Post to the Host

Comments from the weeks of August 22 and August 29, 2022

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COMMENT (QUESTION) OF THE WEEK

Dear GK,

My 18-acre woodlot in rural northern Pennsylvania is being logged this week by an Amishman and his crew using two teams of Belgian horses. None is named Brownie or Pete, but all have dancing feet as large as dinner plates. There are no bells on the harnesses, but the sound is still musical. The young drivers are older than seven going on eight, but they clearly enjoy holding the reins. Sing that song again, please.

Another octogenarian,

Hilma Cooper

Wellsboro, Pennsylvania

I wish I were there to see it. Uncle Jim loved his horses.

Big feet dancing and their big backs shone,
And they tossed their heads like thoroughbreds when we headed home. 

GK

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Dear Mr. Keillor,

First of all, I’m glad you came through your surgery okay. Secondly, you have mentioned several times in your column your fondness for Dairy Queen Blizzards. I learned an important life lesson for myself at Dairy Queen.

I enjoy their small hot fudge sundae. I like the contrast between the dark hot fudge and the cold almost marshmallowy soft serve ice cream. One day I thought to myself, if I like it so much why not get a larger size the next time? So I did and you know what? The larger size didn’t make me any happier!

The life lesson I learned? Sometimes just enough is plenty.

Your friend,

Dave

Friend Dave,

I learned the same thing two days ago. A large DQ Butterfinger Blizzard is too much for a man recovering from cardiac surgery. I did it because I was free of my wife’s supervision. She knows about these things. GK

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I see you are still making both sense and nonsense. Whew.

When I read about human remedies, available from China or India or Africa, used for hundreds of thousands of years, it wows me. I do see that when modern medicine tests itself out, on mice and then on men, it does not take into consideration that they might be taking umckaloabo (South African geranium; Pelargonium sidoides) for assorted symptoms, or blue skullcap, or Baikal skullcap, or Bacopa, or Polypodium (for skin and immunity). But without it, I have an undiagnosable skin condition, which is quite the curse. So maybe I’d better not need the modern medicine for old-lady peeing in excitement (I have a Chinese remedy for that, quite tasty), or for blood pressure (I don’t eat meat or bad fats), or for diabetes (I don’t eat foods made attractive by sugar). So I escape the expensive medicines that ruin access to million-year-old cures because they were not tested in the lab. No mouse was raised on gingko biloba to see if it prevented Alzheimer’s in three-year-old mice. 

But in this era of COVID, someone like me who has never completely ditched a flu or virus in her life has to finally grapple with it. Do I even know that the shadow of the virus is still stalking my midbrain, except for the ringing in my ears? But it comes and goes, like other post-COVID, post-flu things. The number of homeopathic approaches prevents despair, and I’ve shaken a few 40-year curses with this or with that. If I become fully functional, like a teenager, what then? I will have a demitasse of Chilean wine and watch time pour through my fingers like sand.

Right at the beginning of the pandemic, my siblings, free at last of our mother, summoned me to weekly Zooms, and I had COVID and stayed put for about a month, but then joined. For almost three years they would not believe anything I said. I was the laughingstock of every meeting. I think that is passing, as of last week. I notice when they are rounding that bend, they take a week or so off. They say they are TOTALLY busy, retired and all, but anyway. Then they get back on board with the Zooms, minus the, um, attitude. In the beginning, before I was sent away at 15, when the littlest was 4 months old, my parents were a minimal presence. Their job was connection with the world, my father with business, my mother with reading. We ran the household. I would bet that when my now-Google-honcho brother had a psychologist tell my mother that she had “parentified” me (as if that were relevant), she seethed and sent me away. Anyway.

The pandemic gave us the Zoom, and Trump gave us something else: My dyed-in-the-wool Republican siblings have come round, one by one. The 60-year-old tried to get us all to dress up in Proud Boys tartans (not telling us why) for a family wedding. I had seen the marches with bumble-bee skirts and googled it. The one who was four months old when I left lives near the Proud Boy schemer and wore that tartan, in fine wool, to the wedding. I explained that the tartan is Trump’s mother’s from the Isle of Lewis, not ours, by any stretch. But they went deep in history and concocted a stretch.

