If there is a literary prize for diversity, I am a contender. I started out writing poetry, sports, and obituaries, have written short fiction, novels, sonnets (77), limericks (hundreds), essays, comedy sketches, newspaper columns, book reviews, straight reporting, an opera libretto (Mr. and Mrs. Olson), a play (Radio Man), radio monologues, songs (hundreds, some not bad), a movie (A Prairie Home Companion), speeches, campaign literature, an advice column for Salon called “Mr. Blue,” children’s books (Cat, You Better Come Home), and what this says about me is (1) I’m not disheartened by failure; (2) I like to have three or four things going at one time; (3) I had plenty of time thanks to cleaning ladies like Lulu and Ritonia and had good children who played nicely with other children; and (4) I have no hobbies, no dog, no lawn to mow, I lead an uncrowded life.
I did hundreds of shows at which I walked into the crowd and sang, “My country, ’tis of thee,” and because I’m not Pavarotti, the whole crowd sang with me and they enjoyed the communal feeling. We’re all riders on the crowded school bus of life, eventually you find a seat, and the neighbors are nice to you and you’re not an Untouchable. This happened to me in 1978, it’s written down in my diary. A woman named Marilyn Heltzer walked into the radio studio and said, “You smell good.” People had said nice things about stories I wrote but this simple approval of my creatureness touched me. My wife, Jenny, says this to me now and then: You smell good. Walking in Loring Park I saw a woman in a frilly white skirt and ratty old sweater, barefoot, singing to Jesus and dancing with one arm around a light pole, singing, Jesus, I sing your praises. Jesus, I’m glad you’re in my heart, and letting out whoops at the ducks on the mucky lagoon, and then she stopped and yelled at me, “What you looking at?” and I’m sorry I didn’t say, “You sound good.” I walk farther and see a deranged man yammering to himself, talking a blue streak, a perfectly well-dressed lunatic having an episode, and then I notice the little device clipped to his ear. It’s a free country, deranged, doing business, who can tell?
We’re all in over our heads. I was a big shot at one time, and now I’m an old man who’s done his share of dumb things, but at least I’ve not put my tongue on a frozen clothes pole, not so far.
I thought about death when I was young and saw Roger and Leeds and Barry go down in the dust. In hellfire gospel preaching, the prospect of imminent death was the main selling point. Now it’s happening all around me. At the Class of 1960’s reunion in 2000, I gave a speech, and during it, a classmate had a heart attack. He collapsed and three days later he died. I was reminiscing about Stan Nelson, our gym teacher who made us do chin-ups, and Ronnie was thinking, “Oh, God. This can’t be a heart attack, can it?” and it was.
Seventy-eight is a good age: critical opprobrium is no longer a factor in my life. I no longer worry about being dragged off to jail. The goals of my sixties—to learn the tango, hike the Himalayas, win the Nobel Prize in Literature—have faded, and I am focused on other things, such as not tripping on a loose rug, not struggling when I rise from a chair, not telling a story and then forgetting her name, the girl who challenged me to wrestle when we were twelve, my first glimmer of heterosexuality—what a beautiful discovery!
Julie. Her name was Julie.
I feel good. My blood is thinned, a beta blocker suppresses atrial fibrillation, another pill prevents seizures and so I look normal, no collapsing on the floor, writhing and gibbering. People sometimes drop dead at this age on a moment’s notice, I’ve known people it happened to. To go on living is a dangerous proposition and yet I never think about death. In fact, I believe my best work is still ahead, which is a lunatic notion, certifiably batty, but there it is. People give awards to old writers who’ve gone fallow and nobody’s given me one so I feel I’m still in business. Many good friends have crashed, Arnie, Roland, Sydney, Arvonne, and my turn will come, meanwhile, there are good jokes about calamity. Ole is dying when he smells Lena’s rhubarb pie, his favorite, and he crawls into the kitchen and picks up a knife to cut a slice and she slaps him from behind: “That’s for the funeral. Leave it alone.” He says to Lena, “You’ve stuck with me through two heart attacks, a stroke, leukemia, brain seizures, and erectile dysfunction and now this dementia. I’m starting to think you’re bad luck, darling.”
