National Geographic: Civilized Denmark

Original Publish Date: July 1998

Originally published in National Geographic

Denmark is a little land of five and a quarter million souls, most of them Andersens, Hansens, Jensens, or Petersens, with a few Madsens Jacobsens, and Mortensens and Rasmussens thrown in for variety, who live on a pleasant green peninsula and two large islands and many tiny ones north of Germany, between the North Sea and the Baltic, a major supplier of ham and cheese and ceramics, a nation of irreligious Lutherans, a democratic society prickly to wealth and privilege and the home of a royal line that goes back to A.D. 935. The peninsula is Jutland; the two islands are Zealand, which includes Copenhagen, and Fyn. A handsome and civilized country, its only wilderness the sea.

The entire country is a little smaller than Lake Michigan, and if it were slipped in there, between Wisconsin and Michigan, it would not be such a bad fit culturally. The same dark humor prevails as in the Midwest, the same stoicism and gentility. It would be a shock to land in a Great Lake, but the Danes would study the situation and work out the best deal they could, keeping their queen and flag, their chirpy language, their generous health and unemployment benefits, their 37-hour work-week, their five weeks of annual vacation plus assorted holidays, their nine political parties (Social Democrats on the left, Radikale in the center, Venstre, or Left, on the right). They might ban the so-called Danish pastry too gooey). They would make fun of everything American and lambaste our foreign policy. They would see themselves, in every way, as the beautiful swan trapped in the realm of ducks.

Life in Denmark is divided into two parts, the Golden Summer and the Great Murk, which extends from late fall to mid-spring. The months of youth and beauty, when the sky is light until almost 11 p.m. and Danes take to the beaches, eat in their gardens, soak up the sun, feel sleek and smart, and the other months, when they go to and from work in the dark and the rain and just try to keep putting one foot in front of the other and not get too glum.

I used to spend Christmases in Denmark, back when I had connections there, and I remember the night flight over the Atlantic, the sun rising to reveal the solid cloud bank below, the descent through cloud to Copenhagen Airport, like coal miners going down into the hole, the pilot putting the wheels down and the ground still not visible, and then, suddenly, red-tile roofs of houses in the mist below, deep green meadows, tree lines, rain trickling across the window, and the wheels bump on the runway, and you’re in Denmark, in a gloom so dense you feel it in your skull.

You disembark onto a shopping concourse, and past the mink coats and crystal a sign points you to customs. You parade through, a little surprised at how casually the Danish police glance at your passport. (The man who waves you in may be the last uniform you’ll see for a while, Danes being a self-policing people who prefer that authority be inconspicuous.) You collect your bags, and off to the cabstand, the air gray, drizzly, with a tang of salt and smoke.

The cab races off through Amager, past the soccer fields and into the streets of the city, the identical brown-brick apartment buildings, the mustard stucco houses, passing a stream of bicyclists pedaling solemnly to work in their bright red or yellow slickers. Danish jumps out at you from signs, lots of cognates here: A drugstore is an apotek (remember apothecary), and a merchant is a handler—a boghandler sells books, a vinhandler wine—a restaurant is a restaurant, and you realize that you won’t starve here or get lost.

Sober-faced Danes queue at the bus stop in the rain, which they do not flinch at, and it dawns on you that a daylong rain is not unusual, this is a North Atlantic winter. The sun won’t shine tomorrow, maybe not the next day. You have arrived in a land where Christmas means more than in, say, Barbados; it is the last outpost on the long grim trek toward spring. Dark gray sky at noon, dull brown brick all around, dead trees, broken glass in the gutter, and you, sorry you, your head like a sponge full of mud. At first you think it’s jet lag, and then you realize that everyone else feels this way too.

Welcome to the birthplace of existentialism.

The taxi brings you over the canal and into the heart of Copenhagen, the grand old city that has resisted freeway and high-rise in defense of its narrow, twisting brick streets from medieval times, its skyline of green church steeples, its pretty squares and fountains. Past the Christiansborg Castle where parliament sits, past the big department store, Magasin, and the Royal Theater hulking on Kongens Nytorv, a plaza faced by stately old piles, and up a narrow street called Bredgade (Broad Street), past the queen’s palace at Amalienborg, and up to Østerbro, where I once lived, in a big echoey belle epoque apartment on Trondhjemsgade. The dining room had a 14-foot ceiling with plaster moldings, and when I sat in it, writing, it felt as if I were drafting the Treaty of Ghent.

We celebrated Juleaften there every December 24. My stepchildren and I trudged through the late afternoon mists to Trinitatis Kirke, where little Soren Kierkegaard attended confirmation class, the church the Round Tower is attached to. It was packed to the rafters Christmas Eve with shiny children and their mors and fars and mormors and morfars and farmors and farfars. We sang the old Danish carols and heard a sermon about our obligations to the Third World and hiked home to our pork roast and caramelized potatoes, and the oldest boy lit the candles on the tree in the dining room and threw the doors open, and we looked at it and gasped—every year the same gasp—and ran hand in hand through the dark rooms singing, “Nu er det jul igen,” and opened our gifts.

The 25th is an afterthought, a quiet day for recuperation; Christmas Eve is the great night of the year. And on Nytarsaften, the 31st, you sit down at 6 p.m., along with everyone else in Denmark, and watch Queen Margrethe deliver her annual homily to the people. It lasts about 12 minutes and ends with her greetings to the people of Greenland and the Faroe Islands and to the people who work on the sea. “Heartfelt greetings from the prince and me,” she says, beaming. “God bless Denmark.” And then everybody proceeds to get a little drunk, or maybe a lot. At midnight Danish television plays the romantic national anthem, and you stand, champagne in hand, and sing it, reading the words off the screen. At 2 a.m., to clear your head, you go for a walk. Blocks and blocks of five-story brick houses; gray, white, cream, blue, gold candles flickering in the casement windows; the steep red- or black-tile roofs, the forest of chimneys, dormers in the garrets; and you feel the romance of Copenhagen, as if walking into an old painting, the enchantment of darkness and rain and the warm hearth that you eventually will walk back to.

I had seen enough Danish Decembers to hold me for a while, so I flew over last year in June for a week of summer. I looked around Århus, the handsome harbor city with a forest next to its downtown, and had dinner with Brian, a poet friend and iconoclast who loves to drink whiskey and disparage the monarchy and the church. “Brian is one of those English names—Tommy, Johnny, Brian—that working-class parents favored after the war,” he said. “It’s a ruffian’s name. If there was a Brian in a class, the teacher would smack him on the first day and get it out of the way.”

