Post to the Host

Comments from the week of 12.27.21

Yes, indeed, there is a Wink, Texas (I’ve been there). According to the national weather service Wink often records the warmest high daily temperature in the cold months of the year while Stanley, Idaho, posts the coldest daily temp in the warm months (I’ve been there too).

Keep up the good work. You just keep getting better and better.

Len Schrank

Orland Park, Ill.

GK,

In response to your question about the existence of Wink, Texas, you can bet your two six-shooters there is a town called Wink here in the Lone Star State. It’s a small town out here in West Texas in Winkler County that had to shorten its original name because of the inability of the US Post Office to deal with more than one town called Winkler. You may have heard of Roy Orbison, who lived here when he was a youngster and likely got the inspiration for his soulful songs from the heartbreaks this place has suffered for the past 90 years. We have a museum here dedicated to his musical legacy, dark glasses and all. Right now, some of us are mad about these education wackadoodles who want our school children to hear how our oilfield town started out in the 1920s with a lot of bootlegging, prostitution, and gambling. For Pete’s sake, we have been Christianized now for 70 years, so it’s hard to understand why on earth any of us need to hear about this sordid history. Didn’t they kill off all the Indians in the place where you were born and raised? Do you think it does any good to bring that stuff up now? Makes me want to upchuck my frijoles. I hope you will keep telling stories about your hometown that make us laugh and feel good about being average people.

Sammy Joe Criswell

Wink, Texas

History is history, Sammy Joe, and when you try to bury a chapter of it, it comes back to bite you in the rear end, so calm down and enjoy your frijoles. I object to the progressives in Minneapolis who changed the name of Lake Calhoun to Bde Maka Ska in honor of native Americans and because John Calhoun was a slave owner. The problem is that the new name is awkward to most of the current residents and they can’t remember it but they don’t want to seem racially insensitive and so they simply don’t talk about the lake. It’s become a non-lake. Mr. Calhoun died ages ago and God is dealing with him and there is not much sympathy for slavery in Minneapolis and meanwhile the name change does nothing for Indian children living in poverty on reservations that don’t have casinos or oil wells. But so be it. Happy New Year, Sammy Joe.

GK

---

I am writing with a question about the poem titled “Onion Soup” by Garrison Keillor in O, What a Luxury and in the poem is a list of names, “Leon, Diane, Don Juan, Yvonne Dionne, William Shawn, Louis Kahn, Pope John, that whole group,” which of course rhymes with “soup” but in a recent online Post, the poem had a different list of names:

“Leon, Don Juan, Dionne Warwick, Wally Shawn, Connie Stevens, Elton John, that whole group”

What gives?

Sharon Guertin Shafer

It’s careful readers like you, Sharon, who keep us writers on our toes and also cost us sleep at night, knowing you are finding typos and inconsistencies galore, but in the case of this rhymey list of names, I simply dropped some deceased persons in favor of the living. Why I did that, I don’t remember. I believe in moving on. Yesterday’s gone. Let the new day dawn.

GK

---

Dear Mr. Keillor,

Some years ago I returned to the northeast to be closer to my ever-shrinking family. An easy two-hour drive down the Mass Pike into upstate New York, I would time my return on Saturdays to coincide with your show — tuning in to WAMC and then to WGBH as one signal faded and the other grew stronger.

I have so missed those drives with the PHC … I now scan SiriusXM to keep me company on that drive, and wonder, when there is a SXM channel devoted to nothing but Radio Classics from the 1950s or to the traffic in Pittsburgh, why is there not a Prairie Home Companion SXM Channel! If Jimmy Buffett has a big enough catalog for his Margaritaville Channel, surely you, sir, have enough shows at the ready for a PHC Channel.

I am confident it would be popular! It never hurts to ask … so, have your media team check it out!

Missing you and the gang from the road,

Cindy

Grafton, MA

Cindy, there is a town in North Dakota named Grafton and our old PHC truck driver Russ Ringsak came from there. As for my “media team,” I’m not aware that I have one, we don’t even have an office with a mail room with a postage machine. But I’ll mention your idea here in PTTH and maybe someone will respond. Myself, I’d love a Sirius channel devoted to gospel quartets, but that’s just me. And I don’t drive anymore, I’m just a passenger in my wife’s car, and she seems to prefer silence.

