Garrison Keillor's Podcast

A round table in St. Paul Nov 02, 2024

It’s an amazing feat, turning the party of rectitude and personal liberty into a unified body of citizens totally devoted to one man, obedient to his self-absorption. He is down on the country, has never praised his wife or intentionally said anything funny, has never hugged a small child in public. But it was so good of these young people to give their old great-uncle a big burst of faith in America’s future. I can’t wait to see them again. If we lowered the voting age to 12 and required voters over 60 to pass a history exam, I believe it’d be a big step forward.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Don't name a library after me, please, I'm still writing Oct 30, 2024

George Latimer, the chatty New York lawyer who moved to St. Paul in the 1960s and went on to rejuvenate and transform the capital city in 13-1/2 years as its charismatic and visionary mayor. Latimer died on Aug. 18 at 89.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Open the doors, let the young mingle among the treasures Oct 26, 2024

Some of these kids at the Met will wind up in law school and get a serious education in civil procedure and come away with due respect for our system of justice: trial by a jury of one’s peers, the rules of evidence, witnesses testifying under oath aware of the penalty for perjury. The lawyers defending the Famous Man were so taught and they stand silently by his side as he bellows his contempt to the TV cameras……Teen Night at the Met was a holiday from all that. The young people there wouldn’t have elected the Scowler to be a municipal sewage inspector. There are dark days ahead but eventually the young and curious and lighthearted are going to inherit the country and make it great and an artist will make a sculpture of Trump naked with a sword, his bare butt and belly hanging out, and that will be that.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

How I survived the solar flares Oct 19, 2024

We live in an Age of Disgruntlement and when I dine with grumpy people, I listen to their gripes and when they stop to take a breath I talk about the great progress made in my lifetime, which of course irks them no end. For one thing, the cash card. We used to go into the bank and hand a check for cash to Mildred the teller with her pert hairstyle and starched blouse, her specs hanging on a chain around her neck, and she’d wrinkle her mouth and peruse the check, questioning the wisdom of handing you money, and eventually she’d count out your thirty dollars and say, “Now don’t go spending it all in one place.” And now there are ATMs everywhere you look and you slide in the card and get $300, no look of disapproval.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

The beautiful winding road Oct 12, 2024

This is one of the happiest summers of my very long life. My wife installed WhatsApp on my phone and it dings and I pick up and she talks to me from the wine country of Portugal where she’s hiking with her brother and his wife, on their way to a baptism and pig roast. Sometimes my daughter comes on and says, “Make me laugh,” so I tell her about the woman at Yellowstone Park who was chased by a bear and the park rangers arrested her for running with a bear behind. She laughs.I’m an old man, I have no ambition whatsoever but I love my work. I do 90 minutes of stand-up, I go back to the hotel and work on my novel, and in the morning I repeat it. The audience laughs a lot and then I have hours of pure silence occasionally interrupted by the voice of the woman I love lying in her hotel room in a heat wave in Portugal and recounting her days’ adventures. Or my little girl needing a joke. So a woman was hit by a car and lay in the street bleeding and someone yelled, “Call a priest!” The woman said, “No, I’m Unitarian.” Someone yelled, “Then call a math teacher.”
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Standing on the sidewalk shaking hands Oct 05, 2024

What remains powerful is love. My parents loved each other dearly and I witnessed this and it remains large in my life. When I was six, I was a slow reader — when you’ve grown up trying to read Hezekiah and Jeremiah, it does crimp your style — and my teacher Estelle Shaver noticed and kept me after school to read aloud to her from Dick and Jane. When Bill the janitor came in to empty the wastebaskets, she said, “Listen to this boy, Bill. Doesn’t he have a wonderful voice? He’s entertaining me while I’m correcting workbooks.” It was remedial reading but she made it feel like a privilege and this act of kindness sticks with me. Call me naïve but I think marvelous feats can be accomplished by small acts of kindness.The country is moving toward electing a woman president and I am touched by how presidential she looks, her warmth, her gracefulness, how she can converse with a crowd, how she ignores the insults and the bellowing of walruses, and speaks in clipped sentences about the future of the country. This will be a first in my life and I’m looking forward.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Looking ahead down the road Sep 28, 2024

History is a complicated business. There are high plateaus and also a good deal of swamp. The Little Bighorn battlefield in Montana was preserved in honor of General Custer who there gave his life along with his men of the Seventh Cavalry, a sacrifice that no longer strikes anybody as noble. What is the good of preserving an enormous site of military stupidity in an unjust cause? The granite monument on Last Stand Hill was put up in 1881, five years after the debacle. In 2003, a monument was erected to the Lakota, Arapaho, and Cheyenne who wiped out the arrogant jerk and his poor soldiers. Tourists still come to look at this, but why? It’s a dishonest historical site: the reason for its existence is a piece of trivia, a few hundred white guys on horseback thought they could spook a few thousand Native men and they were dead wrong about that. But the larger context of the story is lost. The real enemy wasn’t the Seventh Cavalry but the smallpox and other diseases that Europeans brought to the Great Plains that decimated the tribes. The whole wretched mess should be torn down and the land set aside for the instruction and practice of Native religion, the sweat lodge, the Sun Dance, the quest for visions and dreams, the worship of the Creator.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

It's never too late to learn Sep 21, 2024

like hamburgers. I went into a McDonald’s the other day and ordered a Double Quarter Pounder and thought it was good. At McDonald’s you do not have the carcass of the cow on a spit by the drive-up window, the eyes glazed, the tail hanging down, and the workers don’t gouge the meat from the cow’s rib cage. The hamburger is handed to you wrapped in paper. So after my night in Maine, I believe I will stop my quest for sophistication and be myself, an old man of the prairie. If I hadn’t read A.J. Liebling in the eighth grade and set out to write like him, I could’ve become a small-town teacher and coach like Tim Walz and been quite satisfied with my life.Governor Walz is a straight shooter. A mob of armed right-wingers gathered at the governor’s mansion once in 2020 and Mr. Walz called up President Trump at the White House and asked him to talk to the governor’s daughter who was frightened and Mr. Trump, to his credit, did. When Mr. Walz takes office in Washington and the Walz family moves into the mansion at the Naval Observatory, I believe that even as he sits in meetings regarding national security and Ukraine and Gaza and the warming of the planet, he will remember his days as a high school teacher when he had to supervise the lunchroom. Speaking of which, I recommend a tuna salad sandwich and a tomato and cucumber salad and a Fudgsicle for dessert. It’s good.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

A perfect summer night in Manhattan Sep 14, 2024

I was brought up by Midwestern stoics who drummed the lesson into us: Don’t think you’re somebody because you’re not. You’re not so smart as you think. You’re the same as everybody else. So buckle down and get your work done and don’t fall behind. So I turned into a hard worker. But sitting on this terrace at night with my daughter, and then my wife comes out with her glass of wine, this sandwich putting my friends within easy reach, it is clear to this old Episcopalian, God’s great generosity, how much He loves us, to give us this summer night. In this ugly election year, let us be good for each other.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

What an awesome August! Sep 07, 2024

Thank goodness the Americans won men’s basketball over the French. It’s our game, Americans invented it. To lose would be like English Sauvignon Blanc beating out French. Some English wines have beaten out French in blind tests but who says vision-impaired persons are experts on wine?My event is the old man’s 90-minute stand-up storytelling with some poems tossed in and my routine had an intelligent dog, a girl challenging a boy to wrestle, Babe Ruth, a funeral, and the audience singing “America,” “In My Life,” and “My Girl.” It kept the crowd’s attention pretty well.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Friendship is what it's all about Aug 31, 2024

