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Comments from the week of Feb 7, 2022

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Dear Garrison,

When they tried to take you down over a hiccup, I suffered with you as your work disappeared and you were made out to be an untouchable. And I celebrate with you that you won. Not only by having more fun but now you have the freedom to write, publish, be on stage occasionally, etc. It occurs to me that you were one of our sacrificial lambs — an innocent (but not without blemish) who suffered because of the sins of so many other guys who have treated women poorly, and worse, over the centuries.

Ron Graham

Thanks for your loyal support, sir, and you’re right about me having more fun, and as for the suffering, it’s all back there in the past and it’s an interesting story but I’m not going to tell it. The old friend who accused me asked for anonymity and I see no reason to disrupt her life. I’m looking at 80 in a few months and so what’s the point? Boom Town comes out in April, I’m working on my Salad of Ballads and a new novel The LowBoys about a doo-wop group in 1957 and a musical Shakespeare’s Mom and a new edition of my memoir with some valuable additions and out working a few shows a month and doing my two columns a week on SubStack. No deadlines, so life is easy. My girl is happy, my wife is walking six miles a day and looking at art and having coffee with friends and we went to see Company on Broadway Saturday night and then the youth choir sang a Sondheim song at the 10 a.m. service Sunday. Life is good. My wife has a crush on the skater Nathan Chen but I trust her completely.

GK

Garrison, I’m listening to a cassette tape of News From Lake Wobegon. The cardboard insert on the tape box has a little note from you on it. In that note you dedicate the tape to an Uncle Lou Powell. Was that a real person or did you make him up? I’d love to hear more if you have time. I hope you are well and God Bless.
Kindest Regards,
Tom in Albuquerque, NM

My great-uncle Lew Powell was a favorite of mine. He visited us with his wife, Ada, almost every Saturday night and brought with him a bag of peanut brittle and a box of sugar wafers from his candy company, Ada Claire Candies in south Minneapolis. He loved to tell stories about his childhood in Iowa and Minnesota, about my Keillor grandpa who married Lew’s sister Dora, and about Powell family history going way back to the early 19th century. He was a beautiful storyteller and he had good material. His grandfather David Powell was a farmer but had a restless streak and against the wishes of his wife, Martha Ann, he kept moving the family westward, PA to OH to MI to IL to IA and MO and then got the urge to join the Colorado silver rush, and joined a band of adventurers, got to Denver too late to file a claim but was elected to the legislature, and finally wound up in OK where he joined the land rush and filed a claim and then died of a heart attack. I sat very quietly on the floor and listened to every word Uncle Lew said. David’s children were the opposite of restless and stayed planted wherever they reached maturity. Martha settled in MO. David came back and tried to persuade her to come to OK with him, which she declined to do but nine months later she had their eleventh child. We have a good deal of his correspondence and it would make a good historical novel, if only I had the ambition.

GK

Dear Mr. Keillor,

After recent readings of your posts, I have come to the conclusion that your style of sentence structuring, languid and humorous, is a style of writing gloriously unconstrained by the proper punctuation rules that my sixth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Hall, insisted that I and other mortals must adhere to. To a writer of your lofty caliber, I yield to artistic license, but it does beg the question, are you paid by the comma?

Larry Dudley

Larry, I do think it’s important to know Mrs. Hall’s rules and to respect them in the sixth grade, but eventually a person needs to cross the boundary and roam around the countryside and have fun with sentences. (I think Mrs. Hall wouldn’t have a problem with that sentence or the next one.) I am old enough now to have fun and frankly that’s the best reason for doing anything. One’s great ambitions are all burnt off and after Trump politics makes no sense at all and America feels like a foreign country, so why not loosen the traces and have a good time. I embraced sobriety twenty years ago and the fun I used to get from a gin martini I now find in putting words on the screen. God bless us every one.

GK

Hi, Garrison.

Rather than the RV outside an abandoned factory, my 94-year-old father and I live in a nice neighborhood in Scranton, where most of the neighbors know one another’s names and lend a hand when needed. Despite this, Dad thinks someone is going to make off with our eminently ordinary porch furniture or the garden hose in the back yard. He has a hissy fit if I leave the front door open while I am walking the dog and keeps the curtains in his room closed at all times. Apparently, paranoia is alive and well in Scranton. I always assumed this was age-related (born of the universal phenomenon of selective memory and the tendency to wax nostalgic about the “good old days” when life was simple and therefore better). So it is refreshing to see that you have bucked the trend. Still, I hope you will visit Scranton one day!

