Contact The Editor
Articles By This Author
I am thankful that Thanksgiving is over and the stupor of carbohydrates and tryptophan and I think back and ask myself, "Why? Why in heaven's name did I walk over to the buffet and help myself to seconds?" As Socrates said, the secret of happiness lies in learning to enjoy less. So next year I plan to celebrate the day with a bowl of chicken soup and a few saltines.
In 2026 I intend to eat moderately, resume regular exercise, speak kindly, patch up old hostilities, and clean up the stacks of trash that obscure my desk so that I am now writing this on the kitchen table.
I got a phone call Thursday morning from an old friend who sees the country enduring dreadful damage and it was troubling and also hard to disagree with him. We are an embarrassment for all the world to see, he said, America with its pants down, the world laughs at us. For a nation to elect a corrupt lunatic president does make the Electoral College look like the Electoral Elementary. But then in the middle of this conversation, the door opened, Jenny let out a cry of delight, and in came my grandson Charlie and his girlfriend, Raina, two tall elegant intelligent humorous young people planning to move to New York and make a life here, on their way to dinner downtown, and the day brightened.
I admire their adventurous spirit, leaving Minnesota for the great metropolis with big ambitions. I'm a Midwesterner still and when I can't get to sleep in Manhattan, I slowly recite the street names of Minneapolis to myself, Aldrich, Bryant, Colfax, Dupont through Washburn, Xerxes, York, Zenith. And when I get up in the night and stand at the toilet, it's the thought of Minnehaha Falls that opens the bladder.
I am one of the last American writers to have written a full-length novel on an Underwood manual typewriter, and these two young people are comfortable with A.I. and find it useful. I grew up under some ferocious preaching by men who I felt used the Gospels as an instrument of aggression, and these two skipped that.
If I have any influence on them, I'd want it to be to love your work, to feel ambitious every day, to climb the hill and see the next valley.
We live by humor and grace,
My parents intended for me to become a carpenter like my dad but I became a good speller, the winner of spelling contests, which led to literary ambitions. I was a very quiet boy, silent even — "socially unskilled" they'd say now but back then it was considered a sign of unique intelligence. I had the good fortune to attend a country school where such ambitions were considered effeminate so few other boys took that path, which gave me the illusion of being gifted. I wrote a sonnet (O spring, how freshly do your grasses green inspire) when I was ten. To avoid a life in construction, I worked hard to develop incompetence and was kicked out of Mr. Buehler's shop class and sent up to Miss Person's speech class so that I wouldn't cut off my hand with a power saw and, there in a class of mostly girls, I had the chance to be charming.
My college professors only taught tragedy, which naturally turned me toward comedy and I found S.J. Perelman, who'd written for the Marx Brothers, and the light went on. Perelman once wrote, "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." To me, this paragraph was beautiful liberation from the angry preaching and the dismal study of funereal literature.
The literary life had its hazards — I became a chain-smoker and an ambitious drinker, which seemed to me to be the marks of a serious writer so in my middle years I had to stomp out those two destructive habits, which I did. Cutting out alcohol gave me the gift of a clear head in the morning and some days I wake up at 4 a.m. with an idea in my head and tiptoe into the kitchen and make coffee and sit at the keyboard and feel outrageously lucky. I wish the same for them.
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.
Good manners, books, an embrace,
Good water, good light,
A pencil to write,
And a little orange stub to erase.