I spent a couple hours on the phone the other night with a man I haven’t seen since high school, he in Northern California, I in New York City, two old men recalling our youth in Minnesota. I love the telephone; it can be so intimate — like radio, which is the business I was in for years — the voice carries so much humanity, even the silences speak……And then, on the phone the other night, it was 1959, I was 17, a sportswriter for the local paper, standing at the 20-yard line as Pete took a handoff from Gary the quarterback and came leaping over his left tackle, grinning as he hip-faked the deep secondary and galloped along the sideline and into the end zone as the crowd cheered and we spelled out A-N-O-K-A and sang the fight song as his teammates carried him around on their shoulders and that’s where he is right now, in glory.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Mature man available for speaking, easy terms Aug 24, 2024

I don’t require luxury accommodations. I’m fine with economy hotels. I prefer not to be put up in the home of a family with small children. A Holiday Inn Express is fine; they serve a nice scrambled-egg breakfast buffet. A coffeemaker in the room would be nice and I’d prefer a shower whose Hot and Cold knobs are not directly under the showerhead so that one must stand naked while figuring out which knob is which, dreading the possibility of being scalded and having to call 911 and moaning in pain as EMTs haul me to their van, and I know that I will now become their anecdote (“You won’t believe the call we got this morning …”) and they will google me and find out that I hosted “Pie Aroma in Microphone” and am in the Academy of Arts and Letters and yet I didn’t know to Stand Outside The Shower While Turning On Water. I don’t want to become a joke, okay?
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Waiting at Gate 28 Aug 17, 2024

I don’t talk to many young people — so many of them wear headphones or earbuds and they look stressed out. I’m guessing the music they’re listening to is narcissist pop about Me, Myself and I, my need for more Me time, my exorbitant rent, boring job, bad boss, crowded bike paths, long wait times at climbing walls, the fear of arterial plaque caused by foods containing GMI and DMU, and if I smile at them, they’ll take me for a privileged white male and give me the middle finger.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Hard-earned wisdom passed on at no charge Aug 10, 2024

Mostly I live in a comfortable bubble, enjoying my morning coffee, avoiding bad news that’s beyond my power to affect, bloody wars raging in Ukraine and Gaza, brutal civil wars in Myanmar and Africa, waves of migrants trying to escape violence and poverty — I am mostly oblivious. The Christian missionaries who set out to save souls in Africa and South America saw the world much more clearly than I do. The Ecuadorean moms selling candy bars in subway stations know more about real life than I do. A person could walk along the little shops in low-rent neighborhoods and talk to immigrant entrepreneurs and learn more about the world than if you went to grad school for a Ph.D., but nobody I know does.I ignore my relatives who are loyal to Mr. Presidefendant who is as removed from reality as I am. I went to high school with a Jim Jordan, a Matt Gaetz, a Mike Johnson, but my classmates don’t hold public office, they just hold a mug of beer in the corner saloon while they grouse about the unfairness of life. A nap would do them good.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Man walks out on stage as storm rolls in Aug 03, 2024

I loved that audience dearly and gave them a good ninety minutes and afterward a distinguished man stopped by to shake hands. Back when, he’d heard me on the radio. I said, “I detect an air of authority about you. You’re the president of something.” He said he was a retired Army major; he’d commanded a tank battalion. “Where?” I said. “Vietnam,” he said. I said I’d never heard of tanks used in Vietnam. He said, “That’s because they would’ve sunk four feet down in the Delta and so they were useless. When we got there, we became infantry.”I said, “You’re looking at a draft dodger.” I felt I owed it to him. I said that I was ordered to report for induction and I wrote to the draft board and told them why I wouldn’t go and I didn’t. I waited for the knock on the door and it never came. So I did a radio show for fifty years without using my name. He looked me in the eye and said, “You did the right thing.” It was a profound moment. I felt that an accommodation had been made. I was forgiven by a man who had earned that right. There was no need to say more.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

The meaning of the freestanding life Jul 27, 2024

Aging is a beautiful natural process, the wisdom gained, the growing sense of gratitude, the amusement of seeing young people make your same dumb mistakes, but one thing that bothers me is the difficulty of putting on underpants while standing and not leaning against a doorpost. It’s a graceful moment, left leg held high and poked through the hole, then the right, freestanding, no wobbling, which I’ve done since I was a kid, and now at 81 I can sometimes still perform the trick, but then comes a bad experience — the left foot catches the underpants crotch and you lose your balance and suddenly you’re headed for a tragic accident.I do not want my obit to read “The author died at home of a concussion, while trying to pull on his briefs. No foul play was suspected.” And so after a near fall, I sit down on the bed and practice safety, but still there is a sense of loss. Trousers are easier but not without risk.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

A Letter from Greenville, S.C. Jul 20, 2024

I spent last week gadding about the Carolinas doing shows and enjoying the South, eating eggs and grits and hearing the waitress say, “Can I get you more coffee, darling?” and encountering Republicans, a tribe rarer than Mohicans on the West Side of Manhattan where I live. I miss them. My uncles tended Republican, believing in personal responsibility and fiscal reality, and at church on Palm Sunday, at coffee hour, I heard the word “taxes” uttered contemptuously and a gentleman in his sixties was saying, “Everything government touches, it messes up,” a genuine living Republican. Twenty minutes before, at Mass, he had been forgiven his iniquity, and I wanted to put my arms around him.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

A morning walk along Columbus Avenue Jul 13, 2024

Now I’m an old man, in no rush, keeping an eye out for curbs and crevices and treacherous slabs of sidewalk, hoping not to make a spectacle of myself, knowing that in New York I am surrounded by writers, real or imagined, who would find the crash of a tall elderly author rather satisfying. Once I was swift afoot and long astride, and now I amble along, accepting distractions, my barber Tommy, a sculptor of hair, at work in his shop, and the newsstand, a historic relic, in the Online Age, and the security woman in her yellow vest at the schoolyard gate, and these beautiful children, apartment kids growing up on crowded streets, learning social skills. I had the Mississippi River and woods to go wander off alone in and so I picked up a pencil and a Roy Rogers tablet and wrote, as I am doing now.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

A lucky man admits to happiness, and why not? Jul 06, 2024

Ask a Midwesterner, “How are you?” and we tend to say, “Not bad” or “It could be worse,” feeling it’d sound glib or boastful to say, “Delighted,” and we men in particular tend to adopt an easygoing grumpiness as suitable for all occasions, but I think it’s bad luck not to acknowledge that I am very fortunate to have added my tongue to the other 999 at church, to lift my voice with the two women’s in trio to an audience in Vermont, to see that ecstatic little boy finding the joy in pablum that the Dead tried to find in acid. I am tired of conversations with fellow libs that start with ritual lamentations about the horrors we read about in the paper. We are right to be aware of the horrors, but the display of outrage at cruelties I haven’t experienced strikes me as show-offy. Donate money to organizations that relieve suffering. Volunteer at the food shelf, visit the sick, tutor the needy children, do good where you can, and count your blessings.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Spring is here, time to get to know each other Jun 29, 2024

