Post to the Host

Comments from the Week of 08.01.22

********************************************

QUESTION OF THE WEEK

My Dear,

In this morning’s essay you wrote that your brother married a girl who Catholicized him and that you’d say more but you don’t want to get into trouble. Well too late, my dear! 

Anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable prejudice! Catholics do read the Bible — the whole thing from Genesis to Revelations if we go to Mass every day for a year — and we are just like Lutherans except that our leadership wears funny hats. Plus we do more for the poor than anybody in the world. 

And I don’t want to hear about the Crusades, the Inquisition, or Indulgences. That was a long time ago. I’ll be praying to our Blessed Mother to guide the hands of your heart surgeon, because I love you.

Maria in DeKalb, Illinois

Thank you, Maria. I don’t apologize for a joke that can inspire an impassioned response as good as yours.

GK

*********************************************

---

GK,

In your book you talk about working as the morning host on KSJR. Do you have any tapes of shows or air checks from that time in your career? I think it would be very interesting and entertaining to hear them.

Jim from Michigan

Jim, those old magnetic tapes dissolved into oxide dust long ago, thank goodness, and were thrown away. Most of the people who might’ve recorded the shows are dead now and their stuff is in a landfill. I alone am left to tell the story and the story is that I don’t want you to hear those tapes.

GK

---

Dear Garrison,

In early October 2013 while on a visit from Australia to St. Paul to attend your show at the Fitzgerald Theater, my wife and I also came along to the launch of your book O What a Luxury.

I still enjoy leafing through this collection and am wondering if perhaps you are also the author of the following poem that I came across decades ago:

My days of youth are over
My spark of life is out
What used to be my sex appeal
Is now my water spout

Glad to hear that like me in 2019, Queen Elizabeth II has bestowed on you the British imperial order OBE — Over Bloody Eighty …

Best wishes,

Will Muskens, OBE

Those aren’t my lines, sir, though I am over 80, but as an American citizen I am (I believe) not allowed to receive royal decorations. I am in the American Academy of Arts & Letters and that is all I can tolerate for now.

GK

---

GK,

Some years ago, a friend of mine (and fan of yours — together we had seen you several times in Chicago and at Ravinia) spied you in an airport. Alas, she knew not what to say to you, so she chose to keep silence. What should she have done in that situation?

Steven Cornwell

Berkeley, Illinois

She did as she did and there’s no Alas whatsoever. I’m glad if she enjoyed the show but I don’t need to know about it. (I was there too.) If she had walked up and said Hello, we would’ve struck up a conversation and enjoyed that. Life is full of possibilities and if we tried to take hold of every one, we’d never get anywhere.

GK

---

I agree 100% with Garrison; the role of the press is to peer into the window — to report the news. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line they seem to have forgotten that role — now they have an agenda. Which is why 85% of Americans now distrust the media. And why I have newfound faith in my fellow Americans as they have finally started thinking for themselves.

I also agree with you about Texas. Like you, I would not want to live there; I would much prefer to live in New York or California where the criminal justice system is more humane. Commit a crime — get arrested — immediately get released.

I can imagine the press and your Orange Man scenario. For some reason I just can’t imagine something similar from the press with regards to Sleepy Joe. It does not fit their agenda.

Doug Stenzel

Good to hear from the other side, sir. Your figure of 85% is way off the mark and so is your feeling about criminal justice in New York. If you fly into LaGuardia, you likely fly over Rikers Island, an enormous penal island with thousands of inmates, thousands of whom have not come to trial and are being held because they can’t make bond. This is reported in great detail in the press you distrust. The truth is in the details, not in broad sweeping generalizations. I detect an agenda in your post and you’re welcome to it but you’re missing out on a great deal that’s happening in your country.

GK

---

Dear Garrison,

I would love to see your show in NYC, but the hotels are too expensive. Can I stay with you?

University of Michigan bus driver Larry Skrdla 

I will take this up with my wife, sir.