I drove up to Skagen, where the turn-of-the-century artists Michael and Anna Ancher add P. S. Krøyer painted fishermen and garden parties and ladies in white strolling along a beach under the midnight sun. I took the train to Fyn for Midsummer Eve. I visited Gilleleje, the vacation village on the north coast of Zealand from which, to escape the Germans in October 1943, Danish Jews were smuggled by fishing boat over the sound to Sweden. I swam in the sea there with friends, which I wasn’t going to do, being skittish about nudity and knowing how cold the water is, until my friends said, “Of course, you don’t have to if you’d rather not,” and then, of course, I had to.

And I hiked around Copenhagen, along earthworks and remains of moats and along the pier where cruise ships tie up, to the statue of the Little Mermaid, sitting on her rock, looking small and forlorn, and beyond her to the magnificent fountain of Gefion, the goddess at the plow, lashing her oxen, water spraying from their nostrils, and great plumes arching up from the plowshare. I sat at outdoor cafés in Grabrodretory and Kultorvet and spoke my pitiful rusty Danish to waiters and ate my herring and studied the passersby. Danes are good to watch. They keep a stolid public expression, like Buster Keaton, and are masters of the raised eyebrow. Let a waiter drop a tray of dishes and looks of deadpan amusement flicker on every face, including the waiter’s. I step into a bakery, and when the girl behind the counter says, “Goddag,” I say, “Goddag, jeg vii Berne ha’ to line stykke boiler,” and her left brow lifts and she says, “Oh, you want two of these buns?” “Ja, tak,” I say. “You speak Danish well,” she says. “Where in America are you from?”

I am stopped by a young woman in jeans and a cutoff top who asks where to catch the train to Deer Park. A major thrill for me, to be asked for directions by a Dane, in Danish, and I tell her in Danish where the S-train station is, and add, “And thank you for your navel.” It is a very handsome navel. She covers it in mock modesty and murmurs, “It was a gift from my mother.”

In a cafe near Kultorvet, I used to sit every week and drink coffee with Fradley Garner, an emigre who speaks Danish with a New York accent to his grandchildren. “No matter how much you like Denmark, it’s good to get together with someone who knows who Joe DiMaggio is,” he told me once.

In another café I would have lunch with my friend Elly Petersen, a tall, aristocratic lady of 74 when I met her on my first trip there in 1985 and she told me about her flaming youth, dancing to American jazz in the clubs of Norrebro. We sometimes had oysters and champagne, what she called “the Karen Blixen lunch,” but usually we ordered the classic: herring on rye bread with a shot of aquavit, and then another shot, followed by a fish fillet with a glass of beer, and then a slice of roast pork with the rind on, and a slab of blue cheese for dessert, and coffee.

Elly had met Victor Borge, she said, in 1937 in a dance hall called Zigeunerhallen on Jagtvej in Nørrebro when he was still Borge Rosenbaum and played piano in a jazz trio. Once she had danced with him. “Really,” she said. “I did.” Rosenbaum was a Jew and wrote satiric songs about the Nazis and, on the verge of arrest in 1940, he caught a boat to Sweden, Elly told me. And a few months later he snuck back home to visit his mother, who was dying. He sat by her bed and told her a sweet lie; he said, “Mama, I’m going to Hollywood and get into the movies, and when I do, I’ll send for you, and we’ll live in California in a big house with a swimming pool.” And she said, “Borge, don’t let it go to your head.”

Back when I knew Elly, I aspired in a modest way to dress, smell, walk, and speak Danish, and she corrected my pronunciation, so I would sound more like the queen, less like a yahoo. I remember exactly when my Danish reached its high-water mark: It was late one night after a one-month total-immersion course at Askov Folk High School, in the corn belt of Jutland, when a fellow student and I sat in a tavern jabbering away, and after 15 minutes or so he suddenly stopped and said, “Hvor kommer du fra?” and I said, “Minnesota, naturligvis,” and he laughed and said, “leg er en Texan.” Born and bred in Dallas, but he had a good accent. We continued, in Danish, talking about what we loved about Denmark—the white stone churches, the golden barley fields, the shadowy beech forests, the good humor of daily life, the calmness of the people, their social grace, their eternal, untiring tolerance.

It is—let’s be frank here—almost everyone’s idea of the World’s Most Nearly Perfect Nation: a clean, peaceful, well-regulated society populated by prosperous (but not greedy or rapacious), tolerant (but principled), law-abiding (but humorous), computer-literate, bi- or trilingual people who all vote in elections and are as witty as Victor Borge and have no hang-ups about sex and reside in sunny, energy-efficient homes, the decor running toward light woods and primary colors, who can discuss (in excellent English) the infrastructure needs of developing countries or the Danishness of Woody Allen while serving perfectly poached salmon off handsome earthenware, copies of which are on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Despite Denmark’s manifest virtues, Danes never talk about how proud they are to be Danes. This would sound weird in Danish and violate their pride of modesty. When Danes talk to foreigners about Denmark, they always begin by commenting on its tininess, its unimportance, the difficulty of its language, the general small-mindedness and narcissism and self-indulgence of their countrymen, the high taxes—52 percent is the average income tax rate, and there’s a 25 percent sales tax. No Dane would look you in the eye and say, “Denmark is a great country.” You are supposed to figure this out for yourself.

It is the land of the silk safety net, where almost half the national budget goes toward smoothing out life’s inequalities, and there is plenty of money for schools, day care, retraining programs, job seminars—Danes love seminars: Three days at a study center hearing about waste management is almost as good as a ski trip. It is a culture bombarded by English, in advertising, pop music, movies, the Internet, all the chic media, and despite all the English that Danish absorbs—there is no Danish Academy to defend against it—old dialects persist in Jutland that can barely be understood by Copenhageners. It is the land where, as the saying goes, “Few have too much and fewer have too little,” and an American is struck by the sweet egalitarianism that prevails, where the lowliest clerk gives you a level gaze, where Sir and Madame have disappeared from common usage, even Mr. and Mrs., and children address teachers by their first names. It’s a nation of recyclers—about 55 percent of Danish garbage gets made into something new—and no nuclear power plants: The Danes prefer windmills. It’s a nation of tireless planners. Trains run on time. Things operate well in general. Only 2 percent of the national budget goes to police and prisons and courts, and 3 percent to defense. It is a famously peace-loving country, whose troops, part of the UN peacekeeping force in Bosnia, engaged Serbian militia in a firefight in April 1994, the first official Danish act of war since 1864.

Such a nation of overachievers—a brochure from the Ministry of Business and Industry says, “Denmark is one of the world’s cleanest and most organized countries, with virtually no pollution, crime, or poverty. Denmark is the most corruption-free society in the Northern Hemisphere.” So, of course, my heart lifts at any sighting of Danish sleaze: skinhead graffiti on buildings (“Foreigners Out of Denmark!”), busted beer bottles in the gutters, drunken teenagers slumped in the park.

