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Comments from the week of 05.12.24

GK,

Re: your hilarious description of the cab ride. I grew up in NYC and left at age 21. Ten years later I was working in Tucson as a psychiatric social worker in a county hospital emergency room and I did suicide assessments daily, several times a shift. It is a tedious process because it was up to me whether I ejected the person from the ER or kept them and gave them an expensive county bed. During that job I went en vacance to NYC and got in a cab. The driver sped off, wheeling and dealing just as you described and within the first twenty seconds I realized: We should put all patients who present with suicidal ideation in a NY cab. Within a minute they will passionately proclaim either “I want to live, let me outta here” or they will relish the concentrated probability of death. It would save hours of work. 

Phyllis Francine Nasta

I was in a NYC ER Saturday night and was stunned by the kindness and grace of the professionals there. I’m fine, they released me at 6 a.m. but I was up all night watching and listening and I saw a side of the city I hadn’t seen up close before, the lunacy, yes, the bummed out people, but the kindness too. Your job sounds like a powerful education, getting into a person’s head with a definite deadline. GK

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Mr. Keillor,

I wrote the poem, below about a beach in North Carolina and I wanted to share with you, as a thank-you note for all you’ve shared with me. All the best!

Bill Cox

Walking the beach at sunset,
the sand holds glimpses of the day,
like my memories of my life.
Long spaced, deep footprints of
a strong young runner.
A pair of tracks from a parent and tiny child.
The wandering trail of a sniffing dog.
A gray-brown sandcastle fades,
beside the marks of the beach chairs,
from which they observed the construction.
Gulls ensured no edible crumb remains
and left sharp toed prints.
The sun retreats its last golden light,
and finally the tide creeps up,
to reset the scene for tomorrow.

William Horace Cox

That’s a sweet poem, Bill, especially for me, a Minnesotan, never a beach dweller. My few beach experiences involved sunburn. Once, on Barbados, I lay in what looked like shade but I still turned red and spent the rest of the week in a motel room reading a book. I associate beaches with invading armies, artillery barrages, bombers coming in low, and also stories in which a gang executes an informant and puts his feet in buckets of concrete and throws him off the stern of a fishing boat. Thanks to my mother, I grew up with a fear of drowning and though I took swimming lessons, I never became adept, so the feeling of sand under my feet brings the memory of dread. I am from Minnesota, not a beach state. Our coastline is the rugged North Shore of Lake Superior where the Edmund Fitzgerald went down. So your poem makes something that was sinister seem almost lovely, but I emphasize almost. GK

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Dear GK:

Your recounting of nuclear war fears rekindled my own memories. I grew up a postwar baby boomer in NJ, about 1.5 air miles from the Empire State Building. As a young child, I was unaccountably well informed on global politics and thermonuclear weapons. Doing the duck and cover exercises in Robert Fulton Elementary School, two blocks back from the Palisades, it all seemed egregiously stupid and frightening to this kid. A few years later, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the USAF moved some of their strategic bombers to civilian airports to give the “Russkies” more targets they'd have to take out in a first strike. A squadron of the older B-47s were moved to Newark Airport. I knew enough to realize if the Soviets took out NYC with one or more multi-megaton bombs/warheads, Newark Airport would have a permanent ground stop. And the even closer town of North Bergen would be reduced to glowing rubble. 

I’m a longtime meteorologist, who has blown his share of forecasts over the decades. But the worst forecast I ever made was telling my two young daughters after the collapse of the USSR that “the world has never been safer in modern times,” and that it should remain so for the long term. Naivete cubed, I’d say, was in that sorry forecast.

I don’t worry about a Russian Federation massive surprise first strike the way I did as a child. But I do worry about miscalculations by Thug Putin should Ukraine — whom I badly want to turn the tide against the Thug — gain enough momentum to make Putin think he can chance a “tactical” strike against Ukraine or a NATO target, falsely assuming NATO won’t then leap into the terrible war there. Most of us know once a nuke is unleashed, it will be very difficult to avoid gradual escalation.

So, with all that in mind to this old worrier, your optimism is like a welcome gentle slap to my mind to just move on ... and share your good thoughts.

