Garrison Keillor's Podcast

I’ve known some great fathers, my brother Philip for one, my nephews Will and Douglas, my friends Mark and Tony and Sandy and Fred. Patience is one of their virtues, optimism, a willingness to look the other way: in other words, a sense of humor. Had I been a postal clerk or a plumber, I’d’ve maybe been a better father but I got engrossed in show business and for a few years was fairly popular and was gone a lot and they grew up fatherless. They have done pretty well on their own, all three of them, and I claim no credit. It is what it is. But when the National Fatherhood League gathers for its annual banquet and the bestowing of the Papa awards, include me out. Same with Uncles’ Day and Cousins’. But I am working on being better at husbanding, and I think she notices: I get near her and smell sandalwood and chamomile oil and that stuff goes for thousands per ounce. I must be doing something right.

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A little gift for our Garrison Keillor and Friends subscribers. In the Back Room (paid subscribers) you receive a monologue from the 80’s weekly.12.24.83It was bitterly cold in Lake Wobegon this week. Thirty below and cars wouldn't start. Everyone in Minnesota has jumper cables. Kids even get them in decorator colors as graduation gifts. If cars don't start, they use the cables to spell SOS in the snowbank. In Lake Wobegon it is a matter of pride if your car starts in cold weather, though people stretch the truth about it.Monday morning Lyle woke up feeling extra cold in his bedroom; there was a sheet of ice on the window and his water pipes were frozen. His car wouldn't start and he had the bright idea to light charcoal and place it under his engine. Well, the garage was saved but not the car. Lyle's brother-in-law, Carl, is the one that has the car that starts and is able to fix everything so it's embarrassing to make these mistakes, though he does know that Carl would be there in a moment if needed.

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I tell jokes because I remember a time in my life when I crowded into a booth at a bar with eight other guys and some guys leaning over us and we told jokes and now I don’t see people doing that anymore. It’s a guy responsibility — women are worriers, men are kidders — and I remember one afternoon, over rounds of beer and bumps, that we told 75 different How Many Whatsis Does It Take To Change A Light Bulb jokes — we kept a list (Irishmen, therapists, optimists, agnostics, Russians, English majors) and all of them were reasonably funny. No more.So naturally I wonder if AA and rehab and treatment centers are responsible for the disappearance of the joke circle, and instead of pickles walking into a bar, we have a circle of men on folding chairs talking about their emotionally distant fathers who failed to validate them. So a man talked about his father who was a magician who cut people in half. “Did he work in a carnival or circus?” “No, he worked from home. I have a half-brother and a half-sister.”

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Here is a little gift to our GK and Friends subscribers. (In the Back Room, the paid subscribers receive a monologue from the 80’s weekly)12.18.82Calm falls over LW the week before Christmas, yet there still are no Christmas lights on Main St. GK went back after school was done and went to Christmas Eve service with the eldest Ingqvist daughter (they had been chatting through the fall). He was anything but calm at the service. As they sang “Silent Night” at the service, the congregation broke into tears. No matter how hard he tried he couldn’t bring up a tear. After the service, the two of them were talking and he said something he thought was funny. She told him how terribly cold he was and she didn’t want to see him anymore. Now the tears came. GK also remembered the story of the Lundeen family, Mel and Clarice and their eight children. Mel had fallen off the barn and was in the hospital for four months. Christmas was going to be sparse during this time and James was particularly disappointed he wasn’t getting a Lionel train set. BUT when dad finally came home just before Christmas, they all learned this was the greatest present.

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My bio in 100 words is as follows: My parents were in love with each other, had six kids, I was third, an invisible child. I had no interest in crashing into people so didn’t play football or hockey and avoided brain damage. I dabbled in poetry and when I was 14, I read A.J. Liebling and decided to be a writer. I went into radio, which requires no special skill, and took the sunrise shift, which turned me toward comedy, listeners don’t want grievous introspective reflections at 5 a.m. I told stories for forty years and still do. I married well on the third try.

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I accept the fact that I am a back issue, a relic, and that younger people have taken over. Eight years ago I played the Hollywood Bowl; a few weeks ago I played a 200-seater in Menomonie, Wisconsin. It was fun. People in the seats talked back to me. We hung out in the lobby afterward. I caught influenza from one of them. Do Taylor’s fans get to share their germs with her? I doubt it very much.

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I come from pot roast people and the past two months have been rough on me, when, doing penance for the holidays, we’ve been on a bunny rabbit diet, grazing on bowls of greenery. My mother made pot roast for Sunday dinner, which made me think of it as sacred food. She put chuck roast in a covered pan in the oven at low heat when we left for church and when we returned four hours later, the kitchen was redolent with goodness. I don’t recall that she ever tossed a salad. Cows ate salads so whatever good was in them came to us by way of beef.

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I loved my five days there. I encountered keen politeness. The truck stop guy who said, “I appreciate your business” when I paid for my two Butterfingers. The hotel clerk. I walked a long hall to my room and three cleaning ladies looked up and said, “Good morning.” When I left Austin on Monday, a man walked up to me in the airport and said quietly, “I want to thank you for all the pleasure you’ve given people over the years.”Nobody ever said that to me before in just that graceful way. I was touched. At my age, you should’ve given some pleasure to people and he was thanking me for it, not as a fan but on behalf of people in general. Now I wish I had thrown my arms around him.

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And then around midnight a woman walked in, a civilian, no blue on her except her eyes. She was a Unitarian minister, making rounds, saw my name and remembered a column I wrote back in the Bush era saying what a terrible mistake the Iraq War was. My one good protest column and she remembered it all these years later. I told her I’m Episcopalian and that I’ve read Emerson and decided not to come forward. “We never give up hope,” she said. “This building, the George F. Baker Pavilion — he went to my church, so you’re one of us,” She was very funny. She said, “We think of Episcopalians as people who write thank-you notes after orgies.”“That’s high church; I’m low church.”

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I’m a historic guy. They could put me in a museum. I went to college when tuition was $71/quarter so we didn’t have to ask our parents for money so we got to go into the arts. There were no laptops, no iPhones, no Airplane Mode. I regaled the Lovelanders with stories about the Fifties, back when Minnesota winters were ferocious. I lived through the bitter winter of 1948 when the temp got down to minus 70 and many of us Minnesotans became comatose, our metabolism stopped, there was no neurological response, and a month later I awoke in a narrow wooden box wearing makeup, which I’d never worn before. It was interesting. I should’ve dressed more warmly but as someone said, “Good judgment comes from experience and much experience comes from bad judgment.” And thanks to my mistake I have experienced the afterlife and I told them about it in Loveland. Someday I’ll come to your town and tell you.

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