I'm not hoping for normal, no thank you

I think of the chicken when I crack the two eggs into the fry pan for breakfast but when I put in the sausage patty, I don’t think of the pig. The egg is a work of art; the sausage is a product. As a young man I tried to make art but I didn’t want to work in a factory (teach) to support my art, so I chose to do radio, which is a form of sausage. I admire the egg but I enjoy the sausage more. And it makes me feel good about my life, a good thing at 5 a.m. 

It’s dark out. I’m alone in Minnesota, so the coffee is my own, not my wife’s good coffee but a bitter, accusatory brew. It’s Lent, but I don’t notice it because we’ve had Lent since a year ago when we and a bunch of friends were about to go on a Caribbean cruise and then the word “pandemic” was uttered and I hung my white linen suit up in the closet and Jenny and I, who had only been husband and wife before, set out to become best friends, boon companions, cellmates. When you are locked down, it’s a choice between best friendship and putting rat poison on your pancakes. Rat poison is not a good death.

Back in my careering days, I abandoned her for periods of time and she has completely forgiven me. And here we are. We sit at the table and she says, “You just dropped a pill on the floor” and I look and there it is. I feel noticed, just like a peacock I once saw walk across a yard, his great fan of bejeweled feathers open wide, following a peahen whom he had a crush on, and he stretched out his gaudy neck and shook the little doodads on his head and waved the great fan of iridescent blue-green beauty and she looked up and noticed. This happens to me when I read her something I just wrote, like this very paragraph about the peacock, and she laughs out loud at the thought of me as a large bird in a pen. 

When the virus is beaten back and we are free to mingle again, I plan to go on living the small life we’ve led for the past year. I’ll go visit my London family and my wife’s cousins in Stockholm but home is where my heart is and mainly what I learn from travel is that wherever I go, I don’t belong there. I go to Paris and realize I’m not French, not even close. Same with Florida, the land of yellow pants.
 
I like my small life. Back in my adventuresome years, I canoed into the northern wilderness looking for spiritual lessons out there and once saw an airliner high overhead and thought, “I would rather be up there than down here.” Whenever I fly over wilderness, I remember that and am grateful for my water and a snack. 
 
I have ambitious friends engaged in fighting gender bias and urban squalor and trying to bring diversity to the arts and rename streets now named for bigots and chauvinists, and I love these folks, but conversation with them can be tiring, so many dangerous topics to be avoided. They are Living Large and I’ve chosen small so I need to hang with forgiving souls like my wife. The sentence about the peacock was a highlight of my day. I don’t read the newspaper. My wife does and whenever she says, “Oh my God,” I say, “What?” and she tells me what. The “Oh My God” news is enough for me. Usually it’s funny.

I come from fundamentalist people who were into social distancing before anyone else was — we avoided Catholics and were uneasy around Lutherans — but in a pandemic, locked up with your BF, distance is only available in your sleep. I put my head on the pillow and imagine I’m on a bicycle pedaling south on Lyndale Avenue toward Minneapolis, past cornfields, into the city heading for the library downtown. It’s 1953. I pass a bandbox café, a sawmill, a slaughterhouse, and by the time I come to the printing district, I’m asleep, and I wake up and it’s 2021. She isn’t here but there are two eggs and sausage and this sarcastic coffee. As we say in Minnesota, it could be worse. 

Posts the Host

(In reference to March 3, 2021 column, Blame it on the internet, why not?)

