A Wonderful Week, Thanks

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As I’ve said many times and I’ll say it again, life gets smaller as you get older and you delete things you don’t really care about such as folk dancing and canoeing and camping — camping is a refugee experience, I was a camp counselor for two summers, I lay on hard ground in a cloud of insects dealing with terrible constipation and every time I smell insect repellent or see an insulated vest, I thank the Lord, “Never again, thank you.” I gave up golf in my thirties, the sheer pointlessness of it. Some people tried to get me interested in bird-watching. Sweetheart, the birds know who they are and they don’t use our words for it, they have their own.

No, what a man needs is someone to love and something to do that he loves to do and if possible a daughter. I have my true love and last week I went around and did a show and I sang and told stories and did stand-up and I never mentioned ***** except to say, “I am 83 and an optimist and I believe that one day soon the wackos who are in charge will return to their stone huts in the swamp and we will be free to be who we are, a kind and curious and generous people who’ve done great things in science and invention and extending their benefits to all.” And people cheered.

It’s Holy Week for us Christians and it’s lovely to be one in New York City where we’re a minority, just as it was in Jesus’ time, and so it makes sense to love your neighbor. Many of my ancestors were illegal migrants: David Powell headed west in 1859 to look for silver and the Shoshone didn’t invite him to cross the Missouri, the Arapaho didn’t offer him a visa, he had to be civil to them, trade with them, hunt with them. He never found silver but he was okay with failure, it led him to discover other things such as community. He was in the territorial legislature that wrote Colorado’s state constitution. He was a flatlander who loved the mountains. He had a flock of children, including my great-great-grandfather. When I was a little boy, I lay on the floor listening to my aunt Ruth tell stories about him.

I hope the people who came to the show remember it, and repeat the good lines, like “I’m married so I’m in Assisted Living, and I’m too old to do the things I never wanted to do anyway, like camping.

I said, “We may be the last generation that knows the words,” and Lord, those people loved to sing, “My country, ’tis of thee” and “Great Balls of Fire”—they shouted the lines, mature educated decent people reliving their teens, and Beatles songs and “Auld Lang Syne” and I sang, “I met a gin-soaked barroom queen in Memphis” and they knew the words and when they sang “Honky tonk women,” they really honked.

A lady in the front row yelled at me, “You need a hanky?” and I pulled out a hanky and blew my nose and she gave me a thumbs-up. I recited “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,” Shakespeare’s sonnet that my teacher Helen Story had me memorize in 1959 when I was 17 and it’s still there in my head, his words about the power of love to banish our troubles, and that’s what the evening was about. Surreal things are happening in America as you know if you look at the papers, men in paratrooper gear hanging out in airports, weird late-night posts on Truth Social, talk of “federalizing” the November election. We have a fourth grader for President and now he shows signs of dementia and his midnight posts on social media are weird beyond belief, and it’s good to go to Wilmington and the old opera house and hear a big crowd sing “America the Beautiful” in three-part harmony (there’s a tenor shortage these days).

Keep the faith, my dears. Someday someone will write a book and explain how it all happened — is there a fungus among us? Were there asphalt germs in the shingles shots? Have Martians landed in the marshes and become federal marshals? Meanwhile, be nice to your neighborhood Christians. Resurrection. It’s impossible but we believe in it. Have a good eternity.

Garrison Keillor © 03.30.26