GK 

---

Your comment that “In any case, the true religion of America is sports, particularly football, and it is a state religion, and we remaining Christians are diminishing rapidly” reminded me of the line attributed to President Eisenhower that “An atheist is a man who watches a Notre Dame–Southern Methodist University game and doesn’t care who wins.”

Steve Price

I doubt that Mr. Eisenhower said that. It sounds like a line cooked up by a writer hired to create offhand remarks for a president.

GK

---

Merry Christmas, Mr. Keillor, from hot and dusty Western Australia, where I am reading your The Book of Guys bought from a secondhand store for $1.50. My family listened to your radio show when I was young, and your voice and cadence and style are like a comfort blanket to me. My in-laws, on the other hand, have no idea who you are, but never mind.

Merry Christmas and thanks for everything you have ever given me.

Phil Yates

I’m glad that book is giving you pleasure. People who bought it new back in 1993 for $22 surely paid too much for a collection of stories about guys that, to me today, seems rather uneven, to put it kindly, but at $1.50 I think it’s a darned good deal. As I recall, “Lonesome Shorty” is in there and “The Mid-life Crisis of Dionysus” and “Zeus the Lutheran” and “Earl Grey” and “Don Giovanni” and it was the first book I published after I met my wife, Jenny Lind Nilsson, so it has a place in my heart, even though there are some stories in it that I wish I could delete, such as “Winthrop Thorpe Tortuga” but thus is life. I’m so glad to know you’re reading it in western Australia. Merry Christmas.

GK

---

GK,

You were born in Anoka, I grew up 18 miles directly south of there, in Golden Valley. Our birthdays are just three August days apart, though our birth days are a few years apart. Considering age and proximity, you could have been my babysitter, but I don’t think you were — I bet that would have been something I’d remember.

But I wasn’t aware of your existence until right after I got married. Paul and I were regular listeners of your morning show. Once Paul’s mother called in. You must have put out a call for gift ideas, something like that, and she said her unique gift to her husband was getting into bed before him, warming up the side where he slept, then rolling over to the cold side when he got in. Do you remember? I don’t think you interviewed her; I think you related the story yourself. Hope so. You would have skillfully included every nuance.

Then Prairie Home Companion took the Saturday night slot on MPR, and we got hooked on that, listening to the show as we went about our Saturday-night activities — me cleaning the house, Paul engaged in whatever he felt like doing. (You can see where that’s going.) Beyond loving the show — the music and stories — I felt I had a personal connection to it whenever you had Vern Sutton as a guest, as he had been my Music History prof at the University of Minnesota. Music history, according to Professor Sutton, was heavily weighted toward opera, but I didn’t mind. It was his gift and his passion, so he made it interesting.

You spoke at the U of M yourself one night, and I went to hear you. A woman had just been raped on campus, and everyone had heard about it. You had your own thoughts about it and began to share them. They weren’t funny. How could rape be funny? But you were supposed to be a funny guy! And the audience didn’t know what to make of you that night. There were soft snickers and uncomfortable silences — until at last you launched into a Lake Wobegon story or the like. Later I heard you say in an interview you wanted to 1), get better at singing, and 2), be able to speak about serious topics without having to make people laugh. Ah … I remembered that night and understood.

At some point during this time, you spoke in a tiny auditorium in Marine on St. Croix. I don’t remember the circumstances of that day. (It’s not that I’m slipping — it was over forty years ago!) Why did I make that trip from home in Minneapolis? Had friends invited me? Were we on the way somewhere? I believe the room was in the town’s library. What I do remember was just how small the room was, and how very small the audience who sat there with me. You were elevated a bit by a stage — not on our level, which might have made me nervous. Instead, I was thinking, how nice. We’re a lovely little intimate group here. What a privilege.

