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Comments from the week of 04.07.24

I wrote a song — well, a new version of an existing song —about Brooklyn. Here’s a verse:

Brooklyn once was full of folks who didn’t put on airs,
But now it’s full of yuppies and techie millionaires.
High-priced, pretentious restaurants, they make us rage and fume,
But we'll eat hot dogs at Nathan’s when forsythia’s in bloom.

Forsythia is the official flower of Brooklyn. I’m not making this up.

Elizabeth Block

Toronto, Canada, born in Brooklyn

All I know about Brooklyn I know from the DiGiallonardo sisters, Christine, Nadia, and Daniela, Bensonhurst-born, loyal to the core. The three of them sang on the show back in its New York period, when we broadcast from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a young sister trio who did nifty swing tunes from their parents’ era, nothing pretentious about them. But I’m glad you got Nathan’s and forsythia in at the end. GK

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Hi, Garrison.

You are so right about small miracles. I drove two hours north to Syracuse to celebrate my impending 70th birthday by seeing my first (and most likely only) total solar eclipse. The sun was full out when I arrived the day before, and all morning the day of. About an hour before the eclipse began, the clouds began rolling in. From start to finish the process would take about two hours, and a small group of hotel residents and employees began hanging out in a grassy area behind the building. Other than occasional brief glimpses, the sun remained hidden. As the time for totality approached, I said a silent prayer, hoping to at least catch a few seconds for a photo. And apparently, I was heard — despite the clouds, there was a moment. The darkness took over, the outdoor lights came on, the temperature dropped, and I beheld the tiny miracle. Thank you, God.

Best,
Patricia McCormack

I got a slight glimpse of it from our balcony in New York City but I had to crane my neck. I didn’t think to lie on my back and get a good view. It drew a big festive crowd to the Great Lawn in Central Park. New Yorkers have a knack for putting on parties. GK

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Dear Mr. Keillor,

My wife and I have been enjoying Prairie Home Companion for many years. After its end on NPR, we've gone to several of the road shows in Washington, D.C., and Poughkeepsie, New York. We’ll be at Boothbay Opera in Maine this coming August.

Many long years ago, you performed at the Brooklyn (NY) Academy of Music, and I never forgot the audience singing “Tell Me Why.” A thrilling moment in our lives! I hope you’ll sing that song once more!

Thanks for considering this.

All the best from Bill Wertheim

I’ll give it a try but I think that song belongs to Camp Fire Girls of the Fifties and the people who knew the words have mostly passed from the Earth. But I’ll try — “Tell me why the stars do shine, tell me why the ivy twines” — and either it goes over or it doesn’t. GK

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Dear Garrison,

I was an avid listener of APHC every weekend beginning in 1980, one summer Saturday afternoon, while ironing, and was immediately hooked. I attended your show in Greenville, South Carolina, in late March and you made a comment about Lutherans that was absolutely right-on. I grew up Lutheran on a small dairy farm in west central Minnesota, and you nailed it. I believe it was about them avoiding what they didn’t want to know. 

Warmly,

Candace in NC

I believe I said that Lutherans are very good at ignoring what they don’t wish to know. I wasn’t putting them down — I’m at an age when I practice the same thing: I think its called stoicism, not getting anxious about things you have no power to change. GK

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I recently reread Lake Wobegon Days and rediscovered that you used both my first and last names. Professor Oftedahl was one of the founders of Augsburg College (which I attended) and a distant relative. My first name, Arlan, or Arlen as you spelled it, was popular in my home town, Bagley, Minnesota, in the 1940s, but I’ve rarely come across it since. The book brought back many childhood memories. Thank you. You and I met a few years ago at Agnes Scott College in Decatur and chatted about our growing up in Minnesota. We are the same age. I hope all is well with you.

Arlan Oftedahl

I still get up and write every morning, after my morning walk, and I still do shows, some solo, some with Heather Masse and Rich Dworsky, some with the full cast. It’s still a challenge and I hit the mark often enough that I keep going. GK

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Dear Mr. Keillor,

I don’t understand why all of your 50^th Anniversary APHC shows are in the eastern part of the United States. Can’t you come out here to Seattle? We’re missing out and so are you.

Please try, and thanks.

James B.