Last summer in Odense, two blocks from the Hans Christian Andersen birthplace museum, my car was broken into and a billfold stolen; around the corner from the crime scene was a wooded area littered with garbage, where gaunt figures sat shooting up heroin. I enjoyed telling Danish friends about this for days afterward. When they expressed chagrin, I said, “Hey. No problem. We have crime in America too.”

Nonetheless, it is an orderly land. You drive through a Danish town, it comes to an end in a stone wall, and on the other side is a field of barley, a nice clean line: town here, country there. The stores close at six, even earlier on Saturday, and on Sunday you window-shop; an American has to learn that sometimes you just plain can’t have it. It is not a nation of jaywalkers. People stand on the curb and wait for the red light to change, even if it’s 2 a.m, and there’s not a car in sight. The red light is part of the system: You cross against it, and you are showing disdain for your countrymen. (I feel sheepish waiting for the red light, so I cross, and several times I discovered that Danish drivers don’t slow down for jaywalkers. They don’t see you in the crosswalk because you’re not supposed to be there.) Danes don’t think of themselves as a waiting-at-2-a.m.-for-the-green-light people—that’s how they see Swedes and Germans. Danes see themselves as a jazzy people, improvisers, more free spirited than Swedes, but the truth is (though one should not say it) that Danes are very much like Germans and Swedes. Orderliness is a main selling point.

Denmark has few natural resources, limited manufacturing capability; its future in Europe will be as a broker, banker, and distributor of goods. You send your widgets by container ship to Copenhagen, and these bright, young, English-speaking, utterly honest, highly disciplined people will get your widgets around to Scandinavia, the Baltic States, and Russia. Airports, seaports, highways, and rail lines are ultramodern and well-maintained. There is a presumption of punctuality here. An American train leaves the station if all the members of the Departure Committee can find no reason for it to wait; the Danish train leaves the station unless someone throws himself across the track and he happens to be someone they like.

Daily life turns on predictability. If the timetable says that the train leaves Klampenborg at 7:06 and arrives at Østerport Station at 7:27, those times are reliable, and if you invite Jens and Camilla for dinner at 7:30, that’s exactly when they’ll knock on your door, not two minutes later. And when you open the door, they will expect that you too have managed your time and are not racing around snatching up dirty socks, that dinner is under control, the candles lit, the wine chilling, the hosts prepared to be congenial.

To Danes this is a sensible way of life, and to an American it seems marvelous at first, and then it strikes you as stifling. Weird, even. You meet Danes who have their lives planned in quite some detail for years in advance and derive comfort from this. You see how stability is cherished. You meet an old married couple, both teachers, who keep their finances separate, and the wife says, “I would love to visit America next summer. Ole is going, but I can’t afford it.” To an American, this is perverse. They love each other. Why can’t Ole just pay her way? Because that is not how those two do things, that’s why.

A few years ago, walking along Store Kongensgade in Copenhagen before Christmas, I passed a building gutted for renovation and looked in the cellar window, and there, on a dirt floor, surrounded by piles of lumber, were three long tables covered with white cloths and set for a meal, a Christmas centerpiece on each table, with candles and little Danish flags, and at each place setting, silverware, a glass for aquavit, a glass for beer, a china plate, a napkin. The construction workers were about to enjoy their traditional Christmas lunch, with proper china and silver, with the herring and aquavit, the requisite toasts and speeches, and by the time the apple fritters were served, they’d be in a mood to sing Christmas songs, and you knew exactly which ones they’d sing.

I told a Danish friend, “If American workers held a Christmas party, they would go to a restaurant.” And she said, “Why should they be ashamed of where they work?”

The orderliness of the society doesn’t mean that Danish lives are less messy or lonely or angst-ridden than yours or mine, and no Dane would tell you so. You can hear plenty about bitter family feuds and the sorrows of alcoholism and about aimless, overindulged young people working the system to make a cushy life for themselves and perfectly sensible people who went off one day and killed themselves. An orderly society can’t exempt its members from the hazards of life.

But there is a sense of entitlement and security that Danes grow up with and Americans don’t. Certain things are yours by virtue of citizenship, and everyone knows what they are, they’re the same for everyone, and you shouldn’t feel bad for taking what you’re entitled to, you’re as good as anyone else. A woman in Florsholm, who had lived in California as a child, told me: “I miss people I knew in America, how open and friendly they were, but it’s better to have a safety net under you. You might not have a chance to do big things, but nothing so bad will happen to you.” The rules of the welfare system are clear to everyone, the benefits you get if you lose your job, the steps you take to get a new one; and the orderliness of the system makes it possible for the country to weather high unemployment and social unrest without a sense of crisis.

There is social unrest in the World’s Cleanest and Most Organized Country—which is, to an American, certainly interesting, considering how Danes once lectured us about racial intolerance, but never mind that. Now you hear them discuss the country’s troubles with its Yugoslavian and Turkish guest workers, who came 30 years ago when the country needed cheap labor, and today the guest workers’ children, Danish-born, Danish-speaking, Muslim, are discriminated against because they have the wrong last names. Protest demonstrations flare up in the Muslim ghettos of Ishøj, and right-wing politicians have seized on the issue. But I never heard the problem described as intractable: Everybody seemed to think it would get worked out eventually.

Denmark is the stable society it is because it is productive and prosperous, and because Danes get a similar start in life, whether you grow up in the mansions of Hellerup or the tenements of Norrebro. At birth you become a member of the Lutheran Church. (You can petition to get out, but it’s no simple matter.) You go to similar day care centers, toddle off to the same kindergartens, then to a folkeskole for grades one to nine, where, in the fourth grade, you begin the serious study of English (in seventh, German or French). There isn’t Public School 10 for the poor and St. Cuthbert’s-on-the-Hill for the mill owner’s children; everybody goes down the same road. In the spring of ninth grade you reach the great divide and find out if you go to gymnasium or a technical school or a business school for late bloomers. Gymnasium is for the serious student, no troublemakers, no slackers, no goofballs. About 40 percent wind up there. At the same time the state starts paying you a stipend of up to 1,800 kroner a month ($260), depending on your parents’ income. It’s meant to even up the odds a little more.

After three years of gymnasium you take the test that pretty much decides your career, the studenter exam. Admission to various colleges and professional schools is by bidding, high studenter scores get first dibs. It takes a very high score to get into the humanities, medicine, dentistry, or psychology—a lesser score to major in math or physics or chemistry or theology. On the other hand, to become a midwife (in Danish, “earth mother”) takes a very high score, it being a popular career. So the woman in blue scrubs who tells your wife to take a deep breath and push hard may be a good deal brighter than the guy in the pulpit who explains the parable of the vineyard.

