Post to the Host

Comments from the week of 03.21.22

Garrison,

You concluded this week’s column by telling us that, as a senior citizen, you find that “… immaturity is a great asset.” It calls to mind a quote by Wilfrid Sheed: “A man does not mature until he has exhausted all other possibilities.” I must conclude that you still have a few “possibilities” to uncover. Enjoy the search and the journey!

Coleman Hood

Bishop, Georgia

I suppose you’re right, my good man, and at the moment I’m taking a break from ambition and trying to pay attention to life around me. I’d love to write one more good book and haven’t yet unlocked the box as to what it might be. I enjoy being anonymous in New York. Like everyone else, I hold out hope for the survival of Ukraine. We dare hope that bravery and sacrifice are a match for mechanized evil. And if that is true, then there’s hope for America, which has been so corrupted by corporate power, Teddy Roosevelt would be horrified by the existence of Amazon. But life is good and this is a great country, as Senator Booker so passionately said last week.

GK

GK,
There’s an old real estate story about the mortgage banker who keeps a small box on his desk. Occasionally he will open the lid where there’s a note that reads, “I am the mortgagee.”

When homeowners borrow money on their property, they collateralize it by giving a mortgage to the lender. hence, the homeowner is the mortgagor and the lender is the mortgagee.

In a recent column you referred to yourself as a mortgagee. Nay, nay. May this correction elevate your day, GK, the mortgagor.
Carry on,

jpc
Memphis

Thank you, JPC, and now I’m even more grateful to have an accountant who deals with all this stuff and who sends me a monthly accounting, which I never open because I trust him. All I know is that when I take an Uber to the airport as I did the other day, the driver doesn’t say, “Your credit card has been declined.” I have friends who deal in bonds and securities and when we sit down to dinner, we talk about music or children or the Gospels or our wives, which is all much more interesting.

GK

Alas, Mr. Keillor: forgiveness comes after confession: and none of those guilty have confessed; indeed, they have continued to boast of their sins & to act viciously. If your wagon is rolling downhill toward ‘the verge of a precipice,’ are you going to ‘forgive’ the man who stole its brakes & steered it there? Fat lot of help that is: but you’ll die feeling righteous, no? Comment by another Anglican who’d rather speak and act for justice instead of covering wickedness up in cowardly fashion … and as for ‘I got a letter from an ex-Marine who did two hitches in Vietnam and feels he was badly affected by Agent Orange … This is heartbreaking, a Marine who feels he was a pawn of a regime like Russia’s.’ He was already the invasive pawn of a regime like ... America’s.

Rev. F. Mark Mealing, Ph.D.

My comment about pardoning the former president, Dr. Mealing, is not (in my mind) equivalent to forgiveness but is closer to the idea of cleaning out the garage so you can put your car in it. We have a crazy situation in which disinformation has overtaken the country as never before and a major political party threatens to be a religious cult, meanwhile the environment is being degraded faster than ever thought possible and the Putin empire is threatening and these things, unlike the man with the hairdo, are real. But I’m speaking as an 80-year-old who is not long for the world, so my opinion is negligible, a leaf in the breeze. The children will decide. I hope they have time to do that. I was recently visited by a friend and her three-year-old daughter and it’s terrifying to think of the world she might inherit and I simply can’t bear the thought of Mr. Trump being a focal point for the next ten years. I don’t need him to go to jail, just to disappear.

GK

Dear Garrison,
I’m afraid I must implore you to explain the penguins on the ice floe joke; your dear wife is not the only one who needs an explanation. I have been mulling it over for days, to the extent that it is starting to bug me. Or maybe I am simply overthinking things.
Yours obsequiously (not an original sign-off, I know, but hoping it might cajole you into action.)
Maeve Paris
From Derry, in Northern Ireland

Maeve, your letter makes me so happy after the angry one from the Ph.D. I’m laughing right now. I’m grateful. You’re a beautiful person. What makes you think you don’t get the penguin joke? You do, Maeve, you do.