Bainbridge Island, Washington

We go wherever people book us to come do a show and it seems that academic institutions and nonprofit arts organizations shy away from the show, thinking it backward-looking and unprogressive, so our bookings come from commercial promoters operating smaller venues of 1,500 to 2,500 capacity. I’m an old Democrat but I am perfectly okay about playing in red states to less “woke” audiences. I welcome whatever audience shows up. I’m heading out to Spokane in a week but Seattle has yet to invite us. GK

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Dear Mr. Keillor,

I was saddened to hear you describe yourself as “an old man who has experienced more disappointment than you’ll ever know” and I sat down in my working day to try to take a drop out of that ocean of disappointment. At least I hope that I can.

I live and love in Frankfurt am Main in central Germany and have a very blessed life with two healthy children and a loving wife. I can add to that many other blessings that I try to appreciate daily but I won’t bore you. Rather I will get to the point about how you played a role in my and my family’s blessed life.

It was the very early 1990s, when I arrived in Germany from Dublin, Ireland, with a box of cassettes and a suitcase. I was to work in a factory where no one but the boss spoke English and, as the Berlin Wall had recently fallen, small apartments, small cars and nice, small women were difficult to find having been snapped up by the economic migrants from the eastern part of the country. It was a lonely time, and I was determined to stick it out despite entreaties from my mother to come home to the cramped family home and rampant unemployment.

This was a time before the internet with little access to my culture and limited letter writing from home, and I briefly found a rather awful lodging in the house of a man who was doing noisy and abusive things to vulnerable people in the deep of night. These were people he had procured at the usual haunts for their amenability. I cut and ran and moved on to sofa surfing until such time that I found a suitable bedsit near a new place of work and spent some years building a new career and capitalising on my growing bilingual competencies over the next eight years up to the millennium. 

In all this time, the Sunday mornings rebroadcast of APHC and your Lake Wobegon stories, on AFN — the armed forces radio (Frankfurt was a big GI town in the ’90s) was my solace and comfort and my friend on the radio. I would tape the show and play it over several times in the week.

Unfortunately, I only ever kept the recordings of the joke shows. Yours was the voice of a friend and an older brother telling me how people were all intrinsically good and that things had a way of working themselves out.

Occasionally Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America would be the highlight of the weekend (if I could get the short wave signal from the world service to stop whistling for long enough), but usually it was your summation of the musings of Pastor Ingqvist on the cost of chickens or whatnot that got me looking forward to the coming week.

Yes, I had some of your books, but it was the radio broadcasts that got me through. Well before Stephen Colbert formed with us all a consensual suspension of disbelief that he was a rabid republican, you had formed a pact with us listeners, that you were the inventor of a radio show format that predated your years on the planet and that Powdermilk Biscuits were a real thing that I could buy, the next time I visit my uncle in Long Island.

Mr. Keillor, I met my Irish wife on a skiing trip and we were too old to have children — but we did it anyway!! And God bless us all, they are two fine and healthy kids. My son is 14 years old, and I am so proud that he is more bilingual than me and he dearly loves to write stories in both languages. Detective stories. His teacher thinks he is a joy but needs to be less robotic in his descriptive passages. And so I played for him couple of your monologues to teach him that the story journey is as important as the story destination. 

My wife has also learned to love your work through me, and we see parallels to your stories in our current life spent between the modern Frankfurt city of skyscrapers and our other life in a 150-year-old house in a fishing village on the south coast of Ireland (Dunmore East to be precise). The people there are gloriously flawed and human and small-minded and open and grounded. Yes, grounded is the right word as it is a good word for you I would propose. Because grounded is what happens when we land gently or hard after our times reaching for the clouds. I am approaching retirement, but the kids still have a ways to go with college and sports. But I hope to gently be grounded back where I came from in the village with three bars, one café, and a post office that opens occasionally.

As I look out of my office overlooking the disappointingly small river Main, I am chuffed that I have finally written this message to you after all these years. I don’t know if you will have the time to read it or appreciate this message from a corner of the world that you have never thought of. Nevertheless, I really do hope that you will find a way to reassign your expressed disappointment to a grounding (soft or hard) after a life that touched others in a positive way. The journey is very often more important than the destination.

God bless you, sir.

Norman Walsh

God bless you, Norman, for writing this extraordinary letter about your extraordinary life. When you send a radio signal out into the ionosphere, you have no idea where it might land and you just never think about it, and it’s sort of a miracle to hear that our little radio program from St. Paul, Minnesota, got all the way to Germany and did an Irishman some good. All the best to you. GK

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