Post to the Host

Dear G.K.,

I was talking with a friend who needs to have her aortic valve replaced, as to how after my surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic split my chest open, took out my heart and discovered the pig valve he was going to use was too small, he had a member of his team run out for a larger bovine valve. 

Since then, whenever I take a walk down the road to a dairy farm, I end up talking bovine with the girls when they come to the fence and greet me. I thank them for extending my life well past my Use-By date and they moo in return. 

My friend, being Italian, then told how her mother had an aortic pig valve replacement and after which she began speaking Pig Latin.

I’m enjoying Cheerfulness. Much thanks.

Blessings and peace,
Bob White
(Community journalist, author, and retired clergyman.) 

You have a big heart, Reverend, and I have a smaller one, but then I knew that. I live the well-contained life of a writer, which enables me to avoid strangers and maintain my illusions and attempt to pass them on. But so far, writing keeps me out of trouble and off the roads and out of saloons. GK

Mr. Keillor,

I saw your show in Nashville last week and thank you for coming to the Ryman. I turn 50 myself later this year, and it’s the first time I’ve gotten to see you live. I stood in the long line outside, and it’s the only event I’ve been to where I saw more flat caps than baseball caps. That was marvelous.

During your monologue I did cringe at the language. It didn’t offend me, but I knew others who had looked forward to your show for weeks or months would have their night ruined. On Sunday at the Lutheran church in Nashville, a man who had also attended with his wife told me he was disappointed. He sat in the balcony, and said a whole row of people, with a couple of children, around age 10, got up and walked out at that point.

Over 50 years you’ve built up a brand that people know and love. It’s a brand stamped “wholesome family entertainment,” and people had a reasonable expectation they could bring their children and not hear the F-word. On the other hand, I don’t think anyone who is a fan of yours would have left disappointed had they not heard you say “Fuck.”

It’s not that your material was out of bounds. It’s that it would be like people drinking Coke for 50 years and then buying a bottle for their 10-year-old and finding it was spiked with a fine Tennessee whiskey. The fact that it would be a great drink wouldn’t help the people who reasonably expected the classic stuff.

We’re not all prudes in Tennessee. But we do all have prudes that we know and love and hate to see them disappointed.

I hope you’ll take this in the spirit it’s intended, which is appreciative of you and your work.

Michael N. 

Nashville, Tennessee

I appreciate your letter and your point, which is very elegantly put, but I am not a “brand” and wouldn’t know how to be one. It never was my intention to be one. I am a writer, not a product. I tried to make the point that, having grown up evangelical, I am unable to use profanity or obscenity in any way that sounds genuine. It simply isn’t my vocabulary. And then as a joke, I spoke the word and it got a huge laugh. That was what I wanted. I’m sorry about those children but I don’t believe any 10-year-old child in America is a stranger to that word. Maybe in Amish communities or evangelical families who live in the woods, but in everyday urban America this is common parlance. Not from me, however. GK

I was amused at your comment in today’s Post to the Host that “I think church is the antidote to all sorts of mental debris.” As a longtime, now retired church musician, I can attest that one of the worst kinds of earworms is that one catchy or difficult phrase in the anthem you really don’t like. You’ll have it in your head all week, until the next rehearsal. 

Susan Cox
San Francisco

There are many kinds of mental debris and one is Florida Boy and when I go to church I never think about him. There is nothing in the prophets or the epistles or the Gospels that brings him to mind. This is a blessed freedom. GK

I remember my Kentucky grandparents often saying, “The flame of a candle glows brightest just before it goes out.” Do you think this applies to your present stage of life?

Darrell Pennington

At 81 I feel great gratitude for the goodness of life in America, for the adventure of writing, for the show business, love and friendship and music and Dairy Queen and cheeseburgers and the Pearson’s Salted Nut Roll and a great deal more. GK

Thank you for our conversation at breakfast Sunday morning in Manhattan, Kansas. I am the retired teacher from Mustang, Oklahoma, with the Hulk Hogan mustache. I mentioned that you had traveled with me and my best friend on rugby trips during the ’80s. He is now a retired Marine Lt. Colonel. I had recorded some of your shows and sent them to him on the front line of the Iraq war. He wanted you to know that your voice and monologues gave him some sense of comfort and normalcy in a land far away in an uncertain situation. The entire shows were a reminder of better times. 

