Spring's a ringin', Mr. Keillor. Maybe where you live and ride the rails, but not where I live - yet - but we live and hope, sir; we live and hope. Winter's still got a lot of us by the cockles and doesn't want to let go, but the ice has melted, the snow is gone, and now if it will just warm up....the color green might return once again. Isn't it amazing how, even if we've seen Spring arrive or the brilliant colors of the leaves of October 30 or 50 or 80 seasons in our lives, it always feels like a brand new awesome event all over again.
A love tribute to spring, the season that makes me remember I hate humidity one day when rain pours relentlessly and then the next day the tulips bloom and the air lightens and I forgive weather. With spring, there is hope, for flowers, leaves, even my fine crop of dandy Lions. Yea, even boneheaded legislatures. It’s a shame elections are in late fall when everything is dying and you can’t find a good tomato. Imagine what elections would be like if we voted at the end of a day of breaking breaking up clods of earth in the garden. All our enmity would be dissipated. I still wouldn’t vote for fools, but my outlook would be more positive. Hope springs eternal, and morning glories WILL grow!
Such a beautiful way of writing, it makes me feel so carefree. You've a real, yet goofy (in the best way), way of connecting emotions to things that is so spectacularly spot on after I sit with it. It's like they grow in meaning without changing at all.
I also have to say, my apartment building has a common room with a book shelf. I found your book Wobegon Boy, on the shelf and if I'm honest, I snatched it up and put it in my bag. To be returned later of course.
Almost always there's a little gem in Mr. Keillor's pensive stories. Here's the glimmer that caught me yuck-yucking (the laughing out loud kind of yuck:
"....knowing I’d skip Easter morning due to my aversion to trumpets, an instrument I associate with testosterone poisoning." Mr. Keillor, sir, you are right-on, now that I think about it. There are very few female trumpeters. Most are males who are plain full of hot air and on the downbeat, those notes can really make us jump. At the tomb wherein Jesus escaped, there was no such trumpet as far as we know. The words "He's still alive," just got passed on and on and on. Grab hold....sing out. It's less likely to scare the little kids. "He is not here." In our church we sang out in Greek: "Alithos Anesti ("Ἀληθῶς ἀνέστη! " - "Truly He is Risen!" and "He Has Risen Indeed!").
Perhaps I can soften your stance on trumpets. “ In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.”
I have hitchhiked cross country four times. The first trip three of us set off for California early one summer morning from Buffalo. The sky was a beautiful cornflower blue, cloudless, it wasn’t too hot so we decided that was our cue. We packed up and set off. Two friends we knew left two days ahead of us and told us they would leave a note for us on the bulletin board in The Good Karma Cafe in Berkeley, so that was our destination. One of the many memorable moments in that trip was how we happened on a small paradise in the wilderness of Colorado. We were hot and tired and thirsty and it was getting late in the day so we asked the truck driver (a good bunch who are inclined to buy you a meal and give up their cab so you can sleep). They are often family men who don’t like to see young women out in the great wide open, as Tom Petty sang, so they go into rescue mode. But I digress.
We asked him to drop us off at a random place in the road so we could pitch our tent in what looked like woods. It turned out to be an unexpected bank, so we made our way down and there it was. A shallow stream gurgling over large smooth stones at the edge a bank of sand surrounded by trees across from a small mountain. We immediately stripped and proceeded to step into the stream and lie on our backs with our arms outstretched in the not too cold water running over our weary bodies. After a long while, we washed our dirty clothes in a cove we discovered around a bend, wrung them out and laid them over tree branches to dry. Night had fallen so we decided to set up the tent and sleep. We ate some granola bars and settled into our sleeping bags. My companions fell asleep straight away, but I was wide awake so I slipped out and sat in the sand on the bank of the stream. The only sound was the stream running over the rocks and when I looked up there was a bright full moon nestled in a bed of endless stars. And then, on top of the mountain, a six point buck emerged, bowing its head, seemingly out of respect for the God who had created the night sky, raised it, its antlers appearing to pierce the moon, this giant communion wafer being offered up by the hands that made it. And then the buck disappeared and I sat there with my breath sucked out of me and sat for a while longer to digest what I had been blessed to witness and then finally got up and slipped back into my sleeping bag and fell into a peaceful slumber. It was just one of many miracles I experienced in the duration of our journey. In the morning we packed up (you want to stay but traveling this way urges you to move on. And if we had stayed, it would have stolen the experience I had the night before because nothing could match it).
We rambled up the bank and headed for Berkeley. When we arrived, we looked at the bulletin board on the way in, and we found a note scribbled in pencil. “Sorry we missed you. Love, Michael and John.”
I have travelled a lot in my lifetime. I prefer trains if I have a specific destination mind, like Rome, New York where an old college friend was going to pick me up at the station. He saw me, crept up behind me and quietly said my name and it startled me. He just smiled and told me that’s why they call them sneakers.
These days I live a stable life in a wonderful home and once I’ve straightened up and eaten breakfas, most mornings I sit down to write books about the days when crowds felt like a party and swimming in the Niagara River where the current was a little too strong after a couple of beers with friends was fun. I belong to a wonderful church where I go every Sunday and thank God for what I have been blessed with and all the adventures I have had.
In the 1980s while driving from Jordan to Lewiston in central Montana, a huge bird swooped low over my car from back to front, scaring the bejesus out of me. Amazingly, it landed in a turnout just ahead. I pulled in and there was a full-grown golden eagle not seven feet away. We contemplated one another for a minute. Then I pulled out and left him to his pursuits.
Montana is 147,000 square miles of mostly empty. I think there was only one other vehicle on that road that day. The encounter was so rare and wonderful, a gift from Mother Nature and glows in me whenever I recall it.
Ah! Peekskill, New York! I've taken a handful of AMTRAK rides to that station, on my way to my favorite "Retreat!" There's an Episcopalian monastery nearby there that encourages overnight visitors!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Cross_Monastery_(West_Park,_New_York) In their photograph, you'll see two brick buildings. The large dorm to the near right is their "Guest House" - a hostel for a nominal fee where "pilgrims" can stay. Down the hill, almost out of sight, there's a smaller brick building, the monastery residence for the monks.
These are true religious brothers, but their regimen is like nothing else I've ever encountered! They MIX with their visitors! In the dining hall - with it's attached meeting room - and on the grounds,
wearing "street clothes" the brothers are part of the general public. Even in their religious services, the monks sit on a sort of bleachers, set against the side wall behind a simple wooden bar, and participate in the holy services which are presented facing them, to the parishioner's right. There's nothing "cabalistic", secret, about their religious observances!
One of the reasons that I've gone to Holy Cross Monastery several times, is that I used to be a "lay worker" in a monastery, myself. At Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Monastery, I was the librarian's assistant while I entered their collection into OCLC - the main Online Library of Congress. I ate with the monks, fed the monks' goldfish when the librarian Father wasn't there - and "snuck" books out the back way to read overnight - because, of course, gender prohibited me from being a monk myself.
- by the way, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) wrote a "Tell All" book about Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science. I could hardly put it down! There were other "goodies" there too, but that one stands out in my memory.
Back to Holy Cross Monastery. For anyone who is interested, I'd highly suggest taking a trip up the Hudson River and staying in the dorm for a few days. Heavenly Days! A writer could even take his/her portable laptop there and get some quiet time in the dorm, while their honey took in the Hudson River, shopping in Peekskill, lunch with the monks and all that! It's certainly a big "Change of Scene!"
I am a fast reader and sometimes details escape me. Like the apostrophe in “monk’s.” I was glad to learn that the brothers’ culinary delights did not extend to goldfish!!
Goldfish are too tiny! However, we were on an "ovo-pescatarian (modified vegetarian diet - eggs and fish were allowed but not the meat of ordinary farm animals like beef, lamb or pork). The monastery sourced most of it's own food ( I imagine they got their sea salt somewhere - possibly from a monastery near an ocean?). During Lent, our diet was even more restricted - the only protein source of note was hard-boiled Easter Eggs, colorfully dyed. We ate in a dining hall In the main hall the seminarians sat at the sides of long tables that seated 6 on each side, with a monk at the head of each table. Women were screened off behind a wall that had an opening only big enough for us to see and hear the "reader" for the meal. We ate in silence, while the seminarian for the day read from the Bible in the allotted verse. At our table , dresses or skirts and blouses and head coverings (in services) were obligatory. The seminary had one female teacher - they had to have an English language teacher in order to be accredited.
Lay members of the community could attend religious services every day if we so wished. with additional readings at lunchtime in a small room below the main chapel that I just LOVED going to! The main reader for those set such a mood, I felt almost "sacred!" In the main chapel, there were all sorts of physical cues to enhance the religious feeling : Golden sunlight entering through high windows and reflecting off the well-polished floor. Icons lining the walls. Regular daily prayer sessions, when the priests would walk up and down the aisles swinging incense vases on long, golden chains, saying prayers as we crossed ourselves- forehead, chest, right shoulder, then left shoulder - and joined them in their ritual chants. There were times without number when I'd feel as if I were in a similar, Onion-domed cathedral somewhere in Moscow, or maybe Saint Petersburg!
Then there was the four pm ritual when the monks would do their "Obedience." They would line up, single file, wandering around like "Batmen" in their black robes and hats - Kamilavkas (black tubes covered with black veils that reached below their armpits) tucked carefully under an arm as they chanted and went around the outside walls, like a many-legged black caterpillar - bowing, , saying prayers and kissing the bottom of the icons as they came to them.
It's something I can't explain : it seems to me it's "inside you" or it's not! My great-grandparents were missionaries to India; my paternal grandmother was born in a Methodist Missionary Girl's School in Poonah. My father's mother probably never missed a Sunday service in her life! I read somewhere that x-ray technicians have made images of monks and nuns praying. There's a "hot spot" that lights up, a dot in the cerebrum behind the left eye - in an area that's normally dark. I 'm sure, I must have lit up like a spotlight in Dodger Stadium if they had made such readings when I was in the Russian Orthodox services!
I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of being perishable. On another note, when some of the finest men I ever ever known have been laid to rest, it was to Taps.
Day is done, gone the sun,
From the hills, from the lake, from the skies.
All is well, safely rest, God is nigh.
Go to sleep, peaceful sleep, may the soldier
or sailor, God keep. On the land or the deep, Safe in sleep.
That was a good report Old Scout. Nothing like eating a few oysters to get your corpuscles jumping.
Wonderful. Makes me want to sing,
"You make me feel so young.
You make me feel there are songs to be sung
Bells to be rung
And a wonderful fling to be flung
And even when I'm old and gray
I'm gonna feel the way I do today
'Cause you make me feel so young."
Spring's a ringin', Mr. Keillor. Maybe where you live and ride the rails, but not where I live - yet - but we live and hope, sir; we live and hope. Winter's still got a lot of us by the cockles and doesn't want to let go, but the ice has melted, the snow is gone, and now if it will just warm up....the color green might return once again. Isn't it amazing how, even if we've seen Spring arrive or the brilliant colors of the leaves of October 30 or 50 or 80 seasons in our lives, it always feels like a brand new awesome event all over again.
A love tribute to spring, the season that makes me remember I hate humidity one day when rain pours relentlessly and then the next day the tulips bloom and the air lightens and I forgive weather. With spring, there is hope, for flowers, leaves, even my fine crop of dandy Lions. Yea, even boneheaded legislatures. It’s a shame elections are in late fall when everything is dying and you can’t find a good tomato. Imagine what elections would be like if we voted at the end of a day of breaking breaking up clods of earth in the garden. All our enmity would be dissipated. I still wouldn’t vote for fools, but my outlook would be more positive. Hope springs eternal, and morning glories WILL grow!
Such a beautiful way of writing, it makes me feel so carefree. You've a real, yet goofy (in the best way), way of connecting emotions to things that is so spectacularly spot on after I sit with it. It's like they grow in meaning without changing at all.
I also have to say, my apartment building has a common room with a book shelf. I found your book Wobegon Boy, on the shelf and if I'm honest, I snatched it up and put it in my bag. To be returned later of course.
‘I decided I don’t care about gender, I care about kindness’ ... cha ching 😊💯
"...my mind wandered, which is one thing I like about church." Ah, it's always nice to find a kindred soul!
This was simply beautiful. I’ll start my day with a smile and a skip into the day. Thank you.
You're right about aunts and oysters. This old aunt doesn't even watch someone eating oysters!
This is a wonderful description of a Spring day in NYC and exactly how it makes you feel!
Almost always there's a little gem in Mr. Keillor's pensive stories. Here's the glimmer that caught me yuck-yucking (the laughing out loud kind of yuck:
"....knowing I’d skip Easter morning due to my aversion to trumpets, an instrument I associate with testosterone poisoning." Mr. Keillor, sir, you are right-on, now that I think about it. There are very few female trumpeters. Most are males who are plain full of hot air and on the downbeat, those notes can really make us jump. At the tomb wherein Jesus escaped, there was no such trumpet as far as we know. The words "He's still alive," just got passed on and on and on. Grab hold....sing out. It's less likely to scare the little kids. "He is not here." In our church we sang out in Greek: "Alithos Anesti ("Ἀληθῶς ἀνέστη! " - "Truly He is Risen!" and "He Has Risen Indeed!").
Indeed!
Perhaps I can soften your stance on trumpets. “ In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.”
What instrument do YOU hear!
Love the song of the cardinals!
Garrison, you missed one. In addition to Donald J and Putin, we need to put woke back in the box; it is spoiling the humor and fiber of America.
I have hitchhiked cross country four times. The first trip three of us set off for California early one summer morning from Buffalo. The sky was a beautiful cornflower blue, cloudless, it wasn’t too hot so we decided that was our cue. We packed up and set off. Two friends we knew left two days ahead of us and told us they would leave a note for us on the bulletin board in The Good Karma Cafe in Berkeley, so that was our destination. One of the many memorable moments in that trip was how we happened on a small paradise in the wilderness of Colorado. We were hot and tired and thirsty and it was getting late in the day so we asked the truck driver (a good bunch who are inclined to buy you a meal and give up their cab so you can sleep). They are often family men who don’t like to see young women out in the great wide open, as Tom Petty sang, so they go into rescue mode. But I digress.
We asked him to drop us off at a random place in the road so we could pitch our tent in what looked like woods. It turned out to be an unexpected bank, so we made our way down and there it was. A shallow stream gurgling over large smooth stones at the edge a bank of sand surrounded by trees across from a small mountain. We immediately stripped and proceeded to step into the stream and lie on our backs with our arms outstretched in the not too cold water running over our weary bodies. After a long while, we washed our dirty clothes in a cove we discovered around a bend, wrung them out and laid them over tree branches to dry. Night had fallen so we decided to set up the tent and sleep. We ate some granola bars and settled into our sleeping bags. My companions fell asleep straight away, but I was wide awake so I slipped out and sat in the sand on the bank of the stream. The only sound was the stream running over the rocks and when I looked up there was a bright full moon nestled in a bed of endless stars. And then, on top of the mountain, a six point buck emerged, bowing its head, seemingly out of respect for the God who had created the night sky, raised it, its antlers appearing to pierce the moon, this giant communion wafer being offered up by the hands that made it. And then the buck disappeared and I sat there with my breath sucked out of me and sat for a while longer to digest what I had been blessed to witness and then finally got up and slipped back into my sleeping bag and fell into a peaceful slumber. It was just one of many miracles I experienced in the duration of our journey. In the morning we packed up (you want to stay but traveling this way urges you to move on. And if we had stayed, it would have stolen the experience I had the night before because nothing could match it).
We rambled up the bank and headed for Berkeley. When we arrived, we looked at the bulletin board on the way in, and we found a note scribbled in pencil. “Sorry we missed you. Love, Michael and John.”
I have travelled a lot in my lifetime. I prefer trains if I have a specific destination mind, like Rome, New York where an old college friend was going to pick me up at the station. He saw me, crept up behind me and quietly said my name and it startled me. He just smiled and told me that’s why they call them sneakers.
These days I live a stable life in a wonderful home and once I’ve straightened up and eaten breakfas, most mornings I sit down to write books about the days when crowds felt like a party and swimming in the Niagara River where the current was a little too strong after a couple of beers with friends was fun. I belong to a wonderful church where I go every Sunday and thank God for what I have been blessed with and all the adventures I have had.
In the 1980s while driving from Jordan to Lewiston in central Montana, a huge bird swooped low over my car from back to front, scaring the bejesus out of me. Amazingly, it landed in a turnout just ahead. I pulled in and there was a full-grown golden eagle not seven feet away. We contemplated one another for a minute. Then I pulled out and left him to his pursuits.
Montana is 147,000 square miles of mostly empty. I think there was only one other vehicle on that road that day. The encounter was so rare and wonderful, a gift from Mother Nature and glows in me whenever I recall it.
Excellent as always. Thanks!
Ah! Peekskill, New York! I've taken a handful of AMTRAK rides to that station, on my way to my favorite "Retreat!" There's an Episcopalian monastery nearby there that encourages overnight visitors!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Cross_Monastery_(West_Park,_New_York) In their photograph, you'll see two brick buildings. The large dorm to the near right is their "Guest House" - a hostel for a nominal fee where "pilgrims" can stay. Down the hill, almost out of sight, there's a smaller brick building, the monastery residence for the monks.
These are true religious brothers, but their regimen is like nothing else I've ever encountered! They MIX with their visitors! In the dining hall - with it's attached meeting room - and on the grounds,
wearing "street clothes" the brothers are part of the general public. Even in their religious services, the monks sit on a sort of bleachers, set against the side wall behind a simple wooden bar, and participate in the holy services which are presented facing them, to the parishioner's right. There's nothing "cabalistic", secret, about their religious observances!
One of the reasons that I've gone to Holy Cross Monastery several times, is that I used to be a "lay worker" in a monastery, myself. At Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Monastery, I was the librarian's assistant while I entered their collection into OCLC - the main Online Library of Congress. I ate with the monks, fed the monks' goldfish when the librarian Father wasn't there - and "snuck" books out the back way to read overnight - because, of course, gender prohibited me from being a monk myself.
- by the way, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) wrote a "Tell All" book about Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science. I could hardly put it down! There were other "goodies" there too, but that one stands out in my memory.
Back to Holy Cross Monastery. For anyone who is interested, I'd highly suggest taking a trip up the Hudson River and staying in the dorm for a few days. Heavenly Days! A writer could even take his/her portable laptop there and get some quiet time in the dorm, while their honey took in the Hudson River, shopping in Peekskill, lunch with the monks and all that! It's certainly a big "Change of Scene!"
I am a fast reader and sometimes details escape me. Like the apostrophe in “monk’s.” I was glad to learn that the brothers’ culinary delights did not extend to goldfish!!
Goldfish are too tiny! However, we were on an "ovo-pescatarian (modified vegetarian diet - eggs and fish were allowed but not the meat of ordinary farm animals like beef, lamb or pork). The monastery sourced most of it's own food ( I imagine they got their sea salt somewhere - possibly from a monastery near an ocean?). During Lent, our diet was even more restricted - the only protein source of note was hard-boiled Easter Eggs, colorfully dyed. We ate in a dining hall In the main hall the seminarians sat at the sides of long tables that seated 6 on each side, with a monk at the head of each table. Women were screened off behind a wall that had an opening only big enough for us to see and hear the "reader" for the meal. We ate in silence, while the seminarian for the day read from the Bible in the allotted verse. At our table , dresses or skirts and blouses and head coverings (in services) were obligatory. The seminary had one female teacher - they had to have an English language teacher in order to be accredited.
Lay members of the community could attend religious services every day if we so wished. with additional readings at lunchtime in a small room below the main chapel that I just LOVED going to! The main reader for those set such a mood, I felt almost "sacred!" In the main chapel, there were all sorts of physical cues to enhance the religious feeling : Golden sunlight entering through high windows and reflecting off the well-polished floor. Icons lining the walls. Regular daily prayer sessions, when the priests would walk up and down the aisles swinging incense vases on long, golden chains, saying prayers as we crossed ourselves- forehead, chest, right shoulder, then left shoulder - and joined them in their ritual chants. There were times without number when I'd feel as if I were in a similar, Onion-domed cathedral somewhere in Moscow, or maybe Saint Petersburg!
Then there was the four pm ritual when the monks would do their "Obedience." They would line up, single file, wandering around like "Batmen" in their black robes and hats - Kamilavkas (black tubes covered with black veils that reached below their armpits) tucked carefully under an arm as they chanted and went around the outside walls, like a many-legged black caterpillar - bowing, , saying prayers and kissing the bottom of the icons as they came to them.
It's something I can't explain : it seems to me it's "inside you" or it's not! My great-grandparents were missionaries to India; my paternal grandmother was born in a Methodist Missionary Girl's School in Poonah. My father's mother probably never missed a Sunday service in her life! I read somewhere that x-ray technicians have made images of monks and nuns praying. There's a "hot spot" that lights up, a dot in the cerebrum behind the left eye - in an area that's normally dark. I 'm sure, I must have lit up like a spotlight in Dodger Stadium if they had made such readings when I was in the Russian Orthodox services!
You should read McCarthy’s Bar by Pete McCarthy. Especially the third to last chapter “St. Patrick’s Purgatory.”
The beauty of the trumpet is that it not only wakes the living, it also wakes the dead. Changing us will be good too....
Thanks, Dawn!
I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of being perishable. On another note, when some of the finest men I ever ever known have been laid to rest, it was to Taps.
Day is done, gone the sun,
From the hills, from the lake, from the skies.
All is well, safely rest, God is nigh.
Go to sleep, peaceful sleep, may the soldier
or sailor, God keep. On the land or the deep, Safe in sleep.
Love, good night, must thou go,
when the day, and the night need thee so?
All is well. Speedeth all To their rest.
Fades the light;
And afar Goeth day,
And the stars Shineth bright,
Fare thee well;
Day has gone, night is on.
Thanks and praise, for our days,
'Neath the sun, Neath the stars, 'Neath the sky,
As we go, this we know, God is nigh.
Love it! He is high indeed! Gives me the chills. God bless ‘em all!
Hey GK: A little New Yawk free voice couldn't hoit! I've hoid woice!
Roger Krenkler - LA