Back Home to Minnesota

I flew to Minnesota on Wednesday where it was below zero, but never mind that, I’m a happy man, I’m in love, I have work to do, and it felt good to descend down low over the Minnesota River and onto the tarmac of MSP and roll to a stop.

I was in Minnesota to rehearse a Christmas show. But once again the Great Intruder had seized our attention by setting off another stink bomb, which is hard to ignore. It is Advent, with the beautiful mystery of the child in the stable and the beloved carols and the story we know so well, and then an old man in bright yellow golf pants walks into church with a bucket of dog turds. Where are the ushers?

Once we had presidents who talked like Methodist ministers and now we have a furious cabdriver in rush hour. In less than a week, we get the surrender ultimatum to Ukraine, the evidence of war crimes in the Caribbean, his pardon of a major cocaine king, and his racist slander of Somalis. How will we endure three more years of this man, I ask you.

I had three bags at the airport and when I saw I’d have to maneuver them onto an escalator, I asked a Somali man with a luggage cart to help me get to a taxi. He grabbed the bags and headed for the elevators and greeted some wheelchair pushers and another luggage handler along the way, and I asked him how many Somalis work at the airport, and he said, “About a thousand, I think.” The pushers and handlers and cart drivers are mostly Somali, he said, and also some of the crews that clean the planes. Useful work, particularly for us elderly, but I suppose a multibillionaire president wouldn’t come in contact with such workers, he having Cabinet secretaries to carry his baggage for him.

I grew up in Minnesota and my parents gave me an easy childhood, since they had come through hard times, Dad on a struggling farm with his elderly father failing, Mother in a family of twelve kids without a mother. They shut politics out of our lives entirely, shut out gossip and judgment of others. There were troubles in both their families but I never knew about them until many many years later. They were expert keepers of secrets. We lived in a small peaceful domestic world, our parents dearly loved each other and we knew it and their love was a roof over our heads. We were six children, the two older responsible ones, the three bright gifted little ones, and me the invisible middle child who grew up absorbed in books and stories and elaborate pretend games with friends conducted on the Mississippi banks and woods and ravines.

I imagined myself a writer when I was twelve or thirteen and of course in my teens I rebelled against my parents’ way of thinking as being narrow-minded and now I see it as an enormous blessing, creating a safe loving domicile with strong walls against anger, anxiety, and dread, and the anticipation of evil.

Something happened when I was thirteen. I turned away from my peers and gravitated toward elders, beloved aunts, kindly teachers. I was drawn to their cheerfulness. I skipped the rivalries with peers and the ambition to be the coolest person in the room, and I lived in my own head. As the Psalmist said, Come unto his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise. For the Lord is gracious; his mercy is everlasting; and his truth endureth from generation to generation. In other words, get over yourself. Lighten up.

And now I’m an old man with a clear sense of time. Here I am on a cold morning in a hotel in St. Paul with work to do. Seize the day. Enjoy the work. Let John Thune and Marco Rubio and John Roberts deal with the man in yellow pants bringing manure into church. I am living in the small loving world my mother and father made for me. I never heard them curse. Cruelty was not practiced by them. The car with the bumper sticker The Best Form of Gun Control Is to Use Both Hands is alien to us. The Lord is merciful and so, instead of wrestling three heavy bags onto an escalator, I hailed the Somali man with the cart and it was easy as pie.

Garrison Keillor © 12.05.25