Now, the scheming brother seems to be doing a monster conversion. It involves certain teeth extracted, a certain shoulder opened up and drained, and now a hip to be replaced. The personality is still pretty much MAGA, but I think he sees he needs to outgrow it.

Over here, I’m trying to teach my body to slough off its shingles, stand up straight, and start to integrate with the world while I can. I went to a rained-out local meeting of old folks, a Zoom, and it’s run by a social worker, who’s given a bunch of money to the hospital, and is a Smith graduate my age. Oil and water. This old folks’ group is for people on the way out, and for me, I’m hoping for a way in. No rush, but for real this time.

I used to worry that life was way beyond my ability to see, let alone make sense of. Now, I see that nobody else is doing much better at that, so I pitch in.

Nobody knows what we’re doing. We carve out spaces of competence, if we’re lucky, and wallow around with everybody else for the rest.

Ellen Dibble

Thanks for the last sentence about competence. I’m going to lean on that. GK

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Your recent piece about the CAT scan was brilliant. Thank You!

May your surgery go well and easily and
May you recover fully and, also, easily.
May your caregivers bring their competence and expertise to your healing.

Winona Fetherolf

Nobody recovers fully, we’re in a state of steady decline, but we can recover our common sense and I do believe the kindness of caregivers has been a blessing that goes far beyond the physical. There are beautiful people on this earth. There are nurses striking in Minnesota and my sympathies are 100 percent with them. GK

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I’m 79, with glaucoma and a bunch of other stuff, the latest is persistent vertigo, which you should avoid like the plague, if you can (we’re all still dealing with The COVID Plague, but no one calls it that). I’m still trying to wrap my head around knowing your upbringing was as a Brethren Christian, to which you are still committed. For lo these many decades I’ve enjoyed all your jabs at the Unitarians, convinced that you were one, and smug in the knowledge that you and I were fellow travelers on the road to Free Thought. I never dreamed that your warm, humanistic outlook on PHC every week belied a strict fundamentalist upbringing. So my smugness was misplaced and I’m now getting used to enjoying a somewhat different GK, and that’s all for the better. Thanks for being you.

Ralph McGeehan

I’m no longer Brethren, Ralph, I walked out when I was twenty. I’m Episcopalian. I’m not on the road to Free Thought, just getting older like everyone else. I do believe in kindness and I’ve known humanists who could be cruel as cobras. I’m enjoying being at the age of gratitude. As for making comical remarks about UUs, I did it in a show in Nashville and a UU complained that it made him feel demeaned and marginalized and so I’m not going to do it anymore. GK

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Dear Mr. Keillor,

It was a cold and snowy Thursday night in January 1999, in Akron, Ohio. I went to bed not feeling well and knowing something wasn’t right. I awoke at 4 a.m. on Friday and told my wife that I needed to go to the hospital.

By 6:30 a.m. the emergency room doctor told me that I had a perforated colon, and I was on my way to emergency surgery. They were going to take twelve inches of colon out and I would have a colostomy for three months, reversal surgery and three more months of rehab. My life had just been put on hold and turned topsy-turvy.

By Saturday, after six hours of surgery, an incision 18 inches long in my abdomen held together with two staples, I was feeling pretty beat up and rather scared. I was only forty-three, and this was the first major health issue I had experienced.

My wife asked if there was anything I wanted, anything from home. I asked her for a couple of books and a portable radio. Later that day, we turned down the lights in my room, she climbed into my hospital bed and held me, and we turned on A Prairie Home Companion (that is why I had asked for my radio). It was the first time in forty-eight hours that I felt OK. To this day, I remember how wonderful your show made me feel after a very scary time. I really can’t explain the feeling that washed over me after forty-eight very scary hours.

In the end everything went as planned and six months later I was fine, but I still remember how you made me feel after a very difficult time.

Please pardon my writing as I was not an English Major in the public school system.

