Post to the Host

Comments from the week of May 2nd

I’ve listened to, watched and read your work since the 1970s when we lived in Bloomington, MN, and I regret you using your platform for political commentary. I love your work but not your politics. The country is pretty evenly divided, which means that 50 percent of the audience is uncomfortable. I would consider being a paid subscriber, but not if political views and commentary are part of the package.
Sincerely,

Don

Don, don’t give it a thought. You don’t need to read anything you don’t want to read. I’ve never listened to Sean Hannity and there’s no reason you should listen to me. There are tens of thousands of writers out there and you just need to find some that are to your liking. I don’t see much need for my political commentary, but I can’t promise anything. I think you should save yourself the discomfort.

GK

---

Hello, Garrison. My 61-year-old niece is concerned about her grandson, age 15, who is skipping school and getting F’s in his classes, despite the fact that he is clearly intelligent but unmotivated by anything, including threats and money rewards. Her son (the boy’s father, age 45 and a successful businessman) told my niece that he is giving up and is prepared to let the boy fail in school, saying that he’s disturbed when the boy lies to him and assures him that he has done his homework when he hasn’t. 

My niece declared that at a young age she’d determined never, ever to tell a lie and has lived by that principle — so her grandson’s lies particularly concern her. I feel that it’s okay to lie when forced to face an impossible alternative: in some situations, I have been forced to lie.

She was shocked and said there is never ever an excuse for lying. I replied that her grandson had most likely lied in the face of his father’s anger and frustration. And so the issue still is there. What is your view, Garrison? Thank you!

Rosie

You are asking the wrong person, Rosie. I’ve lied twice as much as you have — no, more like five times more — and though I haven’t told a lie in the past four or five years, I’m sure I could if I chose to. But I’m concerned about this boy. I’ve been guilty of anger in the face of being lied to and I’m ashamed of it. Anger seems so destructive and useless and surely the dad is going to regret this someday. It would be good if an outsider, perhaps a teacher, maybe a kind young therapist, could gain the boy’s confidence. He needs encouragement, not anger. One can hope for an ordinary miracle: they happen all the time. Meanwhile, you might sit down and write the boy a friendly letter, no admonishments, just jokes and small talk. A friendly letter from a great-aunt can brighten his day at the least.

GK

---

Hello, Garrison.  I met Waylon Jennings one night in the steakhouse at the Belterra Casino in Indiana. I was playing dinner music on the baby grand piano, and I was the only man dressed in a tuxedo for forty miles in any direction.

I knew Waylon was to play in the Show Room that night, and I was hoping for a glimpse of the great man. Sure enough, he came in for a steak dinner, with his entourage. They were seated maybe twenty-five feet from me. They put three tables together for the party, and Waylon sat at the end with his back to me. He kept his hat on.

Well, I played every country song I knew and some I didn’t. Waylon caught on right away that I was playing to him — I played that “slip note” in Floyd Cramer’s “Last Date” perfectly. He would turn around, and nod or wave or grin, after nearly every song.

Waylon and his people finished their meal and were fixing to leave, and had to go right past me, and I looked up, took a breath, and said, “How ya doin’ there, Chief!” Well, he liked that, and stopped and I reached out and shook his hand, and he grinned real big and said, “You’re great! I knew every song you played!” I stuttered some kind of thank you and got tongue-tied.

Waylon’s gone now and when I think about that moment I still get a little boost, because you know, I was great! Waylon said so.

All the Best,

Cliff

I once met a guy in Nashville who’d toured with Waylon and he said that Waylon knew how much those songs meant to his audience and so he always did them perfectly, the inflexion, the style, everything, note perfect. That respect for the audience is a big part of country music. People love the songs that go to their heart and so be careful about messing around with it.

GK

---

GK, You seem to enjoy being 78 years old, and I’m looking for a bit of advice, because I hate the thought of getting old. I’m about 15 years younger than you are, but I feel as though my life is going by so quickly that before I know it, I’ll be in the nursing home drinking Ensure by the gallon and forgetting my children’s names. Do you agree that time seems to go faster the older we get? And how do you handle the feeling of loss that comes with age? How do you manage to accept age as a gift and not as a curse? And don’t say, “Well, just look at the alternative.” That’s a trite statement that doesn’t help one bit. And are you honestly content being 78, or do you just say those things to make yourself feel better?

Mary

Mary, I used to be a very ambitious writer and now, in retirement, I look back and am astonished (horrified?) at how ambitious I was, the books, the CDs of monologues, the shows, the speeches, I was writing about the ordinary lives of characters in a small town, but I had very little life of my own, so I don’t understand where all that writing came from. I was ambitious for forty years and I don’t regret it much (some, but not seriously) but having that odd history makes you appreciate the ordinary daily life of an old man. I enjoy small talk with strangers, long phone conversations with distant confidantes, writing notes to people, and also writing a novel, and the ordinary back-and-forth of marital conversation, seeing as I had the good fortune to marry a very funny woman. She’s a walker and keen observer and comes back from a hike with a whole stand-up routine of what she saw and what they were doing. The beauty of this life is living each day intentionally. I sit drinking coffee and say, “Alexa, play the Mozart Requiem” and so what if she plays the Fauré instead, I’m easy. 