My last day in Denmark I took the Inter-City Express from Copenhagen to the island of Fyn for Midsummer Eve at the house of old friends, a teacher and his wife, a writer. The train no longer switches onto a ferry for the trip across the Great Belt; it slips into a tunnel and races under the sea and up to an island and over a bridge, the longest rail-auto bridge in Europe, 6.6 kilometers long, one of a series of bridge and tunnel links that will knit Denmark together and tie the country to Sweden. My friends, Britt and Torben, met me at the station, and we drove south to their house. I said I missed the train-ferry, and they said they had mixed feelings about it. “But then we Danes love to hold two opposing views at the same time,” said Britt. “That’s probably why there was no referendum on the bridges, because the people might have voted against them, out of sentiment, even though everyone knows they’re necessary. We can’t think of ourselves as an island anymore. But we still do.”

The car wheeled south, through the rolling paradise of Fyn, and we talked about the Danish love of paradox—the tendency to strive to get ahead and to deny that you are doing any such thing. To belong to the Lutheran Church and yet never attend except at Christmas. (“Actually,” said Britt, “attendance is up a little. You see 14-year-olds coming in to be baptized, sometimes over their parents’ objections. Anyway, there are more coming in than going out.”) The paradox of a highly secular society—no Dane running for office need make any public show of religious faith whatsoever, in fact it would be taken as bad taste—and yet Danes take Easter as a holiday and Maundy Thursday and Good Friday and Easter Monday, plus three days for Christmas, and Whit Monday, and something called Great Prayer Day in April. “Well, that’s just us,” said Britt.

Danes have belonged to the European Union since 1973 and still, down deep, feel opposed to it, she said. “We are terribly offended by our bureaucrats who go to Brussels to work for the EU and earn more than their counterparts here, fly first-class, live in luxury apartments—at least, we think they’re luxurious. We’re funny that way. If 90 Danes were living the high life in Brussels, or if we thought they were, we might very well vote Denmark out of it.”

Britt and Torben’s house is an 18th-century stone house on the outside, modern on the inside, old casement windows with thermal panes, an antique ship captain’s table with a computer on it, by which Torben exchanges e-mail with me. Shelves full of books, dozens of American novels, Cheever, Updike, Hemingway, Paul Auster. The house looks down a long slope of meadow toward the sea, the island of Langeland in the distance, and the island of Ærø, the name of which I am one of the few living Americans to pronounce almost correctly, they told me. I was so proud, I tried to work Ærø into the conversation all evening. Even if I barely understood what the conversation was about, I said, “Would this also be true on Ærø?”

There were 30 guests milling around in the backyard when I arrived, and a few minutes later we took our seats at two long tables in the backyard. Torben raised his glass and welcomed everyone and said, “Skål. Velkommen.” And we sat down to shrimp salad and poached salmon and lamb and red wine and very good bread.

The dinner included long toasts, to the queen and to America and to one another, and there were songs about the beauty of the Danish landscape and Hans Christian Andersen’s hymn that begins, “In Denmark was I born, there I have a home; there is my root, from there my world begins. O you Danish tongue, you are my mother’s voice, how sweetly you bless my heart.” Every time I looked around, I saw people smiling.

The sky was still aglow at eleven, when we hiked down to the shore where Torben had laid a ten-foot-high tepee of lumber and kindling for the bonfire. His sons trooped down from the house, bearing a life-size straw witch on a pole. She was decked out in a dress and hat and shoes and stockings and riding a broom. “Those are my and your mother’s clothes!” cried Torben in mock dismay. They propped up the pole in the lumber and put a match to the wood, and we sang hymns to Denmark and summer as the blaze licked at the witch’s skirt and she went up in flames.

You could see, up and down the shore, bonfires for miles. Everyone in Denmark seemed to be outdoors, busy banishing evil spirits from the land. When the fire burned down, the boys and men took turns leaping over the embers. We went up to the house for coffee and cake, and I climbed the stairs to bed about the time the sky was turning light again. It was a wonderful party, one of the best. It is hard not to love a country that brings up its people to do this.

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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BOB DOUGLAS (click image for audio tribute)

Bob Douglas (April 22, 1948 - December 1, 2022)

SONG LIST:
Irish Fiddle Tunes
Is It Time
Canaan's Land
Going Up Home to Live in Green Pastures
There's No Hiding Place Down Here
Anchored in Love

Bob Douglas was cheerful, the mandolinist in the Powdermilk Biscuit Band in the early days of A Prairie Home Companion, who loved gospel songs, having grown up with them, even “It’s G-L-O-R-Y to Know That I’m S-A-V-E-D,” and he dove into bluegrass and swing tunes and played a driving backbeat on the fiddle standards, a dedicated devotee and serious folkie, but audiences get restless and earnestness only goes so far, and Bob’s ace card was playing spoons. He kept them in his back pocket, ordinary kitchen spoons. No silver spoons, the tone was clanky. He held two spoons back to back an inch apart in his right hand, did elaborate rolls against the spread fingers of his left hand, and the rickety-tickety-bop glittery-flibbertigibbet shave-and-a-haircut drove the crowd wild. It never failed.

He worked hard to master a complicated instrument, the mandolin, but it was the parlor trick of spoonerism that blew them away—there’s a lesson in humility here.

Bob wasn’t eager to play the spoons, he was a mandolinist, not a clown, but he did it when it was needed and did it with a beautiful big smile, syncopating around, percussing hand-to-knee and off his forehead, bopping on the guitarist’s shoulder, rapping on the knees of a kid in the front row, then the kid’s father, he made solemn hippies whoop like third graders. Sometimes he’d switch to wooden spoons for the clackety tone. It was cheerfulness at work.

Garrison Keillor from Cheerfulness

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O Frabjous day! Callooh, Callay!

The debt limit deal takes an enormous load off my mind, weeks of worrying about what we’d do when the economy crashed and we lose everything and live on the street near a soup kitchen, but now apparently the ship will not sink, and as I understand the deal, the Republicans will raise the debt limit if the Ten Commandments are inscribed on every dollar bill, Disney will make no movies that portray fairies, the southern border will be sealed tight except for food deliveries and migrant farmworkers, all nouns will have the gender of the person speaking, and the word “gay” will simply go away.

I’m willing to give them that. I’m a lib they don’t own. There are other words for “gay” such as “frisky,” “vivacious,” “spiffy,” and “effervescent.” I’ll bet Governor DeSantis has had his effervescent days when he wore bright colors and said frolicsome things, though this has not been evident so far in his campaign for the White House. As for the Current Leading Candidate for the Republican nomination, gaiety seems quite alien. Fulmination is his style. I don’t recall ever seeing a photograph of him petting a dog or hugging a small child or even holding hands with his current wife. So sad, but of course that’s his business, not mine.