Sincerely,
Dirk Hiney

Your writing is excellent, sir. You describe a horrific passage of life very gracefully. You also make me a little uncomfortable because a week after surgery I am very constipated and now I think I must drink a couple quarts of prune juice and chase it with olive oil until the glacier movies. GK

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Hopefully you will receive more than this one in reply to your “challenge.”

It’s impossible to rhyme with limericks
Said G.K. to one of his sidekicks
Who then gave it a try
But gave up with a sigh
As he returned to playing guitars licks.

Willie Kramer

Good try but it doesn’t clear the bar. The bar is too high. GK

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Garrison,

Not led an adventurous life …? Being one of the country’s only contemporary old-time radio shows for decades is an adventure, no matter that you were the showrunner and spent entire days in your head. The wisdom you earned rivals that learned aboard the slippery, tilting whaling ships. No time for regrets, sir.

Regards,

Ron

No regrets, sir, but I do try to cling to reality. GK

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Glad you got through surgery intact, with one valve replaced. And here is something to warm your heart.

On the tits of a barmaid in Crail
Was tattooed the price of brown ale.
While on her behind
For the sake of the blind
Was the same information in Braille.

jpc

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What does TWA mean? Time Weighted Average?

Trans World Airlines? The World Academy? The White Album? T-Wave Alternans? Tibetan Women’s Association? Task Work Area? Travelling Wave Analysis? Today Was Awful? Please go back to “The Writer’s Almanac.” Always spell it out. Down with acronyms.

Steve Rowell

I use TWA so I don’t have to think about whether the apostrophe should go before or after the s. Also because it makes a little podcast sound important. I’m newly released from SMH (St. Mary’s Hospital) in Rochester, MN, where acronyms fly around like beautiful birds. My INRs were measured daily. I forget what it stands for but it was important and so when the nurse said, “Your INR looks great,” I felt better and that helped me heal up. GK

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Dear Mr. Keillor,

I’m not sure if this will get to you, but I wanted to write and let you know how much Prairie Home Companion has meant to me. I grew up in Aurora (pop. ~1800), a small town north of Duluth, and when I was a teenager, my family left for South Carolina. I was happy to leave. I was an angsty teen who hated the slow boring small-town life, the winters, being a country bumpkin, I hated Minnesota. I finished school, moved overseas, work for a real estate developer in the Middle East. Although I haven’t been to Minnesota since 2001, I find myself thinking back on those days. Yesterday I listened to your broadcast from 27 April 1996. You tell the story of Muriel who stole from the bank and fled to Argentina. You shared how at the end of her life she looked up from her chair beside the pool and saw the snow blowing across the prairie and a school bus pulled up, driven by Liberace, come to take her home, and Muriel was happy because she had waited so long.

I felt dumb, but I cried. I felt it was a glimpse of my own fate. But when those school bus doors open for me one last time, I think it will be the familiar and comforting baritone of Garrison Keillor that calls me home. I hope.

Thank you.

Galen Roue

So you see me as the bus driver who will take you down the valley of the shadow of death and into the bright uplands of a celestial January. Okay. I’ve been called worse. At the moment however I am getting back to life myself and learning to enjoy the ordinary, such as being able to pull on my own socks. And I think my double vision would prohibit me from getting a bus driver’s license. Even though death is our destination, there’s no need to take other drivers with us. So let’s rethink this whole thing. GK

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Dear Mr. Keillor,

First of all, I’m glad you came through your surgery okay. Secondly, you have mentioned several times in your column your fondness for Dairy Queen Blizzards. I learned an important life lesson for myself at Dairy Queen.

I enjoy their small hot fudge sundae. I like the contrast between the dark hot fudge and the cold almost marshmallowy soft serve ice cream. One day I thought to myself, if I like it so much why not get a larger size the next time? So I did and you know what? The larger size didn’t make me any happier!

The life lesson I learned? Sometimes just enough is plenty.

Your friend,

Dave

Friend Dave,

I learned the same thing two days ago. A large DQ Butterfinger Blizzard is too much for a man recovering from cardiac surgery. I did it because I was free of my wife’s supervision. She knows about these things. GK