With gratitude,

Don Paul

You were smarter than I was as a kid and you’ve maintained superiority. I’m too dumb to worry. I spent Saturday night, all night, in a New York ER and saw a whole crowd of crises, weeping teenagers and their parents (maybe suicide threats, I don’t know) and kids who seemed to have ODed and wouldn’t confess to a doctor, and fragile elderly dames, and some outright crazy people, but I was fine. Some odd memory lapses suggested I’d maybe had a stroke but I was busy, working on my novel in an alcove, while they studied the MRI and brain imaging and I found the chaos around me very absorbing, sort of profound, the professionalism wholly admirable. I should’ve had dark thoughts about the decline of civilization but it didn’t occur to me. I leave this to the big thinkers. Glad you’re on the job so I don’t have to worry about it. GK

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I was wondering if you would take offense at an act of imitation. On a colony world fourteen light years distant a chemical on the soil keeps earth plants from germinating. A rescue ship delivers a thousand pounds of a terra-forming yeast that will digest the suspect chemical from the topsoil. In the process of removing the chemical, the yeast will do what yeast does in bread. The airy spaces in bread are bubbles of digestive gases left from the yeast in the bread metabolizing the sugar in the bread dough. The terra-forming yeast will create something reminiscent of the aroma of three-days-ago fertilized fields on one of the colonist’s Wisconsin farms. Not far from Winnegard’s Bend way up in Wisconsin by the Schmitt’s and the Thompson’s where logging has come to an end. Said colonists will wax nostalgic about the aroma of freshly spread manure and will feel at home on their adopted world. You accomplished something similar in a collaboration with Antonin Dvořák. I intend to avoid all but the idea.

Bill Schwan

No need to avoid anything. Use the Dvořák song, anything else you need. Sounds like an interesting story. You go, kid. GK

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Garrison,

I am disheartened by what is happening in our country. I’ve seen a lot in my 78 years, but nothing like this. Between Justice Alito flying the American flag upside down to show his support for “stop the steal,” and Donald Trump, a criminal, likely winning or contesting the Presidential election, I wonder if we’ll ever recover from what is obviously happening — the total destruction of what I loved about being an American. How can we ever trust our “impartial” Supreme Court, our election results, and our elected officials? It’s the end of America and I worry for our grandkids.

And yet here it is, springtime in Minnesota, and the lilacs continue to bloom, and the birds continue to spread their messages of joy every morning.

Mary Evenson

St. Paul, Minnesota

You smell those lilacs, Mary, and enjoy the brief spring, and let’s you and I maintain our faith in men and women of conscience. There is room in this bighearted country for all manner of political expression, but when we start to think of it as warfare, we’ve gone too far. The election was very close but it wasn’t stolen. Nobody made a rational case that it was. An old friend of mine said, “But we don’t know that it wasn’t.” Well, we do, actually. The phrase “Crooked Joe Biden” is based on nothing but it is repeated incessantly and it has an effect. But people said terrible things about FDR and about Wilson and Lincoln and public men and women going way back to the Revolution. History is full of calumny and insult and mock outrage and outright prune juice. Speaker Johnson is a good lawyer, a smart man, a dedicated public servant, and when he stands outside the courthouse in Manhattan and calls the trial inside a “travesty of justice,” he knows what he’s doing and he hopes it will vanish and be forgotten, but this may not be true. History is watching. I believe that. GK

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Garrison,

What useful advice do you have for the high school graduates this year? I’m also trying to find a good poem to include in my graduation cards; do you have one I could include? I’d give you credit.

Marlene, grandma of grads

How about this? No need for credit

Be free. Be bold. That’s what my advice is:
And if it’s happiness for which you hunger,
Don’t wait for midlife to have your crisis.
It’s better to do it when you’re younger.
Don’t wait until you’re older and at the pinnacle
And people fawn over you and hail your
So-called achievements. Not to be cynical,
But youth is the best time for a big bold failure.
You won’t learn this from reading Plato or Socrates
But rather than average, why not go for Really Really Bad?
Better to be a fool than one of the mediocrities.
And a major failure can bring you closer to your dad.
	Fritter away your inheritance. Don’t plan, don’t build.
	He’s waiting to forgive you. That fatted calf needs to be killed.

Check out Garrison Keillor’s new(ish) book, Cheerfulness. Drawing on personal anecdotes from his young adulthood into his 80s, Keillor sheds light on the immense good that can come from a deliberate work ethic and a buoyant demeanor.

CLICK HERE to buy your copy today!