The Keillor Reader

by Garrison Keillor

  I started out Sanctified Brethren, then joined the Church of the Sunday Brunch, and when I moved to Copenhagen became an Anglican for the pleasure of hearing English. Most of the folks at St. Alban’s were Brits, big tweedy people who strode into the sanctuary like they’d been on a good foxhunt that morning and knelt down, addressed the Lord, got the thing done and taken care of, and got up and went home to dine on a side of beef. I liked them. I just plain liked them a lot.

  The theology’s easy, the liturgy too.

  Just stand up and kneel down and say what the others do.

  Episcopalian, saving my love for you.

  Back in New York, I joined Holy Apostles, which had a powerful black lady preacher and an ambitious daily soup kitchen, and when I moved back to Minnesota, I shopped around among the Episcopalians. Crossed off the ones whose rector thought a service was a show and he was the happy emcee, and ones whose organist played too loud, and found the church I go to now, where there is a good deal of silence. “Be still and know that I am God,” it says in Scripture, and we do. In the stillness, one can escape from self-righteousness, pomposity, and sentimentality. When we speak, we use the ancient prayers and texts, not our own words, and so resist the temptation to impress the others with our wit and originality and fervor. Left to our own devices, we would emphasize the happy aspects of the faith but God has said many things that are not comforting and those of us who have sinned know this. We sincerely confess to ourselves our sorry state and acknowledge that we are not in charge of our lives and then we find comfort in the four-part harmony of an old hymn that our aunts and uncles sang when they were alive and we shake hands with the people around us and walk home.

  Once in downtown Baltimore, the morning after A Prairie Home Companion, feeling remorse as I always do after a show (for what I did and what I left undone), I found an old brownstone Anglican temple of 1852, wooden box pews, stained glass on all sides, stone floor, and sat through high Mass. The troops processed up the aisle behind an altar boy bearing a big brass cross and two candle bearers and a black man swinging the incense pot and producing billows of smoke, choristers in white marching through the fog and bearded priests in gaudy vestments, precision bowing and genuflecting, all rather exotic for an old fundamentalist like me but moving nonetheless, the formality of it. The priests were all about the ceremony, there was none of that grinning and tap-dancing Hi-and-how-are-we-all-doing-this-morning clubbiness and the homily only summarized the Scripture text about healing, it didn’t turn into an essay on health care. Ten voices strong and true in the choir and positioned as they were under the great arch of the chancel, their tender polyphonic Kyrie and Gloria was O my God just heartbreakingly good. There were fewer than thirty of us in the pews, fewer than the names on the prayer list, and to hear “Behold, how good and joyful it is; brethren, to dwell together in unity” sung so eloquently as the priests swung to their tasks was to be present in a moment of grace that does not depend on numbers or any other measure of success for its meaning, just as the Grand Canyon does not depend on busloads of tourists to be magnificent. Most of our brethren, bless them, are off enjoying brunch or reading the funnies or lifting weights at the gym, and God bless them all. Our attendance at Mass does not make us better people—we simply happened to walk by and see this vast Canyon of God’s Love and stand looking into it.

  And being there made me think of my dad, it being his birthday, October 12, he having died a few years before, my dad who was faithful all his life to the Brethren, who were the anti-Anglicans. This formal high Mass was what J. N. Darby and the early Brethren revolted against in 1831, for its worldly pomp and show, its lack of prophetic fervor for the Second Coming of Christ, its unholy union with the state, and when they became the Brethren, they took nothing Anglican with them. They left behind the Gothic architecture, the chanting and choral music, the liturgy, the ecclesiastical order, the high altar, the clerical garments, incense, candles, statuary, the kneeling and blessing, the bowing and genuflecting, and every other scrap of papist paraphernalia. At Grace & Truth Gospel Hall, on Fourteenth Avenue South in Minneapolis, where I attended every Sunday for twenty years, the walls were white and bare, the seats plain, facing a small table in the middle with bread and wine on it. The Sunday morning meeting could last up to two hours, and the mood of it was solemn, plain, with long silences. No processions—we just clomped in and sat down, and no incense in the air, just Old Spice cologne, and no statuary (though some members were less lively than others). A boy who grew up in Sunday morning austerity is deeply impressed by this dim and mysterious church and ancient chanting, the beady gowns, the smoke, and next thing you know he is joining right in.

  I bless myself with a flick of the wrist.

  You’d never know I was raised fundamentalist.

  Episcopalian, saving my love for you.

  There’s white folks and black, gay and morose,

  Some white Anglo-Saxons but we watch them pretty close.

  Episcopalian, saving my love for you.

  Faithfulness was a guiding principle in Dad’s life. He was the fifth of eight children of a farmer and a schoolteacher on a little farm on Trott Brook in rural Anoka County. Dad worked with his hands, tending his garden, fixing his cars, cutting and joining wood. He was faithful to his family, to Ford automobiles, and also to his separatist theology—that if you are true to Christ and separate yourself from this world, you will be raised to glory in paradise. My father was faithful to this, even as his little band of believers dwindled, diminished by schism and by escaping children, and I was unfaithful.