GK

Editor’s note: So these two penguins are standing on an iceberg. One penguin says to the other: You look like you're wearing a tuxedo. The other penguin replies: Who says I'm not?

Garrison,

In a recent Post to the Host you said the wonderful performance of the song, “Be Our Strength in Times of Trouble” moved you to tears. Reminded me of another hymn that moved me to tears when we recently sang it.

Instead of holding our first Wednesday evening Lenten Service on March 9, our new pastor suggested we have a Prayer Service for Ukraine. There is a Prayer Liturgy for those in service in the Lutheran Book of Worship, so we said and sang it. I suggested we sing This is My Song, a hymn in our hymnal. The tune is Finlandia by Jean Sibelius. The words are more general than the original and stress the need for peace. When we sang it, I was moved to tears.

I heard that when Sibelius composed Finlandia, he had to disguise the Finnish patriotic nature of the text since Finland was under the thumb of Czarist Russia. The more things change the more they stay the same.

Bob Buntrock

Orono, Maine

I wish I’d been there to sing it with you. Lutherans have a beautiful choral tradition, based on universal music education, and this is one thing that binds them together. Sometimes someone needs to throw a wet blanket over the organist, but when you stand in the midst of Lutherans singing, it lifts you up almost bodily.

GK

GK,

My husband had double vision.

One day while tightening up a screw, his eyes put the screwdriver next to the screw rather than directly on it. Then after seeing two white lines on the highway, he drove right to his eye doctor.

He had two surgeries at Hershey Medical Center. As it is a common problem with children, “the lazy eye syndrome,” and as that’s whom they usually treat, they had to find a bed long enough for him.

My husband equated his eye problem to his car headlights being out of alignment.

Before his first surgery, he wore a black patch creating the look of a pirate. After surgery he had prisms in his glasses. Everything helped for a while, but not permanently.

After two years he went to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. There is a surgeon there (Dr. David Guyton) who specializes in this problem and had invented some newer methods. This surgery has brought him back to almost normal.

He can again drive, do electrical work and read — things like The Writer’s Almanac and banned books. Life is good again.

I hope you can have similar success.

Thank you for years of providing us with thoughts of inspiration and humor.

Juanita Fowler

Leola, Pennsylvania

Thanks for the recommendation. I’m working my way up through the ophthalmic ranks and am due for an MRI soon and then who knows what. It’s a miserable problem, but it’s not so bad compared to the miseries of some friends of mine who engaged in contact sports in high school. Parents should not allow their children to play football. The rise of soccer has been a huge benefit for our young men though it may put a good many orthopedic surgeons out of business.

GK

I’ve been a listener since the show premiered on WBEZ (Chicago) in the late ’70s. My wife and I have attended many PHC shows and are eagerly looking forward to the re-creation at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado.

I know that GK researches local stories for the show and I wondered if he was aware of Bredo Morstøl, the Frozen Dead Guy of Nederland, Colorado, (and also a Norwegian). He’s being kept on dry ice in a Tuff Shed in the hills above Ned (what locals call it). This little mountain community just finished its annual Frozen Dead Guy celebration last weekend. Wikipedia/local media has the whole story. Nice to have something good to look forward to. Good health and see you soon.

Bob Ores

Bob, I’m from Minnesota and a Frozen Dead Guy is not a lighthearted subject to us. I wouldn’t touch this with a ten-foot pole. But thanks.

GK

Sir:

Your Lake Wobegon story of adoptive parents meeting their child from Korea at MSP struck a deep and sharp chord in my heart as I was driving home from Sacramento one Sunday evening. One of my greatest joys was adopting our daughter and receiving her into our life when she was four days old. I always said that if I had the choice of a roomful of babies, that she is one I would have chosen. I finished the drive that evening with tears of joy running down my cheeks. You have a special place in my heart because of that simple story. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Dan, Cherie, and Genevieve Porter

Woodland, California

I was on a Northwest Airlines flight from San Francisco on which about twenty Korean infants and their couriers were passengers and as I got off the plane I saw the new parents waiting and the looks on their faces were so exalted and wonderful. They were beyond tears. So I stopped and watched the handing over of the bundles. And now as I think back to it, I am wiping away tears. There was so much love in that scene and it is so disappointing when our society treats children badly as it so often does. The statistics on childhood hunger and child abuse are frightening.