Some libs wanted the White House to be renamed the Big House but I was not one of them. I simply feel that the nation should make good on its debts and if the Repubs want to tinker with American culture, good luck. It’s like trying to replace Tina Turner with Ted Turner: it ain’t gonna work, buddy. Making war against the culture is punching the air. We are a curious, lively, rambunctious people. Freedom has a big effect on people and it’s hard to squelch it, you pound on the bubbles and they pop up elsewhere.

I am not putting down the Repubs; some of my best friends, etc. I don’t hold myself up as a paragon of reason, certainly not an octagon or Oregon. Utter stupidity has been a recurrent fact in my life and now and then I find myself reviewing the Five Dumbest Things I’ve Done, which is brutal punishment but it does highlight the Five Luckiest, which take me into the realm of gratitude.

I was married twice before to women who were near total strangers, back when I imagined romance to be a mystery, the more mysterious the better, and in 1987 I did the No. 1 Dumbest when I gave up a radio show I dearly loved in order to make a woman happy — a woman who had married me imagining it would make her happy and it didn’t, of course, and I knew it was a mistake the night I announced my departure on the radio, and I sat in the kitchen with a friend and he said, “I think you should change your mind. You’d make a lot of people happy.” I didn’t do it. That was No. 2.

I’ve lost money on every real estate transaction I’ve done: if I told you the whole story you’d introduce legislation to put me under guardianship. I’ve thrown fistfuls of money into the wind but you can hire smart people to keep you away from the cliff. I am illiterate about the Christian faith that I subscribe to but I feel that God forgives this. Any third grader knows more about the natural world than I do and yet some very smart people are somewhat fond of me.

No, I’m referring to Dumbness in its pure form, when you walk with complete confidence into a brick wall and you don’t learn from this that bricks are solid, solider than flesh.

But stupidity has given me sympathy for other knuckleheads and also admiration for the beautiful competence of American medicine, which has extended my life dramatically, making it possible for me to beat myself up for my mistakes and not just take up space in a cemetery. And eventually it leads to this beautiful revelation: I will never be so dumb again. I’m too old and I adore the woman I married who is also my best-informed critic. This is an outcome devoutly to be wished for.

In the extra time that medical ingenuity has granted me, I intend to walk carefully, mind my manners, do my work, embrace friendship, sleep with my beloved critic, and put aside enmity and grudges and biases. Eighty is too old to be angry. Even seventy is.

 

Thou shalt not be dumber than dirt

The bill in the Texas legislature to require public schools to post the Ten Commandments in every classroom means that teachers may need to explain to small children what “adultery” means and also “take the Lord’s name in vain” but the real problem is the commandment to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. A great many public schools send athletic teams to compete in weekend tournaments that make it hard for players to make it home for the Sabbath, especially if they’re Jewish. In Texas, a conflict between football and religious faith is not going to turn out well for religion. And taking the Lord’s name in vain is inextricably intertwined with sports. Golf, especially.

I grew up among devout Christians who did not say “gosh” or “darn it” because they took euphemisms seriously. My mother would say, “Oh fudge” but more likely, “Oh for pity’s sake.” I’m an old man and cursing still feels unnatural to me; I’ll bet plenty of Texas legislators who voted for the T.C. bill curse up a storm.

The tablets that God handed down to Moses did not constitute Ten Suggestions, they are Commandments. I don’t oppose posting the Ten Commandments, I only propose that they be taken seriously. And it’s hard to see how allowing people to shop on Sunday and order alcohol in restaurants is keeping the Sabbath holy. I am just saying it because it’s true.

I take Scripture seriously and so I eat beef as it tells us we can in Leviticus, and I also eat salads but not Caesar salads because he was a pagan emperor, but I admit to giving in to wrath, which goes against Scripture. I do it again and again. Like you, I am a bundle of contradictions.

Like many of my fellow Episcopalians, I maintain a progressive enlightened exterior while guarding my simple peasant biases such as my loathing of the use of fancy words like “ubiquitous” in simple conversation, it makes me want to give them a knuckle sandwich if it weren’t for the fact that I’m an author and must protect my hands. Or people who kill conversation by delivering extensive synopses of an article about political polarization that they’ve read recently — POW, right in the kisser.

I absolutely despise the little quiz that pops up on the screen when I finish a transaction online — “On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your experience ordering from Goodwill? Have you been satisfied with the used clothing you’ve purchased? How likely are you to recommend Goodwill to your friends?” — this sort of thing makes me want to throw my laptop out the window even if it might mean hitting an e-biker on the noggin and he hits the pavement and is run over by a guy on an e-scooter. But the T.C. forbid murder so I simply click Delete and move on. Scripture is very much in favor of deletion; deletion is crucial in matters of faith. Love and kindness are fundamental and the acquisition of wealth and power are not.

The verse I would paint on the walls of the Texas legislature is “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” A good verse for me and you too. To put it another way, “We’re too old to be this stupid.”

I was having lunch not long ago with two guys I’ve known since grade school and one said, “I hope I haven’t offended you” and the other said, “We’re too old to take offense, we’re eighty for gosh sakes.” It’s true: we’ve reached the age of gratitude at last, no more time for anger.

I believe that in 2024 the American electorate will start to wise up to the sort of performance-art politics of the T.C. sort and decide that public servants should serve the public good by dealing with actual problems.

California, Nevada, and Arizona did not deal with the Colorado River emergency by painting a verse on the walls of the Grand Canyon, “All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.” Nor did they curse the problem. They agreed on a (temporary) solution.

And if, on a scale of one to three, you give this column a two, I’m okay with that. Let’s go be wise and forgive Texas for its doggone stupidity and do unto others as we would have them do unto us. You kids stop hitting each other or I am going to send you to your rooms and I mean it.

Manhattan man living in the past

I was a big shot at one time, which I knew because when I went to work at the office, twelve people suddenly got very busy. I had a popular radio show and I pulled the plug on it not wanting to become a living legend, a last connection to broadcasting’s past when music came on big black vinyl discs and everyone had an ashtray on their desk.

I left Minnesota because there were so many middle-aged people there who loathed the sight of me because they’d been forced by their parents to listen to my show on long car trips and I was afraid one of them might throttle me so I moved to Manhattan where I felt very safe. Now my office is my kitchen and it’s just me and the coffeemaker and the toaster, and eventually my sweetie walks in and says, “What are you doing up so early?”

Doing the same thing I did when I was important. I do a sort of ventriloquism in which I talk in the voice of old relatives who are all dead, but the voice is in my head, and as long as I keep using it, I keep them alive. I also stay sane. Twitter is not part of my world, I am not an influencer, I used to drive under the influence but don’t anymore.

