A week in Kansas and Missouri

The Column: 02.14.23

I am an old Democrat who’s been traveling around doing shows in Republican towns in the Midwest and it’s making me a better person. I stand up on a theater stage and I hum a note and the audience hums it back and I sing “My country ’tis of thee” and by the “thee” they’re singing so beautifully and are thrilled to do it — they thought I was going to do stand-up but here we are singing “America” and they know the words. It’s a Protestant crowd and when Martin Luther launched the Reformation, he substituted congregational singing for Latin liturgy and clerical costumery and now here are a thousand of them singing four-part harmony, no organ, and they love it. We go into the spacious skies and amber waves and da doo ron ron da doo ron ron and the bright golden haze on the meadow and working on the railroad, songs they haven’t sung since grade school, and I know that they believe a lot of trashy stuff that isn’t remotely true and guess what — I DON’T CARE.

I love these people. Maybe they see me as a guy who’s out to tax the pants off them and confiscate guns and teach gender transition to third-graders but guess what — THEY DON’T CARE. I sing “Mine eyes have seen the coming of the glory of the Lord” and they sing it joyfully. Maybe they belong to a big church with an organ the size of a cattle truck and an organist who loves the eclectic and is contemptuous of the standards and here is this old lefty singing “O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder” and this is their first chance in decade to sing “How Great Thou Art” and they put their shoulder to it and sing it with evangelical power.

So maybe they voted for the guy with the ducktail who wouldn’t know “Abide With Me” if it bit him in the butt, but it doesn’t matter.

I’m done thinking about him. I’m done with anguish in general. Dolphins are dying, penguins perishing, giraffes are in jeopardy, lynx are getting extinct — so learn to enjoy pigeons and squirrels. You see the headline in the paper about the latest mass shooting and resist reading the details because frankly you’re tired of being horrified and it does nothing for the victims to know how the sudden appearance of the shooter at the parade on this sunny day caused such havoc and small children were trampled. Your anguish is not helpful in the least bit. I’d rather know about their happiness in the hours before it happened.

This is the beauty of being eighty years old, my kiddos, the ability to disengage from the tumult and the tragedy and enjoy the everyday ordinary. Last week, in Iola, Kansas, I saw a man eating his blueberry pancakes with his fingers, no butter or syrup, picking them apart and relishing each bite. I’ve been on earth for eighty years and never saw this until then. Someday I’ll see someone eat a cheeseburger with a knife and fork.

Much of Kansas is quite flat, as you may have heard, and many of you, asked for your impression of Kansas, would draw a blank, but one night in Wichita I was so moved by their singing of hymns and doo-wop and “Oh, Susannah” and “In My Life” and “Stand By Me” that I couldn’t stop and I swung into “O say can you see” and miraculously hit a good key, not too high, and the troops went at it like Mormons and made a tabernacle out of it and the sopranos sailed up high over the land of the free and the home of the brave and it was monumental. I sang bass, quietly.

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.

THAT TIME OF YEAR: A Minnesota Life (softcover release March 7th)

PRE-ORDER CLICK HERE

From the author:

I sat down and looked at my memoir THAT TIME OF YEAR when it came out and was put off by the sadness, the opening chapter about how much I missed doing “A Prairie Home Companion,” so I sat down to fix it. That’s why a writer shouldn’t read his own work. But I did and so I sat down to cheer it up a little and wrote a new first paragraph.

I am a Minnesotan, born, bred, well-fed, self-repressed, bombast averse, sprung from the middle of North America, raised along the Mississippi River, which we spelled in rhythm, M-i-ss-i-ss-i-pp-i, a sweet incantation along with the Lord’s Prayer and Psalm 23 and our school fight song about v-i-c-t-o-r-y. We sang it with a sense of irony, knowing we weren’t winners in the eyes of New York or L.A. or even our football rivals, but we were proud of our North Star State, the flatness, the fertile fields, the culture of kindness and modesty, our ferocious winters, when white people become even whiter, and to top it all off, we were the origin of the Mighty Miss. Wisconsin wasn’t, nor North the Dakota. It was us and strings of barges came up to St.Paul to haul our corn and beans to a hungry world.

I wrote a new preface and a cheerier first chapter, which came (literally) from the heart I having undergone heart surgery at Mayo to replace a leaky mitral valve and I felt good. I did this for readers who missed the hardcover edition, to give them a lift, and also myself. The revision led to SERENITY AT 70, GAIETY AT 80 and a new book in progress, CHEERFULNESS. It’s a happy phenomenon, an author still ambitious at 80, and I give credit to my wife Jenny. If I were teaching Creative Writing today, I’d teach my students the importance of marrying the right person." - Garrison Keillor