My story, morning glory

The Column: 03.14.25

I left Minnesota to live in New York because my wife loves the city and I love to see her happy. She comes home from a long walk exhilarated by the sights and sounds of humanity. I left Minnesota because it’s crowded with memories of lost friends and stupid things I did. I pass the cemetery in north Minneapolis where Corinne is buried, an ebullient pal who hit a rough patch at 43, fell into depression, put rocks in her pockets and paddled out on a lake late one night, tipped the canoe and drowned. I grieve for her still.

I drive east of St. Paul and pass the place where, in 1961, Barry Halper, the coolest guy I knew, driving to start a job at a radio station, drove his car into the rear of a school bus stopped to pick up kids. I’m guessing the sun was in his eyes. He gave me my first job in radio. He was 21, an only child and I sat between his broken-hearted parents at his funeral. I remember it like it was yesterday.

When it comes to stupidity, there are several neighborhoods to remind me of two misbegotten marriages and a wrongful romance, and then there was the mindless decision to build a log cabin and studio in the woods of Wisconsin. Me, a city guy who likes to order green curry and have it delivered. There was no delivery of green curry in the woods of Wisconsin. The cabin was meant for someone who knows a few things about plumbing and mechanics, at least know how to read instruction manuals. I know about as much about electric appliances as Thoreau did.

I enjoyed running into friendly people in Minnesota. I went to a clinic once for a colonoscopy and the nurse began the procedure, during which she said, “I have to tell you that I’m a big fan of your show.” I’d never been complimented before while feeling a tube up my rear end. And then she said, “Are you feeling pressure now?” I said yes. She continued and then said, “I think your singing has improved a lot over the years.” The conditional compliment is classic Minnesotan.

But New York is awesome, Central Park, the 800 acres of rocky terrain and swamp that Frederick Law Olmsted designed in 1858 to give immigrants living in squalid conditions a chance to walk among natural beauty and breathe fresh air, is ever amazing, but a couple weeks ago I went down to Broadway and saw the trashiest play I’ve ever seen, “Oh, Mary,” in which Abraham Lincoln is gay and John Wilkes Booth flirts with him at Ford’s Theatre and Mary Lincoln shoots her husband for infidelity. This travesty would’ve been run out of town in mid-America but it got a standing ovation in New York. When you pay $200 for a seat, I guess you assume it must be of high-quality.

The trashiness of New York is on view for everyone to see in the current occupant of the Oval Office, the ultimate New York conman who embodies all the worst things Mark Twain or Ambrose Bierce ever said about politicians. Not far from the felon’s tower is Carnegie Hall where Tchaikovsky conducted and so did Dvořák and Mahler.

When I was 14, my English teacher handed me a copy of The New Yorker with a piece by A.J. Liebling in it, born on the Upper East Side, a great journalist who wrote about food and France and boxing and war and the “wayward press” and after I read him I wanted to be him, which I have not yet accomplished. He was Jewish, I’m Episcopalian, he went to the Sorbonne, I went to the U of M. I’m doing the best I can.

So here I am, out of place, a lucky man having fun in his old age, not yet a vegetable, looking out on Columbus Avenue from the 12^th floor, and often picking up the phone, clicking a name on my Favorites list, hearing about the weather, the grandchildren both dutiful and wayward, and recalling our time back in the mid-20^th century when cool people smoked and listened to jazz on big black discs and planned to be big shots but instead we discovered delight. Thank you, dear Lord, for this good life and make us aware of the needs of others. Amen.

Join us for An Evening with Garrison Keillor on March 30 at Hochstein School—an inspiring night of storytelling and community, benefiting the Coffee Connection’s mission to empower women in recovery.

CLICK HERE for tickets!