I interrupted writing for a while today to have a Zoom meeting about estate planning with a couple lawyers in Minneapolis and for a discussion centered on my own demise it was a lot of fun. We laughed a lot.

They mentioned “legacy” and I laughed. What legacy? There’s no such thing. Scripture promises resurrection but it isn’t specific about the form we’ll take, whether vegetable, mineral, gas, or spirit, meanwhile here I am on a sunny day in New York, sitting at a café on Columbus Avenue and watching the passing humanity, the great variety of gaits, brisk and propulsive, ambling, toddling, sidewalk surfing, window shopping, touristy uncertainty, geezerly gimpiness, and the aimless shuffle of people like me whose heads are full of irrelevancies.

What’s on my mind is family history, the seven children of James Keillor and Dora Powell, and in all of Manhattan there’s not a single soul who has the slightest interest, nor should there be. Heredity, the streaks of tragedy, the guarded secrets, a family of good gardeners and Bible believers, sworn to modesty, dry humor, intensely loyal.

My dad once drove up to Anoka to see his brother Lawrence who was president of the First National Bank. I asked him if he had an appointment. He said, “I don’t need an appointment, he’s my brother.” And when he got to the bank, Lawrence put everything aside and they sat down and talked. That was my family in a nutshell.

James was not a good farmer. He’d go out cutting hay, holding the reins in his right hand and a book in his left. He was of another world. Dora was a schoolteacher and demanded that we make the grade. I’m descended from them, careless and ambitious at the same time. I sit in the café eating salad and remember going to Lawrence’s where he and Dad and Eleanor sat around the piano and sang “It Is Well with My Soul” — “in our ancient ruined voices,” Eleanor said, and that was the end, within a few years they were all gone.

I’ve been telling stories all my adult life and this is one that mystifies me: where did we come from. My shelves are packed with books I’m no longer interested in but I had a dream last night in which I visited James and Dora on their farm after the house burned down and saw their seven kids and little Eleanor had a terrible fever and the family sat praying for her — a fleeting dream but I would give anything to revisit it. I feel the same way about the picture of my mother, 17, with sister Elsie and friend Dorothy, three girls in summer dresses standing holding their bikes by Lake Nokomis in 1932, so happy — I want to ask her, “Do you realize you’re going to have six kids and not much money and they’ll cause you a lot of problems? Is this really what you want? I’m a writer, I can send you to Hollywood. You’re very charming, very funny. What he loves about you, millions of others would love too. What do you say, kid?” And she gets on her bike and wheels away.

Spring once more, what a surprise

I hear from back home that the wretched winter has concluded and the trees blossom and people are allowing themselves to think about resuming normal life though of course Minnesotans know that winter, like COVID, can return at any time and as it says in Ecclesiastes, “What has been is what shall be. One generation comes as another departs. We shovel the walk and the wind blows the neighbor’s unshoveled snow over us, making our labor meaningless. It is what it is.” It’s not a sunshiny view of life but it serves us well, the stoical It Could Be Worse perspective. Yes, we’re flabby, uncool, discouraged, not flossing regularly, our mental acuity is somewhat diminished from when we were in the eighth grade, we can’t remember passwords, we need a paring knife to try to pry NyQuil out of its tight plastic pods, but at least wild bears are not rampaging across Minneapolis, snarfling up small children. The Mississippi still flows south. We have not been invaded by Wisconsin. The yellow goldfinches come to the feeder. The ducks swim in the pond. The frogs are croaking at night. It stays light later and later. Nobody I know has been caught paying hush money to a porn star. Life is good. Sex is less frequent than when we were young and couldn’t keep our clothes on for more than an hour; now we make love only on birthdays and anniversaries if there is a full moon and the Twins are ahead in the eighth inning, but it’s all the more pleasurable for being rare. It’s like Paris that way: if you lived there you’d just be complaining incessantly the way the French do, but a biennial visit can be marvelous. Fishing season opens, which gives men a chance to eat bad food, go without bathing, pee outdoors, and sit in a boat for hours and be monosyllabic, but misery makes for good company as I recall from back when I went to political fundraisers. I’m a Democrat and at our events you wind up standing in a bunch of people talking about economic injustice or declining test scores in secondary ed. Not what I’d call a fun evening. Trump’s success is simple: entertainment. He knows his crowd and tells them what they want to hear: the system is rigged against them and it’s time to overthrow the government. He says stuff you never heard in high school civics class and it’s thrilling. They get to whoop and yell for revolution, knowing this is theater, only intended to terrify Yalies and Times columnists and the book club ladies. I went to a Trump rally in New Jersey last week. I wore a fake moustache and dark glasses. I loved it. He came out collecting donations — for a hundred bucks you get a degree from Trump University and a round trip on Trump Air. He was raking it in. He yelled, “You people are dumber than stumps. I may be a mad hatter but you have the brains of a box of hammers. You couldn’t find your way home if you were standing in the driveway. Without me, you’d be hopeless.” And he pulled out a pistol and fired into the crowd and a fat man fell down dead and the crowd cheered. “See what I mean? I knew you liked me,” he said. I never saw a candidate do that before. I read that younger and younger people are now going around with hearing aids and is it any wonder, what with the world clamoring for their attention as they turn up their headphones to shut out the clamor and now baseball, our sacred national pastime, is employing DJs to make rock ’n’ roll racket to engage people who get bored sitting through the outs, waiting for a grand slam. Nonetheless it is spring, the trees blossom, birds sing, some things remain the same. I saw neighbor kids waiting on the corner for a ride Saturday evening, she was very elegant in a ball gown and he wore a tuxedo and was trying to make conversation. I wanted to warn them about vodka, that it can go down very easily and then be painful coming up, but why would they listen to an old man? I hope they like each other. Friendship is a good start for romance, better than the zing of the strings of your heart. And now I miss my sweetie, far off in Minnesota. She’s the butter on my bagel, the syrup on my toasted waffle. I count the days until she returns.
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

June 22, 2023 (NEW)

Thursday

7:30 p.m.

Cary Memorial Hall, Lexington, MA

Lexington, MA

Garrison Keillor brings his solo show to Lexington, MA. Be prepared to laugh and sing along as you celebrate all that unites us.

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June 24, 2023 (New date)

Saturday

7:30 p.m.

Park Theatre, Jaffrey, NH

Jaffrey, NH

Garrison Keillor brings his solo show to Jaffrey, NH. Be prepared to laugh and sing along as you celebrate all that unites us.

buy tickets

June 25, 2023 (NEW DATE)

Sunday

7:00 p.m.

Paramount Hudson Valley, Peekskill, NY

Peekskill, NY

Garrison Keillor brings his solo show to Peekskill NY. Be prepared to laugh and sing along as you celebrate all that unite us.

