On the road, thinking about Dora

The Column: 04.25.25

I stayed in an old hotel in Northampton, Mass., last week, one with a glass U.S. Mail chute running from the top floor to the lobby, a sweet reminder of olden times when guests might’ve sat at a desk in their hotel room and written letters with fountain pens on hotel stationery to friends or relatives, but now people text those messages so no letters fluttered down the chute and there it is, one more useless artifact just like you and I will be someday if we aren’t already.

I’m not nostalgic. I’m quite aware that back in those fountain pen days plenty of people were conking out from the congenital heart defect that Mayo surgeons fixed very nicely and also from strokes that anti-seizure meds prevent and I also know that people we call “special needs” were miserably treated as cattle and now a growing army of teachers and therapists are dedicated to creating humane programs to enable them to grow and thrive and live good lives. We have one in our family and her happiness makes me happy; I hear her talk about her busy day and her job and her friends and I say, “God bless America for its goodness to humans who could easily be shoved to the side.”

My grandma Dora, born in 1880, a seamstress and Western Union telegrapher and schoolteacher and farm wife, was progressive, not nostalgic. She came from abolitionist stock and was deeply disappointed that her dad wouldn’t take her to the Chicago Exposition of 1893 where she hoped to see the moving sidewalk, motion pictures, the Ferris wheel, and hear recordings of the human voice. Her heroes were George Washington Carver and Einstein. Grandma came to our house when she was 82, my age now, and she watched TV covering John Glenn’s ride in orbit around the Earth and Grandma said she was sure that man would land on the moon someday and she was sorry she wouldn’t be here to see it.

No, Grandma was definitely forward-thinking and wanted her descendants to get to work making a better world and I have a good idea which of my cousins she’d be most proud of, such as Matt and Michael who worked in medical engineering and my brother who worked to prevent nuclear waste pollution and Betty the psychologist and Richard the architect, and I assure you she’d not be bragging up her grandson the radio humorist. Grandma was not interested in show biz; she didn’t want to go to Chicago to see Little Egypt dance the “hootchie-kootchie” on the Midway. No, ma’am. Grandma wanted to see the wonders that the human mind could conjure up to make life better and longer and healthier.

I wish Grandma could’ve seen the show I did in Nashua, N.H., a week ago. I don’t know what she would’ve thought about the jokes but I talked about her respect for memorization, which she required of her pupils, and I recited Shakespeare and Frost and Housman, poems I’d learned back in my teen years that stick with me, also an erotic sonnet of my own and a string of lowbrow limericks. I stood there reciting for 800 people but really it was for Grandma Dora. I led the audience in singing “My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,” which Grandma surely knew by heart and the audience sang it with passion and I saw nobody, absolutely not a soul, google it on their cellphone.

I’m an old man and I’m still trying to impress my grandma though now she’s become a contemporary. She would be saddened by my two divorces and she would love my wife who is independent and practical and loving and forgiving and she’d be stunned by Jenny playing Rossini at the opera and “Giselle” at the ballet, but this crowd happily singing by heart a great national song about freedom and justice would exhilarate Grandma as it does me.

The anthem by Julia Ward Howe,
When sung by an audience — wow.
The Lord’s judgment seat,
The jubilant feet,
I wish we could hear it right now.

My nephew Matt worked on the development of the porcine heart valve, roaming from Minnesota to Norway to Germany to France to find new colleagues, and now this valve is keeping me going. It wasn’t developed so I could play more golf. No. So I’ll keep going and try to make Dora Powell proud. No easy task.

Garrison Keillor is hitting the road for a series of spring shows. See him live in a town near you!

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