My friend Jim Harrison died at 78, at his desk, writing, pen in hand, in Arizona where he spent the winters, having spent enough of them in Michigan where he wrote Legends of the Fall and a great deal more, in a cabin in the woods. “Working every day of the week,” he wrote to me. “I don’t know what else to do. With age all my opinions drift away. Who am I to say for sure? My people thought they’d see Jesus when they died. Now that we know we have 90 billion galaxies, I’m not inclined to discount anything. The towering reality is death. I don’t mind. I was never asked. On death, a tour of the 90 billion galaxies would be flattering. Yes? Our curiosity is still in the lead. Wittgenstein said that the miracle is that the world exists.” He kept a radio in his cabin in the woods, and that’s how we met: I was on the radio. Once, a women’s quartet sang “Shall We Gather at the River (That Flows by the Throne of God)?” on the show, and he was moved to write a poem (“They say it runs by the throne of God./This is where God invented fish.”) in which he said that maybe nothing happens after death, but if so, we won’t know it. But maybe something does:
Maybe we’ll be cast
at the speed of light through the universe
to God’s throne. His hair is bounteous. . . .
We’ll sing with the warblers perched on his eyelashes.
To which I replied:
Here’s to old Harrison—Jim,
Who imagined the Lord as a limb,
Nothing fearful or horribler
But a place where a warbler
Would perch and perchance sing a hymn.
I wish you well, old man, as you fly around the galaxies. Maybe God will invite you to name a few of them.
I look forward to old age. My mother reached 97, and I hope for a cool 100. My heart got sewn up at the Mayo Clinic, solving the valve problem that wiped out two uncles in their late fifties, and I have faith that medical science will keep me upright for a while, though longevity is not nature’s plan. Nature wanted me to beget offspring, raise them to be self-sufficient, then take the long walk across the ice before the young could acquire my deficits. But I intend to be useful. I blew away forty years amusing myself while other Keillors were trying to save the world. My brother Philip did research on shore erosion and thermal pollution on the Great Lakes, my sister Linda raised money for colleges, my brother Steve was a historian and brother Stan an attorney for the state appeals court, my sister Judy taught first grade. Meanwhile, I wrote:
There was an old man of Bay Ridge
Who cried out, Son of a bitch,
I got up in the night
And on came the light
And I find I have pissed in the fridge.
I invented a town “where the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average” and I said, “Nothing gets the taste of shame and humiliation out of your mouth like a piece of rhubarb pie.” And sometimes people quote my line, “Nothing you do for children is ever wasted” and maybe that bucked up some parents and teachers who were sick of the little monsters and wished for a convenient orphanage to send them to.
What a person craves, more than money and fame, is to experience life in its fullness and the radio show was generous that way. Not many nerdy boys got to sing so many duets with women as I did. And singing the Whiffenpoof Song to the US Supreme Court sitting solemnly in a row— seriously, how many people get that opportunity? I spoke to the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa, my text Emily Dickinson’s “Success is counted sweetest by those who ne’er succeed,” and advocated failure as the surest means of education. I was joking, but they took me seriously so then I did too. I sat next to the famous critic Helen Vendler, who I don’t think was fond of my work, and we carried on a friendly conversation—thi
s is a privilege shared by few. I did a benefit for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at which I said, “Merce believes there are no fixed points in dance, which is why he didn’t become a professional ballplayer.” I hung out with famous choreographers whose work I’d never seen and we got along fine. I went to Washington to lobby for the National Endowment for the Arts after they’d sponsored the famous Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit and how many old liberals have walked into a congressman’s office prepared to talk about the value of letting schoolchildren hear Mozart and Chopin and he hands you a Mapplethorpe photograph of a naked man with a whip up his butt and says, “You call this art?” It’s an experience more old liberals should have. (I walked into the office of Senator Alan Simpson (R of Wyoming) in his ornate Minority Whip’s office, which looked like the King of Siam’s personal chapel, and he told me about a contest cowboys waged, competing to see who could drop his jeans and pick up a silver dollar off a bench using only his bare cheeks.) I got to sing with the New York Philharmonic, a cycle of my own sonnets set to music, a pleasure denied to other writers of sonnets. On the other hand, for a show at the San Diego Zoo, I got to interview Murray the 400-pound sea lion who was trained, when a microphone was pointed at his mouth, to say: “BLEAUGHHH!” He never missed a cue. “BLEAUGHHH” was his opinion of the show and everything else. When Murray speaks, he tends to spray. Of all the writers I know, I daresay none has been spit on by a sea lion.
