Post to the Host

Comments from the week of January 17, 2022

What is the name of the church referred to so winningly in the essay on seeing Figaro during COVID? I’d like to give it a try.

Paul Willcott

It’s St. Michael’s Episcopal at Amsterdam & 100th.

GK

---

GK,

In Jan. 17 “Post to the Host” there is a comment about uppity saints. A few however are examples for us. That’s why they are saints. Priests also don’t wear “costumes” as once said.

Blessed Franz Jägerstätter, O.F.S., was an Austrian conscientious objector during World War II. Jägerstätter was sentenced to death and executed for his refusal to fight for Nazi Germany. He was later declared a martyr and beatified by the Catholic Church.

If we learned, we’d all be saints.

Carolyn Straub
San Jose, California

I was referring to lower-case saints, and St. Franz is clearly an upper-case. I, on the other hand, am a humorist and have accepted this as my course in life, believing that silliness is the best I can contribute to the world. I was serious at various times in my life but no more, and sainthood is not available to people in my line of work.

GK

---

Mr. Keillor,

The term “political correctness” has become a label that too often gives people permission to say things that are hurtful and ignorant with impunity. John C. Calhoun, in addition to being a horrible segregationist, also believed that indigenous tribal authority had to end. “Indians had better adopt white ways and fast.” Your reducing the renaming of “Lake Calhoun” in Minneapolis to “Bde Maka Ska” to an act of “political correctness” misses the important point that the lake had a name given to it by the Dakota people long before white settlers stole the land and renamed the lake for the architect of The Indian Removal Act. I admit it took me a while to learn to say “Bde Maka Ska,” but it’s the very least we can do to maybe offer a small symbolic acknowledgment to the many European atrocities that permitted our ancestors to invade and occupy someone else’s land. I have come to love the lake and its reinstated name. It used to always stick in my throat to say “Lake Calhoun,” knowing the dishonorable man whose name was given to the lake in his honor. 

Tim Rauk

Minneapolis, Minnesota

I agree it is “the very least” you can do, and I trust you are doing more than that. To my Minneapolis relatives who arrived long after the land was stolen and bought their quarter-acre five or six real-estate deals later, the name “Calhoun” only meant the lake, it didn’t make them think of John or his evil and stupidity. They were from Scotland where they left behind a miserable life and a rigid class structure compared to which south Minneapolis seemed rather heavenly to them. South Minneapolis today has a problem with serious violent crime and before you go looking to rename Lake of the Isles or Cedar Lake, there are more immediate problems to address. As for Lake Hiawatha, it’s named for the Longfellow poem and his theft of an indigenous legend is an act of cultural appropriation that surely should be addressed.

GK

---

Hi, Garrison:

I think you missed a real opportunity in your reply to Fred Cole’s letter from Texas. Even though he was joking (I think?), Lake Wobegon could revitalize itself in advertising to Texans who need snow in their life. Of course, the town leaders would have to equip town constables Gary & Leroy with automatic rifles and add “In God We Trust” on their patrol car. All the “bad” books would need to be purged from the school libraries and the many trans people who participate in high school sports would need to be sorted out the way God intended. And no more mail-in ballot!

But such changes would be worth the payoff to have all those big, gas-sucking pickup trucks and their gun-wearing new citizens with their big incomes moving to Lake Wobegon, right? After all, the only thing that matters in this country is economic growth. 

P.S. You’ve made the big time! When I spelled Wobegon wrong three times, my dictionary auto corrected me. Try it! Well done! Keep up the good work.

John W Mitchell
Western Slope, CO

John, Texas is going to have to be your project since you’re out there in the West. I’m on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and we can’t even imagine Texas. I have no reason to believe it exists.

GK

---

Upon approaching the end of Serenity at 70, Gaiety at 80, I want you to know I’m appreciating you and what you’ve been in my life. In the seventies, I watched you walk across Dinkytown in your red sneakers. Later I listened to your Saturday, 5 p.m. program from our farm outbuilding in Somerset. More recently, I saw you at the PAC in Appleton. It was at intermission, when I told Fred how much I’d enjoyed your performance and would just like to give you a kiss on the cheek. He said, “Don’t.” He’d known you a bit in Minneapolis and I felt I did too, but I also trusted his advice. We both appreciated you a lot. Fred died over 10 years ago and would also have enjoyed this book. So here’s that kiss from all of us who felt we knew you and that you knew us and we were trusted old friends.

Thanks. 