Pat McC.

I’d love to visit Scranton. Find a charitable nonprofit that wants me to do a benefit and I’ll come do it. A school, a library, a church, anything upstanding. I’ll tell some stories, none of them particularly nostalgic, and the high point will be an a cappella improvised sing-along in which the audience discovers they really do know the words.

GK

Dear Garrison,

Your piece on Elizabeth Bishop on The Writer’s Almanac February 8 left out a beautiful story about the poet, who was born in Worcester, MA. I attach a historical account.
Thanks for listening and “keep in touch!”

Craig Armstrong
USA expat living in Lund, Sweden

Thanks for the account of Bishop’s love affair with a Brazilian woman Maria Carlota de Macedo who had nursed Bishop to health when she got sick in Rio and who killed herself when Bishop left her for another woman. And thanks for letting me know about the film Welcome To This House about Bishop. It’s fascinating, but TWA is five minutes long and there just isn’t enough time.

GK

I enjoy reading your answers to your letters. I admire the benign but not servile way you respond to the slightly aggrieved. And I like your run-on sentences. Keeps the thought processes flowing.

Richard Ruble

As a rule, I don’t print fan letters here, but I’ll make an exception in your case, Richard, because it’s so cogent and I love your use of the word “aggrieved.”

GK

Greetings, Garrison!
While it seems like just yesterday, we really enjoyed your one man show back in 2016 at the Saenger Theatre in Pensacola, Florida. In recent years I’m noticing more posts using the words “conservative” or “liberal.”
In reference to those, I am neither and both. I sense that most of us are, even if we may be hesitant to admit it.
I’m not an English major so I probably have this wrong, but it appears the problem we face with these two words today is they are no longer simply adjectives applied to specific subjects in context. Examples being, one could be “fiscally conservative” or one’s degree was in “liberal arts.” Not only do the words liberal and conservative now seem to apply wholesale in describing every fiber of one’s being, uniformly, as binary and unchangeable monoliths, but I doubt they’ve ever been stronger as political antonyms.
They hold the cat and dog animus of day-to-day conversation among everyday people who somehow pretend we have never witnessed instances of cats and dogs getting along amazingly well together. We have managed to wrongly convince ourselves that a liberal or conservative position in one area translates directly in both measure and passion to all other areas of concern.
We know intellectually this is faulty thinking, but we seem to embrace it nonetheless. Is it for the sake of mysterious tribal forces, or social expediency, or possibly just cowardice?
I, for one, am not afraid to admit I like chocolate. When I serve up a bowl of ice cream it is chocolate, and I am very liberal with the amount I scoop out. However, when I top it with chocolate syrup, I am conservative with the amount I use. I have learned that equal measures of chocolate ice cream and chocolate syrup make, for me, a sickeningly sweet sundae. This lesson came at a young age — too much of a thing, even a good thing — well, it can ruin it.
I suppose this confessed position now makes me an even more despised political character — an independent moderate?
I hope you aren’t a Neapolitan man, but if you are, I will still hold you in highest regard.
Willie

Siloam Springs, Arkansas

That is a fine letter you wrote, sir, and I’m tempted to plagiarize some of it but won’t. The problem, however, is not about language, it’s about a gentleman who came along and changed the political landscape and there are only two ways of looking at him and the country is divided. He is either a hero anointed of God or he is a liar and a crook, there’s no middle ground. It’s rather operatic, the sort of drama we’ve seen in South America but never in the U.S. and nobody knows if we’ll go the way of Argentina or return to normal.