July 5, 2023

Wednesday

8:00 p.m.

Ramshead Onstage, Annapolis, MD

Annapolis, MD

Garrison Keillor brings his solo show to Annapolis, MD. Be prepared to laugh and sing along as you celebrate all that unites us.

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July 6, 2023

Thursday

8:00 p.m.

Sellersville Theatre, Sellersville, PA

Sellersville, PA

Garrison Keillor and Robin & Linda Williams come to Sellersville, PA for an evening of poetry, gospel, sing-alongs and the News from Lake Wobegon.

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July 8, 2023

Saturday

8:00 p.m.

Lime Kiln Theater, Lexington, VA

Lexington, VA

Garrison Keillor and Robin & Linda Williams come to the Lime Kiln Theater in Lexington, VA for an evening of poetry, gospel, sing-alongs and the News from Lake Wobegon. 8:00 PM

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August 4, 2023

Friday

7:30 p.m.

The Opera House, Boothbay Harbor, ME

Boothbay Harbor, ME

Garrison Keillor brings his solo show to Boothbay Harbor, ME. Be prepared to laugh and sing along as you celebrate all that unites us.

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August 6, 2023

Sunday

7:30 p.m.

Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Ctr, Old Saybrook, CT

Old Saybrook, CT

Garrison Keillor brings his solo show to Old Saybrook, CT. Be prepared to laugh and sing along as you celebrate all that unites us.

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August 7, 2023

Monday

7:00 p.m.

Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Ctr, Old Saybrook, CT

Old Saybrook, CT (2nd show)

Garrison Keillor brings his solo show to Old Saybrook, CT. Be prepared to laugh and sing along as you celebrate all that unites us.

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August 27, 2023

Sunday

7:30 p.m.

Big Top Chautauqua, Bayfield, WI

Bayfield, WI

Garrison Keillor and his Prairie Home Friends return to Big Top Chautauqua in Bayfield WI. Singalongs, stories, duets, comedy and a hot band. Be prepared to laugh and sing along as you celebrate all that unites us.

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Radio

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The Writer’s Almanac for Thursday, June 1, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Thursday, June 1, 2023

On this day in 1974, Henry Jay Heimlich published his “Heimlich Maneuver” in the Journal of Emergency Medicine. The article was called “Pop Goes the Café Coronary.” Less than three weeks later, the maneuver was used successfully in a restaurant in Bellevue, Washington. As of 2006, the American Red Cross recommends the “five and five” approach: five sharp blows to the back, followed by five abdominal thrusts if the back blows are not effective.

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The Writer’s Almanac for Wednesday, May 31, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Wednesday, May 31, 2023

It’s the birthday of Walt Whitman, born in West Hills, Long Island, New York (1819). Whitman worked as a printing press typesetter, teacher, journalist, and newspaper editor. He was working as a carpenter, his father’s trade, and living with his mother in Brooklyn, when he read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The Poet,” which claimed the new United States needed a poet to properly capture its spirit. Whitman decided he was that poet. “I was simmering, simmering, simmering,” Whitman later said. “Emerson brought me to a boil.”

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The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, May 30, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, May 30, 2023

On this day in 1922, the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated. The monument was first proposed in 1867, but construction didn’t begin until 1914; the cornerstone was set in 1915. Architect Henry Bacon designed it to resemble the Parthenon, believing that a defender of democracy should be memorialized in a building that pays homage to the birthplace of democracy.

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The Writer’s Almanac for Monday, May 29, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Monday, May 29, 2023

It’s the birthday of comedian Bob Hope (1903), born Leslie Townes Hope in Eltham, near London. His family moved to the United States when he was four years old, and he grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1941, he performed his first show for soldiers, a group of airmen stationed in March Field, California. It was the beginning of nearly 60 years of shows at military bases at home and abroad

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A Prairie Home Companion: June 3, 2006

A Prairie Home Companion: June 3, 2006

Our Hollywood Bowl 2006 feature celebrating the release of our movie with guests Meryl Streep, Virginia Madsen, and John C. Reilly; Sally Dworsky, Shelby Lynne, and Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver.

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The Writer’s Almanac for Sunday, May 28, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Sunday, May 28, 2023

Today is the birthday of American poet May Swenson, born Anna Thilda “May” Swenson, in Logan, Utah (1913). Swedish was the primary language in her house, and Swenson was an avid reader from a young age, with one of her favorite writers being Edgar Allan Poe. Swenson worked as a stenographer, ghostwriter, secretary, and finally, at a publishing house.

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The Writer’s Almanac for Saturday, May 27, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Saturday, May 27, 2023

Today is the birthday of marine biologist and writer Rachel Carson, born in Springdale, Pennsylvania (1907). She was an English major at the Pennsylvania College for Women, but in her junior year, she took a biology course. President Kennedy read Silent Spring during that summer in 1962 and formed a presidential commission to re-examine the government’s pesticide policy. The commission endorsed Carson’s findings.

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The Writer’s Almanac for Friday, May 26, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Friday, May 26, 2023

Today is the birthday of photographer Dorothea Lange, born Dorothea Nutzhorn in Hoboken, New Jersey (1895). She contracted polio when she was seven, and her left leg was noticeably weaker than her right for the rest of her life. During World War II, the War Relocation Authority hired Lange to document the government’s internment of Japanese Americans.

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The Writer’s Almanac for Thursday, May 25, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Thursday, May 25, 2023

Today is the birthday of philosopher, poet, and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was born in Boston in 1803, and his father’s unmarried sister, Mary Moody Emerson, was a great influence on him. In his book Nature (1836), Emerson first introduced the concept of Transcendentalism — the idea that spiritual truth could be gained by intuition rather than by established doctrine or text — and he would become a leader of that movement.

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The Writer’s Almanac for Wednesday, May 24, 2023

The Writer’s Almanac for Wednesday, May 24, 2023

It’s the birthday of Bob Dylan, born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota (1941). He grew up in the declining mining town of Hibbing, Minnesota. He started performing in Greenwich Village clubs and coffeehouses, using the name Bob Dylan (he denies that he took his name from Dylan Thomas). He released his first album, Bob Dylan, in 1962. Dylan won a Nobel Prize in literature in 2016.

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Writing

O Frabjous Day! Callooh, Callay!

The debt limit deal takes an enormous load off my mind, weeks of worrying about what we’d do when the economy crashed and we lose everything and live on the street near a soup kitchen, but now apparently the ship will not sink, and as I understand the deal, the Republicans will raise the debt limit if the Ten Commandments are inscribed on every dollar bill, Disney will make no movies that portray fairies, the southern border will be sealed tight except for food deliveries and migrant farmworkers, all nouns will have the gender of the person speaking, and the word “gay” will simply go away.