I hope you continue to enjoy what you are doing and are able to keep your wife happy. I mentioned your advice about that to my own wife, and she agreed.

Thank you again for your time and the suggestion not to be in a hurry to try lutefisk.

Sincerely,
Mike Mason

I’m glad our paths crossed, Mr. Mason. It’s fascinating to find out who listened to the radio show all those years. You taught high school biology, chemistry, and physics, three subjects I did poorly in, and you coached girls’ rugby, something that’s hard for me to imagine, but it was a good conversation. And I stand by the advice: “Anything you can do to make a woman happy is worth the trouble.” GK

Hi, Garrison. 

I am a fan from Australia, on a cruise visiting New York on a weekend in July and would like to attend the church that you do — you are the only people I have heard of in New York. We would also like to go to a Southern Baptist-type church — are there any in New York? Please help!?

Rev. Anne Butler

South Australia

I attend St. Michael’s on Amsterdam and 100^th on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. There are Baptist churches in the city, of course, and probably a Southern Baptist one. GK

Dear Garrison!

Living in Denmark after growing up in Noank, Connecticut — where childhood was a mix of Ray Bradbury and Garrison Keillor, with a bit of Andy Warhol sprinkled over it — can be wonderful. But I get these seizures of nostalgia for small-town life in the strangely warped U.S. of A., so reading your books is a pleasure. My Danish wife always asks why I am laughing out loud while reading a book, since the books about gardening or Alzheimer’s she reads are not as humorous. Anyway, thanks for being you, and 80 is not at all old: think about some of those guys in the Old Testament who got children when they were 420 — now that would be tiring ...

Enjoy life, it is much better than the alternative, and when it isn’t, it is time to stop.

Yours,

Clark

You’ve clearly done better with Denmark than I did. I was 44 when I lived there and I made the mistake of insisting on speaking Danish with Danes, which they indulged as best they could, and I wasn’t aware of the extent to which Danes enjoy speaking English even with other Danes. Their English was very practiced and natural and witty and by insisting on Danish I missed out on getting to know them. Danes are realists and world travelers and the language they use to travel with is English. As for the warpedness of the U.S., the painful part is the sheer number of adults who are happy to believe things they know are not true. GK

Dear Garrison,

My husband and I have a disagreement. He thinks puns are stupid, but I think they require a high degree of verbal intelligence to generate them on the spot. Do you have an opinion on this? Everyone groans when I use puns, but I keep using them because I think I’m funny and smart. If they’re not entertained, at least I am.

Cathy Brentwood

Groaning is a form of appreciative laughter, at least among grown-ups. GK

Dear GK,

Thank you for your recent musings on marmalade. My mother was born and raised in New Ulm, Minnesota, a quaint town of German heritage where the newspaper was written in German until the war. A place where the local “Glockenspiel” sounded the hours, where Hauenstein and Schell’s beer were brewed, where Buffalo Bill’s buffalo munched on the grass of Grandma Bartl’s front lawn during the annual “Polka Days” parade, and where the KKK burned a Cross on the Bartl family’s front lawn because they were Catholic.

One of the gifts my mother received from hers was the recipe for “Orange Rolls,” sweet rolls made with a coating of orange marmalade.

Nowadays I seldom use jams and jellies, but when I go out for breakfast, I reach for a packet of orange marmalade and put it on my whole wheat toast just for the memories.

Bill Stein

I’ve never been to New Ulm and now I feel I’ve at least gotten a glimpse of it. Thanks. GK

Hi, Garrison.

Thanks for the recent helpful marital advice you offered in terms of “Happy wife, happy life ...” I suggest you expand the topic into a book a likely future best-seller for wedding presents, at least for the groom.

In my case, putting up with a kitchen remodel was necessary.

Mark Larson

Arcata, Calif.

I made two wives and a longtime girlfriend very unhappy before I found the sweetheart I live with today, so it’d be dishonest of me to write a book about husbanding but thanks for the idea. GK

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