Post to the Host

Comments from the Week of 10.01.21

I listened to PHC from about 1980 until Garrison left the show, always marveling at his ability to produce so much content every week. I do remember him crediting other writers at the end of some shows, most of whom (who?) never got a second mention. Some names I can remember are Pete Moss, Norman Conquest, Sandy Beach, Guy Wire, Xavier Onassis, Amanda Reckonwith, Neal Dupree, Warren Peace, Natalie Drest, the husband and wife Ben and Eileen Dover, Kirsten Reviled, and Ginger Lee Dunn. There were more. One person who did get more than one credit was Angie O’Plasty, there around the time of Garrison’s medical emergency.

I can only conclude that Garrison must have been a demanding tyrant to work for, because there was so much abrupt talent turnover. I was impressed to see that in spite of so many names in and out, there were no discernible shifts in writing style.

Many, many thanks for so many enjoyable Saturday nights.

Al Cleek

You have a better memory than I, Al, and I don’t envy you, it must be a burden to have total recall. My mind has a Delete function that drops a great deal that happens around me. My wife is sometimes astonished at what I forget. I do remember that I first met her at lunch at Docks seafood restaurant at Broadway & 90th and that it lasted three hours. Her older sister was a classmate of my younger sister. It was a wonderful, spirited conversation. She’d just returned from an orchestra tour of Asia and she had seen and done a lot. The writers you mention weren’t all that bright and so they came and went.

GK 

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Dear GK,

I am inspired to write after reading TWA of 10/22 with a poem by Adam Possner MD, whom I remember as being the author of “Diagnosis of Stupor and Coma” from med school (Indiana U, 1976), which (at 400+ pages and a cost in today’s market of $80+) I borrowed from a library (and never quite read, which might actually explain a lot).

But to my point: I am awed by those who succeeded in the struggle to not only be accepted into but to finish med school, residency, and a successful career practicing any health care art — and then going on to a second career as a writer. I ponder what it would be like to write more than these few lines, then immediately dismiss the idea since it would be a lot of work. Having just turned 70, and after a 40-year career at least half of which was focused on Geriatrics and end-of-life care, I admire and study your work just as I did my patients who taught me more than “it’s not the years, it’s the miles” (and the old farmers who corrected me saying “No, it’s the miles without Oil …”). And I realize that, 9 years behind you in age and 59 behind you in writing experience, I’d best leave the writing to those more adept. But occasionally I have something to say, and wish I was better at saying it. Especially with fewer parentheses.

So what do you tell those who look to you for support at learning to write in their “later years”?

Dave Lockhart, Quincy, IL — Which is 100 miles from civilization, as I’m fond of saying (although our little Miss. River town of 40K is extremely civil), separated by miles of corn, soybeans, cattle, hogs, and white-tailed deer. The latter are NOT civil after dark.  

At the age of 70, Dr. Lockhart, a man needs an urgent motive to write, otherwise you’re wasting your time. You need to feel you have something to say that will not get said unless you put it down on paper. I write out of habit, for pleasure, but you need a compulsion to get you over the misery of the first draft. Without that compulsion, you’d be better off playing tennis and hiking along the river.

GK

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There is an article in today’s Arizona Daily Star you need to read: “We can learn to live with less stuff.” It’s written by Cynthia M. Allen from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. My kids will remember when we lived in California when they were young and the Christmas that the little boy down the street proclaimed: “Our tree has more presents than yours does and all of them have MY name on them — they’re all for ME!” I asked him, “And how many gifts are you giving, Dickie?”

He said, “Huh?”

This year, strikes and lack of fuel and the pandemic and more will lessen the supply of toys delivered in time for the holiday. I’m old enough to remember the war years and the meager salaries stretched to buy food and clothes and to add the Betsy Wetsy doll, for me. Mama hung those metallic icicles on the small tree, one by one, so she could remove them and save for next year. “Why, do you know, some people just THROW them on and away?” Maybe it’s the year to teach about giving and to “live with less stuff.” 

Maybe it’s the year to value our togetherness during the holidays and think about the servicemen and servicewomen who will be away from their families and loved ones. And what about “to give is more blessed than to receive”?

Bobbie

It’s the great lesson of old age, Bobbie. Less is more. You start disposing of excess. Two meals a day instead of three. Less stuff and more experiences.

GK

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Just happened upon Writer’s Almanac and so glad to see your presence in the world. I miss your radio program. Any possibility it can be revived with you in it?