Judy Gaines

Judy, I’m sorry you lost Fred even though he cost me a kiss. I come from evangelicals who avoided close contact, even with each other — there was no Exchange of Peace in the Sanctified Brethren — and these days, whenever someone embraces me, I find it overwhelming and a kiss would probably make me burst into song.

Love to you,

GK

---

Dear Garrison,

We need you now more than ever!

Do you have an interest in doing a show similar to the old Prairie Home Companion? If it is something you want to do and are able to do, consider finding support for a new show that will keep us all connected when we need you and that essential feeling of support more than ever!

Carol Niec

Carol, I’m a busy writer these days but when I’m invited, I go do a solo show or sometimes one with a few friends and it’s a good time for all, but PHC was an enterprise with a staff of twenty or so and it was carried on hundreds of radio stations and public radio is headed in a different direction now, it’s mostly about news, and everyone is doing podcasts, and I like my life exactly as it is.

GK

---

In yesterday’s column, referring to your current church experience, you used the phrase “a church full of Piskers.” I am not acquainted with the term “Piskers,” so I Googled it, and came up empty. So I tried it the old-fashioned way, and looked it up in my Meriam-Webster dictionary. Again, a goose egg. I am not ashamed of my ignorance, as I generally know how to cure it. To that end, would you enlighten me as to the meaning of “Piskers?”

Thank you!

Coleman Hood

Coleman, I used the term to refer to my fellow Episcopalians, an affectionate diminutive. I suppose I could’ve said “Palians.” Sorry to put you to so much trouble.

GK

---

Dear Fellow Geezer,

I recall — even before I lived in Petaluma (in the ’70s) when it was some sort of chicken capital of the world — many, many redwood chicken houses far too long to be called coops. Thanks for the memory.

As an olde paperboy, I was knocked out by the first Nobel Prize in Journalism since that big fascist upsurge in 1936. Did you hear Maria Ressa’s acceptance speech? Wow. I heard an adult speaking. I believe it was broadcast a month ago on Democracy Now! TWA today reminded me somehow, that facts are a requirement for trust well, and like those hens’ teeth in Petaluma, or local newspapers reporting on (even) small scale corruption — dey gone.

Thank you as ever for the straight twist.

Yours,
David Bean 
founder Wild Salmon Nation 1991–01
onetime publisher of the Portland Free Press
Happy Portlander, tho’ unhappy with the mayor/developer

You’re welcome, Mr. Bean.

GK

---

Hi, Garrison.

You’re too hard on yourself. In a recent response to a Post, you suggested it was hypocritical to advise your readers to let strangers who knock on their front door into their homes and then admit you wouldn’t follow this advice yourself. With all due respect, I don’t think that’s hypocritical, it’s just being realistic. Unlike the rest of us, you’re a celebrity. No one can reasonably expect you to throw open your front door to every stranger who comes along. I mean, if the word got out your apartment would be swarming with strangers in short order.

Nevertheless, my fear is that by referring to yourself as hypocritical and writing that you wouldn’t allow strangers into your home, you have detracted from the strength of your original good, sound advice to the rest of us to do the opposite, that is, to take a chance and allow those strangers in. I offer the following nearly 40-year-old personal story as an example of some of the good that may come from following that original advice.

When my doorbell rang all those many years ago and I opened the front door, the stranger who stood before me was a great hulk of a man with an unruly, long red beard. He introduced himself as Bill Holm from Minnesota and said our daughter had invited him to stay with us if he ever visited the Los Angeles area. The name meant nothing to my wife or me and if our daughter ever extended such an invitation, she had neglected to tell us about it. His overall disheveled appearance and the old beat-up station wagon he’d parked in front of our house supported my initial instinct that he was just some homeless guy looking for an easy mark and a place to stay for the night.

You of course knew Bill Holm well as a friend, and I know you and the rest of the world know that he later achieved considerable fame as a successful writer and poet. But when he first rang our doorbell so many years ago, he wasn’t too different from that homeless-man first impression: Bill was then a pretty dissatisfied and disillusioned high school English teacher who had quit his job and was traveling through the country looking for free places to stay for the night. Still, there was something about the guy that made him interesting enough for me to invite him in for a cup of coffee. 

That was one of the best decisions I ever made. We quickly became friends and he ended up staying with us for two very entertaining weeks. Bill took in LA’s highlights during the day, mostly with me at his side, and he reserved evenings to entertain us with his bigger than life personality, storytelling ability and his outrageously loud but talented playing of mostly Wagnerian piano transcriptions. 