I’ve been a PHC fan since sometime in the ’80s, when I accidentally tuned in while driving to work on a Saturday evening emergency call. I grew up in a Wisconsin farming community and your stories really resonated with me. I often felt that we grew up in the same town. We don’t agree much on politics and I wish you could have seen the good points of the Trump presidency, as well as the looming disaster that threatens us now. However, as a typical conservative, I support your right to be you and look forward to reading your column every week.
Sincerely,
Dave Ronk
Odenton, Maryland

There was a great old singer named Dave Van Ronk who sang on the show once, and clearly, you’re not him — singers don’t make emergency calls — but I wonder if your ancestors might’ve dropped a Van somewhere, thinking it denotes aristocracy. He had a gorgeous raspy blues voice, a real barroom belter, and the Minnesota audience loved him because he was so exotic — we are soft-spoken, self-effacing, and he was not. I mention this to you because Dave was an old Greenwich Village lefty and if someday you are mistaken for him, I think you should pretend to be him and say left-wing things just to see how it feels. As for my views on the previous presidency, other people know much more than I — for example, James Fallows writing about the pandemic in a recent Atlantic article. You might find it interesting.  
GK

Dear Mr. Keillor,
You’re a well-traveled man. Perhaps you can answer a question that confounds my husband and me when we hit the road. Why is it that we can see trash on U.S. highways and byways, but NEVER see anyone actually throwing trash out of their vehicle? I don’t think it’s because of the internet, but I could be wrong.
Best to you and your family.
Cindy Mattson

I used to be well-traveled, Cindy, but for a year I’ve been cooped up. And when I did travel, it was mostly by airliner, whose windows don’t open. I am guilty of various assaults on the environment, but I’ve never thrown trash out a car window for the simple reason that I was brought up to feel that if I did, my arm would be severed by a lamppost at high speed and I’d never be able to write with a pen or comb my hair or turn the pages of a book. Other people were brought up differently. Children of litterers become litterers. Enjoy your travels, once we’re allowed out of our bubbles. 
GK

Dear Mr. Keillor,
Delighted at your mention of Charles Portis. I recently read Dog of the South for the first time after Donna Tartt’s lovely remembrance in the NYT last year. Her audiobook of True Grit was the soundtrack for our drive to Idaho last year. Tartt’s Arkansas twang makes for a perfect Maddie. I wonder which is larger, the number of your readers named Gary or readers who’ve read Charles Portis.  

We liked your line, “Any day you make your spouse laugh is a good day.” We decided this includes both laughing with and laughing at. I forwarded your column to my mother. My father died young and Mom said she now tries to make her neighbors laugh. She’s known for her cheery disposition and inventive headwear among her retirement community. My favorite was her Happy New Year hat with battery powered blinking lights.
James, San Francisco

You’re Italian and from San Francisco with its big solid Italian population and so cheeriness and blinking lights come naturally to you. As a Gary from northern fundamentalists, it’s more of an effort for me but I am doing my best. 
GK

I have an opinion that might settle your materialism angst. When Jesus said, “Ye cannot be my disciples unless you give up all you possess,” my understanding of it is he meant all “your” egoic thinking. Have a humble mind that questions its own thoughts and doesn’t assume what it thinks is the be all and end all of any topic. That said, and hoping that is what Jesus meant, I wish more people would follow THAT thought.  
Your IRA is safe :-).
Cordially,
Dawn Dowd

Dawn, when you recommend self-questioning, this sounds Unitarian to me and not anything the Evangelicals who raised me believed Jesus was talking about. I never got their read on that verse in Luke but they did own homes and cars, but not big homes with chandeliers or Buicks or Cadillacs, they went for Fords and Chevies. There were no diamonds or pearls. And they believed that God was the be all and end all and that He had revelated Himself to them through the Gospels. You can take the boy out of the Brethren but not the Brethren out of the boy. But there is hope. I never heard the word “egoic” before. To be 78 and learning a new word. Who knows what may be next? 
GK

Four years ago, on a hot August day, I bolted upright in my chair, terrified that I had wasted my life and had no idea where to go or what to do about it. I was 52 years old. Suffice it to say, the pandemic has worsened the problem. I try to get by through meditation, living in the moment and limiting my consumption of alcohol and cannabis (thank you California!).