GK

---

GK,

Re: Lillian McCain’s comment on death and Willie Nelson: I’ve recently lost my husband of 54 years, as well as a beloved sister and two brothers. I take great comfort in his line, “It’s not something you get over, but it’s something you get through.”

Doris Weatherford

I like the lines in Willie Nelson’s song, “Life goes on and on/And when it’s gone/It lives in someone new.” We die and make room for our descendants. I keep an eye on the little kids of Heather and Aoife and Sarah and my friends’ grandkids and two tiny grandnieces in Ho Chi Minh City. Let’s leave them a world they can enjoy.

GK

---

GK,

I think you’re a little confused about gun enthusiasts. We are not to be confused with a murderer any more than a military aviation enthusiast likes bombing cities. I also collect knives for their beauty and craftsmanship, but I don’t stab people with them. There is a cold hole in the ground between admiring a well-designed tool and using it to kill people. 

My sport is to hit a dime-sized target at 100 yards with a bullet, and then put two other bullets through the same hole. The smallest bullet hole wins. It’s difficult. Your heartbeat sends a slight shudder through your body enough to move the crosshairs slightly off the target. My enthusiasm for guns and shooting has nothing to do with killing anyone. The demonization of the shooting sports has veered into the realm of paranoia. Gun owners want these homicidal maniacs stopped just like everybody else does. By the way, shooting tin cans off a fence post is fun. I’m surprised you never tried it. 

Clay Blasdel

Buffalo, New York 

I never shot tin cans, for some reason. My dad wasn’t a hunter nor were my uncles. I have nothing against target shooting whatsoever. But gun enthusiasts like yourself need to support sensible gun controls: you have a lot to lose. The kid who bought the AR-15 in Uvalde had no business buying that weapon as easily as he’d buy a flashlight. You can’t ignore those children screaming and the chaos of law enforcement at the scene. You need to draw a distinction between him and you and put that into law.

GK

---

GK,

After I got done reading this week’s wonderful Post to the Host (my weekly must-read), I misremembered your challenge at the top and wrote my first limerick ever(!) for Garrison. It’s not what you asked for but enjoy.

A guy from New York went to Ohio
He hummed a note, and oh my oh!
Singing “How Great Thou Art”
Was so good for his heart
He almost skipped going to Mayo.
(And here’s an extra one for AFTER Mayo)
A New Yorker who had a bum ticker
Was determined not to get sicker
He traveled Midwest
Cuz their docs are best
And now he’s a hale city slicker.

Laura K.

Mount Kisco, NY

Brave attempts, Laura K., which fall slightly short due to off-rhymes and the lack of a punchline at the end. But the idea was great.

GK

---

Good morning, Garrison,

First, I want to share with you our appreciation for Saturday nights gunkholing on the Chesapeake Bay and A Prairie Home Companion. It was my wife’s and my entertainment before settling into our “coffin” berths for the night in our sailboat. We’ve been married now for 56 years. 

We don’t cruise the Bay nor “gunkhole” anymore. But I do find comfort, at now age 78 recovering from a back injury, in your daily missives.

As do I find time to reflect with my friends on life and my memories of Vietnam, serving with my unit at Vung Tau in December ’67. When you go to war as a boy of 23, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you!

As my first assignment out of pilot training, I was there to get my combat ticket punched, build flying hours in combat. I settled quickly into a flying routine … up early, breakfast at chow hall, briefing and preflight while still dark, off at first light for one of the III or IV Corps supply bases, daylong fragmentary order, and returning late in the day for Maintenance and Intelligence debriefings with a shot of whiskey in a paper cup provided by the Flight Doc! Get up the next day and go do it again. Biggest threats were US Army helicopters and artillery … fratricide.

Then the Tet Offensive sobered me up. A rocket attack on the city. I pulled guard duty for our quarters (the Bong Lai Hotel in the City) on the nights when I wasn’t scheduled to fly the next day.