Of course, we — Paul and I, or friends and I — would occasionally go to PHC live shows where the audience was larger. I remember a couple venues. One was a university lecture hall, with the piano down at the front; another had a strangely long, horizontal audience area, with — I think — a long, horizontal stage in front of it. We must have been in the World Theater at least once, though I can’t picture it now. The on-air light was always exciting. Usually, it was hard to see you. I had to squint. Seeing you better that way, I do remember thinking: His face doesn’t match all his negative self-deprecation about it, though of course he’s a lot older. (You were in your thirties.)

Well, I guess I ought to apologize for relating my memories of venues and visuals, not the music or humor or the Lake Wobegon news. But we could get that from the radio. My head’s still full of it. You don’t want to get me started.

Eventually, Paul decided to do a year-long course in scientific illustration in Tucson, Arizona. So we left our Polish landlords downstairs, in Northeast Minneapolis, and headed to Arizona. You’d think our friends would be jealous, wouldn’t you? Warm winters? Cool summer nights, without mosquitoes? No. They felt sorry for us, going to live where PHC radio didn’t reach. So they’d send us tapes in the mail. We’d get two of some shows at times, no tapes at all at others. The tapes piled up. They weren’t labeled well, so we couldn’t find, for example, “The Finn Who Would Not Take A Sauna,” without listening to yards and yards of tape.

Then, as you know, the show went big, and we could tune in from here. Life was too easy! (So we had a kid, and got divorced.) I was still a reader: read Lake Wobegon Days and loved it. Yeah, it seemed to be about “my people,” late-1800s Scandinavian settlers to Minnesota and Wisconsin. But it was funny, too, and well-written. When it was my turn to suggest a book to my reading group, I recommended it. To my shock, the ladies panned it — I think because Barbara Kingsolver (a friend I had invited to the group) led the charge. The characters have no depth, she said, they’re just there to further the narrative and humor. I was cut to the quick, and angry. Then I remembered that one of the other women had liked Clan of the Cave Bear. And that the scope of readership (The Bean Trees was a rising bestseller at the time) doesn’t reflect quality. So I’m good. And I still read your stuff — old, recent, books, stories. I still love it.

For a couple decades after the divorce, I was a single mom with crummy boyfriends. Then — fireworks. I mean, I met Terry. A Tucsonan who had made tons of business trips to the Twin Cities. He loved Minneapolis. And here was this woman from there — me. Did I listen to Prairie Home Companion?

I impressed him by pulling out the old four-tape Lake Wobegon set that I’d bought for my mother to listen to in the hospital. She did, then died, and I got the tapes back. So we played them, marveling at how high your voice used to be. (I myself have gone from alto to tenor over the same time period.) Terry admitted he couldn’t stand Prairie Home Companion at first. Until he listened to it and got it. He became such a fan that he flew to one of the special shows at the Fitzgerald Theater, where the streets were blocked off and you could attend an after-party.

Then I found out you had lived in Avon. My brother lives there now. A couple decades ago, he moved his family to a place on Schuman Lake Road that borders Schuman Lake. He raised his kids fundamentalist Christian. The girls couldn’t cut their hair and had to wear ankle-length skirts, and the boy had many liberties they didn’t. Harry Potter was of the Devil … and so on. After he was born-again in high school my brother doesn’t see me as a person — just a soul to be saved. I wonder if you’ve had issues like that with your family.

Paul’s mother, the above-mentioned bed-warmer, started showing signs of dementia a few years back. After babysitting her for just one night when she visited Tucson, I felt a terrible sympathy for her poor husband, a former UM professor who used to ride his bike to work from Midway Parkway — in his eighties still doing thirty-mile loops around town. Shockingly, he died last year, of a kind of leukemia. His kids believe he died on purpose to escape the slow, trying progress of his wife’s illness.

Terry and I think life in Tucson will soon be like conditions in Death Valley, and we’ve heard the winters are getting milder in Minnesota. Maybe you know that CNN just featured Duluth as the place for climate refugees to escape to. So we want to find a little cabin “up north” of the Cities. Maybe things will come full circle for this aging, but still blond, Swede.

I’m sure I’m not the only one whose life you have paralleled in this strange, tandem way. It’s just that over the years, these stories have piled up in my head, and I had to write them down. Why not send them to you, since I’ve gathered you may have time these days to read some of your emails. I don’t think of parallel railroad tracks, though — as humans we’re equal, but not in terms of renown. So instead, the Simon and Garfunkel song about the sailboats comes to mind. You’re the silver one sailing ahead purposefully, and I’m sailing right behind — along with quite a few other sailboats that would be there, I’m sure, in troubled waters.