GK

Garrison,

Last week, you wrote a very complimentary column on Carrollton, Georgia, which I appreciated and enjoyed. This week however, you made some remarks about a new breed of conservatives. In doing so, you stated that, “Voter repression is being carried out by states where Republicans are finding various small ways to discourage voting.” You implicated Georgia in your comments, and I believe that you were in error to do so. And so I — a conservative Georgian — protest. Not with emotional hyperbole, but with facts. In Georgia, you can cast an absentee ballot, by mail or in person, no excuse necessary. You can request your ballot up to 78 days before an election, and no later than eleven 11 days prior to an election. Georgia law allows early, in-person voting beginning on the fourth Monday prior to an election, including Saturday and Sunday. Georgia does not allow you to give out water to voters within a certain distance of the polling place. Poll workers are allowed to set up self-serve watering stations. If you’re voting, you’re over eighteen — act like it. Plan ahead and bring your own water. You also are not allowed to give to people standing in line to vote alcoholic beverages, or twenty-dollar bills. You cannot “harvest” votes (i.e., go door-to-door to collect ballots). If you vote early, you can drop your ballot in a drop-box (an accommodation instituted for COVID). Every one of Georgia’s 159 counties must have at least one drop-box. It must be monitored, and its hours of access are business hours — it’s not 24/7, like Waffle House. If you can get to Walmart, a doctor’s office, the bank, or the liquor store, you can get to a drop-box to cast your ballot, if that is the way you elect to vote. Georgia requires a photo ID to vote. You have to be able to prove that you are who you say you are, and that you are registered to vote. You have to have a photo ID to drive a car or purchase alcohol. You have to have a photo ID to cash a check, or to apply for credit, to receive food stamps, or to board a plane. Every time I go to a doctor’s office, they scan my insurance card, and my photo ID, my driver’s license. In Georgia, if you do not have a photo ID, the state will issue you one — for free. Regardless of your skin pigment, it is easier to vote in Georgia today than it has ever been in my lifetime.

As you are well aware, this past summer, major league baseball yanked their All-Star game from Atlanta in feigned offense over Georgia’s voting laws. Their mock virtue-signaling was done in ignorance. They’re not woke, they’re a joke. They punished Black business owners and workers in Georgia and took their game to a state that is approximately 87% White, and less than 5% Black. This past October, in a turn of poetic justice, major league baseball played their World Series Championship in Georgia, of all places. The Atlanta Braves, who won the Series, should obviously be forced to forfeit their title.

Georgia assured Joe Biden a senate majority by electing a Black preacher and a Jew to represent them. I don’t think anything is being repressed in Georgia voting, but I’m just going by the facts. I would appreciate it if you would set the record straight by sharing them.

Respectfully,

Coleman Hood, Bishop, Georgia

So noted, Mr. Hood. I hope the election of the two senators does not move the legislature to change these generous election laws. And I respect your governor for refusing to overturn the 2020 results.

GK

Dear Mr. Keillor,
Thank you for still entertaining and provoking thought. I agree that people of good will can be found everywhere if you look, though some days it seems harder to tell.
I come from the East but have lived in the Midwest for longer. I remember my folks coming to visit for one of the first times, and remarking that people seemed friendlier, volunteering directions when they seemed lost in a department store, for instance. Wisconsin nice seemed to be a reality.
I blame power-hungry politicians, obscene wealth, and certain blatantly partisan media masquerading as news, all appealing to our baser instincts for much of our current predicament. My poor late father, who really cared, must be spinning in his grave.
People forget their commonalities and are swept up in misplaced tribalism. While the energy of my youth is gone, I am not as old as you are yet, and perhaps I still care too much, and so sometimes get swept up in frustration. People do not even seem to know any more the principles upon which this country was built, and we cannot even have the same facts as a foundation for our discussions. When even continuous lies are acceptable, where do we go from there?
Anyway, I have had the pleasure of seeing you several times in Madison with family and hope to see you again sometime soon. The saddest had to be after your professor brother had died skating. Despite your grief, you put on a lovely, contemplative yet humorous show of poetry, song, and wit. It was moving.
My father used to have posted on the inside of his closet door a quote of yours about being lucky enough to have found what you have and realized it is what you would have wanted had you known. I carry it in my wallet to think of him, and remind myself of the wisdom of that short phrase.
Take care, be well, and do good work.
All the best.

Ken Axe

Thanks for the note, Ken, and I can only imagine how many times people have done a double-take at your last name and asked you to spell it and commented on it, and here I am, one more. Glad you kept it and I’m sure you brought distinction to it. As for the tribalism of today, I’m as guilty as anyone else. There are people I’ve known for years, some of them blood relations, whom I simply cannot talk to. There’s nothing left to say. It’s too bad, but life is short and there are better things to do than explain the obvious.

GK

Hi, Garrison.

