It's a Beautiful Summer, Says Me

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It’s good to be home after weeks on the road in motels, back in my own shower stall, not in alien ones designed by cruel engineers, where you must stand directly under the shower head when you turn the knob, not knowing if a clockwise turn will give you an Arctic waterfall or an eruption of hot lava. At home my office chair is set for accurate typing, not a cheap motel chair that’s a few inches too low and you glance at the screen and 797ebw33bq2yb0qtbrb9rt8ggwy.

And at home I have a cushy chair that when I sit in it and close my eyes, I fall asleep. A nap chair. This is crucial for any writer. The ten-minute snooze is the cure for writer’s block. You come to a dead end, you just sit in the chair, and minutes later, open your eyes and the road opens before you. So many writers in my generation tried to achieve this by taking LSD, peyote, heroin, cocaine, gin, etcetera, but the answer is: the nap.

My generation went wrong on so many counts. It romanticized the random itinerant life of cowboys, sailors, magazine subscription salesmen — Life As A Journey, Not A Destination — and it derided domesticity in favor of naivete and narcissism.

I hold the New England transcendentalists responsible for this, Ralph Waldo Emerson and his ilk. He said, “Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true.” And thereby encouraged hundreds of people to become songwriters who should’ve gone into trash hauling instead. Songs like “The aunts are my friends, they’re blowing in the wind.” Songs like:

Imagine there’s no countries
And everyone is free.
Imagine we are geniuses
And have a Ph.D.
Imagine if we spread our arms
That we can really fly.
I’m standing in the window,
I think that I should try.

Emerson should’ve said, “Dare to dream but meanwhile look around and see what needs to be done and do it. Be useful. Before you write the song, clean your room and do your laundry.”

My generation led the country down the path of willful naivete, thinking we were going to save the world when actually we were only scattering flower petals. Our parents saved the world when they defeated fascism in the Forties. Some of our generation did important research in medical care, treatment of alcoholism and cognitive disabilities and mental illness, electronics, and others threw words at paper or ventured into avant-garde gardening or conceptual choral conversation.

I was never an important writer but I did something useful, a live radio variety show that families sat and listened to together, old and young, the kids fascinated by the fact that the show was being performed at the same time as they were listening to it — simultaneity! Incredible. —and they had fun together in the same room for an hour or so.

I grew up back in radio days when everyone had a yard, a garage, a refrigerator with leftovers in plastic dishes with snap-on lids, and monogamy was the rule, which puts the parents in the background and gives the children center stage to go through the drama of adolescence, the quest to be a Cool Kid, to dream, to be unique like the Zimmerman kid in Hibbing, but we stayed in adolescence too long. Jumpin’ Jack Flash, it’s a gas, gas, gas is all well and good when you’re in your twenties but when the Stones come back fifty years later and fans with walkers and canes are dancing, is this something we really need to see?

We rebelled against our stodgy parents, not understanding that the prosperity they created made our liberty possible, and then we messed up the country. In 1960 I enrolled at the University of Minnesota and paid $71 for tuition for fall quarter. Now a year’s tuition is $18,462. No wonder the young are furious and so they paid us back royally by electing the most inept and brazenly corrupt, thieving, dishonest regime in American history. My generation’s rebellion was mostly imaginary but what Gen Z males did by electing a jackass has made us a laughingstock. That’s why I quit reading the news, because I still love this country, and when I walk around and observe life, I still can. Walk in the park, sit in a coffee shop, go to church, look at kids in the playground, it’s the same country I grew up in. It’s a beautiful summer if you turn off the TV.

Garrison Keillor © 06.08.26