  I separated myself from the separatists with my eyes open. I wanted to live a big complicated life and not sit in a closet. I do not repent of that, though I have plenty else to repent of and am sorry that it came between Dad and me. There have been dozens of people who happened to sit next to me on airplanes over the years who knew more about me than my dad did. No more his fault than mine.

  • • •

  Now I’m an old tired Democrat, sick of the infernal wars, sick of politics today, the klutziness of Democrats and the soullessness of the Republicans’ “I got mine and to hell with the rest of you”—but here in an old brownstone church at an ancient ceremony, there is a moment of separation from all the griefs of this world. We kneel for prayers, bringing to mind the poverty and the goodness of our lives, the lives of others, the life to come, we pray for the Church . . . for peace and justice in the world . . . for all those in need or trouble . . . for all who seek God . . . for those who have died . . . and offer our thanks. Ten men and women are singing a cappella, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me bless his holy name,” and their voices drench us fugitive worshippers kneeling, naked, trembling, needy, in the knowledge of grace, and when we arise and go out into Baltimore, the blessing follows us. It followed me as I ate a dozen oysters that afternoon and hung around the library and paid homage to H. L. Mencken’s house on Union Square, that hearty old sinner who said, “Church is where men who have never been to heaven brag about it to men who will never get there.” Thank you for your service to our language, Henry. Thank you for your life, Dad. And now onward to November and the first good snowfall, fire in the fireplace, the feel of wool, a pile of good books, the first day of ice-skating.

  13.

  THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT

  My first stories were about animals who talked. My aunt Eleanor had a cat named Mrs. Gray, a sweet old dowager, and I wrote several stories in which Mrs. Gray described outlandish things that happened in that house when everyone was asleep. On the radio I like the occasional singing dolphin or the faithful mutt who unburdens himself (“The tail-wagging meant nothing, it was always about the food”) or the cow who is ruminating on the meaning of life. Anthropomorphism: a grand old literary tradition. When I am older and beyond caring what people think, I might write a whole novel from the point of view of a red squirrel.

  The
Owl and the Pussycat fell in love

  Though their families told them no

  They rendezvoused in a tender mood

  In a grove where the green grass grows.

  The Owl looked up to the stars above

  And sang to a blues guitar,

  “O lovely Kathy, O Kathy my love,

  If only we had a car.

  A car.

  A car.

  If only we had a car.”

  Pussy said to the Owl, “Your tender avowal

  Of love delights my heart.

  Let us get carried away and be married,

  I’m lonely when we’re apart.”

  Said the Owl, “Let’s join our hands in Des Moines

  Or Omaha or Butte.”

  Said the elegant kitty, “How about a city

  More romantic, like Duluth.”

  Duluth.

  Duluth.

  More romantic like Duluth.

  They left at once and it took them two months

  For their car did not run well,

  But they headed for the great North Shore

  And found a nice hotel.

  And there in the lobby was a Pig named Bobby,

  A very intelligent creature,

  Full of knowledge, he knew theology

  And was a Baptist preacher.

  A preacher.

  A preacher.

  He was a Baptist preacher.

  Dear Pig, is it possible to put down the gospel

  And marry a Cat and a Bird?

  Said the Pig, “For a dollar I’ll put on a collar

  And read you from God’s Holy Word.”

  Down by the lake ’round a big wedding cake

  They had them a ceremony.

  And recited a verse and for better or worse

  They entered matrimony.

  They did.

  They do.

  They entered matrimony.

  They looked at Two Harbors but there were no barbers

  Who could style feathers and fur.

  They looked at Chisholm where Catholicism

  Was strong and that’s not what they were.

  They thought about Ely but found it really

  Too wild and somewhat uncouth.

  And Grand Marais was too far away

  So they settled in Duluth.

  Duluth.

  Duluth.

  So they settled in Duluth.

  They promised of course to share household chores

  And their names they would hyphenate.

  They’d live happily and if children there be

  They’d be raised in the Lutheran faith.

  They feel elite on Superior Street,

  Where they live in a telephone booth.

  They are odd, I suppose, but no more than most

  Who live here in Duluth.

  Duluth.

  Duluth.

  Who live here in Duluth.

  14.

