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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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Singing to the Lord to save Herschel

The Communion hymn in church last Sunday was “All People That on Earth Do Dwell,” which I cherish for the lines “Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice: serve him with mirth,” which is the only time comedy is mentioned in our hymnal, I do believe. There’s joy and rejoicing and gladness, but the thought of serving our Creator with jokes is rather rare and, I think, beautiful. I’m not sure I know exactly what joy is but I do know the one about the engineer who sees another engineer rolling a little pellet between his fingers and saying, “I’m trying to figure out if this is more rubbery or more like plastic,” and the first engineer takes the pellet from him and says, “There is plasticity to it but there’s a viscosity, a sort of liquidity too” and he puts it in his mouth and says, “And there’s a salinity to it as well. Where did you get it?” The other engineer says, “Out of my nose.”

A joke is a friendly transaction between two persons and even if it falls flat, it conveys a generous spirit. I have four friends who still tell me jokes, three men, one woman, all of them old enough to remember the Helen Keller jokes (How did Helen Keller burn her fingers? She tried to read the waffle iron.) and the lightbulb jokes (How many philosophers does it take to change a lightbulb? Define “light.”) or the “What’s the difference” jokes (What’s the difference between roast beef and pea soup? Anyone can roast beef.) and the “What did the blank say to the blank” (What did the maxi-pad say to the fart? You are the wind beneath my wings.) and double-amputee jokes (“What do you call a man with no arms or legs hanging on your wall?” Art.) and old guy jokes (Old lawyers never die, they just lose their appeal. Old actuaries never die, they just get broken down by age and sex.) and the Ole and Lena jokes (So Ole died and Lena called up the undertaker to come get him, and he said, “I’ll be there in an hour,” and she said, “I’m having my hair done in half an hour, how about I drag him out to the curb and you can pick him up there?”). And there were Viagra jokes but they petered out.

Back when I hung out in saloon, in a booth stuffed with guys drinking whiskey, all of us in our twenties, trying to get an angle on our lives, any one of us could change the music by saying, “Twelve years in analysis and finally yesterday I got in touch with my emotions and I broke down and cried.”

“What happened?”

“My analyst looked at me and said, ‘No hablo ingles.’”

It was Minneapolis, some of us were grad students, I was a radio DJ, there were a couple of Army vets, we were a tight bunch squeezed in the booth, ambitious, reasonably serious, but there was a patter of jokes to remind us — life is good, don’t take your troubles too seriously — and I miss that tightness. It was a booth for six and we were eight or nine because we really wanted to be there.

So what happened to joke-telling?

For one thing, some of the best jokes are about death. The old Republican is dying and tells his wife, “I’m going to switch parties because I’d rather it happen to a Democrat than to one of us.” These are maybe less funny when you get to be my age. For another thing, a politician came along in 2015 who isn’t funny. This was a first. There were dozens of George Bush jokes and Bill Clinton jokes but with this guy, late-night comics deliver very clever insults but nobody laughs.

I’m not giving up. I was on the phone with a pal who’s in chemo and we spent 58 minutes telling jokes back and forth, including the one about the priest asking the widow, “Did your husband have any last request?” and she said, “Yes, he asked me to put down the gun.” The pal laughed so hard she almost split a seam. Later she called me back to tell me one more. Herschel was swept out to sea by a tidal wave and Mama cried out, “God, you can’t do that to my boy! Bring him back!” and another wave washes Herschel back and Mama cries, “Thank you, God” and then looks at Herschel and looks up at the sky — “He was wearing a hat!” I’ve heard that joke many times and I’m starting to get it. A guy needs a hat.

Epictetus on Fifth Avenue, a week ago

The world’s longest parking lot is Fifth Avenue in New York at midday and a week ago I found myself stuck in it, in a cab driven by a devout Sikh with headscarf and big beard, whose religion evidently taught him to Yield, so we moved at a glacial rate from 86^th to 43^rd Street where I had an important lunch appointment. Had I taken the B train I would’ve been there in a few minutes but that mistake had been made and now I watched pedestrians on the sidewalk passing us.

So what can you do? No need to get fussed up. You embrace stoicism. Epictetus said the way to happiness is to not worry about things beyond your power to control, which includes this taxi ride, totalitarianism, the cost of tickets to “Tannhäuser,” and other things that begin with T. So the two VIPs I am meeting for lunch may have to cool their jets for a while. I don’t have their cellphone numbers — they’re very I — so they’ll just have to amuse themselves at the restaurant. This is New York, a city teeming with amusement, you can stand on any corner and it will come walking along.

I relaxed in the backseat as we inched through the 70s and I remembered the day — I think it was in 1971 — when I flew to New York from Minnesota and got a room at a fleabag hotel, the Seymour, on 44^th, which I chose, thinking of Seymour Glass in J.D. Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey,” a book I loved lavishly in college, and the next day I walked around the block to 25 West 43^rd Street and took the elevator up to the 17^th floor to the office of Roger Angell, a fiction editor at The New Yorker who had bought some stories of mine, the dream of every college writer in America at the time. Back then, I was living in a rented farmhouse near Freeport, Minnesota, just one more impoverished 27-year-old, and I spent the money he sent me for the stories on a flight to New York, where, after telling me how much he liked my stuff, he took me across the street to the Algonquin Hotel for lunch. I felt like the King of the Hill. I think it was one of the most magnificent days of my life, that and the day a nurse handed me my tiny naked daughter in 1997 and my 80^th birthday last year when she, my wife Jenny, and I ate breakfast on the porch of a little summer house in Connecticut.

