Gearing up to go on the road

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Some days I glance at the front page and see the name RUMP in three or four places so I flip back to the Lifestyle section and maybe find a wine review, “Fresh and vivacious with chewy tannins and bursts of flowers and fruits.” The deranged man with cognitive problems is a passing phenom, but bursts of flowers and fruits have been with us forever and even in January here in Manhattan one can find shops to walk into and feel flowers bursting around you and markets where you inhale the freshness of mounds of apples and pears and oranges.

The old king who goes mad is a character out of Shakespeare, he has no place in America, you walk out of a performance of King Lear and buy a bouquet of tulips and a bag of apples and you're back to reality. When Van Gogh admitted himself to the asylum for the insane at Saint-RĂ©my in Provence, he spent the last years of his life painting the gardens and woods, the trees and flowers, paintings that were the finest of his life. He could've been destructive, set fires, broken windows, preyed on the weak and helpless, but he did not, he found solace in painting. This is the difference between an artist and a creep.

I am not insane, insensitive yes, perhaps slightly autistic, lacking in social skills due to my Sanctified upbringing that taught me to shun unbelievers, but I found ways to work around this and engage with people, starting with my discovery of the limerick. Other kids were writing haiku.

The blackbird descends
Overhead in the darkness
And shrieks at the moon.

Which I didn't understand at all, compared to the simple construction of a five-line limerick.

I do not like camping at all,
Not winter, spring, summer or fall.
I hate snakes and owls
And can't move my bowels
Except in a warm toilet stall.

It isn't The Starry Night or Irises but it makes people laugh or at least smile and it is easily replicated, you don't need to go to New York or L.A. to see it.

From the limerick I worked my way up to writing essays and stories and eventually wound up on a stage with a microphone and there, thank the Lord, I was able to be the warm friendly good-humored soul I found it hard to be in real life. As a writer, you spend a good deal of time looking at the wall. Or you lie on the floor and gaze at the ceiling. Neither of these practices is conducive to becoming a charming person. But as I have proved, one can work around one's deficiencies to achieve adequacy.

My life has been a series of trips on sinking ships. I went to high school and college before there were cellphones, when students looked at the teacher and took notes in longhand. I grew up among Sanctified who were so devoted to G od's Word they sat through two-hour Bible study sessions with a brief hymn-singing intermission. I sat in their midst and surreptitiously wrote limericks.

I wrote for my hometown paper when it was set in hot lead on a Linotype by a printer named Jens smoking a Lucky and drinking coffee laced with bourbon and the paper was printed on a flatbed press that was inked with rollers and delivered fresh to people's doorsteps by boys on bicycles, which now is ancient history along with the Aztecs, the passenger pigeon, and magnetic recording tape. I necked with a girl in the front seat of a car, when the front seat was a bench seat and the gearshift was on the steering wheel, before it was installed between the two bucket seats and made necking awkward at best so that the front-seat couple had to listen to the cries of pleasure from the back-seat couple who went on to a happy marriage and the front-seaters lacked the social skills needed to establish satisfying relationships.

But people still go to theaters and clubs to see a person stand at a microphone and try to amuse them, and as long as they do, I am prepared to be that person. I do not talk about mad kings in my performance. I'm not a psychiatrist and I found King Lear boring when I was forced to read it in college. He died. Good riddance.

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.