Lighten up, people, it's Thanksgiving for God's sake 

It worries me that I’m using GPS to guide me around Minneapolis, a city I’ve known since I was a boy on a bicycle, and also that I text my wife from the next room, and when I get up in the morning Siri sometimes asks me, “What’s the matter? You seem a little down. Would you like to hear the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3?” And I say, Leave me alone, I just want to think, and she and I wind up having a conversation about delayed gratification.

Too much technology in my life. I used to go to Al’s Breakfast Nook and now I go on Facebook. Thanks to social media, my handwriting has become illegible. It took me half an hour to decipher a note I left on the kitchen counter that said, “Why am I here? What’s the purpose of it all? Who needs me?”

But Thanksgiving is on the way so let’s talk about something more cheerful such as profound gratitude. I’m from Minnesota and grew up in a culture of cheerfulness. Now I’m old and have much to complain about and am grateful for memory loss. My mother did not encourage complaint — “Other people have it worse than you,” she said, referring to children in China. She also said, “If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Which eliminated journalism as a career and politics, music criticism and any form of fiction except children’s books.

My parents came of age during the Depression, when everyone they knew was hard pressed and scraping to get by, and you did not complain because everyone else was in the same boat. Mother darned socks and mended jeans. They bought day-old bread as a matter of course and shopped around for the cheapest gasoline and slaughtered their own chickens. Dad cut our hair. He bought cans of vegetables for half price whose labels had come off and you didn’t know if it was carrots or beets. They did this cheerfully. I found it embarrassing and I rebel against them by getting haircuts from barbers and paying exorbitant prices for produce raised in Guatemala. I buy fresh bread. But I try to emulate their cheerfulness.

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Living with Limericks

Garrison's newest book has arrived in our shop and in stores across the country. It is also now available for Kindle readers in digital form.  

The book is a hybrid memoir/poetry collection chronicling Garrison Keillor's lifelong love for the humble limerick. Since childhood, Garrison has journaled in limerick form about the people, places, and things he has encountered. Here, for example, he explains why he hates golf:

I regret golf. What was I thinking? Lawyers and bankers play golf and when you think of the damage they would do if they were at the job instead, you realize why golf courses are a wise investment for any municipality.

     I have just wrapped my old No. 3
     Iron around a pine tree
     Where I shanked the drive
     But I shall survive
     And go write a brief elegy.

     Farewell to life on the links!
     The game is over! It stinks!
     The great plaid butts
     Bending over the putts,
     The hike to the clubhouse for drinks.

     Instead I will write at my desk
     Limericks, cool, humoresque,
     And if I need dough
     I'll go do a show,
     Either radio or strip burlesque.
 

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As we continue to mark the 45th anniversary of the first A Prairie Home Companion broadcast, we are introducing new items in our newsletter starting with the "A Year in Lake Wobegon" monologue collection and culminating with Garrison’s new book Living with Limericks, all as a way of saying: Thanks for listening to the show since 1974!