Returning to a Generous Place

I’m an old man and the ease of email and texting is a marvel to me, more so than to you kids, until I notice the time I spend daily erasing emails and texts from various noble causes and Nancy Pelosi and AOC and other Democrats asking for money, which I don’t even read, the first few words, “I’m sorry to bother you” or “This is important” or “Please don’t erase,” tell me what’s up, so I click on the trashcan icon and they’re gone. But it takes a lot of time. I probably could’ve finished reading Moby-Dick in the time it takes, if I wanted to, which I don’t. But anyway.

I marvel at using my cellphone as a video camera. I’m on tour in December and I record Heather Masse and me singing, “I’m lonesome for my precious children, they live so far away,” in sweet duet and send it to my daughter along with me telling the joke, “How do chickens pick their noses? With chicken fingers.”

My phone has a multitude of apps that remain unused, marvelous though they may be, but I doubt there’s one that would fix my problem of purposelessness, that sudden sensation when walking into a room and wondering, “What did I come in here for? It was clear in my mind a moment ago.” So I retrace my steps back to my location of certitude and it doesn’t reappear. So rather than dither, I go on to something else. I write a limerick:

Melville’s great book Moby-Dick
Is rather dark and it’s thick
And the trip to the ship
Is a slow faucet drip
So I think I will wait for the flick.

The tour began in Minnesota, went to Texas, then came to Nashville and we did a show at the Ryman Auditorium and it came back to me, the great good fortune that landed on me there in 1973. I was writing for The New Yorker back then and somehow I wangled an assignment to go to Nashville and write about The Grand Ole Opry and down to Nashville I rode on the train. I knew nobody in town. I went to the Ryman and bought a ticket to the Saturday night show and asked if I could interview Mr. Roy Acuff the emcee and word got to Sarah Ophelia Colley, a friend of Roy’s and also a reader of The New Yorker, that I was there and then I was in like Flynn.

Sarah was a regular on the show as Cousin Minnie Pearl, in a frilly dress and a hat with a price tag hanging from the brim, who came out and cried, “Howwww-dee! I’m just so proud to be here!” and told about her hometown of Grinder’s Switch and her Uncle Nabob and Aunt Ambrosia, and she showed me around backstage and introduced me to Chet Atkins and other people, so I got vouched for and went home and wrote the story.

After it appeared, my editor Bill Whitworth told me I should start a radio show like the Opry and I went back to Minnesota and did that and A Prairie Home Companion ran for almost fifty years, same as Minnie’s run at the Opry, and changed my life. I started my Lake Wobegon after her Grinder’s Switch and worked it into a weekly monologue. The show went national and I got to do a great many things I couldn’t at The New Yorker such as play the private eye Guy Noir and sing duets with wonderful women and hang out with musicians, a great class of people, and even marry one, Jenny, and have a daughter with her who calls me Show Boy.

I try not to look back because I’ve done a number of phenomenally numbskull things that still can make me grind my teeth at night, misbegotten romances, some real estate acquisitions that defy common sense and a couple deaccessions that now strike me as demented. I’ve toted up dumber things over the years than anyone else who finished the eighth grade and I got a B.A. and did two years of grad school. But the one lucky streak that started in 1973 changed the game. It’s like when you go down the stairs into the subway station and through the turnstiles just as the train pulls in and the doors open and you walk aboard as if it’s your private express. You can’t argue with luck, you just ride along.

Garrison Keillor © 12.15.25