A Night in Bed with Her and Me

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Life is so dear, I can’t imagine what we’ll do when it’s over. The other night I lay awake for a while trying to think of the first name of the Romney who ran for president against Obama. I remembered it was in 2012 and I ran through an alphabet of men’s names, Al and Bob and Cal and so forth, and Mark seemed to ring a bell. I remembered his dad, George, and I remembered all too well the name of the guy who claimed Obama was born in Kenya and was ineligible to be president, but the gap remained.

You lie in the dark next to the woman you love (Jenny) and resist the mounting urge to climb out of bed and google Romney and yet as you work to bring him to memory, memory goes elsewhere. I remembered seeing Jacqueline Onassis once at a New York Public Library event honoring authors, standing in a hallway chatting with a gentleman, and then noticed a shadowy gentleman 20 feet away watching her, and it suddenly hit me what a strange route her adult life must’ve been. I remembered sitting next to Michelle Obama at a dinner for Senate spouses in the winter of 2008. I was the speaker and was expected to be humorous and it was highly peculiar to realize that I wasn’t going to talk about the one thing that was on everyone’s mind, including the waiters’ (maybe especially the waiters’). I couldn’t talk about it because it was too enormous, the fact of the first African American First Family in our history.

I sat next to Mrs. Obama who sat next to Elizabeth Dole. I was in shock. You sit through dinner knowing the gigantic inadequacy of the remarks you will deliver as dessert, you look into your soul and are shaken by the insipidity of what you’re about to say. The First Lady conversed equally with me and Mrs. Dole, very graciously, very naturally — I admired the skill involved, how natural it was, and when a photographer asked her to stand with me, she did and she put an arm around my back. I admired that. Politics can be so wretchedly awkward, why not try to be graceful at least?

Someone introduced me, maybe Amy Klobuchar, and her compliments were like whiplashes, whack ka-ching ker-pow, and I got up and — God help me, it was something about baseball, which had nothing to do with anything — and then I remembered Romney’s name. Mitt. I didn’t have to go google him. I lay in bed. Jenny asked if I was all right. I was. I still am.

The speech at the Senate spouses dinner was Al Franken’s idea and I said yes, feeling honored, and then it turned out to be humiliating, but the beauty of degradation is how it makes everything else shinier. I did some solo shows recently in Monterey, Napa, and the Presidio in San Francisco that I feel rather good about, with a monologue about the joys of being old — that you will not need to read Moby-Dick and will never go canoeing ever again or camping in the woods with children and you can avoid friends who’re too fond of tossing French phrases into conversation and then translating them for you.

I wind up with a long meandering tale about a family of loud talkers who love German shepherds and have five of them, dogs who were trained for security purposes to sniff people’s crotches, which makes them unpopular in town. A leash law is passed, whereupon a race of voracious rabbits is free to move in and destroy gardens. Two California condors are brought in to devour rabbits, which is disturbing to small children. There’s a pontoon boat with 21 agnostic Lutheran pastors on it and a man has a seizure and loses his mind and lifts barbells though he’s been told not to and dies of a heart attack and his ashes are buried in his briefcase during a violent thunderstorm and we stand, drenched, around the open grave singing How Great Thou Art and then remember he was an unbeliever so we sing Singin’ In The Rain.

I lay in bed, having all by myself recalled Mr. Romney’s first name, and my wife rolled toward me and lay asleep, her face shining in the moonlight, and a few hours later a doctor at Mayo ran a tube up a vein from my groin to my heart to install a tiny device to break up blood clots. It’s just one wonder after another.

Garrison Keillor © 08.25.25