Surely you have encountered such turbulence in your life and have a message of advice and encouragement to pass along. I always expected to be swimming in contentment at this point in life. What is this demon that has burrowed into my psyche and won’t relent?
Gary

Gary, I haven’t had that experience. I’ve had turbulence, thanks to dumb mistakes and wrong turns, but never felt I was wasting my time. I don’t have an easy answer, except for this, the obvious one: the unrelenting demon in your psyche needs to be expressed to another human being and for that I recommend a good-hearted therapist. If it were me, I’d find an older woman, someone with a sense of humor, not a theorist, not a pill-pusher. I never had a therapist but I’d go for it in a moment if I felt tortured. I have the benefit of writing fiction so I have a place to put demons if one arises. (Have you tried painting or woodworking? Maybe carpentry.) 
GK

That’s how you see pheasant hunting? You say, “I see pheasant hunting as a pretty
straightforward thing: you walk through the cornfield, the birds fly, you raise the rifle and shoot.” Who the heck shoots pheasants with rifles?
Sincerely,
Mike Finity

Back where I come from, some men gave up shotguns as being unfair to the birds and used rifles for the challenge. Others use slingshots, boomerangs, or throw weighted nets. I didn’t have room to include all the possibilities. Good luck in the fall, sir. 
GK

Garrison,
Quite a few years ago, I left my home in Juneau, Alaska, for a few weeks to visit my ailing mother back in the Midwest. I mentioned that maybe she would want to watch a little less television and instead listen to your show on the radio. Her comment was that “we don’t listen to much radio around here.” A year later, as she was “almost done,” I visited again and found a stack of your tapes and a book or two by you. The show and your gentle humor gave her a huge amount of comfort.
Thank you,
Jamo from Kila, MT

Jamo, I’m glad I did some good. My specialty, apparently, is the elderly and infirm and now I’m heading that way myself and I don’t watch so much TV and I don’t listen to any radio. In fact, I’m not sure there is any. I do, however like to talk to friends on the phone and today I had a long talk with Rob Fisher the famous bandleader about what a genius Peter Ostroushko was and how, when Pete played with Rob’s Coffee Club Orchestra the first time, the band sat up straight ten seconds into the tune, realizing that this guy was a big talent. Musicians recognize these things. I married one and when she hears something she admires, she lets out a whoop. 
GK

This week on A Prairie Home Companion

NEWS FROM PAST GUEST PERFORMERS:
Many performers who appeared on the show over the past 40 years have been entertaining fans with new projects and virtual concerts. We will check in on a few each week and hope that you check them out!

Philip Brunelle & VocalEssence
At the beginning of the pandemic, Philip Brunelle began a video series called Musical Moments, where he highlights the works and history of a specific composer and plays a piece or two of their music. It’s become quite the learning experience!

This week, the subject is Carlos Chávez. 

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Young Lutheran’s Guide to the Orchestra

Have you ever wondered what instrument in the orchestra the Lord would have played had he been Lutheran? Garrison’s classic sketch contains the answer. Listen to the sketch featuring the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra (link below).   

This sketch is featured on a special release, with proceeds benefiting the orchestra. It was recorded LIVE as a benefit concert. The product page has a full content list and easy-to-use download links for Amazon and iTunes as part of our Download Project.  

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Gospel Birds & Other Stories

Enjoy this classic tale and one cited by many fans to be their favorite Lake Wobegon story. Many fans have written in wondering if there are further exploits by “Bruno, the Fishing Dog.”  

Three hours of Lake Wobegon stories, including “Bruno, the Fishing Dog,” “Pastor Ingqvist’s Trip to Orlando,” “A Day at the Circus with Mazumbo,” plus six other stories. Gospel Birds is Garrison Keillor at his very best — endearing insights, gentle humor, and warm affection for the human foibles we all share. Includes musical interludes by Chet Atkins. The product pages for the CDs in our store have been updated with detailed track listings and easy download links from Amazon and iTunes. 

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