Post to the Host

Comments from the week of Jan 30, 2022

Good morning, Mr. Keillor.

I enjoyed your radio shows, books, and most of your writings. As a conservative, I have basically gritted my teeth when you condemn us but I’m a big boy and life is too short to worry about it.

I have asked this too many times and never got a response, so I will ask you, as you are very learned with both life experiences and knowledge: How are conservatives repressing voters?

Thank you for time and for your entertainment.

Sincerely,
Dan Hartnett
Kingman, Arizona

Dan, I grew up with conservatives who believed in balanced budgets and respect for law and civil order, but the meaning of the word has changed and when the Republican National Committee comes out in support of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the word has been changed beyond recognition. Voter repression is being carried out by states where Republicans are finding various small ways to discourage voting, making few polling places, shortening the hours, ruling out drop-off boxes, making absentee voting more difficult. Bureaucrats know a hundred little ways to accomplish these things and what shocked them was Georgia electing a Black minister and another Democrat to the U.S. Senate. That sent a shock around the party. I do not condemn conservatives of the sort I grew up with, who believed in loyalty to family and community, freedom of speech and religion, the benefits of free enterprise. Today, conservativism seems more like a cult but I’m too old to care. I have other things on my mind.

GK

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Loved the idea of Montshire. My daughter lives in New Hampshire now and works there. Her first year there, she lived across the river in Vermont and had the bad luck the next year to move across the river to New Hampshire as the COVID pandemic was heating up. They had cops checking the cars at the border (mainly to keep you folks from NYC coming up to Vermont), and the only reason she could go into Vermont was because she did some moonlighting at a hospital in Vermont. Would have made things much easier if they were considered one state! And while we are talking about states, don’t forget D.C., which has a larger population than Vermont and no representation in Congress. Something a new Constitution should rectify. And get rid of the Electoral College!

Melissa Yorks

I had no idea Vermont was patrolling its border to keep New Yorkers out, but it doesn’t affect me since my step grandson graduated from Middlebury and so I had no business going there. Thanks to COVID, I’ve been leading a very small life, mostly limited to a square mile of Manhattan, mostly taking place in our apartment. I don’t know that I’ll ever return to the life of travel again.

GK

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Hey, I just finished reading “Here are your instructions. Go. Do it” and it was the most insightful piece I have read anywhere in a long time. It’s enough to make a guy spill his coffee. A constitutional convention is a big deal. I worry that some renegade TV network might convince their slower viewers to abandon democracy and join the Russian Federation. But I digress. 

So Garrison, please stop this nonsense about being an old man with nothing relevant to say. A lot of younger folks are reading your stuff and taking notes. 

Best,

Clay Blasdel

Clay, I venture into politics only as a joke in passing because anything written seriously about politics will be misconstrued by half the readership and a man gets tired of being misunderstood. A gentleman in Arizona thinks I am anti-conservative — I who believe that one finds one’s identity in work and in doing it well, a principle inherited from my father and uncles. Also the principle of “Love thy neighbor” and the imparting of cultural values by way of storytelling, something I associate with the conservatives of my youth. Rather than contradict you, they’d take the long way around with an anecdote, an amiable form of argument. The world has gotten very strange in the past year and somehow we just have to accommodate ourselves to it.

GK

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Hello, Garrison:

When did you unlearn the difference between a period and a comma?

“It’s an amazing invention, the inflexion of the woman’s voice is so natural, not robotic.”

“The previous one was held in a nation of fewer than four million persons and now we’re around 330 million, time to go back to the drawing board.”

Aside from that, your column is still pretty good.

Don Buck

Sorry you’re opposed to the run-on sentence. I’m not.

GK

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Mr. Keillor: 

Going down memory lane, one of my favorite bits of your “humor ministry” was offered on the morning program from public radio back in the early 1970s. One day, you encouraged all your listeners to get up, go to their window, and dance for the morning show dance contest. I don’t recall who won, but I still smile when I remember that morning show. 

By the way, it seemed to me then that you played “Help Me, Rhonda” pretty often. Was that so? Was there any special tie to that song?

Thank you,
Clay Oglesbee

“Help Me, Rhonda” was a song that many people loved to hate and they’d wait for days looking forward to when I’d play it, which I pretended to do under intense pressure of personal obsession. As for the dance contest, it took place on an extremely cold day and I wanted people to look out at the frozen tundra and dance to keep themselves warm.

GK

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Yankees put cheese in the grits, but I forgive them.

