Post to the Host

The Joys of Aging, as you often note, are a real blessing. I’m a youngster (relatively speaking) of 71 who feels very much that life is getting better. But, sad to say, I look at my 94-year-old father-in-law and see the limits in that. His mind has betrayed him, even though he is physically still active, to the point where we have to remind him of his own name. After the life he’s led, the later years should yield more dignity. He was on a leaky old boat in the middle of the Pacific, as part of the planned Allied invasion of Japan when the A-bomb turned his mission into one of occupation. He contracted TB and spent the first 18 months of my wife’s life in a VA hospital, but went on to raise a family, support his church, and honor his employers, most ably. He helped build an addition on our first house … he had 1 lung and 20 years on me, and I couldn’t keep up, and now it’s come to this. So unfair. I pray that I don’t become a burden to my kids. Just put me on an ice flow and set me adrift on the Bering Sea. Assuming, of course, that plan isn’t nixed by global warming. Anyway, I felt like honoring him by unloading on you. Thanks for listening.

Duane Meneely, Albuquerque, NM 

My friend, the sculptor Joe O’Connell, was on a ship on the Pacific heading for the invasion of Japan and was relieved when Truman dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was a good carpenter and wood carver and stone sculptor who mostly did statuary for churches. He was still mentally agile and in good humor right up to the end of his days, probably due to the fact he was only 68. I’m now ten years older than Joe and hoping for the best but my wife often asks me, “Do you remember that time when you and I —” and I do not. But I’ve just finished writing a novel that I think is pretty terrific and I’m going to head back out on the road this summer and fall and see how the memory holds up. Take care of this good old man and don’t wear yourselves out doing it: when it’s time, send him off to boarding school. Thanks for writing.

GK

Garrison — You and I are both lovers of radio. My father introduced me to Jack Benny, The Great Gildersleeve, and my hero, Fred Allen. Radio stopped being radio during the Reagan years when it was deregulated and delocalized and became a squawk box of syndicated howler monkeys. My question is, would you join me in urging the Powers that Be to re-regulate radio so that everything had to come from your local studio, every station had to do news and public affairs, and at least two hours of programming a day had to be live, local acoustic musical groups? I’d call this the “Radio Full Employment & Entertainment Act of 2021.” Thanks.

R. Lee Procter

I gave up fighting for good causes long ago, back when I went to Washington to support the National Endowment for the Arts, which was under attack at the time for supporting the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe and I went around visiting Republican congressmen and they showed me pictures of naked men with whips inserted in a bodily orifice and said, “Is this great art?” I didn’t have an answer. In the cultural wars, I am a pacifist.

GK

I have a friend who is retiring from a prestigious job at a very well- known private school, head of dept., photography and art. I’m a retired RN myself at 69 and hubby is a physician still practicing. But I am at a loss as to what to say to her at her party. Any words that are meaningful that I’m having trouble finding?

Josie

There is a director of art

Who decided, though young, to depart

And make time her thesis

And create masterpieces

Daily, living life from the heart.

GK

Dear Garrison —
In a recent column you used the word “veldt.” I too, recently used that word, in a game of online Scrabble, and it was disallowed. So I looked it up in my online dictionary, and darn if it wasn’t there either. Everyone online seems to think it’s “veld.”

Since online seems to rule the world these days, I fear our spelling — veldt — is now passe. What to do?

Eugenia, a faithful reader and retired English teacher

I can’t advise you about this but I intend to give up “veldt” and just use the word “prairie” or “plain” or “North Dakota.” My wife beats me at Scrabble by using foreign words like “Qi” and “Qat” and “Za” and I never challenge them because, once you start challenging the women you love, where will it end? The other night I got the Z, the X, the Q, the J and K, and I still lost. She is a winner. That’s why I married her.

There was an old man on the veldt

Who tried to express what he felt

But they paid no attention

To things he would mention

Because of the way that he smelt.

GK

Dear Mr. Keillor,

Thank you for your regular musings. I enjoy reading them.

Some years ago, an older lady and I were following you into the post office in River Falls, Wisconsin. You opened the door and continued moving forward, letting the door close behind you without regard for this senior citizen. I managed to catch the door before it closed and held it open for her. I’m wondering if your behavior was just a fluke or bad manners?

Sincerely,

David H., Saint Paul, Minnesota

David, I remember that day clearly. It’s indelible in my mind. I automatically hold the door for someone following me, man or woman, old or young, it’s an ingrained reflex, but as I went through the door, she stopped and turned to you and said, “Is that David Sedaris?” and you said, “No, it’s Garrison Keillor” and she said, “Who?” and you tried to explain. I thought it was impolite to eavesdrop on your conversation so I went in and mailed my letter. It was a story, sent to The Atlantic magazine, and they turned it down.

GK

Dear GK — I thought I was so clever to name my grandkids’ dog “The Granddog.” Then, I walk into a gift shop and find a rack of bumper stickers that say, “I (heart) My Granddog.” Every time I think I’ve done something clever, I’m reminded how ordinary I am. Somehow, as an expat Midwesterner living in California, I find that reassuring.

Eric D.

Your grandkids have named the dog themselves and I’ll bet they gave it a very original name, such as Anderson Cooper. Nothing wrong with ordinariness, as I can tell you. That’s why I write fiction about ordinary people.

GK

GK:

I wonder how you feel about the rule changes recently introduced into MLB. Doubleheaders only scheduled for 7 innings each, runners starting at second base in extra-inning games, etc.

