Forty days of self-exams, then spring
The Column: 02.23.24
It is Lent, the season meant for us to meditate upon our wayward ways, even us Episcopalians whom you rarely find falling down drunk in the gutter or shoplifting at Walgreens or getting into fistfights — no, for us failing to write thank-you notes is major — but still we have our shortcomings, which, I must say, are clearer to me this week when my wife the violist is away playing Beethoven for a ballet in Minneapolis. Without her here, my life goes slack, I sometimes spend all day in pajamas, my mind jumps from one lily pad to another, I can’t focus. My room is a mess, the bed is a tangle of bedclothes.
My grandma Dora always made her bed upon arising, believing it lent order to the day. She was a seamstress, schoolteacher, railroad telegrapher, farm wife, mother of eight. Her bread was light and crusty. She had firm habits: she drank Postum, ate Grape-Nuts, slept with the window open for fresh air, and she was a progressive Methodist who believed that women and persons of color were the equal of white men and that science could solve many of our problems. Compared to Grandma, I am a hopeless mess. I mean it.
She was born in 1880. I came along 62 years later, a member of the Silent Generation, though I never hear anybody use that term: maybe that’s how we got the name. I was born nine months and ten minutes after Pearl Harbor. I was conceived out of hope for the future. The Silents gave you the civil rights movement, many rock bands, some still performing, and various hallucinogens that inspired a lot of really bad poetry, and now we are very very old.
Grandma’s generation didn’t have a name, they just had high standards. All the nonsense we read about boomers, millennials, Gen X, Gen Z, is a bushel basket of chicken feathers. My wife is a boomer but she has more in common with Grandma than most boomers I know. I wish the two of them had met: Grandma would’ve loved her. Grandma loved to “visit,” as they referred to conversation back then, and so does Jenny.
Meanwhile, we Silents are a drag on the country, enjoying generous pensions while Medicare picks up the tab for buckets of pharmaceuticals and whatever fancy surgical procedures we desire, running up deficits that Gen X will be smacked by when they reach 65. There are 65 million of them and many of them may need to harvest aluminum cans and glass bottles for a living or become security persons making sure nobody enters the exits at airports. They had hoped to be successful singer-songwriters and this will be a major comedown for them. They’ll need antidepressants and Medicare won’t cover those anymore.
The Silent was the truly fortunate generation. Smokes cost 35¢ a pack and a Jack Daniels on the rocks not much more. I put myself through college working as a part-time dishwasher and parking lot attendant at minimum wage. My first apartment rented for $80/month. Hitchhiking was a reliable means of transportation. The economy gave me the freedom to screw up and so I became a writer. I sold a story for $500 and we lived on that for more than a month.
My wayward ways that I contemplate during Lent are not so different from yours — I know my failures as a friend and father and husband, but my line of work, which is writing and performing for small loyal audiences, has enabled me to disappoint so many more people than if I’d been a chiropractor or a yoga instructor. I think of this. I was put here to make people happy and sometimes it just doesn’t work out right. Sometimes I get a standing ovation and then see it’s a standing and leaving ovation. So I contemplate these mistakes during Lent.
As I write this, it’s 5 a.m. and my beloved has returned from Beethoven and is asleep in the next room. I am dressed. The day lies ahead. I will go with her to a museum to look at Byzantine art. We will eat greens for lunch. We will visit. I feel hopeful that I will write something worthy today. If not today, tomorrow. This is what we Christians live on, hope. Be cheerful, dear reader, and forge ahead. Put your regrets aside after due consideration and proceed to do what you were put here to do. Be good at it. Or good enough, and tomorrow aim for better.
Check out Garrison Keillor’s tour schedule and go see a live show celebrating the 50th anniversary of A Prairie Home Companion, coming to a city near you.
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Thanks for your musings, Garrison. I’m from your home state in the upper Midwest that many Americans couldn’t pick out on a map. We’re OK with that! We like being a “fly-over” state … doesn’t bother most of us one bit. Back to your musings … I miss hearing them live on your PHC show. I tuned in on Saturday night from the start of PHC in the 1970’s and listened most every week until the bitter end. My older brother’s biggest claim to fame is that he attended your very first PHC show in the 1970’s I believe at Coffman Hall at the U of M when he was a student and working as a janitor at Coffman. It took him 10 years to work his way through to his degree in geology! No debt! No regrets! I’m a retired Methodist pastor of 40+ years. The only person preaching to me every Saturday night from 5-7 pm week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade … was YOU! Thank you for all your words of wisdom and common sense humanity. I have read many of your books and now I read your column on a regular basis. But I miss your weekly monologue/sermons and your deep melodious voice and slow pace … which always gave me plenty of time to think & reflect on how I would live my life different and try be a better person in response to your words. Thanks for the memories and for the decades of simple wisdom that I believe helped you make me a better person, husband, father and pastor. I’ve seen you perform many times in person at the Fitzgerald and at the State Fair. We saw your performance at the State Fair right after you stepped down from the PHC. It was the show where you walked around the Grandstand, filled with 17,000 people, and visited with people and sang songs and hymns. It was an amazing sent off for you after 40+ years of the PHC. I’m glad you didn’t totally disappear but continue to write and share your musings with all of us who are still listening. Be well and continue to do good!
"This is what we Christians live on, hope. Be cheerful, dear reader, and forge ahead. Put your regrets aside after due consideration and proceed to do what you were put here to do. Be good at it. Or good enough, and tomorrow aim for better."
Contemplating retirement - and it makes one do a lot of looking backwards, and also wary that what's left might not last long enough or might leave too much undone (my parents both died young). But I love your words, to just do the next thing and aim for better. Thank you for your words. You're so good at putting them together in just the right way.