Myself, I have a bias in favor of public education because that was my experience. I came from very exclusive fundamentalist evangelicals who looked down on Methodists and Lutherans as Scripturally off-base, so when I left home and walked into public school, I found myself among — O my gosh! — Catholic kids, boys who took the Lord’s name in vain and told dirty jokes, girls who hung out with those boys. A nice Christian boy felt rather lonely at times.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

The beauty of falls that you walk away from Jun 22, 2024

I fell twice crossing 89th Street, once in the middle of the street, once at the curb. I misjudged the step, crashed down on my hands and knees and chin, and once I walked into a tree branch on the path around the Central Park Reservoir and got plonked on my keister, and each time strangers rushed to my side to ask if I was okay and I said I was and jumped up but now I see these falls were a turning point in my life. Once you come crashing down, there is no longer a need to have a smart opinion about everything; you’re simply part of the human race. Your job is to be a biped rather than a quad. As Scripture says, It is God who has made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.And so long as you can stand up and baa, you can do comedy. I have a good sense of sentence structure and my vocabulary is exemplary. Thanks to my aunts Elsie and Margaret, I speak clearly. They listened to me recite my verse in Sunday school and said, “We could understand every word.” From Ephesians and Ecclesiastes to stand-up comedy is a hop and a jump.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

On the road again, meeting folks again Jun 15, 2024

It’s an age of dread, the news perpetually discouraging, TV and media merchandising ugliness, and either you join the Greek chorus of gloom or you go with the American choir of cheerful resolve, and I choose cheerfulness. I am capable of dismay: I’m dismayed by the Working From Home syndrome that is leaving our big office buildings half empty. I call up an office to get answers to difficult questions and I hear Death Chute singing “Vanilla Windows” and a guy says, “Yeah?” and a dog barks and a woman yells, “Put it on headphones!” This is what Allied Federated has come to. I’d prefer to get a woman named Mildred who is an authority on health coverage and who is looking at me across her desk. But never mind me, I’m old.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

The critic who lit up my week and more Jun 08, 2024

I’m still writing books but haven’t been reviewed by anybody in ages, maybe because I’m an Old White Male and our time is up, or maybe I’ve written too many books, and I’m okay with unreviewing — going way back to Veronica Geng’s caramel custard review of Lake Wobegon Days in the New York Times in 1985, the reviews have been warm and sweet, which is nice for the publisher but for me, the hardworking writer, are unremarkable, like a friend’s cat climbing into my lap: not the equivalent of good conversation. But O’Gieblyn’s essay is a brilliant and engaging piece of work and I feel honored that she went to so much trouble. It pleases me that she quotes funny lines from the book and not pretentious ones: she could easily have used my own words to make me look like a hack and a bore. She does use the word “schtick” in connection with my radio monologue, but I don’t mind: in stand-up, schtick is simply useful, like the handheld microphone. She says that my willful optimism seems somewhat strained at times, and she writes, “There is, alas, no shortage of holes in the book’s logic that could be exploited by an attentive critic”and she goes ahead and sticks her finger in some of them, but she also says, “It’s hard not to conclude that Keillor has reached the sunny equanimity of enlightenment.” (I’ve made it as hard as I could, Meghan.) And then she says, “The prose throughout the book is both sharp and buoyant, and often arrives, somewhat unexpectedly, at profundity.” I was aiming for buoyancy. Profundity is well above my pay grade; it’s Ms. Gieblyn’s territory, not mine. To me, this sentence from a writer so sharp as she is worth more than any prize given by a committee. “Sharp and buoyant” is a nice phrase for promotion, but what makes it meaningful to me is the brilliance of Meghan O’Gieblyn.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Let's talk about honesty, grrrr, rrrfff, rrrfff Jun 01, 2024

The fact is that when I was a kid in Minnesota, struggling my way through six-foot snowdrifts to school, long before lightweight down coats were invented — I was an 82-pound fourth-grader wearing 42 pounds of heavy woolens and corduroy, and one day I was caught by a pack of coyotes who carried me away to their den where I remained for several years and learned their language of growling, snuffling, snorting. I, being prehensile, was sent into the henhouse to snatch chickens, while the others distracted the farmer’s dog, and I bit the chickens’ throats and bled them dry and carried the bodies back to the den where we ate them raw.I was rescued by hunters and returned to my parents who had recovered from their grief and didn’t know what to do with me. I relearned English and I regained a semblance of good manners, though even now, years later, I sometimes urinate on the bathroom floor to mark my space against intruders, which upsets my wife and so does my habit of woofing in my sleep and sometimes I’ve smelled feathers in my sleep and attacked my pillow and chewed a hole in it, so we switched to foam rubber.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

THEY WERE SO YOUNG May 27, 2024

Monday is Memorial Day, a day that got lost when it was turned into a weekend, and someday we’ll turn it back into a day, which it was for a hundred years. Decoration Day. After the bloody Civil War, flowers were placed on the graves of the war dead. One of those times when the country is united. This is our observance of Memorial Day, a poem entitled “They Were So Young.”
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

All of me loves olive oil and this is why May 25, 2024

No, it’s been a hard life and I didn’t mention the time I was kidnapped by coyotes. But I’m grateful. I tell myself, “It could be worse. I could get old and lose my mind.” The other day, I forgot the word “cognitive” for hours, I thought, “Alert? Informed? Awake? Attentive? Cerebral? Incognito?” The very word for the skills I’m scared of losing. And then I made a salad with olive oil and vinegar dressing and the word came back. It wasn’t the vinegar. It was the olive oil. I read that somewhere. Maybe a newspaper, maybe online.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Epictetus on Fifth Avenue, a week ago May 18, 2024

The world’s longest parking lot is Fifth Avenue in New York at midday and a week ago I found myself stuck in it, in a cab driven by a devout Sikh with headscarf and big beard, whose religion evidently taught him to Yield, so we moved at a glacial rate from 86th to 43rd Street where I had an important lunch appointment. Had I taken the B train I would’ve been there in a few minutes but that mistake had been made and now I watched pedestrians on the sidewalk passing us.So what can you do? No need to get fussed up. You embrace stoicism. Epictetus said the way to happiness is to not worry about things beyond your power to control, which includes this taxi ride, totalitarianism, the cost of tickets to “Tannhäuser,” and other things that begin with T. So the two VIPs I am meeting for lunch may have to cool their jets for a while. I don’t have their cellphone numbers — they’re very I — so they’ll just have to amuse themselves at the restaurant. This is New York, a city teeming with amusement, you can stand on any corner and it will come walking along.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

My personal journey towards self-minimalization May 11, 2024

These days we’re in the era of the Personal Position Statement as we saw in the recent National Book Awards ceremony in New York. There is no NBA for humor because the event is all about Taking Ourselves Very Seriously As Compensation For Slights We Have Suffered From The Uncomprehending World. The winner of the poetry prize, a man from Guam, accepted it on behalf of the poets of the Pacific islands. The translation award was accepted on behalf of gay men, the nonfiction award on behalf of indigenous peoples. If I’d been given the NBA for Brief Amusing Essays, I would’ve needed to accept it on behalf of recovering fundamentalists or overlooked Midwesterners or the marginalized octogenarian and nothing would be said about literary quality.It was not always thus. I remember loving Theodore Roethke’s work, not as vindication of the humanity of bipolar persons, and James Wright’s, not as honoring the personhood of Ohioans, but because their poems were memorable, stuck with me, were beautiful to my ear, and still are, fifty years later.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Singing to the Lord to save Herschel May 04, 2024