My first sortie of Tet was into a Special Forces Camp. I had flown into it on numerous sorties in December and early pre-Tet. The sortie was from Bien Hoa to Tống Lê Chân near the Cambodian border. Arrived early morning in a cool stillness. The Camp had been nearly overrun the night before, but the attack had been repelled. The smell of death in the trees surrounding the outpost has been seared into my memory … to this day. Lots of other young men aged that year.

My dear friend and former RAF pilot from the UK sent this along in reply to my post:

Longest Day

Do not call me hero,

When you see the medals that I wear,

Medals maketh not the hero,

They just prove that I was there.

Do not call me hero,

Now that I am old and grey,

I left a lad, returned a man,

They stole my youth that day.

Do not call me hero,

When we ran the wall of hell,

The blood, the fears, the cries, the tears

We left them where they fell.

Do not call me hero,

Each night I stop and pray,

For all the friends I knew and lost,

I survived my longest day.

Do not call me hero,

In the years that pass,

For all the real true heroes

Have crosses, lined up on the grass.

—Rob Aitchison

Written for Normandy veteran Harry Billinge who died in April 2022 aged 96.

ATB

Proud Grandfather, USAF (Ret.)

Thank you, ATB. I had to look up “gunkholing” which sounded to me like some sort of excavating but which means sailing into shallow bays and waters difficult to navigate. I am a Midwesterner and so I can’t comprehend that and I managed to avoid going to Vietnam. You and I have traveled rather different paths and that makes it all the more interesting to hear from you. “Biggest threats were US Army helicopters and artillery … fratricide.” REALLY? I don’t recall having read this anywhere else.

GK

---

GK,

What’s a shoe band? I’ve been wondering for years, and I’m probably not the only one.

And to Daedelus: You may not gloat over the animals you kill, but do you eat them? If you kill it, eat it. If you’re not gonna eat it, don’t kill it. (I make exceptions for mosquitoes.)

Elizabeth Block

Toronto, Canada

The Guy’s All-Star Shoe Band was sponsored by Guy’s Shoes, one of the show’s sponsors.

GK

---

Dear GK,

My husband and I enjoyed the show at the Kent Stage. Thanks so much!

It was lovely to sit in the audience. We could close our eyes and pretend like it was old times … Saturday night and dessert and the sun setting and your voice drifting through the radio. The nostalgia around it all can bring me to tears, even now.

I have one regret, though. As it happened, we ate supper at the Nineteen 10 and sat at one of the tables along the windows directly behind where you were sitting. And we didn’t say hello.

Out of curiosity: 

1. Do you like admirers coming up and saying hello when they recognize you out and about? Even if it interrupts your eating?

2. Do you think about the show while eating before a show? 

3. When you see people you admire out and about, do you stop them and say hello?

Praying all goes well for you with the heart procedure.

Happy 80th!

Be sure to come back to Ohio before you retire at 100.

A belated “hello” to you from Amy

Amy, I’m sorry you didn’t come over and say hello. We would’ve made conversation — it’s a game adults play, finding things in common with strangers — and it would’ve been fun. I doubt that I was thinking about the show when I sat in the café: too late to worry about it. I tend not to approach people I admire, I must admit: I ran into John Updike several times and didn’t walk over and tell him how much I loved his book The Centaur and his Rabbit Angstrom books. I’ve passed up many such chances. But Wynton Marsalis came up to me on the C train in New York and we talked. David Sedaris walked over at a dinner and introduced himself (I knew who he was, I’m a huge admirer). I wrote a fan letter to Paul Simon and he responded. I’d seen his farewell tour concert at Madison Square Garden and it was three hours of absolute perfection.

GK

---

GK,

Please restore to life the annual joke broadcast. Loved it, miss it still!

Al Schipper

Broadcasting is over, Al, it’s all streaming now, and I have no idea how to do that.

