The Keillor Reader

by Garrison Keillor

  There is a photograph of my grandpa James Keillor standing by his team of horses beside the house where his sisters Becky and Mary lived, north of Anoka, a handsome fellow, forty. He had been a carpenter in the shipyards of New Brunswick and came to Minnesota in 1880 to help out his sister Mary, whose husband, Mr. Hunt, was terribly sick, and soon after James arrived, the husband died of tuberculosis, leaving Mary with three small children and a 160-acre homestead. So James stayed on. One spring day, two years from now, he will walk across the road to speak to the schoolteacher, Dora Powell, twenty years younger than he, a lovely slip of a girl. She saw him cross the road, a handsome man with a full mustache, and he walked into her schoolroom and she saw that he had combed his hair and put on a cologne. He stood by her desk and talked about the building and what repairs it needs and she sensed that he had more on his mind. She said, “I’m glad you came over because I’ve been meaning to say goodbye. When the school term ends, I plan to go back to Iowa. And I want to bake you a pie to thank you for those times you came over here and lit a fire in the stove and warmed up the place before I got here, and I need to know what kind of pie you prefer, apple or blueberry.” That was as far as she could go, and then it was his turn. He said he wished she would not leave, that he would miss her, that he has taken a shine to her, that he has wanted to kiss her for several months now. She did not blink. They gazed on each other, not smiling, and then he took two steps toward her and bent and kissed her. And kissed her again. A couple weeks later, they drove to St. Francis to be married by a judge and when they arrived home, James was so enthused, he forgot to unhitch the horses and they stood all night in the farmyard, the reins hanging down to the ground. He took Dora in his arms and carried her upstairs, a ritual he continued until he got old and feeble. He had a strong tenor voice and knew many songs by heart and he always had a book with him. People sometimes saw him sitting on a mower, cutting hay, reins in one hand and book in the other, and later, driving his Model T down the road, steering with his knees, reading. We have letters he wrote to Dora while traveling, addressed “Dear girl” and signed “Jimmy K” and letters to his children signed “Daddy J.” He adored his children and paid close attention to them. He died in 1933, before I was born. My father believed that he would meet his parents in heaven and recognize them, but Scripture doesn’t really promise that. I met my grandfather in my imagination, as a legendary figure, from stories told me by my aunts and my great-uncle Lew and Dad’s cousin Dorothy. The poems he knew by heart. The love of Milton and Shakespeare by one whose life was marked by unrelenting hard labor, those big calloused fingers turning the tissue pages. His favorite hymns, such as “O Thou in Whose Presence My Soul Takes Delight.” Grandpa waking his children in the middle of the night to bundle up and follow him out through the woods to see a silver wolf on a snowbank in the moonlight, howling. The house burning down from a chimney fire and Grandpa raking the ashes, mourning the loss of photographs and books. The grief at his wayward daughter Ruth. His service on the town board. His purchase of a Model T when it first came out and driving it home from Anoka and driving it into the ditch while hollering, “Whoa! Whoa!” The story of his complaining that his mattress was too firm, that he “couldn’t get a good purchase with his knees,” which my aunts laughed and laughed about, which I didn’t understand until much later. And the story of his funeral, at which some people were offended because the preacher took “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” as his text and that verse did not, in their opinion, apply to Jamie Keillor. And there he is in the picture, handsome, beside his horses, having served his sister and raised her children, now waiting for his own life to begin.

  My father seemed to close the door on the past and that disappointed me deeply. If you asked him about his boyhood on the farm, he said, “That was a long time ago,” and claimed not to remember. But my aunts Elizabeth and Eleanor and Ruth adored their father and in my mind he took on mythic proportion, the Good Brother who sacrificed for family, the man absorbed in Longfellow as the mower went clacketing along, the great brutes leaning into the harness, the reins in the man’s lap. And the man who carried the schoolteacher in his arms upstairs to the soft mattress.