So what happened to joke-telling?For one thing, some of the best jokes are about death. The old Republican is dying and tells his wife, “I’m going to switch parties because I’d rather it happen to a Democrat than to one of us.” These are maybe less funny when you get to be my age. For another thing, a politician came along in 2015 who isn’t funny. This was a first. There were dozens of George Bush jokes and Bill Clinton jokes but with this guy, late-night comics deliver very clever insults but nobody laughs.I’m not giving up. I was on the phone with a pal who’s in chemo and we spent 58 minutes telling jokes back and forth, including the one about the priest asking the widow, “Did your husband have any last request?” and she said, “Yes, he asked me to put down the gun.” The pal laughed so hard she almost split a seam. Later she called me back to tell me one more. Herschel was swept out to sea by a tidal wave and Mama cried out, “God, you can’t do that to my boy! Bring him back!” and another wave washes Herschel back and Mama cries, “Thank you, God” and then looks at Herschel and looks up at the sky — “He was wearing a hat!” I’ve heard that joke many times and I’m starting to get it. A guy needs a hat.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Missing Sandra O'Connor, the pragmatic voice Apr 27, 2024

It’s wonderful hearing her at age 78 talking cheerfully about her life. As a young woman, she was hired by the Arizona attorney general, who assigned her to work at the state mental hospital. “To do what?” she said. “Whatever they need,” he said. So she went about organizing a legal aid clinic for the mentally ill, a simple necessary good. Big law firms weren’t hiring women lawyers for fear of what clients might think, so she started her own. As Chief Justice Roberts said, “She broke down barriers for women in the legal profession to the betterment of that profession and the country as a whole.” She was a mid-level state judge when Reagan appointed her — she thought he liked the fact that she’d grown up on a ranch — and off to Washington she went. She was a conservative but a pragmatist at heart, a problem-solver, and as the Court shifted ideologically, she held her ground and cast deciding votes on some historic cases. As you hear her talk about her life and work, you note that there is no resentment, no anger. Bombasticity, not a trace.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

A small life has its own distinct moments Apr 20, 2024

In my parents’ home, waffles took time so they were saved for Saturday morning; you had to locate our waffle iron, a big clunky appliance kept on a high shelf in the laundry room, and we washed the griddle while someone else mixed the batter, and we put Mazola oil or margarine on it for a lubricant, and someone said, “Not too much,” so not enough was put on, so as the waffle baked, it stuck to the griddle, and we had to pry it loose with a fork and it tore into chunks and slivers, which we slathered with syrup and ate, though they were doughy inside, and from this, we got a feeling that life would turn out to be a disappointment. This waffle I’m eating this morning is crisply baked and the syrup is genuine maple from Vermont, not merely maple-flavored, and the waffle is a seven-grain, which is surely a good thing.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

O what a beautiful evening Apr 13, 2024

I get pleasure from words, which is surely due to coming from taciturn people, so when I happen upon a seed catalogue and look through the beans (Scarlet Runner, Provider, Contender, Gold Rush, Blue Lake, Tenderette Green) and the corn (Bodacious, Ambrosia Hybrid, Sugar Buns, Abundance) and the tomatoes (Early Girl, Better Boy, Beefsteak, Sweetie, Big Boy, Sunset’s Red Horizon, Jubilee, Juliet, Moneymaker, Aunt Ruby’s, Boy Oh Boy, Nebraska Wedding, Calypso, Abe Lincoln) it’s a garden of poetry.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

The art of writing, lesson one Apr 06, 2024

Silence is a basic necessity. I’m an early riser and as I make coffee and take my meds, my dreams evaporate and my waking mind is open to inspiration and sometimes finds it — I suddenly know what’s next in my novel, I think of a letter I need to write to someone, and I don’t want an Oscar Mayer wiener to butt in. The thought of wanting to be one, of wanting to be eaten, a jingle about cannibalism. I’ve been off Oscar Mayer for decades, I eat a Nathan’s now and then but what I crave is the Kramarczuk’s bratwurst from the Kramarczuk’s Sausage Company on East Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

I open the fridge and life beckons Mar 30, 2024

From the marmalade to the long table with green lampshades, I’ve chosen one pleasure after another, and when noon approaches, I have a lunch wagon in mind in Bryant Park, which offers an Italian sausage in a bun. Walking around the park eating a sausage with mustard is my idea of what a real city guy does, a guy with places to go and things to do, so why waste an hour and a half sitting at a table with a tablecloth with three people who are outraged by something in this morning’s paper and eager to share their umbrage, which is sound and fury signifying nothing, whereas my heart is beating, I can form words even if I choose not to, and my Grandpa is with me, a stern old Scotsman incapable of saying “I love you” to a child, but he loved marmalade and so do I and that, my dears, is all I can ask for.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Last Wednesday, stuck in a traffic jam Mar 23, 2024

New Yorkers have this ability, to express despair and municipal pride in the same sentence. I over-tipped him and hiked 12 blocks to my doctor who took my blood pressure and said it was excellent, so I owe Joe for getting me to exercise. I was so surprised though by his language describing his likely November opponent, which I read in a paper I won’t name, a two-word term, a participle of concupiscence modifying a word for a common human orifice. Joe, unlike the other guy, is a churchgoer and if my chest had a bazoom, I would clutch it, but it doesn’t, not yet. I just wonder, where are we headed?
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

The winter blues has got me bad, mama Mar 16, 2024

We need to commemorate heroic acts of invention and creativity that have improved our lives vastly over those of our ancestors. I see that Microsoft has a little museum at its campus in Redmond, WA, and there are various rock and roll museums. I’ve googled around for a museum celebrating the first successful open-heart surgical operation, which took place at the University of Minnesota in 1952, a great technological feat that has extended the lives of millions, including me, and I don’t find it.Is there a Google museum somewhere? There’s a Motown Museum in Detroit but it sounds like more of a gift shop than museum. Muddy Waters’s old house in Chicago is now a museum, which is good, but more needs to be done. You set aside 6,000 acres in Pennsylvania to preserve the high-water mark of the wretched Confederacy — why not take that land and create a park devoted to the music of Black people who made the world dance and gave it soul? Nobody knows you when you’re down and out. Everybody needs someone to love. So rock me, mama, rock me. And I’ll fly away, O glory.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Me and Maurizio, ships in the night Mar 09, 2024

He asked about North Dakota, so I told him. Yes, the winters are long and the land is flat, but the people are the salt of the earth. Decency and humor. No pretense. Nobody lives here to show off. The man in the greasy jacket and barn boots might be a multi-millionaire farmer and he will be friendly without patronizing you, and you can tell him what you think and---- I got sort of rhapsodic, though I am not considering moving to North Dakota myself.A man choosing between Singapore and North Dakota has opened up a broad range of options. I saw him again the next day ---- Grand Forks is the sort of town where you keep running into people ---- and he had a big grin on his face. The cold weather seemed to energize him. And he had met other members of his math tribe. He looked good, a free man, the world his oyster, nothing to hold him back.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Crossing the flats, looking for mountains Mar 02, 2024

