Post the Host

Comments from the week of 08.22.21

Sir: Many years ago, I was fired from a job for the only time in my life. While I did not commit the indiscretion, I was aware of it, and I did error in not addressing it at the time. The company did what companies do and fired several of us in an attempt to protect itself. I was devastated and thought my professional life was over. Looking back, it was the best thing that could have happened to me. The company was a bit slimy, but the pay was excellent and therein my focus. I might not have left had I not gotten booted. I learned a lesson, that I never forgot about workplace ethics. And all of the wonderful later jobs and experiences might never have happened had I not had that terrible day.

Dan F

This is the wisdom of maturity, Dan. This is the bonus that comes from growing old and this is why we should exercise, eat less, and look both ways before crossing the street. It isn’t to maintain youthful good looks, it’s to gain wisdom.

GK

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Dear GK,

No, there is no such Bible book as Revelations. It’s Revelation.

Buz

This comes as a revelation to me, sir. It’s been plural in my mind since I was a child and first ventured into it and was mystified. Evidently, others have made the mistake: when I google “Revelations” it offers a number of links to a Bible book of plurality and also one of singularity. Somewhere there is a Ph.D. in hermeneutics who has written a thesis on this and she will send it to me and I’ll send her a thank-you note.

GK

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Thanks for your columns; I always enjoy your dry humor and good perspective on things. I would only have said this one line slightly differently by inserting the modifier I placed in all-caps here: “Liberalism is weak tea when up against men with rifles who operate on SO-CALLED divine guidance.”

Thanks much!
Heidi Mann, Ely, MN

If I inserted skepticism wherever there’s reason for skepticism (so-called), I’d be so-calling all day. In the interest of economy, I leave that to the reader. I am going on the assumption that you truly are in Ely, Minnesota, and not questioning that, nor asking why it was called Ely.

There is a young woman named Mann
Who is doing the best that she can.
And though it gets really
Cold up in Ely,
She accepts it as part of God’s plan. 

GK

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Regarding the Afghanistan situation, I think this has many generations to go before the effects of Islam have worn away. Christianity had a pretty barbaric 500–800 years of political influence in the 2,000 years of existence, if that’s any gauge. 

In Iran, the 20-somethings of recent history have not been able to loosen the stranglehold. Kind of like current Russia or China for that matter. Not sure any dictator of a large country that had a global presence in the modern age has been overthrown from within, and without outside assistance.

That being said, I agree with the Biden decision. Rip the Band-Aid off and move on. 

Bob Thome, Grand Junction, Colorado

You may well be right. Probably you are. Fear is powerful. But the ambition of young Afghan women to get an education and make an individual life is powerful too, and during our 20 years there, many American civilians went to the country to encourage that ambition and I don’t think their effort was in vain.

GK

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Dear Garrison:

Afghanistan will give us many years of fodder for working out our guilt or doubt or anger on American’s involvements during the past 20 years in Middle East affairs, as we should. One of your recent comments, sadly, seems spot on: “Liberalism is weak tea when up against men with rifles who operate on divine guidance.” The historian Robert Kaplan, in his excellent 2005 book “Imperial Grunts,” about America’s military involvements in countries all over the world, agrees with you: “Once you have a gun, why bother to learn to read and write.” He attributes this to a Yemeni soldier, disturbed about the number of guns in his country. Some Afghanistan soldiers trained by the US could not read or write. Figuring out a map and coordinates for a battle were thus difficult. If literacy training had been included, would we be where we are?

Tony Sisto, Alaska

When I wrote about Afghanistan, I was writing out of sheer ignorance, something I do often and with great confidence. A few years ago, I met a woman my age who had been living in Kabul and taught at a university there and she loved the country and its people and I wish we had talked more. It was a crowded room and she was headed elsewhere but I pray she is safe and I remember her generous spirit and the joy she felt in mentoring young women.

GK

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Hi,

Regarding your column dated August 20, I have only one issue and that is the Title: This World Is Not My Home, but Here I Am.

