Columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
Man has almost unlimited power to do damage and cause suffering, as we have been learning lately, and some slight power to do good, but as we grow up and pay attention to our surroundings, we see that we are beneficiaries of great gifts for which we can claim no credit, and so we have a day of thanksgiving in November, just as we’re bracing for winter. My aunt Eleanor was the patron saint of Thanksgiving and rented a nearby Legion hall and organized a dinner for a hundred or more Keillors back when I was a kid, before cellphones, so instead of taking selfies we had conversation.
My aunts told stories about the farm and how Grandpa drove a horse-drawn mower to cut hay with the reins in one hand and a book in the other and the day the house burned down and he raked through the ashes looking for photographs and how he drove home with his first Model T Ford and lost control of the car and pulled back on the wheel yelling “Whoa!” as the car slid into the ditch and he sat in it laughing at himself.
Read MoreEvery morning when I wake up, I ask myself: what have I done the previous day that entitles me to draw upon the nation’s precious water supply and enjoy a hot shower? I don’t see this as a basic human right; it should be earned. And what I did the other day was accompany my beloved to the Met to see Puccini’s Tosca.
She dearly loves grand opera and I dearly love her, and I was glad to go for the chance to see the tenor be executed and the soprano leap to her death. I enjoy violence more when it’s accompanied by great music.
Read MoreI like flying out of the Atlanta airport. I go through Screening and the TSA lady scouts through my briefcase and wipes my shoes with a cloth to detect explosive fragments and then she says, “You’re good to go, sweetheart.” First I’m a suspected terrorist and then I’m a close personal friend. I did two shows in Georgia last week, after the tragic election, at both of which I walked out onstage and said, “It’s been a hard week for us Marxist-Communists, but there’s a song I want you to sing that is often played triumphantly by brass bands but it’s not about triumph so much as survival, the fact that after the rockets’ glare and bombs bursting in air, the flag was still flying” and I hummed the note and a thousand people stood and sang it majestically, a cappella, with four-part harmony on the land of the free and the brave. Some ushers told me the audience was at least half Republican. It was very moving. What they did to the nation was shameful but at least they’re capable of human feeling. They sang gorgeously.
The next morning, a woman came over to me in the dining room of the hotel and said she had flown from Houston to see the show and had enjoyed it and we fell into conversation. She’d grown up in Vicksburg in the Sixties and discovered early on that she had an affinity for math and studied it in college and rose to a point where she was often the lone woman in the room. She remembered some of her professors hinting that she’d gone into math in order to find a good husband. But her love of math was based on a love of logic, that there are clear lines between true and false, that truth can be proven, and her sorrow about the election was that falsehood had won and would wield great power.
Read MoreSo America has gone and done it, elected the evil grandpa, which goes to show that literacy is in serious decline. Nobody who read the transcripts of his two-hour rants would want this old man in the White House. I’ve been reading them with fascination for the past couple months and they are beyond description, the anger and violent obsessions, the confusion, the incredible frequency of blatant falsehoods, the absence of any coherent philosophy, but now the Secret Service is going to have to guard him on his daily golf round, probably requiring the help of the Army and Marines, and who knows if there will be another election in 2026? Congress will be deadlocked, the man owns the Supreme Court, who will stop him if he declares the name of our country is now United Trump?
The beauty of being on the losing side is that there is no shame. Kamala Harris was a serious and tireless candidate who ran a heroic campaign and spoke about the real world, and the outcome shows the high degree of misogyny among American women. She could have been an excellent president. Everyone in my life voted for her, nobody ever walked up to me and tried to talk about her opponent’s good points, so it’s clear that I don’t live in his country. And because I’m 82 and he never talked about cutting Medicare and Social Security or deporting elderly people or accused us of having bad blood or eating dogs and cats, I can rest easy. His 20% tariffs are likely to cause inflation but an old man doesn’t need much to get along.
Read MoreWhen I go to Trader Joe’s on Columbus Avenue to buy groceries, I do it to buy guy food, which my beloved cannot buy because she knows it’s not good for me. I don’t do this secretly; I come home in broad daylight and unpack the bag and she watches without comment. Sometimes, in place of comment, she’ll tell about something she read in the Times about some encouraging development in health care or public education, meanwhile she watches me put away the frozen mac and cheese, large potatoes for baking in the microwave, a few ears of sweet corn, a couple filets mignon, frozen lasagna, frozen meatballs, frozen knockoff White Castle sliders.
I don’t buy greens because that’s her territory, along with other vegetables, coffee, olive oil, cereal, rice, condiments, et cetera. With coffee, for example, she has a specific dark bean from a particular valley in Guatemala that meets her standards. Me, I’m happy with Maxwell House Instant. Coffee is coffee. She favors Portuguese oil from hand-harvested olives. Me, I’m fine with Mazola.