M. Ashlock

I’d like to do some Prairie Home shows in 2022 with a band, cast, guests, Guy Noir, Ruth Harrison the reference librarian, Dusty and Lefty, Duane and his mom, just for people who’d like to see it. It’d be fun to revive it.

GK

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Greetings, Garrison.

As an 80-year-old trying to adjust to the changes that come with age, I had looked forward to buying your new book. But, after reading the examples of what is in it, I won’t be doing that. Some of it is trite and most of the good stuff I’ve come to on my own.

What I am currently discovering is that the folks we admire for how active and productive they are “for their age” all too soon experience a health crisis and/or die. A friend that I traveled with all over Japan and Taiwan a few years ago is now homebound unless someone takes him for a drive. Several of my friends have died in the last two years, three after a long illness, and so it goes.

I’ve already done the work of letting go of the controls and being more cautious after spending a year recovering from an accident that would have taken a week just a few years ago. I am out hiking for miles every day and have just finished building a cabin in the woods, which is great for reflecting on these things. So, yes, I am doing that “Celebration of Life,” and that with increasing urgency. But the questions I must deal with are only partly about living to the fullest in this moment and partially how to deal with certain decline and increasing limitations.

So, put me down for a copy of the book you write at 90 because that is the book I need to read.

Ron Graham

You’ve got no need for reading anything of mine, Mr. Graham, you are doing very well on your own. Good luck.

GK

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Hey, Garrison.

I’d love to subscribe but some of us retired 70+ worked as ministers and social workers and never made much money. So, I’ll content myself with the crumbs that fall from your table. I always appreciate your chatter but wonder why you still find it necessary to monetize your thoughts?

Stay well. Keep over-tipping,

Steven 

I’ve always written for money, Brother Steven. I like the challenge of making something worth the expense. I pay to go to the theater because it’s worth it and if I had to cut back on other things to afford it, I likely would. I’m not monetizing these dull thoughts, only the interesting ones. Frankly, “Why do you monetize your thoughts?” strikes me as an odd question in America. Just saying. I enjoyed earning money back in my earning years because I enjoyed scholarshipping children and grandkids and providing excellent home care for my elderly parents. I enjoyed philanthropy and writing checks to Episcopal Charities, Doctors Without Borders, the local parks conservancy, my alma mater, the Mayo Clinic. I liked quietly picking up the check. I have a child with special needs whom the public schools would’ve torn to pieces, and I found a school run by people dedicated to working with kids like her and they changed her life. I gave money to political candidates dedicated to social services and universal health care and taxing people like me. I hope you don’t consider my weekly columns crumby just because they’re free. But if you want free copies of my books, send me your ten best sermons and if I read them and they convince me to live a life of poverty, then I’ll send you the books, but you’ll have to pay the postage. 

GK

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I’ve always thought that the reality of my childhood is so different to yours (and to most people) that you would find it utterly foreign. I do not have a hometown. My parents were first-generation Italians from Brooklyn. My brother was born in Atlanta, and I was born in Port Chester, Westchester County, New York. I had lived in four different states by the time I was sixteen. I attended college at the University of Iowa, and Iowa City felt like home to me, so I stuck around a year after graduation. But the pressure of family and circumstances meant that I lived in other places by default, as it were, until I discovered San Francisco in my early thirties and once again, I was home.

I gave my heart to San Francisco, but after a few short years it heartlessly dumped me and other creative misfits for the new argonauts of Silicon Valley. Now I reside in Portland (OR). It’s a nice city with lots of culture, but is it home? I don’t know. Home to me means living with my partner in a clean, well-lighted, and cozily decorated space, watching the leaves change color, and listening to A Prairie Home Companion, which I have been doing since that post-college year in Iowa City. You and the show have been constant companions in a life of many changes. Thank you for that.

DC

Sorry San Francisco dumped you. My dear friend Sydney Goldstein was a mover and shaker in SF, a native of the city, and to me she embodied the spirit of the place, she was smart and funny, independent, glamorous, and utterly loyal. Her friendship was the greatest gift. After she died, they named a theater for her, the theater she raised money to renovate, but the city lost its flavor for me when she was no more. Some deaths are just too much to bear. So I stay away. At the moment I’m mostly in New York, which isn’t my home either, but a writer can settle anywhere. We carry our home in our head.