This world is most certainly your home. Mine as well. The world is the Mother of all compromises. We each have a certain effect individually and by means of our organizations small and large. As a voter and a citizen, I am part of the organization that had an effect. Amazing. In the Great Compromise that is this world, it all matters. You matter.

Warm Regards,

Dave Olson, San Francisco

It’s good to know there are Olsons in San Francisco. I hadn’t been aware of this. I thought you were all in Minnesota and Wisconsin. I imagine you have well-kept yards and are considerate drivers and that you drop a dollar in the hat of musicians playing on the street, and that’s all to the good. But when you’re my age, young man, you’ll take a step back and learn to enjoy your irrelevance.

GK

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Hi, Garrison:

You made me laugh out loud three times before 8 AM ... God bless you! And, if you’re considering a house on the coast, please consider Guilford, CT? You would love it here and we would love to have you.

Julie Harris

What a coincidence you should write two days after my wife Jenny and I ate lunch at a lobster shack on the Guilford shore. She has loved lobster rolls for years and I have loved bratwurst and that day in Guilford I tried a lobster roll and now I love bratwurst even more. So I’m not sure I’d fit in in Guilford. I come from Guiltford, Minnesota, and there is not much shore there. My wife loves New England because her family has roots there and she has happy memories of childhood summers in Connecticut, which during our visit I could well appreciate, the brilliant summer days, the cool breeze off the water, the boats moored, the gentleness of the people we encountered. I’m a writer and so I can be happy anywhere, like a tortoise I carry my home on my back. Thanks for the note.

GK

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Dear Mr. Keillor:

Now you’ve gone and stuck your hoe handle into the nest of moiling Thoreauvians in the eaves. Henry David freely states right there in Walden that he regularly went into town and ate dinners and had his shoes fixed. So, where’s the fraud? And he didn’t want anyone to bail him out either — whether Emerson or his old auntie as some say.

Besides, you are a secret fanboy. It was from your lips I first heard his quote: “... if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” But forget sorehead Henry. Instead let me suggest in all kindness that you pick up his work — that copy of Walden that you threw across the room back in high school — and read a sentence or two each morning and see if you don’t find some joy in it. 

Sincerely,

Paul Many, Toledo, OH

Paul, you’ve made my day with your spirited defense of Henry. God bless you for it. In my later years, I’ve come to appreciate Ralph Waldo Emerson more and Henry less, but you’re right — I did used to quote that line of his. But the other day, in a bookstore in Connecticut, I saw a whole shelf of coffee cups with that quotation on it, Thoreau being made into an expensive souvenir, and so I don’t know how I feel about it. Bookstores seem to be half souvenir shop, half bookstore, and maybe that’s the only way to stay in business. I don’t think Henry would approve, nor Ralph. If you write a great sentence, it should stick in people’s minds without their having to drink coffee from it.

GK

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Hi, GK.

The Post-to-the-Host for 8/15 included a message from Allan Stewart-Oaten about a fellow who had shoulder pain and died of a heart attack a few days later. It reminded me of an article written by a cardiologist (the reference is long forgotten but not the key point): He said patients come to him and explicitly or implicitly expect him to help them live forever, perhaps something we all wish for else why worry about health? He would then ask them what they would be doing the following Sunday afternoon. The usual reply was, “Nothing much.” He never said it to them but always wondered what would you do with forever if you don’t even know how to spend a free Sunday?

To you then, what would you do with forever?

Khrystle

I don’t want Forever, Khrystle, and neither do my friends who are venturing into the high 80s and my cousin Stan who just hit 90. I always looked up to him and still do. He lost his wife and then met Gloria who is considerably younger and who gave him a vigorous and happy old age. He’s a lucky man but he doesn’t fear death and when it comes, he’ll be content and meet it calmly, a lesson I will take from him.