GK

GK,

I liked your post today about hearing faceless voices on the phone. It reminds me of the skit in PHC when you talked to “Jennifer” on the courtesy phone in the airport! I loved it!
One of the best performances of “Amazing Grace” was sung by Odetta on PHC. I have tried to find it online with no luck. I would love to hear it again.

Doris

Hey, Garrison.

Although I regret that I cannot join you at the Red Rocks get-together in May, I’d like to extend an open invite for you to come to our tiny old Rock Tavern Restaurant (built in 1937) high on a hill overlooking Big Birch Lake in Minnesota. It’s only 12 miles from Charlie’s Café (think Chatterbox Café) in Freeport.

We’re both getting up there in years and I realize it’s hard to do everything as our limited time dwindles, but this may be something to consider if you’re ever in the area for some other matter.

I attended SCSU in the early ’70s. I was a pot-smoking, long-haired hippie type, yet I found it strange that your radio show also appealed to my dad, a crew-cut, Nixon Republican. Probably because Lake Wobegon was virtually Cold Spring, Minnesota, where I grew up.

John Engel

P.S. The only time I saw you in person was at a graduating commencement speech you gave at SJU back in the ’80s. My dad and two brothers went to college there. I now live in the super big city of St. Cloud.

John, I don’t know when I might get up that way. I mostly live in New York City now and I seem to have lost my connections in central Minnesota but I sure was lucky to start my radio career up there, doing the early morning shift, driving from the farm in Freeport where I lived to the studios in Collegeville. There were plenty of Republican listeners and there were also radicals of the Catholic Worker movement and hippies and it was great fun doing a show for people who didn’t entirely approve of each other. But they all loved classic jazz, New Orleans music, rags and dances, mixed in with Broadway, gospel, Chopin, Bach chorales, bagpipes, Icelandic choruses, and Gabby Pahinui, the Hawaiian slack-key master. A great buffet of music with some fictitious commercials. If I’m ever in the area and see a sign that says “Big Birch Lake,” I’ll head right over.

GK

GK,

You have been writing about your double vision. I had double vision because one eye is higher than the other; my eye doctor prescribed lenses with a prism adjustment, which corrected the problem. I know there are some cases of double vision that cannot be compensated for by prism; is yours one? Or did your eye doctor, perhaps, overlook this solution?

Paul Schindler

Thanks, Paul. My doctor mentioned prison to me and that was a shock so I didn’t go back to him but now I realize that he meant “prism.” I’ll give it another try.

GK

Mr. Keillor,

Why did you leave Minnesota for New York? Minnesota is your home, New York is not. Come back.

Daniella, St. Paul

Daniella, I live in New York because my wife loves it and I love my wife. Minnesota will always be my home but I owe this woman a great deal for sticking with me through my traveling years and raising our daughter and she is my best friend and the person who is never at a loss for a quick retort, she is the truth teller in the household, and I read to her what I write and know immediately what needs more work. She’s from my hometown of Anoka, so we have that connection, but she came to New York when she was 17 to be a freelance classical violinist and she got to know the city when she had no money and she learned that she could lift her mood simply by walking around and observing humanity, and she still does that. She’s a serious reader of all sorts of things, loves theater and opera, walks every day for six or seven miles, does the crossword, reads the news, beats me at Scrabble, and when she puts her arms around me, it makes the world right. I’m in close touch with Minnesota by telephone. When I die, they’ll take me back to Anoka with the other Keillors, and meanwhile I’m happy in New York. Thanks for asking.

GK

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