GK

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Brother Keillor,

Allow me to ask about a matter of faith, specifically yours. You speak of your trips to church on Sunday, your rhapsodizing about the reading of the day or the beauty of the choir’s singing. Forgive me, but I don’t remember your piety being quite so evident before this year. Has age and thus your nearness to the Day of Judgment stoked your religious fervor? I ask as one who has, to my long-suffering and very religious family’s great dismay, gone in the complete opposite direction. Formerly a three-times-a-week churchgoer, I awakened a few years back to find my faith had taken the last train to Clarksville. It was — poof! — almost inexplicably gone, and I might want it back were I not so happy with my newfound peace. My kin, the family pooch, the cockroaches, and I — we’re all headed for the great and eternal dirt nap, and yet I retain my values and love for mankind. ’Tis a conundrum how faith waxes and wanes and sometimes dies while, for others, it manages to burn ever brighter. What say you?

Grant Rampy, Warrenton, VA

I grew up evangelical in the Plymouth Brethren and left it when the elders told me that a Christian couldn’t be a writer. I worked hard for decades and took Sunday as a day of rest. I attended a Congregational church in St. Paul for a while and then moved to the Episcopalians back in 1994 and I go with some regularity and it’s a place and time of deep feeling and meditation and I am very grateful for that. I don’t think it’s due to my advancing age. It’s a reality that gives some order and perspective to my life. I’m sorry if my writing about it is an irritation.

GK

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Garrison,

I very much enjoyed today’s column (“Small talk as the instrument of civility”). In it, you state, “But so much of civility in America is in the form of light-hearted small talk, in passing encounters with strangers, you say, ‘How’s your day going so far?’ and the stranger replies and you make a moment of it.”

This reminded me of a poem that you once featured on The Writer’s Almanac. It immediately became one of my favorite poems, a thing of beauty, and better than most sermons that will be preached this Sunday. I hope that you can share it again, with new readers in this new format. It is the quintessential expression of civility.  

Small Kindnesses
by Danusha Laméris

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”

Coleman Hood

Thank you, sir, for bringing that back.

GK

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When my parents divorced in the early ’60s, the mother half moved to Florida from Wisconsin. This was BD (Before Disney), and before the waters and springs and legislature became laden with sewage and cyanobacteria. Starting with Jeb Bush, then Rick Scott and now DeSantis, our governors have bent over backward for developers and other exploiters, while ignoring our environment and our children. This is no longer a habitable or hospitable place. Oh, the sunrises and sunsets are pretty — as they are everywhere. But you often risk your life swimming or driving. We are in the process of pumping our aquifer dry while simultaneously polluting it. We love our low taxes but pay the price with substandard education and the pollution described above. You would be miserable here as I am now. 

Kris Pagenkopf

Short-term vision and cutting taxes have always been politically popular and I think it takes a charismatic character to sell the voters on the idea of making sacrifices for long-term good. Substandard education is a shame and a disgrace and not only in Florida. This is a moral issue, society’s duty to give every child a good start in life. I have friends back home who attend school board meetings to speak up for education and it is hard and discouraging work. There’s a lot of anger out there and school boards get beat up pretty regularly.

GK

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When on 11/05 our Author writes “I have reminded her of the Florida condo building that collapsed,” does he mean he told her of it; or that he, as a physical specimen, puts her in mind of that possibility?

Thanks! 

David Covington

P.S. OK if it’s both.

She read about it in the paper and I reminded her that it occurred. I did that so as to create doubt in her mind regarding Florida real estate. As to my physical collapse, your question is so far premature and I don’t promise to keep you informed as to the details of my decline.

GK

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Dear Garrison,

My girlfriend just took me to see The French Dispatch by Wes Anderson (Norwegian by chance?), and I found myself plunged into a zany but beautiful homage to the early years at The New Yorker. Since you were not just a contributor but a huge fan of the magazine and Mr. Shawn, have you seen the film and what did you think of it?

Best,

Maxwell Ryan 

I haven’t seen it and now I will make a point to find it. Thanks for the reminder. I loved A.J. Liebling and John Cheever when I first looked at the magazine in the eighth grade. It was handed me by a teacher named Frayne Anderson, who said, “I thought this might interest you.” It did and I tried for years to write in a New Yorker voice and never succeeded but Mr. Shawn sent me to Nashville to write about the Grand Ole Opry and that was the happy accident that led to the invention of Prairie Home Companion, so I owe the magazine and my editor Bill Whitworth a great deal for changing my life.

GK