GK

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Thanks for the Everlys video and here’s one of Sheryl Crow with the white-haired coot with red guitar who is Albert Lee, same guy with the dark mop in the Everly’s video. Guess it’s happened to all of us. We’re the lucky ones.

Mike and Nancy O’Connor, Cincinnati

Where would we be without YouTube, folks? The past is still with us, you just have to google it.

GK

Garrison, you and I are the same age, and I once came in second in a Garrison Keillor look-alike contest. At Tanglewood, my wife and I enjoyed Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers, Arlo Guthrie, Martin Sheen, Heather Masse, and the rest of your radio gang, and after the show you led the audience in song. It was a magical experience, especially when I locked arms with Martin Sheen and swayed in time to “Amazing Grace.”

Crawford

I’m sorry to hear about the look-alike contest. I look like a pest exterminator with a migraine but when I’m in a crowd of people singing in four-part harmony, I feel beautiful. There’s nothing like it. I plan to do more of it.

GK

Hi, Garrison.

I appreciated your tribute to Don and Phil. For my money, their finest composition is “Let It Be Me,” which we sang at my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary party in 1993 in Pocatello, Idaho, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

Each time we meet, love
I find complete love
Without your sweet love
What would life be?

Bob Steele, Redwood City, California

The next time I do a show with Prudence Johnson and Dan Chouinard, I want to sing it. I’ll take Phil’s part and Prudence can be Don.

GK

Please know that I am grateful for your recent reflection on creating moments of respiration when there is so much desperation these days. Last month my love and I took a road trip to the enchanted mountains and noisy rivers of New Mexico to breathe in some cool, clean air in the wilderness there. We relied on paper maps rather than GPS, looking for unexpected pleasures in the sleepy and dusty towns we traveled through. We were amused by the idea that aliens had crash-landed their spaceship in a New Mexico desert about the time I was born in 1947. My wife concluded that this explains a lot about me and my relationship with her. We laughed off and on for the next four days about this alien “coincidence” and how blessed we are that we found each other. We hope some extraterrestrial event occurs for you while at the coast with yours. 

Sid Sententia, Marfa, Texas

I’m glad some people are still doing long road trips. I don’t seem to have the patience for it anymore. I think ocean cruises spoiled me. You spend a lovely day walking around Barcelona and then have dinner and a good night’s sleep and in the morning you’re in Provence and go to a vineyard. It somehow makes a long day driving across Kansas less appealing. Now I’m going to get furious letters from Kansans, and I apologize for saying that. I wish I could take it back.

GK

GK,

We had a baby in 1984, I’m pretty sure we weren’t the only ones. Saturday evenings in Atlanta became a PHC-focused event; listen to the first hour, at the intermission, my wife would start washing the baby and I would race to Hungry Howie’s pizza to pick up our order as the second hour launched. We would always be settled for the News from Lake Wobegon. When our daughter was about six, she was coloring on the coffee table as we all listened to the news story. In it, you delivered one of your magic sentences that started funny and turned poignant in two seconds. Our daughter stopped coloring, sat very still, then looked up at us with tears in her eyes. You reached her. We knew then that she would be very literate, and it came to pass. Thanks from all of us.

Bill Richardson, Orange, CA

I wish I’d been sitting in the corner, invisible, watching you eat your pizza, watching her coloring. If only I’d known what was up, I’d’ve done better with that show but instead I was living in a cloud. I loved doing the News, always left my notes in the dressing room, and stood on stage and faced the crowd and did my best, but when I think of you eating pizza and her coloring, I just want it to be better than it was. It was a beautiful invisible audience, and they made the show worthwhile.

GK

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Garrison —

A while back, you made some disparaging comments on birdwatching. At the time, I wondered why on earth you wanted to bait birdwatchers and thought, “I’m not going to be the one to rise to the bait.”

But the comments kept niggling at me, and so here I am, rising after all, though bearing in mind Aldo Leopold’s observation that, “It is an axiom that no hobby should either seek nor need rational justification.”