To me, this impromptu recollection of magnificence, while sitting in a guru-driven taxi going 3 mph in Manhattan, is the very embodiment of happiness. I’m a Midwesterner and we’re brought up to recollect our transgressions and wrong turns and here I was, having stupidly chosen taxi over subway, coming late to an important appointment, and that day in 1971 came back, crossing 43^rd with a great editor to lunch where he told me that a New Yorker “first reader” named Mary D. Kierstead had pulled my stories off the ”slush pile,” the stack of unsolicited fiction, and sent it upstairs to him. Had she not done that, I imagine I might be an old cabdriver myself these days, or maybe a short-order cook, or a parking lot attendant, but instead my dream of writerdom came true, thanks to an angel named Mary and Roger Angell.

“So what happened when you finally got to the lunch?” you’re wondering. I was somewhat late, they were understanding, I made my pitch, they listened, we had a nice lunch, crab cakes and soup for me, and I could sense that around the room other pitches were being made and you could tell who was who — the pitcher was leaning forward, the pitchee was leaning back. My pitch was caught and they agreed to think about it and we shook hands and parted.

It was about a book project, of course, and at the age of 81, the outcome is not so crucial as Mary Kierstead’s rescue of my stories fifty years ago. I believe in the book I pitched, I really and truly do believe the world needs this book, especially with a liar and crook headed for the White House: this makes beauty all the more important.

But the high point of the day was the cab ride in the parking lot, being late due to my own blunder, and being at peace with it, and remembering the beauty of 1971. Thank you, Ms. Kierstead, wherever you may be.

My personal journey toward self-minimization

I went to see “La Bohème” the other day, such a great opera, it doesn’t matter that the singers aren’t, and let me just say this — at the beginning of the first and last acts, set in the garret, you’ve got Rodolfo and Marcello and the guys and there’s no story, no purpose, nothing but vague bohemianism until Mimi shows up and then the lights come on, and it’s like that in life too. My opinion, okay? Message plays that preach justice and equality are okay for college sophomores but the real story is about two opposites who fall in love and she’s charming and he’s jealous and they come crosswise and hurt each other deeply but in the end they’re tied to each other. Lovers are real, families are real. Demonstrators, not so much.

These days we’re in the era of the Personal Position Statement as we saw in the recent National Book Awards ceremony in New York. There is no NBA for humor because the event is all about Taking Ourselves Very Seriously As Compensation For Slights We Have Suffered From The Uncomprehending World. The winner of the poetry prize, a man from Guam, accepted it on behalf of the poets of the Pacific islands. The translation award was accepted on behalf of gay men, the nonfiction award on behalf of indigenous peoples. If I’d been given the NBA for Brief Amusing Essays, I would’ve needed to accept it on behalf of recovering fundamentalists or overlooked Midwesterners or the marginalized octogenarian and nothing would be said about literary quality.

It was not always thus. I remember loving Theodore Roethke’s work, not as vindication of the humanity of bipolar persons, and James Wright’s, not as honoring the personhood of Ohioans, but because their poems were memorable, stuck with me, were beautiful to my ear, and still are, fifty years later.

One prizewinner said: “Being here tonight as a gay man, receiving this award for a novel about another gay man’s journey to self-acceptance, I wanted to say to everyone who ever felt wrong about themselves that your heart and your desire are true, and you are just as deserving as anybody else of having a fulfilling life.” There is something clunky about “journey to self-acceptance” — I can’t imagine anyone, gay or straight or counterclockwise, saying it in conversation with someone whose company they enjoy, and the idea that feeling wrong about yourself entitles you to a fulfilling life — it leaves out factors such as talent, hard work, good luck, self-discipline. I truly believe that the Deranged Golfer in one tiny corner of his soul feels wrong about himself — how could he not? — but that doesn’t qualify him for the Oval Office.

The NBA ceremony took place in New York, which is the Sarcasm Capital of America: nobody would dare talk aloud about their journey to self-acceptance on the subway or in Zabar’s Deli — you’d get eye-rolling and mocking comments on all sides. Look at the recent resignation of Anne Boyer as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine in protest of the newspaper’s “war-mongering lies” and Israel’s “US-backed war against the people of Gaza” as a war for the benefit of “oil interests and weapon manufacturers.”

This being New York, the real fun was in the Comments section. A few praised her courage and then someone ripped her for “atrocious writing for a college freshman, let alone a Times writer,” and R.T. Castleberry wrote: “That should do it. No doubt there will be peace talks now that the poetry editor of the NY Times Magazine has put her foot down.” Someone wrote, “What does her job have to do with the international tragedy? I don’t know how I feel about people making this conflict all about them.” A classic New York putdown: GET OVER YOURSELF! And then another putdown: “I didn’t know the New York Times Magazine had a poetry section.”

Anne Boyer wrote a book, The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care, and I must admit that a book with that title is nothing I’d give a friend who’s going through treatment for cancer. It won a Pulitzer, maybe because the judges couldn’t bear to add Prize Denial to the Pain and Vulnerability.

Sitting at the opera, hearing the dying soprano sing to the tenor, “You are my love, you are my life,” it struck me as genuine, so much better than, “I’m dying, O the pain, vulnerability, mortality, lack of penicillin, and where is a doctor when you need one?” and the tenor, though he’d been a jerk, wept in her arms, and so should we all.

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