In homage to my ancestor David Powell, I’m riding a train across Kansas heading for Colorado, his goal in 1859 when he left Martha Ann and the children behind in Missouri and headed for the gold rush. Kansas is a state of vastness, some of it seems undisturbed since David rode across it. Here is a little farm near the tracks with no neighbor for several miles. A good place for an introvert like me. I could tow a trailer out on the treeless prairie and pull the shades and sit there and slowly go insane, buy a couple rifles with scopes, and yell at the TV about government oppression.David was an extrovert. He was a leader of his wagon train and organized the lashing of wagons together to cross the rivers. He hunted antelope with the Arapaho and traded with them. He arrived in Colorado too late to get rich and instead sat in the territorial legislature and helped draft a state constitution. At age 62, an old man in those times, he settled here in Kansas and wrote to his children: “I built a house 21r x 24r, one-story of pickets, shingle roof, 6 windows and 2 doors, divided and will be when finished one like my house in MO. Dug a well 20 feet deep, plenty of water, and put up a stable for 10 head of stock, covered with hay. We have done very well with oats and I have 25 tons of timothy hay, not yet sold. I am very comfortable, the times are fair here in Kansas, we are all well except for a touch of influenza. Our love and best wishes to all, yours affectionately.”
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Sunday morning, back in the fourth pew Feb 24, 2024

A man stopped at my table who recognized me from my radio days. “Have a seat,” I said. He’s from Ohio, retired high school English teacher. Like everyone my age, he’s worried about young people. “They’re so busy with sports and activities and social media and video games and whatnot, it got so I couldn’t assign reading, they just didn’t have time for it.”“We were lucky to be born when we were,” I say. We had the advantage of boredom, which led us to become readers. And we launched into memories of our long-ago youth.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

As I keep telling myself, life is good Feb 17, 2024

The birth of the spotless giraffe at a zoo in Tennessee, the only known one on earth, is important news to those of us who grew up as oddballs, seeing the spotted mama giraffe nuzzling her child, remembering the kindness of aunts and teachers who noticed our helpless naivete and guided us through the shallows.And then there was the story of the cable car in Pakistan that lost a couple cables and dangled helplessly hundreds of feet in the air with terrified children inside. A nightmare in broad daylight. A rescuer harnessed to the remaining cable had to bring the children one by one to safety.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

What endures is decency, believe me Feb 10, 2024

I hear people complain about police and city planners and the health care system, but never about firemen or EMTs, and few complain about slow delivery of mail, perhaps because so few people write letters these days. I do and delivery is prompt. This morning I wrote a postcard with a limerick for a new father:Byron is his child’s wiperAnd poop does not make him hyper,He cleans the behindWith a calm focused mindAnd fastens a fresh tiny diaper.A phone text would be eco-friendlier but a written message has the hope of being taped to the fridge, maybe saved in a drawer and 50 years from now the infant’s children will find it and be amused. Fundraising appeals are tossed and paid bills but the little poem about defecation will give pleasure long after I am gone: this is the hope.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

The gift of Miss Helen Story, remembered Feb 03, 2024

But I found my glasses today. They were in my jacket pocket. Sometimes they’re in a shirt pocket, sometimes perched on top of my head. The frenzy ends, the problem solves itself. The comedian is grateful. He looks around and appreciates the beauty of the day, the here and now. It’s 5 a.m. My love is asleep in the bedroom, my daughter in her bedroom. I look out at the lights of New York. I make coffee, take my meds. The day awaits. There is work to be done. Then daughter Maia and I will take a brisk walk around Central Park. There will be lunch, a nap, a phone call, perhaps from cousin Elizabeth explaining how Our Lord, though omniscient and omnipotent, nonetheless experienced our mortality with all its sorrows and pain, or maybe cousin Joyce planning our trip to Scotland, or cousin Richard reminiscing about his travels in Africa. I am rich with cousins. My love has only a couple of second cousins. I have dozens. Cousin Stan is 90, my mentor. Elizabeth is my conscience, Dan my doctor, Susie my family historian, Janice my authority on cheerfulness. Dad had six siblings, Mother twelve. This connects me to hundreds of people, including a month-old great-nephew.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Sing on, dance on, good eye, ain't you happy Jan 27, 2024

At the game I sat next to a true Twins fan named Alex who gave me the lowdown on various players and yelled the right things — “Looked good to me!” at the ump who’d called a strike a ball and “Good eye!” at a Twin who let Ball 3 go by and “Throw him the meatball!” at the opposition pitcher who had an 0-2 count on a Twins batter.It was a big pleasure, the proximity to genuine fandom. I’m old and out of touch. I paid $45 for a Twins cap: in my mind, it should’ve been $5. The Kramarczuk’s bratwurst stand doesn’t take cash, only credit cards. I don’t get it. What country is this? But I bought one, with kraut and mustard, and it was good as ever. I’m not used to the raucous music blaring every half-inning though it thrilled the row of girls ahead of us who stood up, hips shaking, arms waving. I come from the era of intense silence. I may be the only person in the ballpark who remembers the fall day in 1969 when Rod Carew got on base with a double, took a big lead, stole third, and the fans sat transfixed in silence, knowing he might do it, wishing he’d do it, praying, and then he did it — he took a daring lead off third and dashed home and slid under the tag and we jumped up and yelled, “YES!” We didn’t need the Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” to rouse us, the feat of stealing home was enough. I can still see it in my mind, his perfect timing, the headlong slide.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Flying around America, looking at crowds Jan 20, 2024

I imagine that someday at America’s boarding gates, after the wheelchair passengers are boarded and Those Who Need Extra Time, then active military, there will be other categories of merit to be given precedence, Persons Traumatized By Flight, Persons In Need Of Affirmation, Persons Trapped In Bad Relationships, and why not add Unappreciated Poets and Third-Grade Teachers to the list. And then you let the Fat Cats board for First Class, and then the peons and peasants.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

The memory is alive with old roots Jan 13, 2024

The simple pleasures of a long close marriage on a perfect October day, leaves dropping from the trees, eating an egg salad sandwich after her long morning walk, playing Scrabble. She talks about who and what she saw on her hike and I, the writer, am silent in thought, having played the word “irony,” which triggers the memory of a day long ago in Saginaw, Michigan.I’d gone there to give a speech — don’t remember the occasion, only that afterward, a man in a shiny blue suit said to me, “It’s so hard to get good speakers to come to Saginaw.” And it wasn’t clear if this was a compliment or an insult.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

“Stand up for yourself,” I keep thinking to myself Jan 06, 2024

So my friend’s fussiness about the coffee was, in fact, a tribute to the excellence of the restaurant. (Did I mention that this was in Northern California, in a town where a small bungalow goes for $1.8 million and you can’t get a Tootsie Roll for less than five bucks?) She sent back the coffee with oat milk because it didn’t taste fresh. I’m in awe of that. In Minnesota, we feed oats to horses and they eat it, no questions asked.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Finding harmony in the midst of chaos Dec 30, 2023

I don’t belong in New York, I’m a loner, I have the social skills of a hoot owl, but I accept the amusement that the city offers. I saw a dog on the subway with earbuds on and I asked the guy holding the leash what the dog was listening to and he said, “Those are hearing aids.” But he said it sort of sarcastically. You get a lot of irony in New York. So I asked my audiologist if there is such a thing as veterinary audiology and she said, “I think so because there is a hearing test for animals but I think it’s a branch of neurology.” She didn’t seem to want to delve into it.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Life without jokes isn't worth the trouble Dec 23, 2023

