, in with the young

I am delighted by the court ruling in Montana that the state, by encouraging the use of fossil fuels, violated the constitutional right of young people to “a clean and healthful environment,” something no court has ever proclaimed before. “Clean and healthful environment” is in the Montana state constitution. The legislature had forbidden state agencies to consider climate change when considering fossil fuel projects, and this decision would change that, but the state will appeal and likely the decision will be tossed away like used tissue, but still it’s an interesting idea: that we have legal obligations to our kids beyond feeding and clothing them and not putting them to work in shoe factories before they’re 12.

Nobody suggested back in the Fifties that we kids had a constitutional right to a “natural and healthful attitude toward sex” nor did I consider asking a court to reverse the deep sense of shame instilled in me, which has messed up my life to the extent that I dare not see a therapist for fear I’d discover things nobody should ever know about himself.

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Whether solo or accompanied by Richard Dworsky, Heather Masse, Prudence Johnson, Dan Chouinard, Dean Magraw, or others, Garrison Keillor delivers an extraordinary, crowd-pleasing performance.

Garrison Keillor’s celebrated radio broadcast A Prairie Home Companion ran for forty years. He wrote the comedy sketches and more, and he invented a “little town that time forgot and the decades could not improve.” These days, his shows are packed with humor and song, plus the audience-favorite News from Lake Wobegon. He has written dozens of books — recently, Boom Town (a Lake Wobegon novel), That Time of Year (a memoir), a book of limericks, and Serenity at 70, Gaiety at 80 (reflections on why you should keep on getting older). Garrison and his wife, Jenny Lind Nilsson, live in New York City.

Trained as a jazz singer at the New England Conservatory of Music, Heather Masse is equally versed in a variety of traditions — folk, pop, bluegrass, and more. As member of Billboard-charting group The Wailin’ Jennys, she has performed at hundreds of venues across the world. She was a frequent guest on A Prairie Home Companion, both solo and with The Jennys. One reviewer rightly lauded her “lush velvety vocals, capable of melting butter in a Siberian winter.”

 Prudence Johnson‘s long and happy career as a singer, writer, and teacher has landed her on the musical theater stage, in two feature films (A River Runs Through It and A Prairie Home Companion), on a national radio show (several stints on A Prairie Home Companion) and on concert stages across North America and occasionally Europe. She has released more than a dozen recordings, including albums dedicated to the music of Hoagy Carmichael and Greg Brown, and a collection of international lullabies.

 For 23 years, Richard Dworsky served as A Prairie Home Companion’s pianist and music director, providing original theatrical underscoring, leading the house band, and performing as a featured soloist. The St. Paul, Minnesota, native also accompanied many of the show’s guests, including James Taylor, Bonnie Raitt, Yo-Yo Ma, Sheryl Crow, Chet Atkins, Renée Fleming, and Kristin Chenoweth.

 Dan Chouinard is a St. Paul-based honky-tonk pianist, concert soloist and accompanist, street accordionist, sing-along enabler, Italian and French teacher, and bicycling vagabond. He’s been writer and host of a number of live history-with-music shows broadcast on Minnesota Public Radio and Twin Cities Public Television. He played on a dozen live broadcasts of A Prairie Home Companions plus a half dozen APHC cruises, and served as rehearsal pianist for Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, and Lindsay Lohan on the 2005 APHC movie. He’s featured on a number of recordings with Prairie Home regulars Peter Ostroushko, Prudence Johnson and Maria Jette.

 Composer/arranger/producer/guitarist Dean Magraw performed and recorded extensively with Ukrainian American virtuoso Peter Ostroushko over several decades, and he has worked with some of the finest musicians in the North America, Europe, and Japan. As one of his collaborators commented, “Dean Magraw’s guitar playing transcends, transports, and lifts the soul to a higher level as he weaves, cajoles, and entices every note from his instrument.”

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