Read MoreI took the fast train last Friday from London to Edinburgh to do my solo show at Queen’s Hall and sitting in the café car watching the countryside pass at a hundred miles per hour, I felt utterly happy. It was the fourth day of my tour and finally I was emerging from the prison grip of jet lag, which I’d tried to sleep off, which only makes it worse. The cure is daylight, movement. Now I was feeling resurrected.
When I visit Scotland, I think of my grandpa William Denham who emigrated from Glasgow to Minneapolis in 1905. I only knew him as a querulous old guy with high-top leather shoes who pronounced “girls” “gettles” but cousin Joyce told me he left to escape the Calvinist cruelty of his stepmother. William and his wife had 13 children, my mother Grace the 10th, but the first kid was born only four months after the wedding. He was never forgiven. When he returned years later to visit his dying father, he kept a detailed journal of the voyage and it goes blank once he reaches Scotland. My guess is that guilt and shame shut the door. The story couldn’t be told.
Read MoreI am looking forward to November 6 when at last we may be done with the “How in the world is this actually happening in America today” conversation and we will return to enjoying our lives, watching the weather, maybe reading a classic or two, maybe read aloud to a child, perhaps take a walk out of earshot of freeways, maybe astonish a distant relative by writing a letter longhand in ink offering your humorous take on life as you observe it, maybe deal with the boxes of junk in the back of your closet. We will leave the past decade to platoons of authors to dredge through sloughs of the irrelevant and ridiculous and our national leaders will turn their attention to the real world.
In New York, traffic will resume moving on Fifth Avenue, which the Secret Service has pinched tight to protect Melania and Barron up in their tower, and someone will show mercy to poor Rudy in his cruel downfall and it will no longer be required of all Republicans that they reaffirm that up is down and it’s 1953 and Commies in the State Department are selling us down the river and we’ll go back to being the country God intended us to be, one with a sense of humor and gratitude for His generosity and a decent respect for the facts.
Read MoreI flew to Dublin a week ago and even with jet lag, it was downright glorious and I’m eager to do it again. I flew out of JFK, a prison camp attached to a strip mall, and landed seven hours later and was struck by the friendliness. The immigration lady seemed glad I had come and I got into conversations at baggage claim simply by asking questions. I find the Irish accent impenetrable but when I cupped my ear and said, “Eh?” they instantly switched to clear English.
The cabdriver was friendly. I asked him about Gaelic and he said, “Yes, they teach it in the schools but we forget most of it except for a few words and not many of us could carry on a conversation.” I asked him about the Irish gypsies, the Travelling People, and he said, “Yes, you still see some horse-and-buggy folk but they don’t allow them to camp on the roadsides anymore. They’re trying to settle them.” The cab fare was 31 euros and I handed him a fifty and said, “Thank you,” and he hesitated. “Are you sure?” he said. A cabdriver trying to decline a tip. Remarkable.
Read MoreI once owned a house on Goodrich Avenue in St. Paul, across the street from a house Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald rented in 1921 when Zelda gave birth to their daughter, Scottie, and this slight proximity let me imagine that someday college kids would write dull term papers about me as they do about The Great Gatsby and The American Dream. I tossed that idea aside long ago. Now I’m38 years older than he when he died, and clearly I got a better life and what’s the purpose of longevity if not to enjoy it?
I had my adventures with gin and whiskey, as he did, and sat in a bar with vets going to the U on the G.I. Bill who thought the Army was ridiculous but then they hadn’t been shot at. I once tasted a Bordeaux from the year of my birth (1942), which was pretty magnificent, war wine from the grapes of wrath. I once was given a sedative for a wisdom tooth extraction that made me ecstatic for a day and a half. I was baptized in waist-deep water by a preacher in a suit and tie. I entered many churches and heard the Gospel and confessed my sins and was forgiven. I wrote for a great editor, Roger Angell, who sent me delicate rejections — passages of wonderful writing but somehow it wasn’t you at your best — and crisp acceptances — and pleading letters — Everyone around here keeps asking when will we see another piece by Keillor. Write, I beg of you. — and I felt privileged for twenty years.
Read MoreIt was a good week. It began with a night I lay awake for hours listening to my daughter’s hacking cough in the next room like an inmate in the county tubercular farm. We were both weary the next day until we remembered a ride at the Minnesota State Fair from 12 years before, the River Run ride, the two of us on a raft racing around a sluiceway, that I’d shot a video of with my phone. Last week I got a new iPhone but she found the video on it, two solid minutes of her hysterical laughter as she watched water splashing on her father’s lap so that it appeared he had wet his pants. I pretended to be horrified but I kept recording her crazy beautiful laughter.
We ate soup for supper and she, with no trouble at all, texted the Pee Ride video to her aunt Kay and our friend Heather, each of whom texted back within minutes their delight at this video. To me, this alone justifies the invention of the phone that can text, though I, along with every other elderly person, have said caustic things about texting in the past. So? I changed my mind. Now I can see the good it can accomplish in our troubled world. Kay had been watching her favorite basketball team get drubbed and Heather had been teaching first grade. Two minutes of my girl delighted by the apparent urinary tract problems of her elderly father was exactly what they needed.
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