I went to see The Magic Flute at the Met last week and dozed through the sleepy parts of it, woke up for the Queen of the Night aria, and again when the Papageno dashed into the audience carrying a stepladder. This almost never happens in opera. My beloved explained it to me during intermission: “It means he is looking for something higher.” “Oh, right,” I said. But several times during Act One he dropped the ladder, which made a great clatter and you could feel the audience awaken, which is a good thing.Papageno was played by a Dutch baritone, Thomas Oliemans, and he doesn’t have a big voice but he was having a big time clowning around onstage with the ladder for a prop. He’s a fine actor and quite agile for an opera singer, unlike singers of yesteryear who embraced the “Park and Bark” style, and I was fully awake for his big moment. He did something I’ve never seen before on an opera stage and don’t expect to see again.This is Mozart’s great final opera, written shortly before his death, his homage to Masonic ideals of enlightenment and civility, but here was Papageno lining up a dozen beer bottles on stage and playing a tune on them with sticks of celery. One bottle sounded flat so he pretended to drink from it and thereby raised the pitch. And then another bottle sounded sharp, so he stood, back to the audience, very still, his hands in front of him, and the audience got the joke instantly: Papageno was urinating into the bottle to lower the pitch. (Not really, it’s only acting, but on the other hand, how do we know for sure?) He zipped up, and tapped it and the tone was lower, and the audience fell apart, especially the ones with male pronouns.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

It was a good time, there was none better Dec 16, 2023

I’m at the age when you see the insides of more than your share of health clinics and some are like walking into a meat warehouse but when I walked into New York Presbyterian the other day and then the Hospital for Special Surgery, I was struck by the extraordinary kindness of everyone — even the security woman welcomed me like a friend and the receptionists and the guide who took me back to an examining room and the tech who did the exam — it really knocked me out, me a Midwesterner, this being New York — and I found Lillian the supervisor and told her what a wonderful place this is: “Most people walking in here are having a bad week and the kindness and good manners of this place mean So Much. Thank you.”Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

A happy summer clears the air Dec 09, 2023

Friday afternoon, I boarded the Lake Shore Limited in New York, bound for Chicago and then the Grand Canyon, along with my Londoner stepdaughter and her husband who are ambitious hikers and eager to experience one of nature’s great erosion projects. We chugged through tunnels under Manhattan and then emerged along the mighty Hudson, on our way to Schenectady and Syracuse, and along Lake Michigan through Ohio and Indiana, not far from the route my ancestors David and Martha Ann Powell traveled 150 years ago with a milk cow tied to a wagonload of babies, including my great-grandpa James Wesley. David was infected with the westward urge.I have no such urge myself and never did. It’s been an accidental life, a twig floating in the stream of life, like the driverless car that Google is developing but one programmed to be directed by gusts of wind.I love trains. The food was bad but the conversation was good. Something about motion stimulates talk. I come from people of few words; they should’ve gotten on bicycles, it would’ve loosened them up. The train stopped for maintenance problems, then hit top speed to make up the time, so it was a rough ride, a lot of bucketa-bucketa, which stimulated a wild night of interesting dreams: I was in Reykjavik singing in Icelandic, I spoke with my mother who said she loved me, I was in a dinghy with a sail heading up the river to meet my love, I won the Nobel Prize in literature, I fell into a pit of manure but kept my mouth shut, I was sitting in a city room of a newspaper typing on a Royal typewriter and using carbon paper.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

A lovely lunch last week in New Haven Dec 02, 2023

At lunch with a pregnant woman, you talk about ordinary life, family, summer, the food, the elation of the kids at the graduation we’d attended that morning and the pride of their parents, and we never set foot in politics at all. The naked ex-emperor is 77 and he is irrelevant to the life around us so it’s a pleasure to ignore him. By the time this boy gets around to studying American fascism, I will be gone from the world and unconcerned about the weaponization of falsehoods. But I want to leave something behind that this boy might cherish. I don’t expect him to read my novels. I only want him to know I existed and that I was capable of delight. E.g.––We live by kindness and grace,Good manners, books, an embrace,Good water, good light,A pencil to write,And a bright orange stub to erase,And yet I cannot forgetThose great bawdy stories, you bet,When we sat with good folksAnd told dirty jokesUntil everyone’s trousers were wet.God bless the child. I don’t know his name but I pray for him diligently day by day.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

A few minutes on a hilltop in Concord Nov 25, 2023

Thoreau’s great work wasn’t Walden but his daily journal in which he wrote about his walks in the woods and fields, what he saw, what he loved. Walden is blighted by a great deal of pontificating about solitude and independence. If there had been a Mrs. Thoreau, she’d have agreed with him on “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.” And she would’ve scoffed at his nonsense — “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” He was chewing on the wrong weed when he came up with that, a line that has led people to waste years writing a bad novel who could’ve been happy bus drivers. Henry wouldn’t have said so much about the necessity of solitude with a woman looking over his shoulder.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

A private word from me to Joe Nov 18, 2023

Biden needs a sport to put to rest the whispers about dodderiness. It’s nice to see him putting his arms around his dog and his grandkids — his predecessor was no hugger except with a few foreign leaders — but Biden needs to be seen being physically active. The press is waiting, cameras poised, hoping to see the guy stumble, and what you need to do, Joe, is go hiking in a dense forested area in chaps and boots, a leather vest, a bright red cap, a faithful dog at your side, a shotgun on your shoulder. The dog dashes ahead and flushes a pheasant from the brush and you raise the gun and fire it.Yes, this will offend some vegans and progressives and people with pet pheasants, but everything you do comes with a price, and Dems need to broaden the base. The FDR wing of the party has faded away, we need to attract some people with tattoos and purple hair. Dems do well among fencers and archers but you need to connect with the rural male population that loves firearms. Guns have been around since the 14th century. Get with it. Teddy Roosevelt had the disadvantage of a pampered New York upbringing and he overcame it by going out west and shooting things.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Canada is burning but we're doing okay Nov 11, 2023

I’m not nostalgic about olden times. I love these passwords and PIN numbers that give me the sense of foreign agents trying to get into my email, steal my prescription for metoprolol. I am fond of the GPS woman who gives us directions in such a sympathetic tone, not condescending at all. I adore my laptop and have no warm memories of my Underwood typewriter. Someday I believe the GPS woman may become a therapist and tell me to put regrets behind and prescribe a memory-loss drug that will do exactly that.I do feel that young people are overloaded with electronic stimulation. I worry about the environment and economics. I sat in the Oyster Bar and ate a cheeseburger and overheard two smart guys talking about the banking system in a way that made me queasy and I said to them, “But it’s not as bad as it looks, right?” and one of them said, “No, it’s worse.” I heard about a college history teacher who was asked by a student, “You talked about World War Two, does that mean there was a First?” This was not high school, this was c-o-l-l-i-t-c-h.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Why I love the Shenandoah Valley Nov 04, 2023

I hung out with the customers before and after (there’s no backstage at this amphitheater so I entered and exited through the audience) and it’s startling to hear middle-aged people tell me they listened to “Prairie Home” as kids, grew up with Guy Noir and Dusty and Lefty, I was sort of a distant uncle to them. I was very busy those years, hosting the show, writing it, touring around, and I was an ambitious author. My hard drive is full of the rusted wreckage of unfinished novels and stories and screenplays. I was not paying attention to the radio audience, it was only a statistic and I didn’t really believe it. And now here were the statistics shaking my hand. I stood next to them while they took a picture of the two of us.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