  There were giants in my ancestry: Elder John Crandall of Rhode Island, who in early colonial days took a true Christian view of Indians and strove to learn the local languages; Prudence Crandall of Canterbury, Connecticut, who admitted young colored women to her school and was driven out of town for it; David Powell, a farmer who lived through most of the nineteenth century and spent it migrating westward, from Pennsylvania to Ohio, then Illinois, then Iowa, Missouri, a big jump out to Colorado where he served in the territorial legislature, and then the Oklahoma land rush, and then died, having left a string of Powell progeny in his wake. But James Keillor was the mighty oak whose branches overspread us and I sat in his shade. I spent a couple boyhood summers in his house, where Grandma and Uncle Jim lived, pumped his pump organ, read from his Bible, ate corn flakes at his breakfast table and johnnycake baked on his old woodstove, washed my face in cold water from his hand pump in the lean-to behind the house, played in his haymow, drew cream from the milk can sitting in the cold cistern in the milk house, rode on Grandpa’s old hayrack and on the backs of Uncle Jim’s big draft horses, who were descendants of Grandpa’s horses, a little boy hanging on to the harness as the mane bounced and enormous shoulders swayed under me and chains jingled as we came galumping up the dirt road and into the pasture. Grandma was a dear and a good heart but she could also be peevish. The saintly dead grandfather was the colossus who stood invisibly over us, the seed from whom we sprang, and through the tumult of adolescence and beyond and all my troubles, Lord, I felt his light shine on me.

  When I was a boy, attending parades around town, I often saw, riding in the backseat of a convertible, slumped down, wearing a blue campaign hat, Albert Woolson of Duluth, the last living veteran of the Civil War, who rode in many parades until he died, age 109, in 1956. He was a few years older than Grandpa and had been a drummer boy in the 1st Minnesota Regiment and now he was a gaunt relic, our last live connection to Lincoln, horse-drawn caissons, ladies in crinoline gowns and tender songs about sad farewells in the moonlight, and he made me wish Grandpa were alive.

  • • •

  When a man dwells on the past as I did, and still do, you lead a double life. You’re in L.A. working on a screenplay and sitting through production meetings attended by men in short-sleeved white shirts discussing the Narrative Arc and the Hero’s Quest and what is the Gift that he brings back from his Journey, and none of it is real, what is real is the memory of driving last night in a convertible along Sunset Boulevard, traffic juking and bopping around you, through a canyon of glittering lights and billboards, and all you can think of is your dad, who is dead, and how much he loved driving around and the years he spent in the swaying mail car on the Empire Builder hurtling through the night, a .38 snub-nosed revolver on his belt, and the movie you’re trying to write is a thin tissue of falsehoods—there is no memory in it whatsoever—and when the studio fires the executive producer and cancels the production, you are secretly relieved. The work did not stand up to the memory of the man in the mail car or the man on the mower reading Longfellow to the clip-clop of horse hooves. It was only blind ambition, no more.

  • • •

  In 1987, I quit A Prairie Home Companion and went off to Copenhagen thinking I had spent long enough being silly in public and it was time to become a novelist. I sat in a back bedroom at No. 3 Trondhjemsgade, at the keyboard of a word processor the size of a suitcase, working at a novel about a man in his late forties trying to find himself in a foreign city. It was a dramatic time in Europe and from my window I could see the front gate of the Soviet embassy as the Soviet Union was falling apart and hear a crowd of Danish demonstrators across the street. I walked around the corner and here, behind police barriers, were several hundred old Danish Communists protesting the
liberal reforms of Gorbachev, protesting the imposition of democracy and freedom of speech. They had grown up on Marxist-Leninist dogma and enjoyed being radicals in a comfortable bourgeois country and they were angry that so many Russians wanted to be more like Denmark. The lunacy of this made me think of the Brethren, enjoying the benefits of a liberal society while maintaining a righteous contempt for it, which was also pleasurable. And it made me think of myself, who had abandoned what was good in my life to pursue an illusion. Writing a novel is like setting out to hike across Texas and somewhere around Dallas you discover that you don’t really like Texas and you still have five hundred miles of Texas to go. Doing a weekly radio show is like walking into town to have lunch with your friends. So I thought about getting back to radio.

  We were young people devoted to old-time music; that’s where A Prairie Home Companion comes from, people who’d sit and play old 78s over and over, trying to decipher what the Possum Creek Boys were singing there—was it “hittin Pascagoula again” or was it “git yer mule a pint o’ gin”? Our high school classmates were rising through the ranks of corporate life and living in the Seventies and we went around in homesteader clothes and sat on broken-down sofas on ramshackle porches singing “Angel Band” and “I’ll Fly Away” and “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me,” singing grandpa songs, singing old blues as if all the good times were past and gone and the water tasted like turpentine and we were heading for California where they sleep out every night. Bill Hinkley was a regular from the beginning and years later when he lay dying at the V.A. hospital, miserable, legs not working, fingers clumsy on the mandolin, he asked if I knew “Abide with Me,” and we sang it together, about the Lord’s unchanging love as life ebbs away and earth’s joys grow dim, Help of the helpless, O abide with me. There was nothing you could do for him except be there.