Wes Gordon

Charlotte, North Carolina

In Carrollton, Georgia, the Brown Dog café served cheesy grits and I had it twice and, for grits, it didn’t taste bad.

GK

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I have been reading That Time of Year. You speak of your father sorting mail on the train with a .38 strapped to his side. My father sorted mail on a train with a .38, on the Evansville, Indiana, to Chicago route. Nothing extraordinary but it brought back a fond memory, thank you.

William Dale Talarzyk

Dad wasn’t a hunter and that gun was the only one in our house. The Railway Mail Service issued it to him and I believe he only fired it once when he tried to shoot a stump at my uncle’s farm and fired six shots from twenty feet away and never hit the stump. Much more impressive was his memorization of small towns in western Minnesota and North Dakota and how to route their mail. I drove him to work at the Union depot in St. Paul sometimes and he climbed aboard the mail car with the rest of the crew and I was quite impressed. The Mail Service was an artifact of the 19th century but it did provide good service to a big chunk of rural America.

GK

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Mr. Keillor,

We had the privilege of enjoying you in Georgia this last week for the luncheon and concert. My wife noticed your fly was open, I of course did not. Seeing you again, having seen you at the Ryman with APHC a few years back, made me realize how much I truly miss my weekends with you and the troupe. If I could have asked you one question it would have been “What must it be like to be compared to Mark Twain during your lifetime?” 

I hope you stay well and look forward to your return south someday. 

Stuart Goldsby

Cullman, Alabama

I keep meaning to read more of Twain to try to figure out what people mean by that. Innocents Abroad I haven’t read or Joan of Arc or The Mysterious Stranger. It is terribly sad that Huckleberry Finn is banned in schools for the use of a common Southern idiom now considered derogatory. The censors have a good deal to answer for.

GK

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Hi, Mr. Keillor.

I have enjoyed your work for many years. I hope you come near Cheyenne soon. If you do, I’d like to meet you. Have a great week.

Ryan Lindsey, RN

I just go where they tell me to go, Ryan, I have nothing to say in the matter. I still love to get up in front of a crowd and try my luck and Cheyenne would be a whole new challenge. I imagine a crowd of long lean men in skinny jeans and feed caps and their bountiful women and maybe some of them with shotguns.

GK

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Hi, Garrison.

Your 01.28.22 column starts with your recurring artsy-techy theme, which resonates deeply with me as I started out aspiring to the arts as a painter or maybe a poet or both. I too furled my young brow attempting to look high-brow, or at least middle-brow as I pondered various red wheelbarrows and white chickens (W.C. Williams). But a look did “April me” (EEC) so I accepted the “full catastrophe” (Zorba) and followed Frost’s more traveled divergent; dropped out of Wayne State, served time in the U.S. Coast Guard, got a job and married the girl who Apriled me 50 odd years ago. She still Aprils me every day.

I forsook the world of Fine Art in order to make a living and it worked out just fine. I soon realized that an engineer with an abundance of creativity was as rare as a pitcher that can hit, so I had a niche and a paycheck even without formal credentials. Traveling the road, I took over the years has moved me past pondering the imponderable and on to trying to comprehend where we actually are. For me, romanticizing the unknown has become meatloaf and mashed potatoes. What’s tantalizing now is the fascinating tangible world of figuring out what we haven’t figured out yet. Carl Sagan said it best:

“At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes — an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense.”

Oh BTW, I must admit that my wife makes a flat-out wonderfully delicious and nourishing meatloaf and mashed potatoes usually served with green beans. Garlic? No thanks.

William Juntunen
Michigan and Indiana

You’ve had a wonderful life, sir, and I wish you a good deal more of it. I do not disparage meatloaf and potatoes; it’s the dish of my childhood and it holds a great deal of meaning for me and I do not scrutinize it with skepticism. My wife does, and she does not fix it; she creates big salads and for meatloaf I have to go to a diner. I intended to be a satirist but the job doesn’t pay well so I went into radio and eventually found a way to sort of merge the two. I’m still trying. Did High Point, NC, last week and it was pretty good. Maybe not a high point but certainly above the mean.

GK

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Well done. Re: “In Georgia, taking shelter from the storm,” you are officially off my s*** list. My family (North Dakota Lutheran & The Bronx Jewish/Methodist) and my wife’s family (Wisconsin Catholics) have been in Nashville, Tenn., for more than 60 years now, and I have embraced the heritage of my dad’s Georgia cotton-farming family. My cousin Marti Fredrickson Maraden knew you at U of M.