Murray the Sea Lion, San Diego Zoo.
Once, when the show was in Alaska, I went fishing for salmon on a commercial boat out of Juneau one chill summer morning and sat in the pilot house next to the captain as he maneuvered out of the anchorage and up the fjord, one ear to the radio, coolly observing the great gray whale surface on the starboard side. My daughter Malene was on board, and she came topside with a salmon she’d just hooked. The captain pulled out a knife and skinned a patch from the fish and cut two thin slices of raw flesh and offered it to us and she and I ate them. She was delighted. Snowy mountain peaks beyond the fjord, a chill wind, a gray whale alongside, a captain at the helm. And I felt a bond of captaincy with him, each taking responsibility for his own ship. I’d had fine crews, without whom there would’ve been nothing, people like David O’Neill who started out at the age of twelve as a volunteer and stayed to the end, and Debra Beck the Can-Do woman who managed everything that came her way, and Kay Gornick who did contracts and permissions and research and Caroline Hontz who liked to pretend she didn’t love being a travel agent. I went out on stage and talked about my hometown, which people came to believe was real though they knew it wasn’t. I was an oddball who never belonged in Anoka, so I had to invent a hometown. It happened accidentally, a story lost in the Portland train station men’s room, the attempt to recapture it from memory, and I did this for a thousand-plus Saturday nights and when I told the audience, “Well, it has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon,” they sighed and closed their eyes and listened. I had been John and Grace’s rebellious child, and yet the Lake Wobegon philosophy was simple and practical: The way to do something is to do it. The secret of writing is rewriting. It’s nice to dream, but the urge to perform is not in itself an indication of talent. Life is short and it’s getting shorter—on the other hand, don’t buy cheap shoes. Tall People cannot expect Short People to look out for us, so when you bang your head on the frying pan rack, it’s your problem, nobody else’s. Put a big dish by the door and put your car keys in it, your billfold, phone, extra glasses, and in the time you’ll save not looking for them, you can write War and Peace. (On the other hand, it’s already been written.)
Cheerfulness is a fundamental American virtue. Some people look for euphoria, which I experienced once from a sedative an oral surgeon gave me for a wisdom tooth extraction, and I was euphoric for a whole day, but I only have three wisdom teeth left so the prospects are limited. So we sit and wait for redemption. Bases loaded, one out, our pitcher is struggling, disaster on the horizon, and then there it is—a squiggly grounder to the shortstop who underhands it to the second baseman who pivots and fires to first for the DP, catching the runner by a half-stride, and reflexively we jump to our feet and say, YES! Once again, the world is saved.
As the Psalmist said, it is God who hath made us and not we ourselves; we are His people and the sheep of His pasture. Come unto His gates with thanksgiving, and into His courts with praise. For the Lord is gracious; His mercy is everlasting; and His truth endureth from generation to generation. In other words, lighten up. It isn’t about you. Improve the hour.
A Prairie Home Companion ended a month before my 74th birthday. When I invented Lake Wobegon in my thirties, I made the old people 75—Florian and Myrtle and the Norwegian bachelor farmers—and they stayed 75 for forty years—their grandchildren aged, old people didn’t—I was fond of them and didn’t want them to die. Now I’m older than either of my grandfathers. They died at 73, worn out from hard labor, and I avoided the labor and did work that I loved, a privilege unimaginable to them. I am a lucky man to live long enough to see how lucky I am.