  • • •

  How does one maintain a cheerful heart in the face of failure and loss, marching toward the cliff that lies ahead in the fog? I feel boyish most days and sort of jazzy and imagine I could still hit a hard cross-court backhand and ride a bike no-handed but then I cross a street and see oncoming traffic and I break into a gallop and there is no gallop, I run like a frightened duck. I no longer go down stairs two at a time; I reach for the railing. In junior high, my friends and I did imitations of elderly dither, the quavery voice, the trembling hand, the mental lapses on the verge of lunacy, and now we old satirists are becoming our victims.

  When I turned seventy aboard the Queen Mary 2 in the middle of the Atlantic with three women—fifty-five, twenty-five, fourteen—we didn’t talk about aging, we lay out on deck, the three of them in sunshine, me in shadow, and breathed salt air and then got dressed up and went to the dining room for a hearty meal, oysters and steak and chocolate cake. But I thought about my aunts and uncles who toppled over in their seventies. The young women in their summer dresses, the young man in the Pure Oil uniform standing by the gas pumps in Anoka, the burly young farmer on the hayrack holding the horses’ reins, the aunt who could swing a bat and run the bases, the aunts who baked bread, the uncle with the billiards table in the basement—they all lie under their self-effacing tombstones, the memory of them fading, as my words will fade, as even the great ones fade. I spent two nights at Sun Valley Lodge, room 206, where Hemingway liked to stay with his mistresses before they became his third and fourth wives and where, I’m sure, they washed each other’s bodies tenderly and made love and he thought, At last! Someone who really gets me. The lodge is a stone’s throw from the cemetery where his body lies. Several empty wine bottles lay on his tombstone, from people drinking to his health, I suppose. I think of him as an old old man with a gray beard—I was nineteen when he put the shotgun to his forehead and blew his head off—but he was not quite sixty-two.

  A man starts to feel vulnerable when he turns seventy. We are programmed to degenerate. Nature only wanted us to find a willing female, impregnate her, raise the offspring until they could fend for themselves, and then get out of the way. Nature is not interested in our twilight years. Erectile dysfunction is common among older males: nature’s way of saying, Enough out of you. Time is up. Go sit in the corner. So why go on? What, besides inertia and vanity, is the point? Your curiosity wanes, your ideas are old and stiff, you’ve said all you have to say—haven’t you? Most writers have shot their wad long before this age; maybe I have, too. I go to a convention of radio programmers and it’s all foreign to me. I am a relic of the analog in a world of ones and zeros. I grew up in the stereo hi-fi era when people were thrilled by audio texture and clarity and now our ears are trained to accept tinniness, flatness, audio cardboard. The programmers are very welcoming, as you would be to a dotty old uncle, but I don’t understand a word they say, not even the prepositions. They don’t do radio “shows” anymore, they create content which is distributed on various platforms, and as each speaker murmurs on and the laser pointer waves at the bullet points on the PowerPoint I come to the point of mindless stupor and visualize large rooms with many small beige cubicles in which silent drones sit at desktops and spin audio tissue, each unit three minutes in length, the duration determined by neuropsychologists to be sufficient to impersonate intelligence with the least risk of boring the indifferent listener, and these tissues are randomly assembled into a patchwork format that is broadcast, podcast, upcast, downcast, recast as Web copy, which somehow satisfies the demographic much as white noise might, a choir of low-impact spoken content that creates the illusion of social engagement for the lonely motorist or the runner on the treadmill, and the beauty of the whole enterprise is that no individual in the entire organization feels keen personal responsibility for the outcome, no more than the average bumblebee. Everyone, from those in the smallest cubicle on up to the largest enchilada, has the luxury of a faint cool disdain for the corporation and for their own work. It’s a no-fault deal. In my radio world there is real suffering. I’ve done A Prairie Home Companion for forty years and never used my own name—the writing credit goes to Sarah Bellum—but I suffer for my screw-ups and the monologue that wanders off into the ditch and collapses, the laborious song, the wimpy sketch, the guest out in left field: I go home and hang my head and relive the low points over and over and wish I could anesthetize myself with a good stiff drink. I do know how to suffer. I learned some from the Brethren and some from other writers. I do a good job of it.