Your old fan,
Kay Sather

Kay, I read your epic letter from start to finish with fascination at your artful writing and also our two separate but entangled lives. Thanks for writing it. I remember Paul’s mother’s story about bed-warming and the solo show at the Marine library (I used to live in Marine) and the street dance downtown. PHC was such an odd phenomenon and someone (not me) should write about it. It began as an afterthought in 1974 and I knew nothing about performance and it went through a slow growth period that gave me a chance to learn something and went national in 1980 and of course it was panned by a great many people for perfectly good reasons but it gained a loyal following that kept it going for forty years. I loved doing it but I never listened to it myself so I know less about it than its loyalists do and I’m just a writer now, sitting at a table in New York, but your letter moved me, how entangled we are and don’t know it. I hope you find that cabin in the woods. Jenny and I have our 12th floor cabin in Manhattan near the woods of Central Park and she loves it here so I stay on as her resident writer and sweetheart. Happy New Year to you and Terry.

GK

---

My dear Garrison.

You have been with me for 46 years through it all and I am grateful for having you in my life.

You have also shared with me great truths. Witness this article about Scandinavian happiness, which illustrates your maxim that, “Pretty good is good enough.”

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/04/finland-happiness-lagom-hygge.html?viarss_socialflow_facebook&fbclidIwAR057E857Q1G6MNiwFniV4uNFN5sdmKPlsJhAePdz5bxlu9T2gthkXXc9po

I hope that you enjoy this article, but not too much.

With reasonably great affection,
Gary Scialdone

Thanks for the essay on “hygge,” the Danish concept of coziness, which sounds accurate to me, having spent some time there. It’s also true of the Midwest in general, I think. Superlatives are distrusted, people don’t talk about how happy they are lest the evil eye hear them and punish them for it, and “good enough” (in Danish, god nok) is all one can hope for. The problem with this culture of modest expectation is that it is somewhat lacking in ENTHUSIASM!!!! And love love love is a necessity of life, as one discovers when, as I did this morning, you wake up and there is the bare shoulder of the women you love who is asleep next to you and you rise from the marital bed and make coffee and sit cheerfully answering your mail, awaiting her appearance. I miss Minnesota, especially now that it’s snowing and cold there. But I love living among the Jews and Episcopalians here in Manhattan. A few Sundays ago, the congregation got so enthused during the closing hymn, everyone standing and singing “Lift every voice and sing till earth and heaven ring, ring with the harmonies of Liberty; let our rejoicing rise high as the listening skies, let it resound loud as the rolling sea” and people raised their hands in the air and the clergy danced in the aisle. It was jubilant. I married a jubilant woman. She goes running in Central Park and comes home joyful. Music delights her. People delight her. I’m trying to give up irony and embrace enthusiasm. Not much progress so far but I have hope.

GK

---

Dear Garrison,

What I’m thinking as I read your column is, I don’t want you to die. Could you manage not to do that or at least wait until I’m gone? You have a wonderful face, mile and miles of roads traveled and written upon it and your voice is one of great comfort and calm. I wish you a beautiful new year coming filled with optimism and gratitude for just arriving at this point in the shape we are in.

You are continuing to write stories, poetry and limericks, what a gift you give to us, your eternal fans.

I plant a hug on your mug,
Kathy McGovern

I am 79, Kathy, and various people around me are falling by the wayside and it seems to be a trend and so I assume it’ll happen to me too. My dad got to 88, my mother to 97, so I have hopes of a few more years, but when dementia descends, I hope to go quietly to Happydale and be a good resident and wash myself and brush my teeth and be appropriate and, most important, be continually grateful for the life I had. My cousin Stan is 90 and is my role model. He still has his marbles but if some marbles should roll away, he still has good manners and a kind heart. And now, let’s change the subject, okay? I’m very high on the screenplay I’m writing about Lake Wobegon, called THE END. Wish me well.

GK