A trip to Rochester for examination

The Column: 05.17.25

I went to Mayo for some tests this week, a clinic that always puts me in a cheerful mood, even at 6:30 a.m. when the 9th floor receptionist said, “Good morning” and really meant it, and a young woman in blue scrubs led me into a dressing room, where I stripped down to socks and shoes, donned two hospital gowns, was led to a little room full of electronic gizmos and wires and screens, lay down on a cushioned examining table, was IVed and oxygenated, by two women in blue and one of them, Lindsay, laid a warm blanket on me and it was very moving. When you’ve spent the night using powerful laxatives to clean out your insides, this gesture of hospitality is meaningful, and before the doctor stepped in, we fell into friendly conversation as if we’d gone to school together, though they were young enough to be my granddaughters. It made me feel the future was bright. And then, running a magic anesthetic through the IV, they made me disappear.

It was a procedure in which tubes with tiny cameras are poked into your body from both ends, but it was not much more dramatic than a haircut, and there was no bad news after, and all was well.

Years ago, I made my pilgrimage to Mayo, the Lourdes of the North, the Court of Mortality Appeals, and Dr. Dearani installed a new mitral valve in my heart so I didn’t fall prey to the family heart defect and no obituarist at the Daily Planet had to take inventory of my life (“His books were easy to read and contained very few serious grammatical errors.”). Modern medicine has given me 24 years more than Aunt Ruth and Uncle Bob and Uncle Jim got who died in their 50s from the same mitral valve prolapse I have. I remember Grandma sobbing, her shoulders shaking, at Ruth’s funeral, her oldest daughter. But Mayo repaired me nicely and now I’m one year younger than Grandma when she died.

I’ve been rather lucky. I’ve known what I wanted to do with my life since eighth grade when I got a copy of A.J. Liebling’s The Road Back to Paris and read it in an evening and decided I wanted to be a writer. I still do. I went to college so I’d have a good answer for when people asked me, “What are you doing?” I majored in English to become a writer, which is like majoring in physics so you can sail a boat. One cold winter, looking for indoor work, I got a job announcing on a classical music radio station, and I managed to refit my Minnesota accent to sound educated, a great benefit. You can’t hang a degree around your neck but you can learn to sound smart.

Grandma heard me read the noontime news once and said, “It doesn’t sound like him. It sounds like an older man.” Aunt Jo said, “That’s how they talk on the radio.” Grandma listened closely. She heard me introduce a suite with a French name by Maurice Ravel and was impressed by my pronunciation. She would’ve preferred I’d gone into teaching, like her, but at least I had a job.

Through pure serendipity, it led to “A Prairie Home Companion,” which you know all about, and now I’m an old stand-up comic who walks around in the crowd and does a 90-minute set:

God tells us to be righteous but still He
Tells us to lighten our hearts and be silly. 
Live in the moment, this moment, here with you, right now,
And let cruelty and stupidity disappear somehow. 
It is spring, there is a turn in the weather,
And as George Frideric Handel wrote, let us sing together.

And I hum a note and they pick it up and we all sing:

Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hal-le-lu-jah.

And then again. They’re surprised at how good they sound. And on it goes from there, some thoughts on the beauty of old age, some stand-up, poetry, stories.

An individual, as we know, is capable of doing great harm, and my aim is to show that one person can make 600 people happy for 90 minutes. And that’s how I hope to justify Mayo’s doing miraculous things for me. You don’t get a new heart valve so you can go play golf, I say. Make yourself useful. Grandma would approve of that. She had high standards and I’m still trying to measure up.

Garrison Keillor’s upcoming shows promise to bring smiles, laughs, songs, stories, and an all-around great time! Check out his calendar by clicking below.

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