Happy Old Man Looking Over His Shoulder

Watching Zohran Mamdani campaigning before Election Day, smiling, full front teeth visible continuously with only a momentary closure of lips for long periods of time, the friendly expression looking genuine while walking through crowds shaking one hand after another, turning up the charm, offsetting the word “Socialist” around his neck, maintaining his nonstop grin, a physical feat as amazing as the Dodger outfielder who leaped against the wall and snagged the Blue Jay triple and broke the hearts of millions of Canadians. As amazing as when my friend Bob Douglas would set down the mandolin and pick up a pair of spoons and play them against the outstretched fingers of his left hand, playing snazzy ragtime percussion, like your church choir dropping their gowns and becoming the Rockettes.

The wonders of this world never cease to amaze. I took the 8th Avenue subway to midtown Manhattan a couple weeks ago in the heaviest downpour in memory — the train stopped at Columbus Circle, the track flooded ahead, so I climbed up to catch a cab and waded in a river where Columbus’s statue stands and got drenched in the typhoon. Even in the mass metropolis, Nature exercising command when it chose, office workers ducking down into the subway, soaking wet.

The world keeps moving on. I board a plane to Minneapolis and the preflight announcement that tampering with the smoke detectors in the lavatory is illegal recalls the long-ago era of smokers who might’ve tampered but they’re long gone, dead, and cigarette smokers today are lonely outlaws lurking in back alleys. I attended college in smoke-filled classrooms, it felt sophisticated, people in French movies smoked, but eventually the light dawned. Now the preflight warning is like a sign forbidding the trapping of beavers or polar bears.

We live in fascinating times. History is being made daily. The president, asked on “Meet the Press” if it’s his duty to uphold the Constitution, says, “I don’t know.” Other presidents wouldn’t have been stumped by the question. I imagine that a gentleman walked the Titanic’s deck that cold night as the ship, seeing the field of icebergs, cut its engines and drifted, and he thought, “Someday there will be great books written explaining how this came to be and I feel I have a right to know but I won’t live to read them.”

My Crandall ancestors in the Colonies stayed loyal to George III and found the Revolution revolting so when Jefferson and Madison and their Virginian pals got the best of Cornwallis, my people escaped north and my wife’s ancestors, the Griswolds and Spencers, got the silverware and the livestock. In Nova Scotia, a Crandall married a Keillor who’d just arrived from Yorkshire and from that line I am sprung. My grandpa James came down from Canada to help his sister, whose husband died of TB, and James, a skilled carpenter, took over a miserable farm and got stuck in the life of an impoverished farmer with eight children. Two became well-to-do, four middle-class, two remained struggling.

I grew up in the country, a hardscrabble life, a quiet kid with glasses, a misfit, and I recall vividly the fly ball that flew toward me in right field that I dashed in for, glove raised, only to have the ball bounce off my head, to the shrieks and scorn of my teammates. It was painful. I skipped recess and gave up ball and sat in the library instead. This is how you become an author, by the traumatic road of ridicule. I seized the illusion of giftedness, and set out to be an author while hosting a radio show and made a name for myself by the age of 32.

I scrambled through a series of rocky romances and found true love at 50 and hung on for dear life and got snookered in old age but survived somehow and stayed productive and happy, stood upright, maintained a comic balance and kept busy doing solo dates, stepping out onstage and singing, “Here I am, O Lord, and here is my prayer: Please be there. Don’t want to ask too much, miracles and such. Just whisper in the air: please be there.” And I swear, He is there. And so is she. It’s a remarkable life, to be truly loved in old age. And to think that when I was a teenager, my school bus went right by her house but I had to go all the way to New York to find her. And in ten days it’ll be thirty years. Happy anniversary, Jenny.

Garrison Keillor © 11.10.25