GK

---

Dear Mr. K.,  I’m almost as old as you are and not entirely a “fan,” but close. I find a slightly “smug” attitude has crept into your musings. This irritates me because it seems that you have a lot going but maybe you should watch Nomadland and get your bearings slightly adjusted.

Myfanwy Phillips

P.S. I’m a Canadian Citizen, so a few steps removed from all that’s going on in Your Country, tho’ I’ve lived south of the border for fifty years! I’m minus a “sweetie,” and grateful for it.

Myfanwy, thanks for the warning. The smugness may result from the brevity: I stay within an 800-word limit so as not to waste people’s time and that can make me sound glib, I suppose. I am not glib. I carry plenty of guilt around. I am not smug about guilt. I have to joke about it, for my own mental health, but I carry masses of regret. Just saying. My ancestors were Canadian, settled in Nova Scotia, then tried Manitoba, and finally settled on Minnesota. I have a picture of them standing in front of their Minnesota farmhouse, which years later caught fire and burned down. My dad was eight years old and watched it burn from the schoolhouse across the road. He remembered his father raking through the ashes, looking for photographs, in grief, knowing the fire was his fault because he had postponed cleaning the chimney. That poor man is very much in my memory and I know how he feels.

GK

---

Mr. Keillor, As a bestselling author, do you think you were born to be a writer, or was it painstaking work that made you shed all kinds of blood and tears as you worked your way to the top? Did you ever consider work other than radio and writing? Why is it that some people are obviously gifted while others of us are just barely above average? Does God have something to do with this, or do you think it’s just the luck of the draw? Why in the world do we have little Mozart prodigies, and why was Pavarotti blessed with that stunning tenor voice when my husband wasn’t? Am I asking too many questions?

Betsy

Yes, you’ve exceeded your question limit, but I’ll do my best. Persistence is how you become a writer, not blood and tears, not heredity, you just keep trying, and I still do. I was a good dishwasher and parking lot attendant; menial jobs suit me very well. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. But back to persistence and being a writer: you write a lot of stuff that doesn’t work, and you put it away for another day and eventually you pull it out of the swamp of bad stuff and amid all the dreck one paragraph strikes you as meaningful and you work with that and make something happen. I feel that my best work is still ahead of me and on the basis of that, I keep persisting. I can be a ferocious editor, throw away pages and pages of stuff, and out of the demolition comes renewed purpose. We need to keep in touch with each other. Simple as that. 

GK

---

Dear Mr. Keillor, I’ve been a fan of your work in the past but reading you these days, I simply don’t understand how you can ignore the issues of race and privilege and justice that are all around you in Minneapolis. The country is going through a crisis, trying to reckon with its racist culture, and you sit there silent, gabbing about your childhood and your wife and spring and baseball, and ignoring the thunderstorms. Wake up, there’s a war going on.

Arturo

Your faith in my sociopolitical/cultural acuity is not shared by those who know me well. I’ve sat and listened to smart people talk about these things and, frankly, I think that whatever they’ve said and whatever I might say has been said better by other people. I grew up with powerful preaching and the preachers I heard were all very self-assured, but I thought that, when it came to wickedness, they were lacking in experience and needed to spend more time among the sinful and less among us the sanctified. Just a thought. 

GK

---

Garrison, I know you mean well but I do get tired of hearing your thoughts about aging. What’s the point of talking about it? You’re still mobile, still making sense, so why not focus on the world around you and not obsess about being almost 80?

Frank J.

I’m grateful to be 78. Three heroes of mine died in their early twenties, Barry and Buddy and Leeds, and my cousin Roger died at 17 and all of them are still on my mind. Leeds was from Anoka and was in love with my friend Corinne; he was the most together person I knew, and late one night, a drunk pulled out of a parking lot on University Avenue, caromed off another car, and hit Leeds head-on who was heading home from the U, and he died a few days later. A tragedy like that puts a person under an obligation to live your life on his behalf, and on behalf of Corinne who died, a suicide, at 43. Two of my uncles died in their late fifties from a heart problem that I was lucky to have fixed surgically in my late fifties. These things make a person grateful, and I look forward to turning 79 and intend to whoop it up for my 80th and maybe take up wine again after a couple decades of abstinence. I’m living for Leeds and Roger and Barry and Corinne — Buddy Holly has thousands of people living for him — and it’s a privilege. God grant them peace everlasting and God give me a piece of blueberry pie. 

GK