The story of my life, a brief version

The Column: 06.28.24

My bio in 100 words is as follows: My parents were in love with each other, had six kids, I was third, an invisible child. I had no interest in crashing into people so didn’t play football or hockey and avoided brain damage. I dabbled in poetry and when I was 14, I read A.J. Liebling and decided to be a writer. I went into radio, which requires no special skill, and took the sunrise shift, which turned me toward comedy, listeners don’t want grievous introspective reflections at 5 a.m. I told stories for forty years and still do. I married well on the third try.

There you have it: perseverance, not brilliance, is the key. I walk out on stage, the audience assumes it’s the janitor. I have no stage fright because my vision is so poor, I don’t notice them looking at me. They pity that old man on stage but I’m holding a microphone and that’s the advantage: when I hum, they hum with me and we all sing “My country, ’tis of thee” and they’re amazed by how good it sounds. The audience entertains itself.

I’m lucky, when it comes right down to it. Last Monday, after seeing my cardiologist, I stopped at an Italian café for a big plate of sausage lasagna and in my fascination with a nearby conversation between several surgeons I forgot my hand-corrected book manuscript on the table, on the East Side of Manhattan. I discovered this when I got home, three miles away. I’d paid the café with cash, had no receipt, couldn’t remember the name. I went to the East Side, walked around, nothing looked familiar. Ran into a couple who knew me from my show and they looked up Italian cafés on their phone and told me it was probably on First Avenue. (I was on Third.) I walked over and recognized the hot dog stand, the Citibank, and there was the café. I walked in, the maître d’ recognized me, got the manuscript out of his desk, handed it to me. I gave him a hundred bucks. Now I wish I’d given him three hundred. Cheapskate.

As we say, “The Lord is good and His mercy endureth forever.” Old age is turning out to be my favorite part of life. I worked much too hard for much too long, was driven, and in the process did a whole series of dumb things that we needn’t recount here. I was lucky to live at a time when cardiology came of age and they could sew up a leaky valve like you’d fix a shoe. At the doctor’s Monday, a young woman adjusted my heart monitor/defibrillator, standing at a computer at my elbow: she said, “Now I’m slowing your heart …” and did, and said, “Now I’m speeding up your heart,” and she did that. I said, “Many women have made my heart beat faster,” and she actually laughed at a joke she must’ve heard a thousand times, maybe two. That’s a whole other miracle, the patience of health care with patients.

When I was 12, I helped my aunt Josephine slaughter chickens at her little farm. I was sent with a wire hook fashioned from a clothes hanger to chase chickens and snatch them by their ankles and I chased one into the garage and snatched her and then realized it was a chicken I knew as Chuck though she was a hen. A trans chicken, perhaps. She squawked and flapped and I didn’t see how I could participate in the killing of a chicken I knew personally, had talked to, had named, but on the other hand, if not her it would be some other chicken. An awesome power in my hand. I stroked her and she calmed down. I decided it would be better for her to go to the chopping block with someone who loved her than with someone rough and cold, and so she was delivered to the axe. She had enjoyed being fed and now she would become food, a sort of symmetry to her life, and Aunt Jo was a tremendous cook, working at a wood-burning stove, and her fried chicken was memorable.

Someday a boy with a coat hanger will chase me around the yard and into a garage and take me in his arms and calm me down. I only want it to be peaceful. I want to be useful up to the end and have all my wits about me but that of course is for others to decide. Thank you for reading. It was my pleasure.

If you liked this column, maybe you want to read the full story of Garrison Keillor’s life. You can find it in his memoir, That Time of Year: A Minnesota Life.

CLICK HERE to buy your copy today!