I have been a birdwatcher for over 60 years. I can’t say when I began, but my parents gave me a little field guide for my seventh birthday. They were not birders. I arose de novo; this is often true — we come out of nowhere and can’t say why we bend that way. I also keep a life list and a few others (yard, cabin) but I am not in it for the numbers. My earliest sightings do not have a date, only a “Roseville,” stemming from my childhood before I kept a life list. One of the Roseville birds is the Black-Crowned Night Heron. When I was researching my third book, I learned that T.S. Roberts took his university ornithology classes to a night heron rookery in Roseville in the 1920s. The herons I saw in my childhood must have been remnants from that rookery. Made the hair prickle on the nape of my neck to realize that.


1. Birding sharpens the eye to detail. Most people see in only a coarse-grained way. Birders by necessity are fine-grained lookers. What color legs? Yellow or pink? Do the wings extend beyond the tail? Does the beak curve downward? How sad to move through this beautiful world and not clearly see it. Furthermore, this looking not only takes in separate details, but also the entirely at once, behavior and movement. Birders see the whole picture.

2. But I rely far more on my ears than my eyes for bird identification. Having learned the songs of most Minnesota birds long ago, I now am continuously and unconsciously aware of what is around me at any moment outside. I hear the chimney swifts zipping across Minneapolis skies and the unending songs of red-eyed vireos. I know exactly when the predatory Cooper’s Hawk is in our yard, eying my songbirds.

3. Because birds are extremely local in their choice of nest site, watching them is one way to develop a sense of place. This is an excellent skill for a writer to have, but it seems to me to be essential for anyone to be fully in this world, to know exactly where you are on the face of the planet. The oak savannah. The maple/ basswood forest. At our cabin, we have had an eastern Phoebe family nesting in the same nest for 33 years. I am sure the occupants have been descendants of the original pair.

4. When one is so aware of birds around one, one develops a certain empathy for a life lived on earth that is not human. How many humans do you know that would be improved by this characteristic? The human population is vast, but the nonhuman population is vaster. Perhaps we would not be in the trouble we are in if we were more in tune with our fellow creatures.

5. As a hobby, birding is most satisfying to me because I cannot exhaust it. There is always more to know, (those darn fall warblers … and shorebirds!). There is more to learn from birders better than you. Unfamiliar songs to add to the repertoire. I recently heard a song unfamiliar to me, but which I believed to be a Tufted Titmouse. It’s a southern species, pushing northward with climate change. I am happy to see tufted titmice, but unhappy about seeing them in my back yard.

I could go on, but that’s enough.

Let me also add a thank you for stocking my second book at Common Good Books when the store was in that underground spot below Nina’s. I was thrilled to find it on the shelf and felt like I had really made it! I also did a reading there (I realized only later that this was because it was up for a Minnesota Book Award) and I was given a book bag that I use to this day. It’s my carry-on for my European vacations, and I may take it to Europe again one day, who knows?

Sue Leaf, Center City

You have now justified my joking about birdwatching with your excellent essay. You wouldn’t have written this for a fellow birdwatcher, you wrote it for me, an ignoramus. Case closed.

GK

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I’ve known Coach Tubby Smith for over 20 years. He grew up in a faithful family as the sixth of 17 kids and is one of the most thoroughly decent men I’ve met. He was head coach of the Minnesota Gophers from 2007 to 2013. We discussed attending your show but never arranged it.

He is now head coach of High Point University and I see that you are scheduled to perform there on 11/12. I am considering traveling to NC to attend the event with him but wanted to apprise you of the background info.

Fred Fernatt

Thanks for the warning, Fred. I will be careful not to say disparaging things about football that evening. But if I meet him, I’m going to ask how one comes to terms with a nickname like Tubby. Does he prefer it to his given name? Does he feel he needs the self-disparagement? I got a nickname when I was in grade school and no amount of money could persuade me to reveal it in public but when I got to 7th grade, I avoided the two boys who called me that name and I’ve avoided them now for seventy years and intend to continue.

GK