So you never know, Garrison, hypocritical or not, I think your original advice was sound. Sure there are risks, but you never know who you might be turning away if you don’t allow that stranger through your front door in the first place. 

Tom Gilfoy

Tom, I’m glad you took Bill in and I’m sure he was such a good talker that he soon made himself welcome. I miss Bill. My friend Jim Harrison was a friend of his and Bill had dinner with Jim in Arizona the night before he flew home to Minnesota, got off the plane, and died of a heart attack. Jim could see that he was unwell and tried to get him to go to a hospital but to no avail. Bill lived in the town of Minneota, where he’d grown up, owned a house full of pianos and harpsichords, played organ in the Lutheran church, and wrote beautiful books. One good deed in my career was having him on a broadcast of PHC from Iceland, where his mother came from, and afterward we went to dinner at the home of the president of Iceland. A banquet in a big house beside the sea with no visible security. Bill loved that whole experience and Icelanders loved hearing his poetry. May he rest in peace and rise in glory.

GK

---

The lionization of Robert E. Lee in today’s newsletter was disappointing. Lee was a slaveholder who fought for the continued subjugation of Americans and sent hundreds of thousands of men to their deaths for this cause.

When discussing Lee, you could have mentioned the massacre of surrendering Black Union soldiers at the Battle of the Crater in 1864. You could have mentioned Lee’s refusal to engage in prisoner exchanges with Grant when Grant insisted on the condition that Black soldiers be exchanged “the same as white soldiers.”

You could have mentioned that Arlington National Cemetery stands on the grounds of Lee’s onetime plantation.

You could have mentioned how Lee treated the people he enslaved. The American Civil War Museum hosts a firsthand account of Lee supervising the severe beating of a runaway family: Wesley Norris, one of the slaves who was whipped, recalled that “not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done.”

https://acwm.org/blog/myths-misunderstandings-lee-slaveholder/

But you said nothing of any of these things. Instead, you quoted Benjamin Harvey Hill, calling Lee “a Christian without hypocrisy.” If Hill’s Christianity without hypocrisy includes washing a wounded man’s back with brine, then Hill must indeed have turned his back to God.

Your newsletter today fed the damaging, dividing myth of the Lost Cause, and I’m ashamed to have received and read it.

Saying Lee’s name in the same breath as a humanitarian like Dolly Parton is a disservice to her good name. You owe her and your readers an apology.

I’m embarrassed for you. Shame on you.

Charles Johnson

I looked up that reference to Lee and I have no memory of it but I take responsibility for it and you’re right, it’s a shame. It was used twenty years or so ago and then got edited into a repeat, and it shouldn’t have been. Thanks for the correction and the reproof.

GK

---

Brother GK,

Reading your column about the pleasant bliss that can be found in winter took me back to fond childhood memories of growing up in Florida when the rest of the world was freezing their butts off. Winter was the time of year when we would frolic in the sand dunes (which you can’t do anymore because of the environmental destruction it causes to seagrass) and wade in the water imagining the Atlantic opening up so we could walk over to Spain or Morocco picking up enormous seashells along the way. January and February were ideal times to go sailing on the St. Johns River and for admiring the gentleness of the manatees seeking refuge from the cold. This was the time of the year when we enjoyed playing basketball outside without the sweltering heat, imagining ourselves to be the next Bob Cousy or Wilt Chamberlain. Winter was the time for exploring the anatomy of the opposite sex at the drive-in movie with the car windows fogged up from all the body heat being radiated inside that added to the privacy. While the sap still doesn’t run in these cold months and my wife relies on flannel pajamas to keep her warm, I can recall the lust I felt in those wintertime moments of ecstasy when we were breaking the preacher’s taboo against indulging in carnal sin. January was the time for us to eat the last of the shrimp we had caught the month before and to finish off the citrus ambrosia from the holidays before we started butchering the hogs. With all the folderal we keep hearing from the anti-vaxxers and the rigged election crowd, it seems doubtful that America will ever be great again. But the sun-filled days of winter that I can recall from living in Florida make me yearn for shrimp and ambrosia and hope that Kentucky and the Celtics will somehow regain their past basketball glory. Do you ever wonder, in the words of Merle Haggard, if the good times are really over for good?

Pete Laravich

Sun City, Texas 

That’s a lovely reminiscence, sir, of a life entirely different from my youth in Minnesota, especially the part about carnal pleasure, and thank you for sending it. I believe the good times are available to each of us and I’ve had plenty of them in the past week or two alone, some carnal, some spiritual, some social, and I wish you the same. I didn’t know there is a Sun City, Texas, and I wonder how they came up with that name, which strikes me as a name chosen in desperation when you couldn’t come up with something more specific. Is there also a Moon City or Sky City? But Florida sounds heavenly.

GK

---

Hello, Garrison.

I’m a longtime fan. I knew the late great Helen Schneyer and once chauffeured you to her house. But it was your delightful column about visiting the Metropolitan Opera that prompts me out of my star-struck reticent shyness to write you. COVID willing, my company, Happenstance Theater, is bringing our show BAROCOCO to 59E59 Theaters next month and I would be honored if you came to see it. I think you’d enjoy its portrait of oblivious privilege on the brink of extinction, featuring a small group of European aristocrats in apparent confinement with the French Revolution at their door. It’s funny too. If you and your honey would like to come, we’d be happy to provide you with a pair of tickets, and if you have questions, just let us know. More info at www.happenstancetheater.com

All the best,
Mark Jaster

I don’t go over to the East Side except for medical care, Mark, but I may make an exception for your play. I’ll consult with my honey who is the artistic director of our family and makes all these difficult choices. I miss Helen Schneyer who once stayed at my house in St. Paul with Jean Redpath and Lisa Neustadt, three ladies with powerful voices and when they sang spirituals, it ignited people’s spirits, even the devout nihilists. And my gosh Helen could pound the piano in those gospel numbers. She was the greatest Jewish gospel singer I ever knew, dressed in a white wedding dress, wearing pounds of turquoise jewelry, and singing praise to the Messiah.

GK

---

My great-grandfather Charles H. Chandler founded — along with his father — the Chandler Pump Company, based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It was quite successful, accounting for a substantial share of pumps sold in the Midwest in the late 19th and early 20th century and making him a rather wealthy man. Around the turn of the century, he purchased a large tract of land on the shores of Lake Leelanau, in Leland, Michigan, as a summer resort for himself and his rapidly expanding family. To this day it is the very heart of our now far-flung family, our true home no matter where we might live. The original C. H. Chandler cottage still stands, just down the shore from my own more modest cottage, and behind it can be found an old Chandler pump:

And so I wonder: Is the pump in the photo found in Garrison Keillor and Friends Column 01.19.22 by any chance a Chandler pump? I think it very well might be. The name would be cast into the body or the handle of the pump.

Thank you,

David Higley

My eyesight is poor, and I can’t make out a name on the handle but I’m sure that putting your tongue on a Chandler pump handle in the freezing cold would be as hazardous as with any other pump handle, not that this makes your family liable for damages. Enjoy that cottage at Lake Leelanau and I hope the lake was not named for Robert E. Lee. Just a word of caution.

GK

---

Hi, Garrison.

Accents aside, the frantic vs. laid-back vibe you observed in NYC vs. Minnesota extends to the larger regions they occupy. I grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and thought we were fairly chill until I traveled to South Bend, Indiana, for grad school. I soon learned that somewhere past Pittsburgh, it became “the Midwest” and that my hometown definitely was part of “the Northeast.” The defining moment came when I encountered a novel invention — the four-way stop sign — during a blizzard. As I reached the middle of the intersection (amazed that the other three cars ahead of me had actually waited their turns), I went into a 180-degree spin. The next three cars remained politely in place — no honking, no jack rabbits — patiently waiting till I finished my revolution. As I concluded that road conditions demanded retreat and proceeded back the way I had come, I understood why there were no four-way stop signs back East. Surely this would never fly back home!

Fast-forward 45 years … now we have them, and you can count on at least one of the four drivers to do that Northeast thing!

Pat McC.

I boarded a plane in Las Vegas the other day and a man from Brooklyn motioned me to go ahead of him in line. He was in his thirties, and I was carrying a laptop and cord and a large cup of Starbucks coffee, the lid of which was coming loose, and I was trying to pull my boarding pass out of my pocket without spilling on myself, so he took mercy on me. I thanked him. I thank you. I’m at an age where gratitude is the primary feeling. I am a passenger these days, so I don’t worry about stop signs, but I’m continually grateful for volcanoes that don’t blow up, meteorites that don’t hit us, crazy gunmen who don’t come down my street, and for Medtronic whose electronic device implanted in my chest wards off atrial fibrillation. I could go on, but that’s enough.

GK