A round table in downtown St. Paul Friday night

The Column: 06.09.24

The rule is “Only buy oysters on the half-shell in months with an R in them,” but I took some relatives to dinner Friday and shelled out fifty bucks for a dozen shells of not much, which is truly dumb for a man my age. But it gave me the chance to quote Mark Twain to a great-niece sitting next to me at the restaurant, a smart sixth-grader: “Good judgment is the result of experience and experience the result of poor judgment,” and she laughed. She’d never heard of Mark Twain. Which gave me the chance to quote some more of him: “To do good is noble. To tell others to do good is even nobler and much less trouble.” And “Don’t let your education get in the way of your learning. I was educated once and it took me years to get over it.” I’ll bet she went home and googled him and read a hundred more quotes and learned something invaluable about sentence structure, and long after I am gone into the sunset I will have helped bestow a fine humorist upon the world. Which is a noble thing and all the result of poor judgment.

It was a beautiful dinner, the best I’ve been at in months, nine of us relatives around a table in downtown St. Paul, and four of us were teenagers, which taught me I’ve been spending much too much time with people my own age, and when I do, the conversation devolves to a low point — inevitably, just as if you eat dinner with four other plumbers you’re likely to wind up discussing interesting toilet problems, when I eat with old people we wind up talking about Mr. Mirage-of-Long-Ago, but Friday evening his name never came up. Not once. The closest was when I said I do my best writing before dawn.

The tenth-grader on my left talked about her sport, swimming — she does the 100-yard butterfly — and about friendship, which being on a swim team leads to, and about playing violin and places she wants to see and things she hopes to do, and the sixth-grader talked about gardening and playing cello and car trips and she laughed at many of my jokes. I quoted her a limerick of mine about the old lady of Vancouver who drank two quarts of varnish remover and didn’t get ill or vomit but still it didn’t do much to improve her. I don’t think she’d heard a limerick before so I wrote one for her:

In Scripture it says when one meeteth
Another and stoppeth and greeteth,
In so addressing
One bestoweth a blessing,
And so I say, “God bless you, Edith.”

It’s a rare reverse limerick and I’m proud of it so I wrote it on a card and gave it to her.

It was so much fun. We were at a hotel a stone’s throw from a storefront theater where I started doing a Saturday night radio show. The Mississippi was a couple blocks away and a few miles upstream, back in 1960, was an enormous parking lot where I, a college student, worked five mornings a week parking cars. It was a gravel lot for about 500 cars, with no painted lines. The traffic all came in a rush around 7:30 and my job was to direct them into double rows in straight lines, and to get the job done right I had to adopt the persona of a Nazi storm trooper, crushing free will. Democracy led to chaos, so for an hour every morning, I transformed myself into a fuehrer, which means I can appreciate what Mr. Mirage Ago has accomplished, bringing the Republican Party to heel using the same techniques I employed in the parking lot: the stone face, no kidding around, My Way or the Highway, Death To The Disloyal and All the Human Vermin and Scum who ignore me.

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.

Check out Garrison Keillor’s upcoming shows! There’s something for everyone, perhaps in a city near you!

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