Having read about the legendary games between the Whippets and the Uff-das, I would like to hear your opinion if you are so inclined to share.

Respectfully,

Mark M

I haven’t been to a game where the new rules came into effect, but I’m in favor. Baseball can get tiresome, as we all know. I like to go with friends who’re good company, but still. Pitchers are working faster than they used to, less wandering around the mound, playing with dirt, going for the resin bag. I left a game after 7 a couple weeks ago. The Twins were ahead, I’d had a good time, eaten a brat with onions, and felt like going home.

GK

Dear Mr. Keillor — We have cicadas in Florida, too. Georgia is not the end of their southern experience. My crepe myrtle tree is sometimes full of the carapaces (what is the plural here?) of insects that have gone to rapture.

Patricia W.

Thank you for the correction. Georgia was the southernmost state listed in a Wikipedia article about cicadas so I went with that but the internet is a font of misinformation, as we all know. As for the rapture of cicadas, you are on your own; I have no information about that.

GK

You mentioned that you offended half your audience by coming out as a Democrat. In 2004, I was at the Dallas Methodist church where you gave a talk, and decided to skip talking about your latest book, because it was about your liberal Democrat beliefs, And the church was George Bush’s home church. I enjoyed your talk, but I disagree about the percentage that you would adversely affect. First, I would assume that the percentage of Republicans, listening on NPR to you, was way below 50% of your listeners. Secondly the percentage of Republicans that did listen to your show, and who read, was probably much less than that. I doubt that 10% of your audience disagreed with your views. Your book Homegrown Democrat helped me to organize my thoughts about what I believed. Keep up the good work. We must stand for facts and truth, against lying liars!

Paul

Paul, I believe someone on the church staff mentioned the Bush connection, and I decided to be circumspect and stifle myself. Talking politics leads me down the road toward preaching and, having grown up with preaching, I don’t feel a need to go there. I’d rather tell stories that don’t have big flashing-light morals. And I liked that my audience was so varied. We were practicing inclusivity and diversity before people started overusing those words. What I remember about that day in Dallas was how good the audience sounded singing. Different as our politics may be, we — at least those of my generation — still know the words to a lot of songs.

GK

Mr. K.,
In raising our kids we tried to keep their grammar as well as potty mouth in check. In fact when I was young, the word “butt” was a punishable word. I noticed that you like to talk about bodily functions both on Prairie Home and in your novels and that you use them to get that cheap laugh. What rules did you have in your house when you grew up about forbidden words?

Anne from MN

My grandmother was a schoolteacher and expected her descendants to speak proper English so we did. We learned grammar simply by listening to our parents converse. It came naturally. We were evangelicals so cursing was simply nonexistent and so were slang words dealing with sex or bodily functions. We used the phrase “go to the bathroom” for that. My cousins who grew up on farms used some earthier terms like “shitty,” which I found sort of shocking. For some reason, I never took to rough language; it just never was important to me. My vocabulary was shaped by the King James Bible; words like “beseech” and “perdition” and “redemption” spring naturally to my lips. Odd, but true. Bodily functions are of interest to my characters in Lake Wobegon, the cause of shame and embarrassment, sometimes humorously so, and so of course they enter into the writing, but in my daily life, my language is not really different from my parents’ except for some terminology you pick up from books.

GK

Garrison,
A couple months back, you made comments about stepping back from the Roe v. Wade fight in the Supreme Court and focus the fight on more humanitarian topics that could be won under a conservative court. Critics jumped on you for selling out. Weren’t you a good friend of Justice Blackmun who wrote the majority opinion, and as a liberal shouldn’t you stand in solid support of defending that opinion?

Did you sell out? That’s what your critics thought. I don’t think so, I imagine you stand in support but you were making a commentary on what can get passed through this conservative court. Who is right?

Signed,
Midwestern liberal

Senator McConnell has gotten the country a 6-3 conservative Court and now the justices have the problem: to overturn Roe v. Wade, which would be very unpopular, or go against their own principles. This is not a Catholic country, nor a fundamentalist one, and the Court seems wary of taking an absolutist stand. Roe v. Wade would be a minor matter if Congress did a simple thing and provided full financial support for single mothers for the first five years of a child’s life, and free pre-K. If we take care of the young women who find themselves pregnant and in poverty, the number of abortions would be reduced to below where it was when it was illegal. To oppose the right to abortion and oppose welfare and social services for single mothers is a moral contradiction. We shall see how the Court rules, but a Court that is wildly out of step with the society it serves is an institution in need of reform.

GK

Mr. Keillor,

I’ve been reading your memoir and I’ve been curious to know more about your religious beliefs and how they impact you today. You describe the Plymouth Brethren as Christians who are judgmental, arrogant, and expect a life of perfection, which is impossible to achieve. What beliefs/practices from the Brethren are still deeply embedded in you, and which ones have you left behind? And why did you choose to attend an Episcopal church? 

Barbara

The Brethren were a band of Anglican scholars and radicals who left the Established Church in the early 19th century to form free assemblies with no ordained clergy, no statuary or pipe organs or vestments or sacred accoutrements, believing in the literal meaning of the Word, the priesthood of all believers, the free working of the Holy Spirit. It had a great mission but it fell into schismatic politics and divisiveness and that sapped it of its righteous energies. Going to an Episcopal church, I’m simply returning to what the early Brethren left. I’m still judgmental, maybe arrogant, but I am moved by the faith of the people in the pews around me, and when I walk out on the street, I feel lightened by it.

GK