GK

---

In 1982 I was working as a nurse in a Hmong refugee camp in northern Thailand. I sent you an aerogram from the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp asking you to say “Nah Jong” to the Hmong community in Minnesota and to tell Steve, my Powdermilk Biscuit, hello and thanks for giving me the strength to do what needs to be done. You did it! Friends taped the show. We will play it at our 38th wedding anniversary celebration on August 11. Two kids, 9 pets (one still with us), one house, and A Prairie Home Companion radio show every Saturday night. It’s been a wonderful life! Thank you for all of the worlds you have given us and for making our world a much better place.

Nah Jong!

Priscilla Lee

You’re welcome, Priscilla, and thanks for your service. I was forty that year and now I’m twice forty. Not sure I have the strength to do what needs to be done but maybe Mayo can fix the situation.

GK

---

Loved the column today, August 3, 2022.

Especially the sentence about “bore” and “sow.”

Glad to read that ole Democrat you is finally waking up to the Biden hot air fiasco and the need to return to honor people who do actual work and make government function. Unfortunately, the present administration is staffed from top to bottom with people who have no merit and were chosen only on the basis of their biology and genetic heritage. What a disgrace!

Speedy Recovery … and love to you and yours.

Kathleen Casey

“From top to bottom”? Really? When did you conduct this investigation? Or are you in the fiction business? If you believe the Biden administration is a complete fiasco, then I’m not sure what sort of “recovery” you’re wishing for me.

GK

---

Greetings from Great River, L.I.,

If objections to your comments are not at a disadvantage, then I take it to mean that you welcome friendly banter?

While I understand and agree with you 100% that monetizing may sometimes be synonymous with exploiting, are you not in some way monetizing your very life by way of friendly chitchat in these Post to the Host exchanges?

Don’t get me wrong, I believe you enjoy the socializing and that’s why you do it, but isn’t it ironic that you are monetizing your gifts and paying for the salary of your technology staff and yet avoid discussions about monetizing?

Forgive me if I have this all wrong. I really want a limerick.

Stay well, GK! Looking forward to seeing you at Town Hall in November.

Donna DiGioia

Donna, the columns and the Post to the Host go out gratis to whoever wants them and we only charge a small fee for the Back Room, which helps pay for staff. I’m not aware of any money coming to me and I don’t want to know. I do it for fun. Which it is.

GK

---

I was interested to hear you join the chorus of senior citizens who say that wisdom has come with age. I wish I could say the same. Some of the dumbest mistakes I ever made in my life happened after I was 65 years old. Maybe I just wasn’t old enough. I am now 85 and seem to have done okay in recent years.

Ron Moline

Ron, I’m glad you’re doing okay. So am I. I don’t claim to be wise and don’t know anyone else who does, either.

GK

---

GK,

Not being as old as you, I still try to make something right in the world. After 28 years in the military and four more years in Massachusetts, where political activity wasn’t really needed to get people to act normal, I arrived down here. I discovered that here, one party gave up, turning the place into a real swamp. Democracy is not a spectator sport. And then a woman’s right to determine her health care was taken away. So we will get even more involved, and invite you to as well. Would love to have you over for a crawfish boil in the spring.

Sincerely,

Jonathan

LTC (Ret.), US Army

Leesville, Louisiana

I admire a man who takes on a lost cause and I shall watch to see what happens in Louisiana.

GK

---

What do you think about commodify? 

As an older-than-you Jew and lefty resting crankily in coastal Maine, I use commodify to stick it to those who not only say monetize but do it. In our time you and I have seen innocence and rebellion get commodified, like wearing beat-up jeans, or folk music, or healthy bread, or the whole counterculture, which was created to de-monetize our world. Or revolutionaries (King, Dylan) in America they are commodities. 

To me it’s an unpretty word for an unpretty process. It sticks out and it should. 

Whaddayatink? 