Take care,

Paul

Glad to be off your list, sir, though my admiration of Georgians got me onto the list of some progressive readers. I enjoy the fact that Georgia seems to be a swing state after being owned by one party for a while. Competition is a good thing. I fly Delta whenever possible because they’re a classy airline. They devoured our Northwest Orient and we do not resent that at all. I hope that in your Georgian heart you keep a warm spot for the Bronx Jewish/Methodist strain as well.

GK

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GK,

Thank you for sharing your conversion experience in Georgia. In these days of overly confident self-righteousness, it is refreshing to hear someone publicly confessing a change of heart or mind about those who do not reflect our own cultural identity. Your poignant story about encountering gracious human connections in a small-town café reminded me of my experience years ago leaving my home in the Deep South and moving to Rochester, New York, to attend seminary. After unloading our meager possessions, the day we arrived my wife and I were hungry so we asked a returning student where we could get something to eat close by the campus. He directed us to a small pizza parlor a few blocks away that had an Italian name. We went in and sat at a table with a checkered plastic tablecloth. A middle-aged waitress came over with several menus and asked us what we would like to drink. I turned to my wife and she said to the waitress, “I would like a Pepsi, please.” I followed with a request for a Pepsi and a glass of ice water. The waitress put her pad down looking at us with real curiosity and asked, “Where are you guys from?” We realized at the moment that we stood out as being different simply because of the way we talked, being totally unaware that we had a foreign accent. I responded to the inquiry by saying we had just moved to Rochester from Tallahassee, Florida. The waitress in turn smiled and delivered a friendly welcome-to-town greeting before she scurried off to get our drinks and submit our pizza order. Later, after we had finished our pizza, she brought us the check and asked with a real inquisitiveness what it is like to live in the South noting that she had never been anywhere in that direction beyond Pennsylvania. We enjoyed a 10-minute conversation with an exchange of information about dealing with unfamiliar weather conditions, laughing about the regional idiosyncrasies in cuisine found in chitlins and scrapple, and mutual interests in discovering how folks in different parts of our country think and live. To this day we remember with appreciation this unexpected welcome from one of the very first people we had met in the land that we had been told was marked by rudeness and social indifference. Let’s hope more of us today will learn the wisdom of Mark Twain who suggested that travel is fatal to bigotry, prejudice, and narrowmindedness, especially when you go around with your pants unzipped. 

Elvis Kruwalt

Jonah, Texas 

Glad you found a friendly face in Rochester, NY, sir, and someday I hope to hear how seminary turned out and how you deal with carrying that interesting first name. I don’t believe I ever met an Elvis except Elvis Costello and I never got up the nerve to ask him. But you’re right about Mark Twain. Hannibal is right on the border so either way he went, north or south or east or west, he was in foreign territory.

GK

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If any Georgian said “Y’all” to Mr. Keillor, Mr. Keillor can’t have been alone. No Southerner or Texan uses that term to mean just one person. It can be used to one person when that person and at least one other are meant. Not otherwise.

Donald Mace Williams
Canyon, Texas

There is disagreement about that among letter-writers from the South. I take no position on it. I was, however, alone.

GK

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You said you were “officially done with looking down on the South” … how did you ever get started with that in the first place? I’m a little surprised at you?!

Jerome Colten

I was around during the civil rights struggle when people like George Wallace and Bull Connor came to represent the South in the minds of many Northerners. Those images linger, and the murder of the three civil rights workers and the march on Selma and other dramas. It was ugly.

GK

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Just want to comment on your thoroughly enjoyable post about the hospitable people of Georgia. I’m a nonfiction author (seven books on WWII in the Pacific), originally from Pennsylvania, and have lived for the past eight years near the incredibly charming antebellum town of Madison, an hour east of Atlanta. Spared during Sherman’s march to the sea during the Civil War, it is known today as “the town too pretty to burn.” Relocating here was one of the best decisions I ever made.

Thank you for sharing your gift of words,
Bruce Gamble

General Sherman doesn’t have a reputation as a preserver of beautiful towns but I suppose he made exceptions now and then or maybe he was just in a hurry to get to the coast. I envy your having found such a good place. I think I’m pretty well situated in New York because my wife loves it and it’s a good enough life. The bicycles in the bike lane are a real hazard and I expect to be run down and killed one day by a delivery boy and die with the smell of sausage pizza in my nostrils. Look both ways is my advice. I get to go around and do shows in small towns now that my career is in decline, and last week I did Carrollton, GA, High Point, NC, and Easton, MD, on the East Shore, a classy town with brick buildings downtown, full of stuff I’d like to buy but can’t because we have enough stuff, alas.

GK