I was pleased to see your response to Don Buck about your different view of short sentences, versus the comma and run-on sentences. I’m glad you’re a commakazi. As a working freelance writer, more and more editors are insisting on short, social media, search engine optimal sentences. I’ve had to adjust to keep clients. But in my novels (I’m writing my third for self-publication, my first has four-star rating on Amazon) I mix it up with short sentences and run-on sentences, liberally sprinkled with commas — and even sometimes a dash or a semicolon. I’ve read almost everything you’ve written; you’ve been a good example — thank you.
Best,
John W Mitchell (pen name J. Willis Mitchell)
Western Slope, CO

I assume you took up the pen name to avoid being Mr. Nixon’s Attorney General and sometimes I’ve thought of adopting a pen name so as not to be the former host of a radio show, but I’m not at that point yet. Good luck with the third novel. I am incapable of writing search engine-optimal sentences so it’s good that nobody is searching for me.

GK

Dear Mr. Keillor,
I am beginning to find the persistence with which you tell us of your blissful life cloying, if not annoying. I understand that you are, in the largest sense of these
words, a comedian, not a tragedian, but the ease with which you dismiss the truly serious issues facing this country and the world as “not my problem” seems to me to border on pathological denial. I am 85 years old, and I understand that my angst and anger at those forces that are undermining our democracy and destroying the planet are neither good for my health nor likely to affect anything except my vote; but you have a large audience, and how you feel about things can affect how many others think and feel. I only hope more people react to your happy lullaby as I do rather than feeling that, after all, things aren’t so bad, are they? Love is in the air!

Ronald Moline

Thanks for the stern talking-to, sir. It’s very bracing and I respect your honesty. I also believe in getting out of the way of young people who need to deal with the undermining of the democracy. And I feel I must write from the heart and my strongest feelings are gratitude and admiration and the daily pleasures of life. I believe the pulpit should be reserved for people much better informed than I. I prefer humor to self-righteousness and I don’t see how one can do both. I don’t think I’m singing a lullaby, I’m describing what I see. And love is in the air. Truly. Look around and you’ll see it.

GK

Dear Mr. Keillor,

You wrote: “I am severely irked by the silver security foil protecting the tip of my tube of toothpaste, which I must pry off with my thumbnail before I can squeeze Colgate onto my toothbrush.”

If you’re also irked by having to use your thumbnail: plastic tops that you unscrew to get at the paste have at their tops a cone that ends in a sharp point. Use the point to puncture the odious silver foil. That’s why it’s there.

Cheers,

Steve Price

You are so right. I knew this and somehow forgot it, so there you are. I shall never bring up the subject again.

GK

Dear Mr. Keillor,

Today is my last day as a 79-year-old and I promised myself I would write this request before I turned 80; I am out of time.

I became a Country Music fan relatively late in life and “City of New Orleans” as performed by Arlo Guthrie was an early addition to my iPod; however, it troubled me that I could not discern the name of the place the train pulls out of. I went to www.songlyrics.com and learned that it was Kankakee, which, being Canadian, I’d never heard of, so I looked it up on Wikipedia and now I know. But! When I looked at the surrounding lyrics, I was very upset to read:

Now you know what a “southbound odyssey” is, so you know a train can’t pull out of anyplace “along” one, so, the teacher in me (Jr. High Science, Language Arts, Industrial Arts) knew that word does not make sense in that context.

I had been singing along, in my head, thusly:

Arlo and Willie Nelson both sing “... along ...” not “... alone on ...”

I tried to figure out how to fix this, but I am an ordinary citizen with no artistic credentials. Then I discovered PHC and Lake Wobegon and The Man In The Red Shoes and found that you had done a whole “piece” on Steve Goodman, including a brief look at “City of New Orleans” but you kind of glossed over what Steve was singing in that particular line. Later I found a version of the song recorded live by Steve and he is clearly singing:

I could be very happy if Arlo and Willie and all future performers would sing: “All out on a ...” instead of “All along a ...” because at least that makes sense, but here’s the reason they won’t: the rhythm of the line works better with two syllables (a-long) in there, even if it doesn’t make sense.

Here’s my punch line: the rhythm is even better with three syllables (a-lone on) (sounds like train wheels) plus it makes perfect sense AND it contributes to the romance of the song!

Dear Mr. Keillor, as a person who has some artistic credibility and some relationship with the late Steve Goodman and his work, can you prevail upon the people in charge of his artistic legacy to get the official record, or ASCAP, or whoever to show the lyrics for that line of City of New Orleans as:

or, if you disagree with my point,

It’s not like the official record is absolutely true to Steve Goodman’s version of the song — there are at least three other places in the song where Arlo and Willie sing different words than Steve sang when he performed it; and Steve never sang or agreed to “... along” so if it’s going to be different from what Steve sang, it should at least make sense and if there’s a way of making it better, why not?