The art of leaving home Oct 28, 2023

The pleasure of moving is the excavation of the past. I open a box and here’s a photo of my fifth-grade class, the eager neatly-combed-and-dressed boy with glasses sitting behind John Poate is me. I am still that eager boy, heavier but anxious to do well. There is a letter from a fan of my radio show, “Every Saturday at 5 p.m., everything else ceased and we gathered around the radio.” Also, in a brown envelope, eight color photographs of my innards taken by the surgical team that installed a pig valve in my heart: the valve is pale pink, the innards are dark red. And there is a letter from a beloved aunt in 1995, reproaching me for traveling to Rome with my fiancée, engaging no doubt in premarital sex, embarking on a path of philandering and adultery, for which there would be no forgiveness. It’s a powerful articulate letter and I admire her for writing it, which she did out of love.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Enough about them, this is about me Oct 25, 2023

When I moved out of Minneapolis, I sorted through personal papers and it struck me that, in hundreds of pictures of me, I am not smiling in a single one. I look like a mortician with a migraine. Partly this is due to the cold. Winter is brutal and you keep your mouth shut so you won’t frost your lungs. Teachers told me that. Plus which, in Minnesota there never were many people around so what was the point of exercising personal charm? Plus which, there are strong Lutheran tendencies there, people consider humor frivolous, maybe sacrilegious. Jesus wept; He didn’t laugh.I feel much freer in New York. I sometimes talk to myself when walking in the park, assuming I have something interesting to say. If you did this in Minnesota, there would be an intervention, you’d go into rehab for self-consciousness training. In New York, people enjoy this. It’s a looser culture. Crosswalks are ignored and “Do Not Walk” signs are considered only a suggestion.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

The beauty of a bitterly cold Sunday, 8 a.m. Oct 14, 2023

What I found inspiring were two Scripture readings, one from the prophet Micah, where the reader faced the line, “O my people, remember what happened from Shittim to Gilgal that you may know the saving acts of the Lord,” and she slowed down when she saw “Shittim” and got traction and very carefully pronounced it “shi-team.” I was the only one in the sanctuary immature enough to enjoy this moment. There were no 13-year-old boys there, just me. I could tell from her voice that the reader had been dreading this for an hour, trying to decide between “shy-tim” and “shi-team” and fearing that she’d slip and pronounce it phonetically and a marble angel would fall and crash and red lights would flash and people would require treatment for post-traumatic stress.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Marriage is a game and two can play it Oct 07, 2023

She also loves to look at art, which I can take or leave and mostly leave. I go to museums to overhear conversations between couples, usually the woman telling the man, “You don’t like it, do you” and he says, “It’s interesting,” and she seizes on his lack of enthusiasm for the splashy canvas he’s looking at, thinking “I could’ve done that,” and she says, “If you’d just take the time to learn something about art, you’d enjoy it more,” as if this is a personal failing on his part.The guy majored in economics, he’s on track to become a vice president at Amalgamated Linguini, they vacation on the Cape, the kids are in private schools, and suddenly she wants him to be an art critic and talk about ambience, brushwork, and chiaroscuro? And she walks on to the next piece as he follows her like a dog on a leash.I find this more interesting than anything on the walls, the competitive aspects of marriage. Women’s ace card is the eye roll; they learn this by the age of 14 and use it on their mothers, and then on the husbands.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Manhattan man living in the past Sep 30, 2023

I interrupted writing for a while today to have a Zoom meeting about estate planning with a couple lawyers in Minneapolis and for a discussion centered on my own demise it was a lot of fun. We laughed a lot.They mentioned “legacy” and I laughed. What legacy? There’s no such thing. Scripture promises resurrection but it isn’t specific about the form we’ll take, whether vegetable, mineral, gas, or spirit, meanwhile here I am on a sunny day in New York, sitting at a café on Columbus Avenue and watching the passing humanity, the great variety of gaits, brisk and propulsive, ambling, toddling, sidewalk surfing, window shopping, touristy uncertainty, geezerly gimpiness, and the aimless shuffle of people like me whose heads are full of irrelevancies.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Father Time advises a brown-eyed girl Sep 23, 2023

Prison reform is a truly noble cause because there is no political constituency demanding it. Every time I fly into LaGuardia, I look out at the hellhole of Rikers Island, a prison right out of Dickens’s England, where men languish who are unable to make bail and life is brutal, and the Democratic hacks of New York won’t touch this issue lest they be thought weak on crime. Emily knew all about this, and she nodded.And if you take on prison reform, then you need to reform our broken mental health system that was destroyed by my fellow liberals forty years ago as “deinstitutionalization,” the idea that rather than enormous hellholes, you put the inmates in small hellholes where we wouldn’t be so aware of them. Emily knows about this too. And whatever progress you make will be painfully slow: nobody will come up with an algorithm to produce social justice.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Thinking about that woman in Kentucky Sep 16, 2023

The woman came by a little later and said, “How’s your breakfast, dear?” I said, “It’s wonderful,” though actually it was rather mediocre, but I didn’t want to cause her anxiety because — this is going to sound pathetic but forgive me — her “hon” had given me a very warm feeling deep inside. Me, a published author who once got a terrific review in the Times and who’s attended luncheons at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, but neither the Times nor the Academicians ever called me “hon” and she did and it means something to me.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

So this guy in New York walks into a grocery store Sep 09, 2023

There is so much plasticity and pretense in the world today that when I come across the authentic such as a little kid bawling because his sister kicked him, it restores my interest in life. He isn’t trying to sell me something or even raise money for a good cause, it’s true feeling. His sense of injustice is real. I think he should hit her, which might spare his having to go through expensive therapy in years to come, but he does not. Perhaps he’ll be a stand-up comic instead.I find authenticity in church, in the prayers, in the psalm, and last Sunday we sang “How Great Thou Art” and it was so joyful it reduced me to rubble. We sang all four verses and the chorus built each time around and the third and fourth choruses were so euphoric, they would’ve melted a stone-cold atheist and my bass voice got shaky, hearing those sopranos soaring. People held their arms in the air, we were freed from our Episcopalian decorum into realms of pure joy, I get teared up now writing about it.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

The daily pursuit of happiness Sep 02, 2023

Texting replaced the postcard mostly, and I have a shoebox full of old postcards from long-departed relatives about the happy afternoon spent in Pasadena or Lincoln’s home in Springfield or the Empire State Building. My people were reluctant to express happiness for fear it might be bragging but I love to think of them writing about the “lovely day” they spent walking around Springfield.The box needs to be discarded but I love my mother’s penmanship. I will recognize it even when I’m deep into dementia and have forgotten the street names of Minneapolis (Aldrich, Bryant, Colfax, Dupont, Emerson, Fremont, etc.). I come from serious people but when they wrote postcards they were always happy. Look in my shoebox, see for yourself.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

A week in Kansas and Missouri Aug 26, 2023

Journalism is about tragedy and malfeasance and corruption, it’s not journalists’ job to report on happiness, you need to experience that directly, which I did, night after night, standing in dim light among strangers many of whom intensely disagree with me, but I feel their humanity, their love of beauty, their cheerfulness, my fellow Americans, and I shall leave politics to people smarter than I, and keep my distance from anguish, at least until next summer when I may exercise my right to be righteous. Or maybe not. I do think the House and Senate, instead of opening sessions with a prayer, would do well to open with a song. Maybe “We know we belong to the land and the land we belong to is grand,” followed by “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.” It might help.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

