Garrison Keillor's Podcast

10.27.84Carl Krebsbach’s brother, Lyle, bought a new car this week from a St. Cloud dealer. The little red foreign car was not available in Lake Wobegon. Lyle saw a picture of this car in a magazine and he just had to have it. On Tuesday, the car wouldn’t start because someone put a potato up the tailpipe. Lyle has lived in town for twelve years so he’s still seen as an outsider. He needs some friendship.The host was at the Sidetrack Tap a while back playing the baseball pinball machine and doing pretty well but lost his last ball. Carl put his hand on his shoulder, which almost brought him to tears. Lyle walks into the Sidetrack and he still has to give his order when Wally knows the order of all the regulars.The high point of the week was the show put on by the Lundeen’s Gospel Birds up at the church. Attendance had been getting smaller and smaller so they needed to do something. The Deacons called a Christian booking company to book events at the church. Ernie and Irma Lundeen and the Performing Gospel Birds was the program on Wednesday. The church was packed. Ernie and Irma walked out in white satin outfits and they were covered in live birds. The birds were singing at the top of their voices. As Ernie bowed his head, the birds went silent. It was a 45-minute program full of flying and swooping and singing. The birds — dressed in little animal outfits — reenacted the Noah’s Ark story. It was stunning. The birds then took up the collection as people held up dollar bills. Then little parakeets played “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” on tiny silver bells. Finally, Irma said she was going to send the birds out to people as they were praying, and a bird would land on their shoulders. It was the blessing of the birds, and everyone felt blessed by this event.

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What I found inspiring were two Scripture readings, one from the prophet Micah, where the reader faced the line, “O my people, remember what happened from Shittim to Gilgal that you may know the saving acts of the Lord,” and she slowed down when she saw “Shittim” and got traction and very carefully pronounced it “shi-team.” I was the only one in the sanctuary immature enough to enjoy this moment. There were no 13-year-old boys there, just me. I could tell from her voice that the reader had been dreading this for an hour, trying to decide between “shy-tim” and “shi-team” and fearing that she’d slip and pronounce it phonetically and a marble angel would fall and crash and red lights would flash and people would require treatment for post-traumatic stress.

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She also loves to look at art, which I can take or leave and mostly leave. I go to museums to overhear conversations between couples, usually the woman telling the man, “You don’t like it, do you” and he says, “It’s interesting,” and she seizes on his lack of enthusiasm for the splashy canvas he’s looking at, thinking “I could’ve done that,” and she says, “If you’d just take the time to learn something about art, you’d enjoy it more,” as if this is a personal failing on his part.The guy majored in economics, he’s on track to become a vice president at Amalgamated Linguini, they vacation on the Cape, the kids are in private schools, and suddenly she wants him to be an art critic and talk about ambience, brushwork, and chiaroscuro? And she walks on to the next piece as he follows her like a dog on a leash.I find this more interesting than anything on the walls, the competitive aspects of marriage. Women’s ace card is the eye roll; they learn this by the age of 14 and use it on their mothers, and then on the husbands.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music

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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.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music

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Prison reform is a truly noble cause because there is no political constituency demanding it. Every time I fly into LaGuardia, I look out at the hellhole of Rikers Island, a prison right out of Dickens’s England, where men languish who are unable to make bail and life is brutal, and the Democratic hacks of New York won’t touch this issue lest they be thought weak on crime. Emily knew all about this, and she nodded.And if you take on prison reform, then you need to reform our broken mental health system that was destroyed by my fellow liberals forty years ago as “deinstitutionalization,” the idea that rather than enormous hellholes, you put the inmates in small hellholes where we wouldn’t be so aware of them. Emily knows about this too. And whatever progress you make will be painfully slow: nobody will come up with an algorithm to produce social justice.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music

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The woman came by a little later and said, “How’s your breakfast, dear?” I said, “It’s wonderful,” though actually it was rather mediocre, but I didn’t want to cause her anxiety because — this is going to sound pathetic but forgive me — her “hon” had given me a very warm feeling deep inside. Me, a published author who once got a terrific review in the Times and who’s attended luncheons at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, but neither the Times nor the Academicians ever called me “hon” and she did and it means something to me.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music

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There is so much plasticity and pretense in the world today that when I come across the authentic such as a little kid bawling because his sister kicked him, it restores my interest in life. He isn’t trying to sell me something or even raise money for a good cause, it’s true feeling. His sense of injustice is real. I think he should hit her, which might spare his having to go through expensive therapy in years to come, but he does not. Perhaps he’ll be a stand-up comic instead.I find authenticity in church, in the prayers, in the psalm, and last Sunday we sang “How Great Thou Art” and it was so joyful it reduced me to rubble. We sang all four verses and the chorus built each time around and the third and fourth choruses were so euphoric, they would’ve melted a stone-cold atheist and my bass voice got shaky, hearing those sopranos soaring. People held their arms in the air, we were freed from our Episcopalian decorum into realms of pure joy, I get teared up now writing about it.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music

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Texting replaced the postcard mostly, and I have a shoebox full of old postcards from long-departed relatives about the happy afternoon spent in Pasadena or Lincoln’s home in Springfield or the Empire State Building. My people were reluctant to express happiness for fear it might be bragging but I love to think of them writing about the “lovely day” they spent walking around Springfield.The box needs to be discarded but I love my mother’s penmanship. I will recognize it even when I’m deep into dementia and have forgotten the street names of Minneapolis (Aldrich, Bryant, Colfax, Dupont, Emerson, Fremont, etc.). I come from serious people but when they wrote postcards they were always happy. Look in my shoebox, see for yourself.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music

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Journalism is about tragedy and malfeasance and corruption, it’s not journalists’ job to report on happiness, you need to experience that directly, which I did, night after night, standing in dim light among strangers many of whom intensely disagree with me, but I feel their humanity, their love of beauty, their cheerfulness, my fellow Americans, and I shall leave politics to people smarter than I, and keep my distance from anguish, at least until next summer when I may exercise my right to be righteous. Or maybe not. I do think the House and Senate, instead of opening sessions with a prayer, would do well to open with a song. Maybe “We know we belong to the land and the land we belong to is grand,” followed by “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.” It might help.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music

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I feel that opera should be inclusive and tell the stories of ordinary people and not just European aristocracy and so I am sketching an opera in which the soprano is furious at the tenor and showing him the proper way to clean a bathroom — “Apri gli occhi, guarda dietro le cose” (Open your eyes, look behind things) — and to calm her he proclaims his love for her — “Farò di tutto per renderti felice” (I will do anything to make you happy) — and as he does his pantaloons start to slide and she points at them but in his passion he doesn’t notice and the pants fall to the floor. I was wearing underwear when my pants fell but I leave it to the director to decide. The tenor’s back is to the audience and personally I think opera could use a pair of what the Italians would call “glutei nudi.”Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music

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