At lunch with a pregnant woman, you talk about ordinary life, family, summer, the food, the elation of the kids at the graduation we’d attended that morning and the pride of their parents, and we never set foot in politics at all. The naked ex-emperor is 77 and he is irrelevant to the life around us so it’s a pleasure to ignore him. By the time this boy gets around to studying American fascism, I will be gone from the world and unconcerned about the weaponization of falsehoods. But I want to leave something behind that this boy might cherish. I don’t expect him to read my novels. I only want him to know I existed and that I was capable of delight. E.g.––We live by kindness and grace,Good manners, books, an embrace,Good water, good light,A pencil to write,And a bright orange stub to erase,And yet I cannot forgetThose great bawdy stories, you bet,When we sat with good folksAnd told dirty jokesUntil everyone’s trousers were wet.God bless the child. I don’t know his name but I pray for him diligently day by day.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music

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Thoreau’s great work wasn’t Walden but his daily journal in which he wrote about his walks in the woods and fields, what he saw, what he loved. Walden is blighted by a great deal of pontificating about solitude and independence. If there had been a Mrs. Thoreau, she’d have agreed with him on “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.” And she would’ve scoffed at his nonsense — “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” He was chewing on the wrong weed when he came up with that, a line that has led people to waste years writing a bad novel who could’ve been happy bus drivers. Henry wouldn’t have said so much about the necessity of solitude with a woman looking over his shoulder.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music

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Biden needs a sport to put to rest the whispers about dodderiness. It’s nice to see him putting his arms around his dog and his grandkids — his predecessor was no hugger except with a few foreign leaders — but Biden needs to be seen being physically active. The press is waiting, cameras poised, hoping to see the guy stumble, and what you need to do, Joe, is go hiking in a dense forested area in chaps and boots, a leather vest, a bright red cap, a faithful dog at your side, a shotgun on your shoulder. The dog dashes ahead and flushes a pheasant from the brush and you raise the gun and fire it.Yes, this will offend some vegans and progressives and people with pet pheasants, but everything you do comes with a price, and Dems need to broaden the base. The FDR wing of the party has faded away, we need to attract some people with tattoos and purple hair. Dems do well among fencers and archers but you need to connect with the rural male population that loves firearms. Guns have been around since the 14th century. Get with it. Teddy Roosevelt had the disadvantage of a pampered New York upbringing and he overcame it by going out west and shooting things.

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I’m not nostalgic about olden times. I love these passwords and PIN numbers that give me the sense of foreign agents trying to get into my email, steal my prescription for metoprolol. I am fond of the GPS woman who gives us directions in such a sympathetic tone, not condescending at all. I adore my laptop and have no warm memories of my Underwood typewriter. Someday I believe the GPS woman may become a therapist and tell me to put regrets behind and prescribe a memory-loss drug that will do exactly that.I do feel that young people are overloaded with electronic stimulation. I worry about the environment and economics. I sat in the Oyster Bar and ate a cheeseburger and overheard two smart guys talking about the banking system in a way that made me queasy and I said to them, “But it’s not as bad as it looks, right?” and one of them said, “No, it’s worse.” I heard about a college history teacher who was asked by a student, “You talked about World War Two, does that mean there was a First?” This was not high school, this was c-o-l-l-i-t-c-h.

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I hung out with the customers before and after (there’s no backstage at this amphitheater so I entered and exited through the audience) and it’s startling to hear middle-aged people tell me they listened to “Prairie Home” as kids, grew up with Guy Noir and Dusty and Lefty, I was sort of a distant uncle to them. I was very busy those years, hosting the show, writing it, touring around, and I was an ambitious author. My hard drive is full of the rusted wreckage of unfinished novels and stories and screenplays. I was not paying attention to the radio audience, it was only a statistic and I didn’t really believe it. And now here were the statistics shaking my hand. I stood next to them while they took a picture of the two of us.

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The pleasure of moving is the excavation of the past. I open a box and here’s a photo of my fifth-grade class, the eager neatly-combed-and-dressed boy with glasses sitting behind John Poate is me. I am still that eager boy, heavier but anxious to do well. There is a letter from a fan of my radio show, “Every Saturday at 5 p.m., everything else ceased and we gathered around the radio.” Also, in a brown envelope, eight color photographs of my innards taken by the surgical team that installed a pig valve in my heart: the valve is pale pink, the innards are dark red. And there is a letter from a beloved aunt in 1995, reproaching me for traveling to Rome with my fiancée, engaging no doubt in premarital sex, embarking on a path of philandering and adultery, for which there would be no forgiveness. It’s a powerful articulate letter and I admire her for writing it, which she did out of love.

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When I moved out of Minneapolis, I sorted through personal papers and it struck me that, in hundreds of pictures of me, I am not smiling in a single one. I look like a mortician with a migraine. Partly this is due to the cold. Winter is brutal and you keep your mouth shut so you won’t frost your lungs. Teachers told me that. Plus which, in Minnesota there never were many people around so what was the point of exercising personal charm? Plus which, there are strong Lutheran tendencies there, people consider humor frivolous, maybe sacrilegious. Jesus wept; He didn’t laugh.I feel much freer in New York. I sometimes talk to myself when walking in the park, assuming I have something interesting to say. If you did this in Minnesota, there would be an intervention, you’d go into rehab for self-consciousness training. In New York, people enjoy this. It’s a looser culture. Crosswalks are ignored and “Do Not Walk” signs are considered only a suggestion.

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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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