I plan to become a living artifact like Albert Woolson of Duluth, the last living Union veteran whom I saw riding in a parade at the age of 105. I rode a hay wagon with my Uncle Jim, drawn by a team of Belgian horses, and saw New York City in 1953 and slept on a fire escape in a heat wave. I sang gospel songs on a street corner as a preacher hollered at passersby to give their lives to the Lord. I threaded 16 mm film in a movie projector. I sat in a car outside Anoka High School and mourned for Buddy Holly, who’d died the night before. I typed my first stories on an Underwood upright typewriter, using carbon paper. I was edited by the late William Shawn of The New Yorker. I hosted a live radio variety show. I refused induction into the Army during the Vietnam war. In my nineties, I will become an attraction, a man who can sing “The Frozen Logger” for you or “Frankie and Johnny” or recite the eighty-seven counties of Minnesota from Aitkin to Yellow Medicine and, if it is requested, I will tell how in 1947 I set out to ride a streetcar downtown to Dayton’s and went into a luncheonette and was caught and not punished and my aunts were amused and that is how I got into comedy and radio.
I’ve been deeply troubled at times, like everyone else, but then I think of my college classmate who smoked some bad hashish and suffered a psychotic episode and was diagnosed as schizophrenic and went through various therapies and married a fellow therapee and illness became the main topic of her life. I have avoided therapy and sought grandeur. Therapy shows you that sadness is inexhaustible, and why would I want to know that? Hercules suffered insanity and purified himself by performing heroic labors, and I did the same by walking out on the stage, a sad man trying to be funny in front of thousands. I have a fundamentalist face and it was odd for the audience to see Cotton Mather singing “You Were Always on My Mind” with a woman standing next to him. Who wants to be on Cotton Mather’s mind? Nobody. I had less stage presence than the average stone post, but audiences are polite and they gave me the benefit of the doubt. They looked around at the crowd and thought, “He must be good to attract this big an audience.” So I made my way upstream. I made my mother laugh and taught African cabdrivers English and befriended a million strangers just as Jesus told us to do: love one another whether we want to or not, and for years thereafter, strangers walk up and say, “I liked your show,” people smile at me in the airport, something Grandma never imagined as she and I knelt with our faces in the sofa as Uncle Jim asked the Lord’s merciful blessing. He never prayed for me to be outstanding or celebrated, and now I’m over it. Minnesota is not a state of great poets or opera singers, much as we might wish to be, we are a choral state, people who enjoy ourselves more if we are surrounded by like-minded persons doing exactly what we’re doing. I wanted badly to be gifted but instead I walked into a crowd and sang about how often at night when the heavens are bright with the light from the glittering stars and the crowd was amazed and asked as they gazed if their glory exceeds that of ours. That’s what happens when yo
u get old, your specialty fades, your uniqueness, you wade into the river of anonymous old age, the river of Jordan, Shenandoah, the beautiful beautiful river where bright angel feet have trod that flows by the throne of God, and you gather here and join your voices to the others, and this, you realize, is what you always wanted, life itself, why wish for anything more?
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
That which I see clearly in my peers
Who disappear at New Years’ to escape the cold,
My classmates with white hair and gizmos in their ears.
In me thou see’st a former tennis player
And devotee of biking, hiking, sailing,
Now hesitate when heading down the stair
And take a firm hold of the railing.
In me thou see’st a formerly swift mind
Once given to riposte and repartee
Now he resorts to googling to find
The word for confusion that begins with D.
This thou perceiv’st, and regard with gentle scorn,
But your time will come, as sure as you were born.
Acknowledgments
My fervent gratitude to these two, Katharine Seggerman and Kate Gustafson. Katharine came aboard for the 27-city Farewell Tour of 2017 and stayed on to run The Writer’s Almanac and as managing editor and Kate was managing director of PHC through half its history. They were trusty companions through my productive twilight and now that I’ve told my story, they’re free to fill in the gaps.
The publisher and the author thank the following for permission to reprint copyrighted materials:
“Barnyard Dance” words and music by Johnny Copeland. Copyright © 1972 Happy Valley Music. Copyright Renewed. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission. Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC.
“Bus Stop” from Collected Poems by Donald Justice, copyright © 2004 by Donald Justice. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
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