Post to the Host

A Personal Edition — celebrating the release of the softcover version of That Time of Year: A Minnesota Life (Part 1)

From the author:

I sat down and looked at my memoir THAT TIME OF YEAR when it came out and was put off by the sadness, the opening chapter about how much I missed doing “A Prairie Home Companion,” so I sat down to fix it. That’s why a writer shouldn’t read his own work. But I did and so I sat down to cheer it up a little and wrote a new first paragraph.

I am a Minnesotan, born, bred, well-fed, self-repressed, bombast averse, sprung from the middle of North America, raised along the Mississippi River, which we spelled in rhythm, M-i-ss-i-ss-i-pp-i, a sweet incantation along with the Lord’s Prayer and Psalm 23 and our school fight song about v-i-c-t-o-r-y. We sang it with a sense of irony, knowing we weren’t winners in the eyes of New York or L.A. or even our football rivals, but we were proud of our North Star State, the flatness, the fertile fields, the culture of kindness and modesty, our ferocious winters, when white people become even whiter, and to top it all off, we were the origin of the Mighty Miss. Wisconsin wasn’t, nor North the Dakota. It was us and strings of barges came up to St.Paul to haul our corn and beans to a hungry world.

I wrote a new preface and a cheerier first chapter, which came (literally) from the heart I having undergone heart surgery at Mayo to replace a leaky mitral valve and I felt good. I did this for readers who missed the hardcover edition, to give them a lift, and also myself. The revision led to SERENITY AT 70, GAIETY AT 80 and a new book in progress, CHEERFULNESS. It’s a happy phenomenon, an author still ambitious at 80, and I give credit to my wife Jenny. If I were teaching Creative Writing today, I’d teach my students the importance of marrying the right person." - Garrison Keillor

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Where your childhood memories are concerned, what was your most magical experience?

Scott Y.

In 1953 when I was eleven, my dad and I drove to New York City to deliver a new Pontiac to be shipped to Germany for an Army captain stationed there. I took some Federal Writers’ Project guides with me and read to my dad about the places we were driving through. It was a two-day trip on two-lane roads except for the Pennsylvania Turnpike. We came into the city through the Lincoln Tunnel. It was my first time in New York or in any city bigger than Minneapolis, but what made it magical was that it was the only time in my childhood when I had my dad to myself. There were six kids in our family. He and I were never so close afterward — I disappointed him — and this trip remains very clear in my mind. The night during the heat wave, we couldn’t sleep and walked around the streets of Brooklyn and saw people sleeping in the park, there being no AC in their buildings. GK

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Are you disappointed that you haven’t won the Mark Twain prize for humor? I think you richly deserve it, much more than some TV “comedians” who have.

Paul C.

I never was a prize-winner, Paul, and I have no idea who gives out the Mark Twain so it just doesn’t mean much. I never earned merit badges as a Boy Scout, wasn’t an honor student, and I don’t have any trophies to speak of. The real prize is to be able to go on working and this past week I did shows with Heather Masse and Rich Dworsky and every night I was onstage for two hours and she and I sang some great duets, especially “Under African Skies” by Paul Simon and a string of classic love poems. I’m 80. I can’t tell you what a gorgeous week it was. GK

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You’d shaved your beard before I ever heard of you. (I first made your acquaintance as a high school kid when you called yourself “the world’s tallest radio humorist” on the Letterman show in 1982 or so.)

Personally, I think it was an improvement but why did you get rid of it? Was it at someone’s suggestion or was it your own idea?

Jeff Eldridge

I shaved it back to a moustache and then cut that off, too. A beard sets you apart from a big swath of people, makes you look mysterious, maybe prophetic, and these are disadvantages for someone doing comedy. Why hobble yourself? Comedy is hard enough without carrying extra baggage. GK 

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When you were a child, what was your favorite toy?

Dawn Colla

A cap pistol and a holster, a birthday gift from someone. The pistol was so much better than holding a stick and making gunfire sounds. And then, around the age of ten or so, we stopped playing cowboys. It happened one day, suddenly it seemed childish, and we invented other games. GK

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Are you still wearing eyeglasses prescribed for you by Frank’s Optical, in the Dales (Chippendale, RoyandDale, HillandDale, Mondale, and so on), one of your advertisers on your morning show on MPR? 

