Post to the Host

Comments from the week of September 18, 2022

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

Comment/Question/Limerick of the week

Dear Garrison,

Looking forward to the PHC show at Town Hall Thanksgiving weekend, and here is my limerick:

I knew a guy who wrote a swell limerick
His name was either Bob or Tim or Rick
Though the chance is quite slim
It was Bob or Jim
I think it was Tim — either him or Rick 

All the Best,

H.J. Hart 

Southington, Connecticut

You, sir, are the winner of the Limerick-Limerick contest, with a little help from me eliminating a few excess beats. This is great! I said it was impossible and I was wrong. Your prize will be waiting for you at Town Hall. GK

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

---

Mr. Keillor,

I played my Autoharp at a potluck gathering at your home in Marine on St Croix in late fall 1978. We met on Saturday nights when I drove up from Northfield to see the show; I believe I played the gospel hymn “I Will Guide Thee” as our six-month-old daughter Janna napped in peace.

I remember phoning you with the news of the death by suicide of the mandolin player in my band at that time, and you had recently lost a friend in the same way, and you commented, “The hardest thing is to forgive them.”

I hope you still strum your Autoharp a bit. I never quite got my planned Autoharp guild organized but I did choose its Latin motto: Semper tonans (“Always tuning”). Please continue to advance in years with grace and humor, a gift to us all.

David Hoekema 
(then Philosophy prof at St. Olaf, later at U of Delaware, then Calvin University till 2018 retirement)

David, I never got the knack of tuning the ’harp and had to ask Bob Douglas — who was in the Powdermilk Biscuit Band — to tune it for me, and it soon dawned on me that musicians tune their own instruments, and if they can’t they become ushers or agents or clog dancers. Eventually I found a musical role on the show, singing duets with good women, which I’m still doing. I often put myself to sleep at night, imagining I’m in that house in Marine, which was next to a waterfall that made a steady low comforting sound. It’s gone all over the country with me and saved me from pharmaceuticals. GK

---

In the June 26, 2021, edition of The Writer’s Almanac, the poem was “Amo, Amas” by John O’Keefe. Upon hearing the poem, I recalled that the college choir of Hamilton College, my alma mater, had sung a version of that poem. And upon doing a bit of research, I discovered there were recordings of it. I wondered if the song had ever been sung on A Prairie Home Companion.

Bruce Rockwell

I doubt it, sir. We didn’t go in much for choral arrangements, though I remember a powerful male chorus on a live show in Reykjavik that blew everybody away. And the St. Olaf choir sang Christmas songs once, with such angelic purity, it brought tears to everyone’s eyes. GK

---

GK,

Here is my attempt at expressing my perennial gripe about baseball while attempting to write a limerick-limerick:

Have you heard all the baseball silly limericks
About umps that are always such dim wicks
That a strike is a ball
And a ball is a strike
Because umpires are always such dip-shits?

Bill Juntunen
Middlebury, Indiana

“Dim wicks” was good, Bill, but the middle lines really need to rhyme and then you blew it on “dip-shits.” Sorry. GK

---

Dear GK,

I didn’t know till your essay this morning that the Protestant Reformation began in the lovely month of October. 

Catholics celebrate the feast of St. Francis of Assisi on October 4th, and we bring our pets to our churches to have them blessed in his honor. Brother Francis was a reformer like Brother Martin Luther. He saw rotten clergymen and corruption in the Church. But he didn’t start a new one. He first reformed himself and then worked on the Church from within.

Brother Martin left the Church and took half of Germany with him. I admire him for not backing down at Worms, but now we have around 28,000 Protestant denominations, including the First Associated Reformed Federated Topeka Synod 1953 Church (I made that up), when we should be one Church.

But I must admit that a good Prot hymn — like “It is Well With My Soul” — can melt me into a quivering mass of Catholic pulp. 

When you hear Dona Nobis Pacem, do you melt into a quivering mass of Protestant pulp?

Your friend,

Sister Maria

I’ve only heard Dona Nobic Pacem on recordings, Sister, and indeed it’s divine, but the hymn that reduces me to pulp is “I Am the Bread of Life,” written (I believe) by Sister Suzanne Toolan, which we often sing in our Episcopal church in New York and which makes me weep and shake and makes my fellow Piskies stand with arms upraised like charismatics. The whole church is affected and it’s so beautiful. Our music director, John Cantrell, often uses it as a Communion hymn so there we are in the aisle, moving forward, weeping, the mystery of faith in our hearts. YouTube has a good rendition of it by the Notre Dame Folk Choir. GK

---

GK,

Those of us who don’t appreciate constitutional monarchies were challenged this past week by the Queen’s pomp and circumstance funeral to find something worthwhile in all the royal hoopla going on in England. How someone who is born into a family of wealth, prestige, and pseudo-political power can end up as the head of a church is lost on many of us here in the U.S. However, there was something to admire and respect in the dignified way that Queen Elizabeth II carried out her royal duties for 70 years. By any measure, public decency and dignity among our civic leaders today have all but evaporated in the partisan catfights going on in our country. The Brits honored the dignity and public decency that Queen Elizabeth embodied during her long reign. The Queen’s symbolic role in uniting the U.K. should cause us to worry about the loss of decency and dignity in our country’s political life.

Mickey Huffman

Dry Creek, Texas

My friend Pamela and husband Don visited Windsor (or Balmoral) once and walked along a country lane when a Land Rover came along, driven by a pleasant old lady who stopped and chatted with them for a while, and that’s their permanent memory of the Queen. GK

---

Garrison,

My wife, Lori, was born September 27th in Great Britain when the future Queen was 17. It was the time of bombing by the Hitler planes, and it was a terrible day when Lori’s mom was told she was pregnant.

She named the baby to come for two of her little daughters who died from a dive bomber who killed one in the school and the other on the playground. They were to be named Lorina and Brenda, the two little children killed by the Luftwaffe dive bomber. Lori’s birth is a fun day nowadays but if she thought much about it, it can be a terrible day knowing that her mom named her for two little girls killed that day!

Yours truly,

Nick Baldwin

Mr. Keillor:

I enjoy your columns but would enjoy them more if you’d let up on the Trump-bashing.

Marjorie M.

Indianapolis

I try to avoid mentioning him but the problem is that he is unique, there’s never been anybody like him. His recent assertion that a president can declassify secret documents simply by thinking it in his own mind is a good example. But I shall renew my efforts to ignore him. Thanks for reading. GK

________________________________________

Due to unforeseen circumstances a few of the October events have been rescheduled

Please watch this event page for changes.

OUR WASHINGTON, D.C. October 21st performance remains unchanged - please join us.

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/schedule/