  Suffering is the ground from which cheerfulness springs.

  I wrote that sentence to see how it looks and then I didn’t delete it, so there it is.

  • • •

  I watched my mother in her old age, for clues about my own future, and watched as her life got smaller and smaller. She stopped traveling; it was no longer fun. She came with me to Florida for a couple weeks and we sat in a large soulless house day after day in the rain looking out at the gray Gulf and she was delighted to get back to snowy Minnesota and the house where she had raised her children. She picked up her walker and did her daily dozen circuits of living room, sun porch, dining room, hallway, and she perused the paper, read my column when I was writing one, read her Bible, prayed, welcomed visitors; the caregivers came in shifts and made her lunch and she sat at a table with empty chairs around it and enjoyed her macaroni and cheese, followed by butter brickle ice cream and weak coffee. She missed John but did not talk about it unless asked. (You must miss your husband, don’t you? Yes, of course.) On warm sunny days she motored out on the deck and sat under a broad-brimmed hat and looked at the former garden where bushels of tomatoes once grew and were brought to the kitchen, peeled, boiled, in an orgy of canning, but no more. It had become lawn. Tiny evergreens Dad had planted in pioneer days had become towering pines. In the yard stood the old square pipe frames between which clotheslines once stretched, the verticals anchored in concrete, and nobody felt it necessary to root them out, artifacts of the old life, monuments to years of labor at the wringer washing machine and hanging wet
sheets and jeans on the lines. A couple dogs are buried under the apple tree. I can see where incinerator was where I blew up aerosol cans and the path from the raspberries down to the ravine where I trotted off when I needed to disappear for a while. The old ball field is just north of here, the one that a gang of us boys created in a vacant field with a deep weedy ditch just behind second base where grounders sometimes turned into home runs.

  • • •

  In her late years it seemed to me that Mother found that spiritual awareness that Buddhism holds up as enlightenment, in which one does not covet more than one’s small lot, one is free of animosity, and one lives in the immediate present, day by day, without dread of what might befall. You call it satipatthana, I call it cheerfulness. When I visited her, she never said, “Why so long since I’ve seen you?” She said, “You work too hard.” I brought her a block of her favorite English cheese, Cheshire or Gloucester, and she savored a bite and had a sip of port. She didn’t talk about her ailments unless asked. She did not reminisce unless you led her there. She wore her faith lightly and did not witness to you unless prompted. She wanted to hear your news, the comings and goings of grandchildren: family was preeminent and presidents and potentates and winners of Academy Awards were merely names. She had nothing bad to say about anybody. She spoke on the phone regularly to her sister Joan, who was an accomplished complainer, and Mother heard her out, no comment. In her last years, Mother drifted now and then into what you might call dementia, after her cohorts died and she became the last rose of summer. She alone was left to remember the yellow trolley clanging along East Thirty-eighth Street and the iceman in his horse-drawn wagon and be able to identify the old Brethren gents in dark suits and Brethren women in shapeless dresses standing under the trees in the panoramic photo of the 1927 Minneapolis Bible Conference. She and Dorothy Bacon had been high school classmates and when they got together, Mother was all delight, life came alive, but then Dorothy faded away, and Mother started talking to her dead sisters Elsie and Ina and brother George, as if they were present. She carried on extensive conversations, sometimes laughing at some remark we couldn’t hear. Call it dementia but it struck me as strategic, Mother living in her imagination, creating a novel before our eyes, a very perfect invisible novel in which she was young, in the arms of family, surrounded by lively talk and maybe looking forward to riding the interurban trolley up to Anoka and catching a glimpse of Johnny. A very old lady with snow-white hair, almost blind, her skin papery, reaching out to put her old hand on the table toward the late Elsie, who is telling her something very amusing, and Mother laughs. It is not so different from what I do on the radio. All those Lake Wobegon people are dead now and I keep them alive: the children age but the grown-ups stay the same. She is talking cheerfully to Elsie and someone else and I can tell from the cadence that she is telling a story and that Elsie is laughing. Nothing she says makes literal sense at all, it is like birdsong and it’s a story with wonderful things in it. She is enjoying telling it. I sit and watch, an alien but not for long. My time will come in due course and when it does, however it does, whether in a house in St. Paul or an apartment in New York or a room at the Good Shepherd, I am prepared to welcome it with a good heart. To do my part, pull my weight, don’t be a crybaby, hold my horses, and get the job done, just as I was told long long ago to do.