I’m willing to give them that. I’m a lib they don’t own. There are other words for “gay” such as “frisky,” “vivacious,” “spiffy,” and “effervescent.” I’ll bet Governor DeSantis has had his effervescent days when he wore bright colors and said frolicsome things, though this has not been evident so far in his campaign for the White House. As for the Current Leading Candidate for the Republican nomination, gaiety seems quite alien. Fulmination is his style. I don’t recall ever seeing a photograph of him petting a dog or hugging a small child or even holding hands with his current wife. So sad, but of course that’s his business, not mine.

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Thou shalt not be dumber than dirt

The bill in the Texas legislature to require public schools to post the Ten Commandments in every classroom means that teachers may need to explain to small children what “adultery” means and also “take the Lord’s name in vain” but the real problem is the commandment to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. A great many public schools send athletic teams to compete in weekend tournaments that make it hard for players to make it home for the Sabbath, especially if they’re Jewish. In Texas, a conflict between football and religious faith is not going to turn out well for religion. And taking the Lord’s name in vain is inextricably intertwined with sports. Golf, especially.

I grew up among devout Christians who did not say “gosh” or “darn it” because they took euphemisms seriously. My mother would say, “Oh fudge” but more likely, “Oh for pity’s sake.” I’m an old man and cursing still feels unnatural to me; I’ll bet plenty of Texas legislators who voted for the T.C. bill curse up a storm.

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Cheerfulness preview

Read the first chapter of Garrison’s newest book, CHEERFULNESS and find out where to purchase.

Read Chapter One here

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Manhattan man living in the past

I was a big shot at one time, which I knew because when I went to work at the office, twelve people suddenly got very busy. I had a popular radio show and I pulled the plug on it not wanting to become a living legend, a last connection to broadcasting’s past when music came on big black vinyl discs and everyone had an ashtray on their desk.

I left Minnesota because there were so many middle-aged people there who loathed the sight of me because they’d been forced by their parents to listen to my show on long car trips and I was afraid one of them might throttle me so I moved to Manhattan where I felt very safe. Now my office is my kitchen and it’s just me and the coffeemaker and the toaster, and eventually my sweetie walks in and says, “What are you doing up so early?”

Read More

Spring once more, what a surprise

I hear from back home that the wretched winter has concluded and the trees blossom and people are allowing themselves to think about resuming normal life though of course Minnesotans know that winter, like COVID, can return at any time and as it says in Ecclesiastes, “What has been is what shall be. One generation comes as another departs. We shovel the walk and the wind blows the neighbor’s unshoveled snow over us, making our labor meaningless. It is what it is.”

It’s not a sunshiny view of life but it serves us well, the stoical It Could Be Worse perspective. Yes, we’re flabby, uncool, discouraged, not flossing regularly, our mental acuity is somewhat diminished from when we were in the eighth grade, we can’t remember passwords, we need a paring knife to try to pry NyQuil out of its tight plastic pods, but at least wild bears are not rampaging across Minneapolis, snarfling up small children. The Mississippi still flows south. We have not been invaded by Wisconsin. The yellow goldfinches come to the feeder. The ducks swim in the pond. The frogs are croaking at night. It stays light later and later. Nobody I know has been caught paying hush money to a porn star.

Read More

What we don’t know we must invent

The past is so fascinating to me now that I have so much of it and last Monday night at a New York nightclub I listened to a big band of men in tuxedos playing 1920s jazz that I heard when I babysat the neighbors’ kids when I was 10, which I did for the chance to watch TV, which we, being Sanctified Brethren, did not have in our home, but these were Lutherans so they did, and after I wore the kids out and got them to bed, I watched old movies about sophisticated people dancing to syncopated rhythms just like what the band was playing. My Brethren considered this music wicked, apt to lead to gin, maybe fornication, but at the age of 10 I found it joyful and I still do.

Brethren music was draggy, even the hymns about joy were sung lamentfully, and the recognition of the happiness of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Tiger Rag” and “Shreveport Stomp” was a tiny step toward independent judgment.

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A day in May sitting in the Park

I go to the park because I don’t read the paper because there are too many celebrities to keep track of like Madonna, My Maia, Meghan Markle, Marla Maples, Mary Murray, Marilyn Manson, Marsha Mason, Marky Mark, Mike Marcus, Melissa McCarthy, Mo’Nique, Moses Maimonides, Lin-Manuel Miranda, not to mention Mitch McConnell and Miss Minnesota — the mind spins at the multiplicity of eminence and immortality that I’ve moved away from mass media and the megaworld and simply go walk in the park and admire the nameless walkers. benchwarmers, birdwatchers, ballplayers, and realize that celebrity being so widespread, it is anonymity that is special. Fame is an old story and the nameless are a delightful mystery.

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Why I am not joining the strike

I salute the Hollywood writers who went out on strike this past week but I can tell you that we essayists won’t be joining them. For one thing, the essay is deeply imbedded in our nation’s very identity (U.S.A.) but for another thing, a national essay strike would be like a National Husbands Day of Silence, most wives wouldn’t care and many wouldn’t notice.

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It’s a good time, there’s none better

I remember when I was six and was allowed to do dishes with my older brother and sister while Mother cleaned the kitchen with Lysol: it was a ceremony, a step into maturity, being entrusted to handle the family china, a mark of maturity for a little boy, and, busy, crowded around the sink, we talked a lot, a big pleasure in a family in which children were not encouraged to speak up. And I made my brother and sister laugh, describing my teacher’s upper arms that bounced as she wrote on the blackboard, that we named Hoppy and Bob, and also when I said that Washington looked like Lincoln’s wife. To think I could amuse my elders was a real spark of self-esteem.

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The beauty of being a guy

When you bang up your knee so it swells up like an elephant’s and it brings tears to your eyes to take a step, the orthopedic guy gives you a knee brace to wear requiring four straps to be wrapped tight around the leg and hooked and held tight by Velcro strips, a piece of equipment that I, a professional humorist with less mechanical ability than the average primate, need to remove every night when I go to bed and reattach in the morning. My wife could do this in a jiffy but I made her go to Minnesota to play the opera (she’s a violist) because I love her and because I don’t want her to see me as a pitiful helpless wretch. You understand.

Why should two people be miserable? One is enough.

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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.”

Recent reviews:

“Fans laughed, applauded and sang along throughout Sunday night’s two-hour show” -Jeff Baenen, AP News

“His shows can, for a couple of hours, transform an audience of even so-called coastal elites into a small-town community with an intimacy only radio and its podcast descendants can achieve” -Chris Barton, LA Times

“[Keillor is] an expert at making you feel at home with his low-key, familiar style. Comfortable is his specialty.” -Betsie Freeman, Omaha-World Herald

 

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