Ari Baruch in Penobscot

I doubt I’m going to make it up to Penobscot to argue this with you and probably if I did, you’d talk me under the table. So I’m hanging in New York and trying to maintain my innocence. I spent my birthday with my beloved and that has restored my sense of being wildly fortunate. I put her into my novel Boom Town, which I suppose is a form of commodification, but she was amused by it and so no harm was done.

GK

---

I just love you! Read the funny bit about fungi, the pig valve, running for president, living in a shack, and you’re right, it is a wonder Joe speaks as well as he does! Sending love & light & healing vibes out into the universe (prayers) for you. Oh, and Happy Born Day! Eighty is a big deal. You got this! And the presidency! 

Kathryn Conroy

I add you to my collection of Kathryns and Katherines and Katharines, all of them smart and funny and sweet. Kathryn Court was my first editor at Viking Press and she came out to Minnesota and spent a week working on my book Lake Wobegon Days. Katherine Powers is my favorite book reviewer. Katharine Seggerman worked on the last big PHC tour the summer of 2017 and has now become a therapist. Katherine Sanderson runs the whole enterprise.

GK

---

Dear Garrison,

I started listening to PHC when I was a college student at North Dakota State University and the University of Minnesota at Moorhead in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

I must comment on your reference to teaching Third Grade in your 8-2-2022 column, though. “Joe’s problem isn’t his age, it’s his experience. He spent his adult life in the U.S. Senate, which is less educational than working in a restaurant or teaching third grade.”

I have been an elementary school teacher since 1979 and I have had the wonderful opportunity to teach third grade in my long, honorable, and educational career.

Being a teacher is one of the most noble and essential professions. 

We teachers are continually advancing our education, through required courses to maintain our credentials. Every day is educational to teachers. Each year a teacher has an entire new group of students entrusted to her/him. It is the job of the teacher to learn how to reach those students, to guide them and show them the way. We not only teach them in academics, but often we are called upon to be their nurses, their counselors, their coaches, and in some cases their stand-in parents.

I truly thought you were a champion of teachers. It shocked me that (even though humorously intended) you would cite a being a third grade teacher as a non-educational profession.

Please do not add yourself to the list of critics when it comes to teachers — we have enough of those already.

Thank you for reading my response.

Patty P.

Petaluma, California

Patty, thank you for writing this excellent letter. I think it supports my point, that service in the Senate is less educational than teaching third grade. Perhaps you were offended by my apparently equating it with restaurant work, which I could understand. And I do think it was off the mark to suggest that Joe Biden is ignorant or inept. But I remember my third-grade teacher Mrs. Fern Moehlenbrock very well and I’ve paid tribute to her often. She was a great encourager and teacher in Benson School, a three-room school, two grades to each room. I revere her memory.

GK

---

Dear Garrison,

I hope you enjoy your new heart part as much as my mother did the one she received in 1964. Rather than a modern pig unit, hers was good old-fashioned plastic, Dacron to be exact. She was the blessed beneficiary of the expertise earned by Dr. Dwight Harken in his role as a MASH surgeon in France during WWII. He had learned that a human heart could be sewn up and fixed in situations when failing to do so would have led, very soon, to its owner’s demise. One, and maybe the only, positive result from war is the chance it gives medicos to “experiment” outside the usual constraints of ethical research. 

Hers was an eight-hour operation with only an 80% record of survival. The incisions required 285 stitches to close. The result was that she lived another 35 years and got to know all her grandchildren. She may have been the longest-lived recipient of this surgery when she finally succumbed to other factors at 75. On her last day the sound that was music to all our ears was that which we had all learned to love, the subtle click of that little plastic miracle in her chest. May you be so blessed.

Carl Rich
Harpswell, Maine

Thank you, Carl, and I intend to take this up with my surgeon when we meet a couple days before: what are the advantages of the pig valve over the Dacron? He will be impressed that I know about it and Dr. Harken. It’s very important, I think, to impress one’s surgeon before surgery. I will, of course, write him a limerick but this info will serve me well. I want him to see me as an 80-year-old with a future, an old man who still has a contribution to make.

GK