  CHEERFULNESS

  There is a picture of my mother, Grace, in a white summer dress, standing astride her bicycle on a sidewalk near Lake Nokomis in south Minneapolis, with her sister Elsie and their friends the Haverberg sisters, in the summer of 1933, when my mother was eighteen. She is smiling shyly, the third youngest of twelve children of William and Marian Denham, who had emigrated from Glasgow in 1905. Marian died when Mother was seven and she went through life with no memory of her mother, not a scrap, which troubled her. A few years before she died, at age ninety-seven, still living at home, she said, “There is so much I’d still like to know and there’s nobody left to ask.” All of her peers were gone, swept away, mourned, buried, and mostly forgotten, their laughter, their smell, the twang of their voices—you die and the ones who remembered you die and your story vanishes, all its little twists and turns, your jokes, your songs, all gone. I said to my mother, “It goes to show you the importance of writers.” She laughed. Mother was not one to write about herself—much much too forward—though she loved reminiscing and gossiping and laughing about oddball neighbors and childish hijinks and all. She loved jokes and the screwball comedy of Lucille Ball and Jonathan Winters. She was a good cook within her repertoire. She loved Christmas and made it beautiful every year, against the resistance of my dad, who considered it pagan excess and highly unscriptural. She once strode next door and lectured our tall truck-driver neighbor and told him to stop beating his wife and he did, at least for a while, so far as we could tell. She was a fearless traveler, and in her early nineties she flew off to London and Scotland for a two-week train odyssey with family, a very alert and cheerful grande dame in a wheelchair, chin up, smiling at the gate agent, game for whatever came next. She had to endure the death of her oldest son, Philip, and attend his funeral in Madison, Wisconsin, and sat stunned and weeping, watching his coffin lowered into the ground. Toward the end, she sat at her kitchen table and took my hand and murmured and kept murmuring things I couldn’t understand, but I knew from the cadence of it that she was praying for me. My sisters and I kept watch the last night of Mother’s life, taking shifts, holding her hand and singing to her and squirting morphine into her mouth to relieve the misery. She was conscious in the afternoon and knew who we were, and when we put her to bed, she fell asleep and didn’t wake up. On my shifts, I sang “Abide with Me” and “O Love That Will Not Let Me Go” and after my sisters went to bed I sang “Minnesota, hail to thee, hail to thee our state so dear” and “What’ll I do when you are far away” and “Let the Rest of the World Go By.” In high school, I’d smoked forbidden cigarettes in that room, exhaling out the screened window, reading Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, thinking long thoughts about the future, and now I thought about the volumes of history fading with her, about that young couple in rented rooms on Jefferson Street in Anoka, and then she was gone. A couple weeks after she died, I turned seventy and I sat down and wrote an essay about cheerfulness, which she possessed, and so did my dad, and all the more as they got old. It was a new topic for me.

  Cheerfulness is a choice, like choosing what color socks to wear, the black or the red. Happiness is something that occurs, or it doesn’t, and don’t hold your breath. Joy is a theological idea, pretty rare among us mortals and what many people refer to as joy is what I would call bragging. Bliss is brief, about five seconds for the male, fifteen for the female. Contentment is something that belongs to older cultures: Americans are a hungry, restless people, ever in search of the rainbow, the true source, the big secret. Euphoria is a drug.

  I found euphoria when I had a wisdom tooth extracted—three words, wisdom tooth extracted, that sound like pure agony to those of us who grew up in the Age of Pain when the dentist was a cranky bug-eyed guy with sour breath who climbed up on your lap with a pair of pliers and rassled you for the tooth, but now you go to an oral surgeon who asks if you’d like a sedative and you say, Why not? and they pop a needle in the crook of your elbow and usher you into a dreamy phase and five minutes later you wake up and a nurse says, Are you okay? Oh, my gosh, you have not been this okay for a long time. You are in a creamy dreamy state of happy buoyancy wafting high above this world of squalor and misery. There is no hangover, none. This is what my hippie pals were looking for back in the Sixties, sitting in candlelight smoking reefer that smelled like burning asphalt, that was no more effective than smoked trout. It’s what I was aiming for when I used to make a martini. Alas, there was a second martini that made me stupid, which is not the same as ecstasy. In any case I was not brought up to expect ecstasy. Our God was a sober and practical God who appreciated cleanliness and good work habits more than outbursts of overenthusiasm. Suffering was an important part of the big picture—suffering drew us closer to Him—one more reason to feel good about living in Minnesota. So here is a drug to smooth out the rough places on the highway of life. I can
hear my ancestors crying, No no no no. That is a coward’s way of thinking. An intelligent person craves reality over illusion. And the dosages are hard to control. A life of euphoria can easily slide into the life of hibernation.

  Cheerfulness, on the other hand, is a habit you assume in the morning and hang on to as best you can for the rest of the day. It fails at times and then it recovers. It’s a job. The sour narcissism of others can dent your cheerfulness, or heartbreaking news on the radio—the college boy who left the party drunk and passed out in a snowbank and died, nineteen, a nice kid who did one dumb thing and ffffft he’s gone—but the cheerful man retains his vim and verve, rises to the occasion, makes people laugh. You can cheerfully endure the deaths of loved ones, a gloomy marriage, a dopey job—you can drive away from a bad-luck town and make a fresh start on a new frontier—it’s all possible if you maintain your good humor.

  Cheerfulness is a great American virtue, found in Emerson, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, even in Mark Twain: Don’t be held hostage by the past, the bonehead mistakes, the staggering losses, the betrayals of trust. Look ahead. Improve the day. Grow flowers. Walk in the woods. Be resilient. Clear away the wreckage and make spaghetti sauce. Power and influence are shadows, illusions. As Solomon said, the race is not to the big shots nor the battle to the tall nor success to a guy with connections.