Contact The Editor
Articles By This Author
Most aphorisms are self-evident, such as "A bird in the hand is
worth two in the bush" and the one about glass houses and
throwing stones and the mice playing when the cat is away and
"As you sow, so shall you harvest" and as I get older, the ones
about living in the moment and seizing the day and not crying
over spilt milk feel very profound.
I remember a day fifty years ago when I had lunch with my
hero S.J. Perelman in Minneapolis when he was to give a
reading and I was to introduce him. I was stunned by
admiration for his writing, such as:
I guess I'm just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an
underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a
beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a
chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws.
I admired elegant wackiness, having grown up among devout
Christians who even in dinner table conversation tried to sound
like the King James translation. They wouldn't have written a
paragraph like his about the mad scientist if you'd gotten them
drunk, sat them on a bundle of dynamite and set the timer to
ten minutes. I knew Perelman's work from The New Yorker and
also from the Marx Brothers movies (great lines like "Don't
wake him up. He's got insomnia. He's trying to sleep it off.").
He didn't know me from Adam or an atom-smasher. I looked at
him and tried to compose a suitable compliment but nothing
was good enough and then a man told him that I had been
published in The New Yorker and Perelman leaned across the
table and started complaining about the magazine, its miserly
payments, its confounded editing, and its clueless fact-checkers
who ripped into comic fiction as if it were a doctoral thesis, and
it was the ultimate honor, to be treated as a fellow working
writer by the great Perelman. I was prepared to kiss his ring and
he talked to me as a colleague in his line of work. The honor of
equality.
His illustrious past didn't matter, the future was unknown, but
there we were, two writers having a Cobb salad and a chicken
sandwich, about to go meet an audience, living in the present.
I guess I'm just an old humorist at heart. Give me a wedding
chapel, a groom who forgot his suspenders and is trying to hold
his pants up, a beautiful girl with last-minute trepidations, the
man puts the ring on her finger as his pants drop, there is an
expulsion of gas, and I care not who wins the National Book
Award.
I live in the present. If I were to think about the future, I'd be
alarmed about the utter demise of journalism and the self-
degradation that many U.S. senators are eager to accept. Instead
I spend the day in my laboratory experimenting to design AI
software to let me chat with long-deceased relatives such as my
great-great-grandfather William Evans Keillor who says, "I
don't know if this is heaven — it looks like Nebraska — and
immortality is not my cup of tea but I'm getting used to it. No
calendars, no clocks. The good news is that death dissolves your
marriage so I'm free of Sarah and I've taken up with an angelic
slip of a girl named Celeste who flutters about in water-wings
and silk undies and instead of beans and bacon we have rigatoni
with zucchini, cannellini, salami Bolognese, prosciutto,
radicchio, parmigiano, pepperoni primavera, chorizo crostata,
guacamole, guanciale Calabrese, pistachio pesto, and
Sangiovese. We never had Italian food in Minnesota in 1880."
He's quite the guy. Opinionated but very witty. I told him to
look up Perelman and now the two of them play canasta together. I'm living in the present, which, thanks to AI, includes
the past.
Garrison Keillor is an author and radio personality. His latest book is "Cheerfulness". Buy it at a 38% discount! by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR.