Post to the Host

Comments from the week of 08.29.21

Dear Garrison Keillor,

I’m a big fan but of late your left-wing political views have crept into the storyline (re: A Fresh Start Is a Beautiful Thing). Believe me I sympathize with you but it’s no place for “YOUR” style of satire. It is out of step with what you represent to all of us. Perhaps you should have submitted “A Fresh Start” to the Op-Ed section of the New York Times. At least it would feel at home. In the absence of politics, we look forward to your keen sense of observation and sage wisdom. And so I feel I have to sell my Powdermilk coffee mug at my next yard sale.

Lee De Liberal

I thought “A Fresh Start” was pretty much simply about the need for a fresh start now and then. I celebrated the resignation of a liberal governor and I opined that Joe should be a one-term president. Hardly left-wing, as I see it. I mentioned the usefulness of jokes as a way of changing the subject. I’m not a reader of the Times Opinion page. I think you’ve got me wrong, but the obvious solution to your problem, when you read a column you don’t like, throw your computer out the window.

GK

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I read your daily missives with eagerness. I have cringed, sometimes, at what I see as blissful denial. I was a lifelong Democrat. I get the liberal mindset. I lived it for decades. What I don’t get is tacit acceptance of last summer’s legacy of destroyed cities; loss of livelihoods; random and lethal violence. What I don’t get is a mere shoulder shrug for millions crossing the southern border under murderous and massively desperate conditions. I try to understand the lack of outrage. I feel a little sad.

The Biden/Afghanistan reference today, though, did me in. This debacle of epic proportions is on Biden and the perceived kindness and gentleness of our president means not a thing to those suffering and dying in the Middle East.

Kathleen

If you’re expecting outrage, there are better places to find it. If I were in the outrage business, I’d do it every day at the top of my voice. “Millions crossing the southern border”? “Destroyed cities”? Where are you getting your news? “Debacle of epic proportions”? If we use the word “epic” for the defeat of the Afghan government, then what word do we use for Vietnam? We have a marble monument in Washington with the names of a number of people I know on it. If you want outrage, I could give you a few thousand words of it about that. But what would it accomplish other than to show my capacity for useless outrage? Vietnam ended forty-five years ago and now cruise ships stop there, and American tourists walk the streets of Hue and Saigon. I often take the freedom of skipping outrage, figuring that there is more outrage in the air now than ever before in my lifetime, students trying to get teachers fired, the cancel culture in full swing, families riven by political animosity, so sometimes I write about the ordinary pleasures of life in the summer of 2021, the pleasure of marital happiness and baseball and recollections of childhood and sweet corn and humor, and if that infuriates you, then the opinion shows on Fox can satisfy all your needs and more. Chaucer lived through horrible times, and he told funny stories. Anne Frank was a victim of the Holocaust and I find curiosity and affection and wonderment in her journals, not much in the way of outrage. “Tacit acceptance”? I guess so. Dozens of people in Queens and the Bronx, a few miles from where I live, drowned Wednesday night in the downpour, most of them impoverished immigrants living in illegal basement apartments. Did I march on City Hall on Thursday? No, I didn’t. I hope some people in city government take notice. The more I think about your letter, the more it infuriates me. If I keep on, I could work myself into a lather and announce that I’m going to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge. So I’ll stop.

GK

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Have your fans read Political Tribes by Amy Chua? This book explains why the US failed in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Also, remember, the secret to a long life is waking up every morning.

Tom Teliska

So far, so good.

GK

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I dismissed Revelation after the professor said, “Revelation isn’t very revealing.” Then it hit me one day that the book was a second-century Star Wars, with the forces of good and evil duking it out in the cosmos. With different eyes, I even found a Christmas birth story.

Bob Tucker, Houston

I shall keep this in mind Sunday morning in church and if the sermon loses my interest, I’ll turn to the back of the book.

GK

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Garrison — I am enjoying a second listen to your engaging memoir. I was struck by your insight that NPR was allergic to you because of your steadfast refusal to take yourself all that seriously. Considering the Level 10 degree of thunderous pomposity on cable news, would you consider serving in a new Cabinet-level position, Secretary of Not Taking Ourselves So Seriously? Can you think of something this country needs more than that?

R. Lee Procter

It’s something that comes with age, Mr. Procter, and the term for it is irrelevance.

GK

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Hi, Garrison: I enjoyed Sue Leaf’s response to your now much analyzed comments on birdwatching. I hang feeders in my yard to help out the hummingbirds and we get three varieties that start showing up in mid-April and depart by mid-October. The hummingbirds are a noisy and quarrelsome lot, much as with some of your readers. But these tiny, ambitious, energetic, and persistent beings are also very entertaining and even a bit magical, too — just like your weekly Post to the Host column. It takes all kinds, keep up the good work.

Best — John W Mitchell, West Slope, CO

It’s a brave man who dares to be wrong and gives good people the chance to show him so and I am trying to be that man.

GK

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Dear Mr. Keillor,

When I was in the 4th or 5th grade my absolute favorite book was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. When I got to the last page I would literally go back to the beginning and start all over again, rereading that book 8, 9, 10 times in a row. The characters and situations were so real and vivid in my mind … Aunt Polly, Muff Potter, Injun Joe’s Cave, Tom and Huck’s terrifying night on the island during a thunderstorm. Maybe I related so closely to the book because, like Mark Twain (and Tom), I also grew up in a small, sleepy Midwestern town (Hoopeston, Illinois, “The Buckle on the Corn Belt”) and yearned for some adventure in my quiet life. It’s still one of my favorite books. In later grades and in high school I was introduced to James Thurber, Douglas Adams, Angela Thirkell, you, and most especially P.G. Wodehouse, who has been a very good friend to me for over forty years.

Which authors and books did you enjoy reading as a boy? Did you have access to a good library?

Your fan and friend,

Dave Albert

I loved Tom Sawyer but only read the book twice. We were Bible readers in our family and read a good deal of boring “Christian” fiction, but I was thrilled to discover Thoreau and Hemingway and Fitzgerald and anything else I could get my hands on. And then I found Gershon Legman’s unexpurgated limerick collection and I became a limericist.

GK

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Gary Keillor once told tales
Meant to please our mothers
Now he writes verse as if under a curse
Some are funnier than others

Rich Jewett

True, so true.

GK

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I heard a preacher once ask, “Is your faith like a drive across Kansas?” I never listened to him again. However, with your comment I will make an exception.

Ralph McCluggage

Hi, Garrison and TWA folks.

I’ve enjoyed you since long before you performed in Durango, Colorado, where I live. You do good work, and I’m staying in touch. I am pushing 70 and embarrassingly let slip ancient references and expressions, as you do, but a part of your narrative on Goethe gave me pause, and not in a good way.

 ” ... Goethe went down to a church the very next day and married her, his live-in girlfriend of 18 years.” Well, I’m sure she participated in the choice to go down to the church and marry. And I’m sure this “... live-in girlfriend” had in Goethe a live-in boyfriend. Your words suggest to me a male-dominated perspective of ownership and efficiency. Words perpetuate attitude, which as an English major you well know, and I see in this usage a male bias, subtle as it may be, which this journalism major hopes we are moving beyond. It also looks like lazy storytelling. You might check this with your smart daughter and wife.

Sincerely,

Stephanie Dial

I’m sorry, I don’t recall the reference to Goethe. If it’s Johann Goethe, I believe I can claim complete ignorance of him and his romantic life. I have vague recollections of a woman character named Goethe who appeared in a Guy Noir episode, but I think she was a stripper. Sorry, I can’t be more helpful.

GK

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Dear Mr. Keillor:

I enjoyed today’s column. Your phrase about Cuomo, “a man for whom public attention was oxygen,” made me immediately think ”a man for whom public attention was a ventilator.” 

Sincerely,

Sally Neary 

He is gone, long gone, and I assume has a place to live and work on his memoir.

GK

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Garrison,

In today’s Post to The Host, you wrote: “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.” This reminded me of something I once heard Johnny Carson say, “When turkeys mate, they envision swans.” Such an elegant thought. Keep singing!

Coleman Hood

I mated many years ago in a church in New York and some fine people were there who are no longer on earth. We had a wedding luncheon at a restaurant up on 81st and Roland Flint stood and recited a poem and a waitress named Danielle did a big rendition of “La vie en rose.” The bride was quite lovely in a simple lacey dress and the groom was sort of stunned.

GK

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Mr. Keillor:

Several years ago you gave the advice (paraphrased): A ten-mile hike cures most problems. That advice has been very helpful to me. Thanks for your help.

As I’ve aged, a five-mile hike does the trick (most of the time) now.

Mike, Lincoln, NE

I should remember to take my own advice. Maybe tomorrow. But first I need some problems.

GK

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As a songwriter I feel compelled to point out that Mr. Bob Steele in this week’s Post the Host committed the all-too-common mistake of ascribing credit for writing a song to someone who merely sang it.

The Everly Brothers most assuredly did not write “Let It Be Me,” despite the beauty of their rendition. The song was written by Pierre Delanoë, Gilbert Bécaud, and Mann Curtis. And I wish Garrison would have caught that.

Dang oh well.

Steve Wacker

I knew it but I bit my tongue, as I’ve been taught to do. I come from people with badly scarred tongues.

GK

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Dear G.K.

As a longtime fan of your storytelling abilities I have learned that some folks think your musings these days about growing old, surviving a pandemic, and adjusting to New York apartment living lack the intrigue and irony that your Wobegon world exhibited. Some years ago, my wife and I attended your show at the Paramount Theatre in Austin. She was very reluctant to go hear someone tell fanciful stories for an hour and a half. But she indulged me by going to your show thinking that only Southerners like me appreciate extended tall tales and exaggerated yarns. She is from Pittsburgh, so her cultural tastes run in a different direction. Being the sensitive husband that I am, I asked her at the intermission if she had enough of your babbling about quixotic characters from Minnesota. To my pleasant surprise, she wanted to stay and hear more. Now when I share your posts with her, she claims that your real-life stories and experiences are too narcissistic and not as interesting as your imagined world once was. I told her you were reviving in your Back Room effort the monologue stories from the 1980s. Her only response was to suggest that your creativity must have died when you moved to New York. Nothing she says, however, will dissuade me, an old narcissistic only child, from appreciating your writing. I just wanted to share this comment in case you were thinking about doing a show in Pittsburgh.

Roy Bob Burleson, Briggs, Texas

You married a good honest woman, and I would never try to dissuade her from thinking what she thinks. A couple months ago, I was sitting in the ER at New York Presbyterian at 4 a.m. having an EEG rig wired to my head by a technician from Nepal who was explaining Buddhism to me. We were surrounded by the dying and insane and some old drunks and various sad cases, and he explained that Buddhism is utterly simple. It consists of kindness and contentment, and he said, “You don’t go seeking contentment, you simply accept it.” It was an odd revelatory experience and the thought of contentment as a natural state interests me and I’ve tried to write from that point of view. It means accepting my own irrelevance. And for the first time in my life, I do. The stories you heard were the work of an ambitious man and I am not that many any longer.

GK

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Dear Garrison,

Your latest column struck several nerves with me and so I find myself finally penning you the letter (does one pen a letter if it’s an email?). I’ve been contemplating for some time. I am not only a relative newcomer to your work, but also a mere spring chicken to you, being in my forties. You give me hope that life will get better.

Whilst I don’t have any pals with COVID, or QAnon relatives, or ringworm infestations, and not many I know for certain to have anxiety, I do have four unruly children who have this evening caused me to take refuge in my study and my laptop. But I won’t complain either as it has given me time to read your column, which cheered me up, while I was reading it at least.

Unlike you, I don’t have the joy of sitting outside (or inside, come to that) with my love, or touching his knee, as we are unable to be together (or even communicate really) for reasons I won’t enumerate. However, I read your column, and he reads your column, and we both know we both read your column and that gives us one small point of connection. It’s not enough, but it helps.

Thank you, sir, for your words, which enable me to imagine my love reading them, and chuckling over them in the same way I do. I do believe I will stay with you to the end.

Bex, England.

There is a story hiding in this letter and it intrigues me, but I respect your privacy. I hope those children give you some peace and quiet. I worry for our children and the world we’re leaving them. But I had a good long talk with my grandson the other day who was full of ambition and curiosity and excitement at launching into college with the hope of becoming an architect. I wish I knew more young people. Maybe I should become a school bus driver. Or get a job in a candy shop.

GK

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Garrison, responding to your rhetorical question:

I’m by love possessed and who could have guessed I would find it here in the Midwest.  —Pokey LaFarge

Pokey LaFarge – Central Time

James Puckett

You’ve given me something to think about, sir.

GK

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Please assemble a court book of GOOD POEMS.

Michael Murphy

Tell Viking Penguin, my old publisher.

GK

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I read your latest writing and halfway through I realized I love you and your wife. I don’t know you personally, but your words bring simplicity to the way I feel. Life is holding my wife’s hand when we’re sitting together looking at the ocean on a Sunday afternoon. Everything else is not important. Except trying to give to others.

Brad McMinn

The pandemic brought us close together, as it did with so many other people. Our lives were changed by this, what one has to call a “disaster,” what with a horrible death toll and the seeming endlessness of it, but it also has served to simplify the lives of millions of people. I doubt that we’ll ever return to how things were before.

GK

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