Please? Will you see what you can do? Here’s an “arts project” for you, free of politics, that is beyond the abilities of the “younger generation.”

P.S. I watched and listened to “The Dakota Incident” yesterday on the PBS site after reading about it in one of your columns. How can we recover from so much evil?
J. McEwen

My dear sir, in the time and attention you spent on the problem of preposition and adverb here, you could’ve written a great Canadian train song of your own. What bothers me about the song isn’t the along/odyssey problem but the lines:

Don’t you know me, I’m your native son
I’m the train they call the City of New Orleans.

The masculinization of a piece of machinery offends me as a man. I also doubt the line about “freight yards full of old Black men” since the train is the narrator of the lyric and how does a train distinguish racial identity and what relevance is it anyway? And the sentimental ending with the mothers and babies rocking to sleep on the rhythm of the rails takes all the power out of the song. It would’ve been a better song if he’d brought in the issue of fossil fuels and air pollution. As it is, it’s just another romantic nomad ballad. That’s why I never sang it on the show. But thanks for raising the question.

GK

Hello, Garrison.

Your 2/7/22 reference to the banning of Huckleberry Finn in classrooms reminded me of a situation several years ago when I was teaching high school English. The school board of an adjacent large city’s education system was debating removing this book from the schools. A reporter from a local TV station asked a board member whether she had read the book. “No,” she replied, knowledgably, “but I saw the movie.” I groaned. And these are the people who control our curriculum?!

Since retiring, I have read seven of Twain’s books along with one version of his autobiography. Nowhere have I found any derogatory reference to the Negro. The Southern moniker was innocently common in Twain’s day. The ones who should have been offended were the lackadaisical, backwoods Southern men as depicted in Twain’s novel.

I hope that you can find time to read some Twain. I recommend his travelogue The Innocents Abroad (his first book) and Roughing it, documenting his stagecoach trip West and subsequent silver mining experiences. I also recommend Life on the Mississippi, a book about his learning to pilot steamboats in pre-Civil War days. He has amusing, as well as serious, observations about life in his day. His humor, like yours, is often directed at himself in a subtle, gentle, but, yet “laugh out loud” manner.

Stay well and keep entertaining your loyal readers with your humor.

Ruth

McMurray, PA

Ruth, thank you for the reading assignment and I shall get started on it as soon as I find a large-print edition. My eyes are dimming and ordinary 10-point type is a struggle. But I shall persist.

GK

My wife and I enjoyed your show in Waynesboro, along with Robin and Linda Williams. We recently moved to Luray, Virginia, from the Smoky Mountains after a career in print and broadcast journalism.
We were longtime listeners to Prairie Home Companion and hated to see you leave radio and NPR.

I do have one suggestion: instead of singing the “Star-Spangled Banner,” why not sing “America the Beautiful.” There is a move underway to make it our national anthem, because it is a more fitting reflection of our national experience.
Thanks,
Ray Snader

I don’t agree, Ray. I love the other song but the SSB is our anthem, a great song, and there are better things to do than battle for the change. Canada is beautiful, so is Mexico, and a hundred other countries, and those spacious skies are not ours, and those purple mountains were mostly stolen from the Indians and where do you find “alabaster cities” for heaven’s sake? But we did, by Godfrey, turn back the Brits at Fort McHenry and kick butt at Yorktown and that’s why we’re Americans and we don’t have Charles and Camilla riding around in a limo caravan or a Tory with bad hair and not an ounce of honesty presiding over us. If you succeed in trashing SSB, I will join a militant underground group to go around the country singing it at ballgames, the rockets’ red glare, the bombs, the whole schmegegge.

GK

Garrison:

You whispered “obey!” and I was reminded of my stepsister’s wedding — 39 years ago, and yes, they are still married — where both bride and groom promised to love, honor, and protect, and I thought: Yes. Wives do protect their husbands. From everything from unwanted phone calls to too much cholesterol. Your wife may not have promised to protect you, but clearly she does.

Elizabeth Block

Toronto, Canada

I never heard of that vow to protect and don’t know what I think about it. “Protect” seems to me to be beyond my power. We live in New York and my wife goes for long walks, sometimes runs, in the city and who knows what she might encounter but she’s street-smart and keeps an eye out and that’s her best protection. Meanwhile, how can she protect me from cheeseburgers and caramel ice cream and a big stack of pancakes for breakfast? We honor each other by granting independence.

GK

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