We get around correctness by means of comedy Aug 19, 2023

I feel that opera should be inclusive and tell the stories of ordinary people and not just European aristocracy and so I am sketching an opera in which the soprano is furious at the tenor and showing him the proper way to clean a bathroom — “Apri gli occhi, guarda dietro le cose” (Open your eyes, look behind things) — and to calm her he proclaims his love for her — “Farò di tutto per renderti felice” (I will do anything to make you happy) — and as he does his pantaloons start to slide and she points at them but in his passion he doesn’t notice and the pants fall to the floor. I was wearing underwear when my pants fell but I leave it to the director to decide. The tenor’s back is to the audience and personally I think opera could use a pair of what the Italians would call “glutei nudi.”Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

The author disembarks almost Aug 12, 2023

I am not disheartened by insignificance. I am content to be a bug. Insectitude is no problem at all. I grew up with stories in which God is seen as a person, or three persons, and He speaks to His people directly, but when I look at light that is billions of years old coming from an infinite number of galaxies, it shocks the imagination into gratitude for existence itself, nothing more, nothing less. It also makes my political registration less than interesting.I feel this in church on Sunday morning. Feel myself disappear, my opinions, likes, dislikes, and believe myself loved by the Creator, and in that moment I am joined to others surrounding me, which was the feeling down South recently when we sang, “O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder consider all the worlds Thy hands have made,” and we were briefly united, all of us equally. I was onstage but still a firefly, singing bass.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

I missed out on the big storm regretfully Aug 05, 2023

In Florida, people live in dormitories for the elderly, watching golf on TV, which turns your mind to lime gelatin. In their working lives, they practiced law, healed the sick, managed money, and now they doze in a perpetual twilight and seem to prefer this life to their former working life, which calls into question the very meaning of our free-enterprise culture. I mean, if Methodists preferred to be mollusks, then why bother going to Bible Study?Senator Scott of Florida had a good point when he suggested cutting back on Social Security and Medicare. Why should our tax dollars go to subsidize inertia?Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

There's money in dystopia but so what? Jul 29, 2023

One advantage for us Christians of living in New York is that we’re a small minority just like in early A.D. living among Romans and Turks so we can’t lord it over people. We walk quietly. If schools avoid using the word “Christmas,” we understand. Children walk past, cursing like truckers. We ignore it. In places where Christians form a powerful majority, they can bully and persecute with great enthusiasm, even though our Savior instructed us in kindness and charity.I speak as an old man. Righteous intensity fades with age. We spend too much time wringing our hands over evil. I no longer read stories about What’s-His-Name. There’s nothing more to be learned about narcissism. Fascism is not that fascinating.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

I am giving up anger, so should you Jul 22, 2023

If you’re considering larceny, my dear reader, stop and think this through. Cellphone towers can track your whereabouts and the country is full of surveillance cameras. Twenty-eight grand is poor compensation for three years in prison. You can do much better by setting yourself up as an advocate for the math challenged and bringing a lawsuit against Apple and Microsoft for writing instruction manuals that make you feel unwelcome and marginalized. They are practicing normaphobia and the letttter tt keeps repeattting and it’s causing you menttal disttress and you can’tt fix ittt. Ask for a million and hope for tttttttwo hundred grand.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Thou shalt not be dumber than dirt Jul 15, 2023

I take Scripture seriously and so I eat beef as it tells us we can in Leviticus, and I also eat salads but not Caesar salads because he was a pagan emperor, but I admit to giving in to wrath, which goes against Scripture. I do it again and again. Like you, I am a bundle of contradictions.Like many of my fellow Episcopalians, I maintain a progressive enlightened exterior while guarding my simple peasant biases such as my loathing of the use of fancy words like “ubiquitous” in simple conversation, it makes me want to give them a knuckle sandwich if it weren’t for the fact that I’m an author and must protect my hands. Or people who kill conversation by delivering extensive synopses of an article about political polarization that they’ve read recently — POW, right in the kisser.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

The old man's lecture about manners Jul 08, 2023

Six a.m. at the MSP airport, a February morning, long lines of sleepy travelers snaking their way toward Security, and I approach the scanner and a TSA lady sees that I haven’t removed my shoes and says, “You’re not over 75, are you?” and I say, “Darling, you’ve made an old man very happy,” and she smiles and says, “My pleasure.” I go through the scanner and a TSA guy pats down my back and underarms and I say, “Are we having fun yet?” and he says, “It’s a laugh a minute.” Two simple exchanges, two moments of fellowship.Garrison Keillor Jason Keillor, Engineer Jason Keillor, Original Music
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Music as a means of detecting a Heart Jul 01, 2023

It’s not often a person gets to experience euphoria. For years I imagined alcohol could do the job if I could just find the right brand but eventually I gave up on that. Sometimes in church I’ve felt it. When I was 11 I got to go to the top of the Empire State Building. I sang the Dead’s “Attics of My Life” once with two women and got a little high from it. And one night before the Philharmonic I experienced it at the Bowery Ballroom on Delancey Street listening to Aoife O’Donovan and Hawktail and the phenom fiddler Brittany Haas and it made the big crowd go wild to see artists overcome gravity and simply float.Aoife and Messiaen, two transcendent tours on successive nights: it makes living in Manhattan worth the trouble and expense. You can eat expensive mediocre food in loud restaurants, almost get run over by e-scooters, deal with surly salesclerks, cabs stuck in dense traffic, extortionate rents, impenetrable bureaucracy, but the museums and trains and tulips in spring and the occasional transcendental experiences make up for it. Two nights of mind-blown beauty make me want to start my career all over again.Garrison Keillor Jason Keillor, Engineer Jason Keillor, Original Music
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

A pound and a half? Really? Why? Jun 24, 2023

Welcome to Garrison Keillor’s Podcast. We plan to release one podcast per week (sometimes more). Feel free to comment and share with friends.“I’m not opposed to legalization; I think it’s crazy to lock people up for wanting to be stupid, and if your doctor prescribes marijuana, goody-gumdrops for you, but when I smell marijuana smoke, I get away from it as quickly as possible before some pothead on a skateboard and wearing headphones comes crashing into me. Getting high lowers alertness.Go back and read Beat poetry written in dim smoke-filled rooms and most of it is less interesting than the average computer manual.”Garrison Keillor Jason Keillor, Engineer Jason Keillor, Original Music
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

That cold day I was naked in Utah Jun 21, 2023

We are going to produce a weekly Garrison Keillor’s Podcast soon, kicking off in short order. At the start, the majority of these will be audio recordings of columns previously published in the newsletter, but we are giving Garrison the freedom to do as he pleases. We are working out a few glitches, so consider this a TEST version.“Everyone has their story and mine is that fall. I was walking into a recording studio in Midtown and didn’t see a step and stumbled and crashed. My own fault. Banged up the left knee but a man doesn’t write with his knee and the pain of putting weight on it only highlights the great good luck of my life starting with this long marriage to my friend and lover who, thank God, is back in Minnesota, rehearsing for an opera, and not here worrying about an old man with a bad limp.Plus which, I didn’t bang my head so I can still recite Shakespeare’s sonnet about getting old, ending with the lines, “This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong: to love that well which thou must leave ere long.”
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Garrison Keillor’s Podcast

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected