Garrison Keillor's Podcast

Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 in C Major, the “Jupiter,” was his last, a symphony he never heard, composed in the summer of 1788, three years before his death, along with two other symphonies, a piano sonata, other chamber works, by a 32-year-old genius deeply in debt, having lost the favor of his noble patrons, caring for his ailing wife, Constanze — it’s heartbreaking to hear the tenderness of the dances in the third movement, the inventiveness of the finale.The audience adored the Shostakovich. They gave it a standing ovation and brought the maestro back for five bows and he gave bows to the brass, the English horn, the violas, the tympani, the cymbals, the strings, the winds, the harps. Shostakovich wrote it in honor of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 but during intermission Jenny had shown me videos she’d taken of New Yorkers sliding Cedar Hill in Central Park, sliding on plastic saucers, pieces of cardboard, baking trays, roasting pans, skis, going off a jump and flying in the air and landing in a cloud of…

Some days I glance at the front page and see the name RUMP in three or four places so I flip back to the Lifestyle section and maybe find a wine review, “Fresh and vivacious with chewy tannins and bursts of flowers and fruits.” The deranged man with cognitive problems is a passing phenom, but bursts of flowers and fruits have been with us forever and even in January here in Manhattan one can find shops to walk into and feel flowers bursting around you and markets where you inhale the freshness of mounds of apples and pears and oranges.The old king who goes mad is a character out of Shakespeare, he has no place in America, you walk out of a performance of King Lear and buy a bouquet of tulips and a bag of apples and you’re back to reality. When Van Gogh admitted himself to the asylum for the insane at Saint-Rémy in Provence, he spent the last years of his life painting the gardens and woods, the trees and flowers, paintings that were the finest of his life. He could’ve been destructive, set fires, broken…

A Times story reporting that college students in a writing course do better when they go offline for a month makes perfect sense to me, same as if you say a writer does better at a laptop in the public library than shnockered on a sailboat in a storm, but the idea of persuading students to go offline strikes me as quixotic, like Amish evangelism or banning the use of chairs. The internet is here and we’re all caught up in it.l was in my 50s when the World Wide Web came in. Its advent was not a big event to me; I was still working on a manual Underwood typewriter. I have a clearer memory of seeing Albert Woolson, the last living Civil War veteran, in a parade in downtown Minneapolis. I remember my uncle Jim farming with horses and Fibber McGee and Molly on the radio. And I remember boredom, which has mostly disappeared in America except perhaps among lighthouse keepers or attendants in parking ramps or felons in solitary confinement. And maybe imprisonment offline would be considered cruel and inhumane in a…

I remember when I was a kid, our family driving home from Sunday night gospel meeting and stopping at A&W for root beer floats, how beautiful they were after an hour of contemplating eternal damnation. I remember being sent to Aunt Jo’s house when my mother was having babies, a house with a wood-burning stove and outhouse like in Little House on the Prairie. I remember my first time on skis, skidding down a steep hill and thinking, “I will never do this again,” a promise I have kept. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

This all came crashing down last Monday night at JFK when I boarded a Delta flight to Seattle around 5 p.m. I consider JFK to be as close to a prison camp as I care to get. The Delta terminal is vast and crowded and ugly, endless lines at Ticketing, TSA agents whose badge entitles them to freely express hostility and contempt, miles of concourses lined with souvenir shops, the smell of bad food. Naming the airport for our late lamented president did him no service.We boarded the plane and sat at the gate for a while, then pulled out and sat on the tarmac. A massive storm was moving east. The pilot came on the horn every 15 minutes to apologize for the delay and say that Air Traffic Control had no idea when, if ever, we might leave. Five became six p.m. and then almost seven when suddenly he said we were clear to go and the plane sprinted toward the runway but something changed, we were too late, and we returned to the gate canceled. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other…

Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for moreMy weekly walk to church and backThe Column: 04.04.25Garrison KeillorApr 4READ IN APPShareWe seem to be in a war against science and research, which is causing anxiety among us geezers grateful for anti-seizure meds that guard against us suddenly shaking uncontrollably on the street corner and strangers having to remember first aid from 4-H to keep us from strangling on a hot dog and when we’re not reading about that, we see news of low-frequency seismic waves that can travel for hundreds of miles underground and cause tall brick buildings to crash to the ground, which is disturbing to us in Manhattan, and then there’s news of Mr. and Mrs. JD Vance who announced their trip to Greenland to see the dogsled races only to be told, “Nobody invited you,” so they flew to the U.S. military base at Pituffik for three hours and Mr. Vance announced that Greenland needed American defense whether it wanted it or not. He did not change the name of the area to Pitiful.An…

And now I worry, as old people do, about the kids I see who are growing up in the dreadful clutter of American life, the gizmos and social media bullying, and can they find delight as I did in skating on the frozen Mississippi and discovering Liebling and Jenny found listening to Prokofiev and Brahms. I pray for our kids to be lighthearted. The darkness is out there, and Christmas becomes utterly beautiful, the circle of love and friendship, the lighted candles, the anticipation of the child, the radiant beams, the redeeming grace. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

And so you have men on bikes racing through narrow gaps on jammed avenues with a backpack full of shrimp curry and pad thai, meanwhile an elderly man (me) on his way to the drugstore to pick up some Alka-Seltzer stands on the curb, peering into the darkness for some glimmer of light, some sign of motion, some clue as to approaching bicycles. This is the adventure of life in Manhattan, serious bodily injury from bicyclists delivering exotic food at high speed to stay-at-home software programmers.This is why I pay extra to live in a doorman building. Felipe will deal with the guy on the bike, accept the charred wok vegetable medley and the crispy calamari and drunken noodles with peanut sauce and hand the bag to Lenny, who will bring it up to the 12th floor and leave it at our door and the food will still be hot though the restaurant is a mile away. This is a remarkable amenity. It’s not the cold weather that keeps my sweetie and me indoors, it isn’t the fear of stickups, it’s the fear of being run down by…

Life is good once you master the art of Deletion. Every day my laptop is full of emails asking for money to do worthwhile, even noble, things, which, if I donated to them, I’d soon be living in a cardboard box in a vacant lot, and so I click on “Unsubscribe” and they go away for a while. Instead, I google “What is the prospect of international peace and understanding?” and find that the U.N. thinks it’s inevitable and dalailama.com says it’s based on compassion and foreignpolicy.com thinks the prospects are not good. We didn’t used to have Google, my kiddoes, we used to sit and worry about these things and now at last clear answers are available. Contradictory, but still. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

I was not a good son. A good son is one who visits his mother regularly and I was too busy to do that. I ran around a lot. Sometimes I traveled in fancy company. I was once in a movie directed by Robert Altman and financed, in part, by the Pohlad family. Carl Pohlad, the richest man in Minnesota, sat next to my mother at the premiere, and the two of them carried on an extensive conversation, which didn’t faze her a bit. I was proud of her. My mother was one of thirteen children of William and Miriam on Longfellow Avenue South in Minneapolis and sometimes during the Depression she went door-to-door peddling peanut butter sandwiches she’d made. When Mr. Pohlad said, “You must be very proud of your son,” she replied, “I am very proud of all my children,” which is the correct answer. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

I live in the present. If I were to think about the future, I’d be alarmed about the utter demise of journalism and the self-degradation that many U.S. senators are eager to accept and the use of cryptocurrency to enrich the Chief Executive by tech tycoons kicking back 20% of their federal contracts, but instead I spend the day in my laboratory experimenting to design AI software to let me chat with long-deceased relatives such as my great-great-grandfather William Evans Keillor who says, “I don’t know if this is heaven — it looks like Nebraska — and immortality is not my cup of tea but I’m getting used to it. No calendars, no clocks. The good news is that death dissolves your marriage so I’m free of Sarah and I’ve taken up with an angelic slip of a girl named Celeste who flutters about in water-wings and silk undies and instead of beans and bacon we have rigatoni with zucchini, cannellini, salami Bolognese, prosciutto, radicchio, parmigiano, pepperoni primavera, chorizo crostata, guacamole, guanciale…

The lust for world domination does not make for the good life. It’s the life of the male raccoon who battles for preeminence and winds up in a ditch being pecked at by crows. It’s not for sensible people. Be at peace, read books, cherish your friends, take walks, love life until the first coronary walks up and slugs you in the chest. Charisma is pure fiction, and so is brilliance. It’s the dummies who sit on the dais, and it’s the smart people who sit in the dark near the exits. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

I intend to enjoy defeat and go back and read Shakespeare, whom I wrote C-minus term papers about in college using terms like “well-structured,” “complex,” “buttery.” I’m going to travel to Dublin, Stockholm, Rome, where a person can become absorbed in the immediate surroundings, be engrossed in the moment. I want to hear The Marriage of Figaro again and the Fauré Requiem. I want to walk in the park with my sweetie and look at people and their dogs and the jazz musicians who congregate to jam. I want to pay attention to joyful outbursts of little kids astonished by ordinary things. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

I do not understand the neighbors, actually, such as why their summer house has LANDSCAPING and LAWN ORNAMENTS. A summer house is for relaxation, it isn’t to demonstrate craftmanship. You are supposed to sit on the porch and read Proust, you are not supposed to create a home that Proust would’ve envied.And I don’t understand why a copy of Foreign Affairs sits on their kitchen counter. In the den, out of sight, yes. In the kitchen? People are eating in the kitchen. Foreign Affairs is the diplomatic version of the prophet Jeremiah. He said, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” Foreign Affairs says pretty much the same thing except for real. Ukraine and Gaza are sort of covered in the newspapers but terrible things are happening everywhere, so much so that you don’t want to know about it. Let Antony Blinken know about it. This is why foreign policy is a minor footnote in our presidential elections, somewhat less important than bike lanes or prayer in public schools —…

When I was 12, I was a teacher’s pet, so I was a target for playground bullies. A boy told me my teeth were green and rotten and I believed him and stopped smiling. And I believed that the Second Coming was imminent and though I was a Christian I wasn’t sure that God realized that. Brother Frank could preach a sermon that made me feel like a war criminal.But you grow up and experience the generosity of this world. Justice prevails, at least it tries to. I got a good college education on the cheap. The world is full of fascinating individuals who are here for our appreciation. Highly educated people tend to treat you with respect, which is rather stunning. Society will try to do the right thing by you. And this woman will accept my love. So what’s your problem, Mister? Enjoy the day. All of it. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

There is always an excuse for not exercising, a religious prohibition, some hereditary syndrome that makes you feel desperate when you breathe hard, an allergic reaction to your own perspiration, but these can be overcome with help. My excuse is that I hated high school phy-ed with a passion, the chin-ups, the rope climb, the running somersault, the running dive over the horse, the wrestling, the ridicule and the bullying, and I despised walking naked into a shower with other young men. I still do. After I graduated, I made it a point not to join other naked men to take showers. When invited, I have declined. If this is a favorite activity of yours, I do not judge. For some men, this may be the high point of the week. Don’t say this is self-loathing on my part because it isn’t: it’s the other men I loathe, not myself. And it’s not homophobia. I have many gay male friends and they do not undress when they come to my home. I am perfectly okay taking a shower by myself or with my wife on very rare occasions…

My steak arrived and I hated it. It was tender to the point of being gelatinous. It was rare, not medium rare. It wasn’t chewy, as steak should be. It was sort of like eating raw liver. But when the waiter came by to ask if everything was okay, I said, not wanting to be a complainer or seem unworthy of this great delicacy, “It’s wonderful.” Other Midwesterners have this same problem. Hauled to the gallows to be hanged for a crime we didn’t commit, asked by the hangman if the noose is too tight, we’d say, “It’s just fine. Very comfortable. And if you don’t mind, please don’t offer me a last cigarette, I quit smoking years ago.” Self-advocacy was not taught in the Anoka, Minnesota, public schools back in my day. We were taught to be grateful for what we had.I paid for the dinner, a sum of money I associate with first-class round-trip airfare between New York and L.A., and I went home, fell into bed, woke around 3 a.m. feeling an urgent need for Alka-Seltzer. I took two tablets, which helped. Around six, I took…

I like Trader Joe’s because the clientele is half my age or less and I stand with my cart in a long double line with college kids and mothers of tiny children and I listen to fragments of phone conversations that are fresh and fascinating to me. These people lean toward eagerness and curiosity with a streak of satire; my people tend toward dismay and resignation. The lines move fast at Trader Joe’s because the store has 24 checkout cashiers and as I come toward checkout, this being New York, I wonder how many of the cashiers are hoping to be actors, writers, artists, dancers, composers, and I worry about them as I catch sight. I was a dishwasher when I was their age and I hoped to be published in The New Yorker where my heroes Updike, Perelman, Thurber published. For me, the magazine was the Big League and I needed to climb out of the Minors and when I made it, at 27, I bought filet mignon.The Bigs are still around but the young and ambitious have found new roads — podcasting, for example — in which you…

I’m grateful that, as a kid, I got to experience “visiting,” when the family got in the car and dropped in at someone’s house and sat around and visited. We kids sat quietly and listened to the elders reminisce about their childhoods, which could be a true revelation, hearing their different versions of history, who looked out the window of the schoolhouse and cried, “Our house is on fire!” and the day Joe Loucks drowned in the Rum River, and the winter night Grandpa woke up the seven of them and got them dressed and hiked out to the meadow to look at the silver timber wolf howling at the moon. What lives in memory is firsthand experience. I read the pundits’ eulogies but I remember those two women and those two audiences. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Cranberries are the heart of Thanksgiving dinner. You don’t want a gourmet dinner that distracts you from your life blessings, so you serve turkey, a profoundly average dish. Every turkey dinner is about as good as any other turkey dinner. Same with pumpkin pie. But cranberries are terribly exciting. They are the Robert Frost of fruits, the Flaubert, the Frank Lloyd Wright, the Gabriel Fauré. You can overcook the turkey and serve a pumpkin pie that is just pudding with a crust, but if you serve cranberries you’re okay.Be happy, my dears. America will soon see the return of the dopiest president in our history. Anyone who nominates Matt Gaetz to be Attorney General and Bobby Kennedy Jr. to be Secretary of Health needs GPS to show him the way to the bathroom, but keep this in mind: many of America’s cranberry growers voted for him and many people whose cranberry sauce has the power to make you stand on your tiptoes and yodel. Think about that for a moment. There is some good in all of us, maybe more than we…

I’ve known some great fathers, my brother Philip for one, my nephews Will and Douglas, my friends Mark and Tony and Sandy and Fred. Patience is one of their virtues, optimism, a willingness to look the other way: in other words, a sense of humor. Had I been a postal clerk or a plumber, I’d’ve maybe been a better father but I got engrossed in show business and for a few years was fairly popular and was gone a lot and they grew up fatherless. They have done pretty well on their own, all three of them, and I claim no credit. It is what it is. But when the National Fatherhood League gathers for its annual banquet and the bestowing of the Papa awards, include me out. Same with Uncles’ Day and Cousins’. But I am working on being better at husbanding, and I think she notices: I get near her and smell sandalwood and chamomile oil and that stuff goes for thousands per ounce. I must be doing something right. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes,…

A little gift for our Garrison Keillor and Friends subscribers. In the Back Room (paid subscribers) you receive a monologue from the 80’s weekly.12.24.83It was bitterly cold in Lake Wobegon this week. Thirty below and cars wouldn't start. Everyone in Minnesota has jumper cables. Kids even get them in decorator colors as graduation gifts. If cars don't start, they use the cables to spell SOS in the snowbank. In Lake Wobegon it is a matter of pride if your car starts in cold weather, though people stretch the truth about it.Monday morning Lyle woke up feeling extra cold in his bedroom; there was a sheet of ice on the window and his water pipes were frozen. His car wouldn't start and he had the bright idea to light charcoal and place it under his engine. Well, the garage was saved but not the car. Lyle's brother-in-law, Carl, is the one that has the car that starts and is able to fix everything so it's embarrassing to make these mistakes, though he does know that Carl would be there in a moment if needed. This…

I tell jokes because I remember a time in my life when I crowded into a booth at a bar with eight other guys and some guys leaning over us and we told jokes and now I don’t see people doing that anymore. It’s a guy responsibility — women are worriers, men are kidders — and I remember one afternoon, over rounds of beer and bumps, that we told 75 different How Many Whatsis Does It Take To Change A Light Bulb jokes — we kept a list (Irishmen, therapists, optimists, agnostics, Russians, English majors) and all of them were reasonably funny. No more.So naturally I wonder if AA and rehab and treatment centers are responsible for the disappearance of the joke circle, and instead of pickles walking into a bar, we have a circle of men on folding chairs talking about their emotionally distant fathers who failed to validate them. So a man talked about his father who was a magician who cut people in half. “Did he work in a carnival or circus?” “No, he worked from home. I have a half-brother and a half-sister.” This is a…

Here is a little gift to our GK and Friends subscribers. (In the Back Room, the paid subscribers receive a monologue from the 80’s weekly)12.18.82Calm falls over LW the week before Christmas, yet there still are no Christmas lights on Main St. GK went back after school was done and went to Christmas Eve service with the eldest Ingqvist daughter (they had been chatting through the fall). He was anything but calm at the service. As they sang “Silent Night” at the service, the congregation broke into tears. No matter how hard he tried he couldn’t bring up a tear. After the service, the two of them were talking and he said something he thought was funny. She told him how terribly cold he was and she didn’t want to see him anymore. Now the tears came. GK also remembered the story of the Lundeen family, Mel and Clarice and their eight children. Mel had fallen off the barn and was in the hospital for four months. Christmas was going to be sparse during this time and James was particularly disappointed he wasn’t…

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. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

I accept the fact that I am a back issue, a relic, and that younger people have taken over. Eight years ago I played the Hollywood Bowl; a few weeks ago I played a 200-seater in Menomonie, Wisconsin. It was fun. People in the seats talked back to me. We hung out in the lobby afterward. I caught influenza from one of them. Do Taylor’s fans get to share their germs with her? I doubt it very much. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

I come from pot roast people and the past two months have been rough on me, when, doing penance for the holidays, we’ve been on a bunny rabbit diet, grazing on bowls of greenery. My mother made pot roast for Sunday dinner, which made me think of it as sacred food. She put chuck roast in a covered pan in the oven at low heat when we left for church and when we returned four hours later, the kitchen was redolent with goodness. I don’t recall that she ever tossed a salad. Cows ate salads so whatever good was in them came to us by way of beef. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

I loved my five days there. I encountered keen politeness. The truck stop guy who said, “I appreciate your business” when I paid for my two Butterfingers. The hotel clerk. I walked a long hall to my room and three cleaning ladies looked up and said, “Good morning.” When I left Austin on Monday, a man walked up to me in the airport and said quietly, “I want to thank you for all the pleasure you’ve given people over the years.”Nobody ever said that to me before in just that graceful way. I was touched. At my age, you should’ve given some pleasure to people and he was thanking me for it, not as a fan but on behalf of people in general. Now I wish I had thrown my arms around him. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

And then around midnight a woman walked in, a civilian, no blue on her except her eyes. She was a Unitarian minister, making rounds, saw my name and remembered a column I wrote back in the Bush era saying what a terrible mistake the Iraq War was. My one good protest column and she remembered it all these years later. I told her I’m Episcopalian and that I’ve read Emerson and decided not to come forward. “We never give up hope,” she said. “This building, the George F. Baker Pavilion — he went to my church, so you’re one of us,” She was very funny. She said, “We think of Episcopalians as people who write thank-you notes after orgies.”“That’s high church; I’m low church.” This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

I’m a historic guy. They could put me in a museum. I went to college when tuition was $71/quarter so we didn’t have to ask our parents for money so we got to go into the arts. There were no laptops, no iPhones, no Airplane Mode. I regaled the Lovelanders with stories about the Fifties, back when Minnesota winters were ferocious. I lived through the bitter winter of 1948 when the temp got down to minus 70 and many of us Minnesotans became comatose, our metabolism stopped, there was no neurological response, and a month later I awoke in a narrow wooden box wearing makeup, which I’d never worn before. It was interesting. I should’ve dressed more warmly but as someone said, “Good judgment comes from experience and much experience comes from bad judgment.” And thanks to my mistake I have experienced the afterlife and I told them about it in Loveland. Someday I’ll come to your town and tell you. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit…

It’s an amazing feat, turning the party of rectitude and personal liberty into a unified body of citizens totally devoted to one man, obedient to his self-absorption. He is down on the country, has never praised his wife or intentionally said anything funny, has never hugged a small child in public. But it was so good of these young people to give their old great-uncle a big burst of faith in America’s future. I can’t wait to see them again. If we lowered the voting age to 12 and required voters over 60 to pass a history exam, I believe it’d be a big step forward. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

George Latimer, the chatty New York lawyer who moved to St. Paul in the 1960s and went on to rejuvenate and transform the capital city in 13-1/2 years as its charismatic and visionary mayor. Latimer died on Aug. 18 at 89. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Some of these kids at the Met will wind up in law school and get a serious education in civil procedure and come away with due respect for our system of justice: trial by a jury of one’s peers, the rules of evidence, witnesses testifying under oath aware of the penalty for perjury. The lawyers defending the Famous Man were so taught and they stand silently by his side as he bellows his contempt to the TV cameras……Teen Night at the Met was a holiday from all that. The young people there wouldn’t have elected the Scowler to be a municipal sewage inspector. There are dark days ahead but eventually the young and curious and lighthearted are going to inherit the country and make it great and an artist will make a sculpture of Trump naked with a sword, his bare butt and belly hanging out, and that will be that. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

We live in an Age of Disgruntlement and when I dine with grumpy people, I listen to their gripes and when they stop to take a breath I talk about the great progress made in my lifetime, which of course irks them no end. For one thing, the cash card. We used to go into the bank and hand a check for cash to Mildred the teller with her pert hairstyle and starched blouse, her specs hanging on a chain around her neck, and she’d wrinkle her mouth and peruse the check, questioning the wisdom of handing you money, and eventually she’d count out your thirty dollars and say, “Now don’t go spending it all in one place.” And now there are ATMs everywhere you look and you slide in the card and get $300, no look of disapproval. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

This is one of the happiest summers of my very long life. My wife installed WhatsApp on my phone and it dings and I pick up and she talks to me from the wine country of Portugal where she’s hiking with her brother and his wife, on their way to a baptism and pig roast. Sometimes my daughter comes on and says, “Make me laugh,” so I tell her about the woman at Yellowstone Park who was chased by a bear and the park rangers arrested her for running with a bear behind. She laughs.I’m an old man, I have no ambition whatsoever but I love my work. I do 90 minutes of stand-up, I go back to the hotel and work on my novel, and in the morning I repeat it. The audience laughs a lot and then I have hours of pure silence occasionally interrupted by the voice of the woman I love lying in her hotel room in a heat wave in Portugal and recounting her days’ adventures. Or my little girl needing a joke. So a woman was hit by a car and lay in the street bleeding and someone yelled, “Call a priest!” The woman said, “No, I’m…

What remains powerful is love. My parents loved each other dearly and I witnessed this and it remains large in my life. When I was six, I was a slow reader — when you’ve grown up trying to read Hezekiah and Jeremiah, it does crimp your style — and my teacher Estelle Shaver noticed and kept me after school to read aloud to her from Dick and Jane. When Bill the janitor came in to empty the wastebaskets, she said, “Listen to this boy, Bill. Doesn’t he have a wonderful voice? He’s entertaining me while I’m correcting workbooks.” It was remedial reading but she made it feel like a privilege and this act of kindness sticks with me. Call me naïve but I think marvelous feats can be accomplished by small acts of kindness.The country is moving toward electing a woman president and I am touched by how presidential she looks, her warmth, her gracefulness, how she can converse with a crowd, how she ignores the insults and the bellowing of walruses, and speaks in clipped sentences about the future of the country. This…

History is a complicated business. There are high plateaus and also a good deal of swamp. The Little Bighorn battlefield in Montana was preserved in honor of General Custer who there gave his life along with his men of the Seventh Cavalry, a sacrifice that no longer strikes anybody as noble. What is the good of preserving an enormous site of military stupidity in an unjust cause? The granite monument on Last Stand Hill was put up in 1881, five years after the debacle. In 2003, a monument was erected to the Lakota, Arapaho, and Cheyenne who wiped out the arrogant jerk and his poor soldiers. Tourists still come to look at this, but why? It’s a dishonest historical site: the reason for its existence is a piece of trivia, a few hundred white guys on horseback thought they could spook a few thousand Native men and they were dead wrong about that. But the larger context of the story is lost. The real enemy wasn’t the Seventh Cavalry but the smallpox and other diseases that Europeans brought to the Great Plains…

like hamburgers. I went into a McDonald’s the other day and ordered a Double Quarter Pounder and thought it was good. At McDonald’s you do not have the carcass of the cow on a spit by the drive-up window, the eyes glazed, the tail hanging down, and the workers don’t gouge the meat from the cow’s rib cage. The hamburger is handed to you wrapped in paper. So after my night in Maine, I believe I will stop my quest for sophistication and be myself, an old man of the prairie. If I hadn’t read A.J. Liebling in the eighth grade and set out to write like him, I could’ve become a small-town teacher and coach like Tim Walz and been quite satisfied with my life.Governor Walz is a straight shooter. A mob of armed right-wingers gathered at the governor’s mansion once in 2020 and Mr. Walz called up President Trump at the White House and asked him to talk to the governor’s daughter who was frightened and Mr. Trump, to his credit, did. When Mr. Walz takes office in Washington and the Walz family moves into the mansion at…

09.18..82 This week in Lake Wobegon, the Whippets had a big celebration at the Sons of Knute lodge to celebrate a final game win against the Avon Bards. Hjalmer Ingqvist spent time at the party drinking whiskey because his wife told him about her plans to do a makeover of the house, including peach and apricot.Some men of the lodge were down in the basement building giant duck decoys to be used at Pete Peterson’s house. Pete would shoot ducks right out of his basement window till his wife was startled one too many times. Now he uses a duck blind out behind the house.AS A PAID SUBSCRIBER, YOU WOULD RECEIVE A MONOLOGUE IN YOUR INBOX EVERY SUNDAY. THESE ARE MONOLOGUES THAT ONLY WERE BROADCAST ONE TIME AND CURRENTLY ARE NOT AVAILABLE ON ANY OF OUR WEBSITES.BY SUBSCRIBING, YOU WOULD HAVE ACCESS TO OVER 100 MONOLOGUES RELEASED TO THE BACK ROOM OVER THE LAST TWO YEARS. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit…

I was brought up by Midwestern stoics who drummed the lesson into us: Don’t think you’re somebody because you’re not. You’re not so smart as you think. You’re the same as everybody else. So buckle down and get your work done and don’t fall behind. So I turned into a hard worker. But sitting on this terrace at night with my daughter, and then my wife comes out with her glass of wine, this sandwich putting my friends within easy reach, it is clear to this old Episcopalian, God’s great generosity, how much He loves us, to give us this summer night. In this ugly election year, let us be good for each other. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Thank goodness the Americans won men’s basketball over the French. It’s our game, Americans invented it. To lose would be like English Sauvignon Blanc beating out French. Some English wines have beaten out French in blind tests but who says vision-impaired persons are experts on wine?My event is the old man’s 90-minute stand-up storytelling with some poems tossed in and my routine had an intelligent dog, a girl challenging a boy to wrestle, Babe Ruth, a funeral, and the audience singing “America,” “In My Life,” and “My Girl.” It kept the crowd’s attention pretty well. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

I spent a couple hours on the phone the other night with a man I haven’t seen since high school, he in Northern California, I in New York City, two old men recalling our youth in Minnesota. I love the telephone; it can be so intimate — like radio, which is the business I was in for years — the voice carries so much humanity, even the silences speak……And then, on the phone the other night, it was 1959, I was 17, a sportswriter for the local paper, standing at the 20-yard line as Pete took a handoff from Gary the quarterback and came leaping over his left tackle, grinning as he hip-faked the deep secondary and galloped along the sideline and into the end zone as the crowd cheered and we spelled out A-N-O-K-A and sang the fight song as his teammates carried him around on their shoulders and that’s where he is right now, in glory. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

I don’t require luxury accommodations. I’m fine with economy hotels. I prefer not to be put up in the home of a family with small children. A Holiday Inn Express is fine; they serve a nice scrambled-egg breakfast buffet. A coffeemaker in the room would be nice and I’d prefer a shower whose Hot and Cold knobs are not directly under the showerhead so that one must stand naked while figuring out which knob is which, dreading the possibility of being scalded and having to call 911 and moaning in pain as EMTs haul me to their van, and I know that I will now become their anecdote (“You won’t believe the call we got this morning …”) and they will google me and find out that I hosted “Pie Aroma in Microphone” and am in the Academy of Arts and Letters and yet I didn’t know to Stand Outside The Shower While Turning On Water. I don’t want to become a joke, okay? This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

I don’t talk to many young people — so many of them wear headphones or earbuds and they look stressed out. I’m guessing the music they’re listening to is narcissist pop about Me, Myself and I, my need for more Me time, my exorbitant rent, boring job, bad boss, crowded bike paths, long wait times at climbing walls, the fear of arterial plaque caused by foods containing GMI and DMU, and if I smile at them, they’ll take me for a privileged white male and give me the middle finger. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Mostly I live in a comfortable bubble, enjoying my morning coffee, avoiding bad news that’s beyond my power to affect, bloody wars raging in Ukraine and Gaza, brutal civil wars in Myanmar and Africa, waves of migrants trying to escape violence and poverty — I am mostly oblivious. The Christian missionaries who set out to save souls in Africa and South America saw the world much more clearly than I do. The Ecuadorean moms selling candy bars in subway stations know more about real life than I do. A person could walk along the little shops in low-rent neighborhoods and talk to immigrant entrepreneurs and learn more about the world than if you went to grad school for a Ph.D., but nobody I know does.I ignore my relatives who are loyal to Mr. Presidefendant who is as removed from reality as I am. I went to high school with a Jim Jordan, a Matt Gaetz, a Mike Johnson, but my classmates don’t hold public office, they just hold a mug of beer in the corner saloon while they grouse about the unfairness of life. A nap…

I loved that audience dearly and gave them a good ninety minutes and afterward a distinguished man stopped by to shake hands. Back when, he’d heard me on the radio. I said, “I detect an air of authority about you. You’re the president of something.” He said he was a retired Army major; he’d commanded a tank battalion. “Where?” I said. “Vietnam,” he said. I said I’d never heard of tanks used in Vietnam. He said, “That’s because they would’ve sunk four feet down in the Delta and so they were useless. When we got there, we became infantry.”I said, “You’re looking at a draft dodger.” I felt I owed it to him. I said that I was ordered to report for induction and I wrote to the draft board and told them why I wouldn’t go and I didn’t. I waited for the knock on the door and it never came. So I did a radio show for fifty years without using my name. He looked me in the eye and said, “You did the right thing.” It was a profound moment. I felt that an accommodation had been made. I was forgiven by a man who had earned…

Aging is a beautiful natural process, the wisdom gained, the growing sense of gratitude, the amusement of seeing young people make your same dumb mistakes, but one thing that bothers me is the difficulty of putting on underpants while standing and not leaning against a doorpost. It’s a graceful moment, left leg held high and poked through the hole, then the right, freestanding, no wobbling, which I’ve done since I was a kid, and now at 81 I can sometimes still perform the trick, but then comes a bad experience — the left foot catches the underpants crotch and you lose your balance and suddenly you’re headed for a tragic accident.I do not want my obit to read “The author died at home of a concussion, while trying to pull on his briefs. No foul play was suspected.” And so after a near fall, I sit down on the bed and practice safety, but still there is a sense of loss. Trousers are easier but not without risk. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus…

I spent last week gadding about the Carolinas doing shows and enjoying the South, eating eggs and grits and hearing the waitress say, “Can I get you more coffee, darling?” and encountering Republicans, a tribe rarer than Mohicans on the West Side of Manhattan where I live. I miss them. My uncles tended Republican, believing in personal responsibility and fiscal reality, and at church on Palm Sunday, at coffee hour, I heard the word “taxes” uttered contemptuously and a gentleman in his sixties was saying, “Everything government touches, it messes up,” a genuine living Republican. Twenty minutes before, at Mass, he had been forgiven his iniquity, and I wanted to put my arms around him. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Now I’m an old man, in no rush, keeping an eye out for curbs and crevices and treacherous slabs of sidewalk, hoping not to make a spectacle of myself, knowing that in New York I am surrounded by writers, real or imagined, who would find the crash of a tall elderly author rather satisfying. Once I was swift afoot and long astride, and now I amble along, accepting distractions, my barber Tommy, a sculptor of hair, at work in his shop, and the newsstand, a historic relic, in the Online Age, and the security woman in her yellow vest at the schoolyard gate, and these beautiful children, apartment kids growing up on crowded streets, learning social skills. I had the Mississippi River and woods to go wander off alone in and so I picked up a pencil and a Roy Rogers tablet and wrote, as I am doing now. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Ask a Midwesterner, “How are you?” and we tend to say, “Not bad” or “It could be worse,” feeling it’d sound glib or boastful to say, “Delighted,” and we men in particular tend to adopt an easygoing grumpiness as suitable for all occasions, but I think it’s bad luck not to acknowledge that I am very fortunate to have added my tongue to the other 999 at church, to lift my voice with the two women’s in trio to an audience in Vermont, to see that ecstatic little boy finding the joy in pablum that the Dead tried to find in acid. I am tired of conversations with fellow libs that start with ritual lamentations about the horrors we read about in the paper. We are right to be aware of the horrors, but the display of outrage at cruelties I haven’t experienced strikes me as show-offy. Donate money to organizations that relieve suffering. Volunteer at the food shelf, visit the sick, tutor the needy children, do good where you can, and count your blessings. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with…