Back in the days of that show (when you and I would chat by phone and you’d excuse yourself to announce a new selection, perhaps a Haydn string quartet to follow a Robert Johnson blues number) I really wanted to patronize that business, relying on your assurance that their opticians could fit us with glasses that show us the world all sharp and clear if we like it that way, or would make everything a little misty around the edges if that is how we see the world, or, if we are persons of faith, would show us the substance of things hoped for. 

But I never found them in any of the Dales. Nor did they open a branch in Northfield, where many of my students and colleagues at St. Olaf would have flocked to their door.

Probably you had to consult Frank and his associates by appointment only. I hope they are still meeting your optical needs.

David Hoekema

I’m afraid my world has gotten very misty since then and now I’m talking to an ophthalmologist about getting glasses with prisms to eliminate double vision. There’s new technology to help those of us with low vision and I’ve just heard of an outfit called Lighthouse Guild that specializes in this. I think Frank’s glasses were mostly about appearances, Studious, Artistic, Charismatic, French, etc. I gave up caring about that long ago. As for the substance of things hoped for, I get glimpses of that some Sunday mornings at my Episcopal church, especially when we sing “It Is Well With My Soul.” GK

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I remember that every time you went on vacation, you were NOT happy. I used to talk back to the radio saying, “Why do you go anywhere?” Was this all theater? Were there any trips that you truly enjoyed?

Stephanie Foster

I liked taking my wife and daughter to a warm place with a pool, Coral Gables or La Jolla or elsewhere, because my daughter loves to swim and my wife loves to hike and look at nature, and it made me happy to see them happy. The things I like to do, I can do at home, I don’t need to travel. I love to go on the road and do shows, do a healthy two-hour show with stories, stand-up, and sing some duets. I did a terrific show at the Orpheum in Sioux Falls and they invited me to come back when I’m 90 and I said yes. GK

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What are some of your favorite books?

Sarah W.

Ecclesiastes, the Gospel of Luke, Mary Oliver’s poems, Emerson’s essays, First Corinthians. When John Updike died, I put a whole bunch of his books aside to read eventually, and I’m looking forward to finishing them. GK 

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If you had to pick one (for me it is hard), which hymn is your favorite to sing a cappella with the audience —and in church? (Dictionary shows “a cappella” as primary spelling, even though I prefer a cappela). Mine would be “It Is Well With My Soul” — but I enjoy many, being Lutheran, after all.

Don Cox

I love that hymn too (When peace, like a river, attendeth my way and sorrows like sea billows roll) and the audience at Sioux Falls last Friday night sang it with real power in four-part harmony. In my Episcopal church in New York, we sometimes sing “I Am the Bread of Life” and people get very emotional, stand, arms raised, like charismatics, and weep. That song with the chorus (And I will raise them up and I will raise them up and I will raise them up on the last day) invariably brings me to tears so I can hardly pronounce the words. Church is where I go to weep; I don’t do it otherwise. GK

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As an English major, what novels or poems most interested you?

Rob McCreano

I loved Charles Portis and Flannery O’Connor and Twain of course but I wasn’t a good student, and back in my day English departments avoided comic novels. My wife, a violinist, read Dickens as a child. I never read him and now I feel I missed out. We toiled over Ulysses and Herzog and avoided anything that was fun. Now I read Mary Oliver’s poems, a poet of stunning observational clarity and zero self-pity. GK

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You come from a large family. Did any of your siblings appear on your programs? I met your sister at one, as well as your wife and daughter.

Darel

My first wife, Mary, played piano at a few early rehearsals of PHC but no family members appeared on the show until my son Jason played guitar with Chet Atkins accompanying my reciting a James Wright poem and later my wife, Jenny, played with her two sisters in a violin trio ­­— she did not enjoy it one bit and made it clear she’d never do it again — and my niece Erica Rhodes, a child actor and now a terrific stand-up comic, came on. GK

Of the many News from Lake Wobegon stories, I believe my favorite was about Bruno, the Fishing Dog, in the cities for a baptism. Do you have a favorite News you’ve told?

RJ Heeres

I get engrossed in the News when I’m doing it but I don’t go back and revisit — though I have referred to the Pontoon monologue sometimes, with Kyle on his parasail dropping the bowling ball with his grandma’s ashes in the lake. Bruno makes an appearance in that one. GK

TO BE CONTINUED TOMORROW…