A close call is a beautiful thing

The Column: 09.05.24

I am still working full time at the age of 82, which sometimes gives me pause and I wonder, Why? I’ve had a rich full career. I sang on the Grand Ole Opry once. I played Radio City Music Hall, riding up on the stage elevator accompanied by Chet Atkins and Leo Kottke. I once made a movie in which I was kissed by Meryl Streep. Only on the cheek, but still. A portrait of me once appeared in the Seed Art exhibit at the Minnesota State Fair, my face done with seeds, mostly wheat, some corn. I am one of the best limericists in America (There was an attractive stockbroker who beat everybody at poker. Her dress was revealing and also concealing the ace of hearts and the joker.) How much does a man need before he decides it’s enough?

The truth is that I have nothing else to do, no hobbies, no interest in travel, I have no social life because my friends are all in bed by 9 p.m., so I keep working. I know that a man with time on his hands can easily go wrong, even an Episcopalian like me. I could easily drive up to the drive-up window and tell the teller to empty her cash drawer and take the dough to Memphis and find a gin-soaked honky-tonk woman who’ll take me for a ride across her shoulder or, as an alternative, I can write a novel, which is what I was doing this morning.

Does the world need more fiction? Probably not, so long as Donald Trump is running for office. But a writer gets engrossed in a story and although my novel is set in a small town in Minnesota, I stuck a Trumpian character in it and he’s such an absolutely beautiful beautiful guy, completely authentic, an amazing character in every way, that thanks to him I think this is going to be the greatest American novel since Moby-Dick and millions and millions of people are going to buy it. I am already in touch with movie producers. The Marxist Woke DEI critics aren’t going to like it but it’s a beautiful beautiful book. I’ve shown it to dozens of top English professors and they all say the same thing. That it’s beautiful.

Otherwise I am simply trying to mind my own business and be ever grateful for the good things of life. Last Tuesday evening, sitting on a balcony looking out on rooftops of Manhattan, I remembered the time I dashed out onto Interstate 94 to rescue a new mattress I had tied to the roof of my car with twine, and it had blown off the roof due to the aerodynamics of driving 65 mph so I stopped the car, jumped out as my dear wife screamed, “What are you doing?” and hauled the mattress off the highway and got to hear close-up the Doppler effect of a semi air horn passing at high speed a few feet away. Very few persons have had the privilege of hearing that, the 150 dB cry of mortality passing.

It’s an experience that is still quite vivid in my mind: I forget what I ate for breakfast — there’s nothing memorable about bran flakes — but I remember clearly the time I almost sacrificed my life for a mattress. Furniture stores deliver mattresses. Rope would’ve been a better choice than twine. It would’ve been smart to take side streets home rather than the interstate. The sound of “What are you doing?” would’ve been a good cue to stop and reconsider doing it.

I was 56 when I ran back and rescued the mattress and if the semi had hit me as I was doing that and distributed me along the roadside, it would’ve erased some wonderful years, my daughter’s growing-up years, a great deal of fun in the show business, a bunch of lighthearted friendships, and now I can see what a lucky man I am, having outlived Hemingway by twenty years and Buddy Holly by sixty. What brought it to mind was the long blast of a semi horn on Columbus Avenue.

I was sitting on the balcony, trying to describe to a friend the beautiful feeling of focus I get when I walk out to a microphone in front of an audience. Out of the mishmash of life, suddenly there is clarity. The mattress slips off, I hit the brakes, open the door, she yells, there’s a blast of dB and a whoosh, and here I am, still standing.

Garrison Keillor’s 50th anniversary tour of A Prairie Home Companion continues this fall. Come see the show before it turns 51!

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