Garrison Keillor's Podcast Prairie Home Productions

In my parents’ home, waffles took time so they were saved for Saturday morning; you had to locate our waffle iron, a big clunky appliance kept on a high shelf in the laundry room, and we washed the griddle while someone else mixed the batter, and we put Mazola oil or margarine on it for a lubricant, and someone said, “Not too much,” so not enough was put on, so as the waffle baked, it stuck to the griddle, and we had to pry it loose with a fork and it tore into chunks and slivers, which we slathered with syrup and ate, though they were doughy inside, and from this, we got a feeling that life would turn out to be a disappointment. This waffle I’m eating this morning is crisply baked and the syrup is genuine maple from Vermont, not merely maple-flavored, and the waffle is a seven-grain, which is surely a good thing.

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I get pleasure from words, which is surely due to coming from taciturn people, so when I happen upon a seed catalogue and look through the beans (Scarlet Runner, Provider, Contender, Gold Rush, Blue Lake, Tenderette Green) and the corn (Bodacious, Ambrosia Hybrid, Sugar Buns, Abundance) and the tomatoes (Early Girl, Better Boy, Beefsteak, Sweetie, Big Boy, Sunset’s Red Horizon, Jubilee, Juliet, Moneymaker, Aunt Ruby’s, Boy Oh Boy, Nebraska Wedding, Calypso, Abe Lincoln) it’s a garden of poetry.

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Silence is a basic necessity. I’m an early riser and as I make coffee and take my meds, my dreams evaporate and my waking mind is open to inspiration and sometimes finds it — I suddenly know what’s next in my novel, I think of a letter I need to write to someone, and I don’t want an Oscar Mayer wiener to butt in. The thought of wanting to be one, of wanting to be eaten, a jingle about cannibalism. I’ve been off Oscar Mayer for decades, I eat a Nathan’s now and then but what I crave is the Kramarczuk’s bratwurst from the Kramarczuk’s Sausage Company on East Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis.

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From the marmalade to the long table with green lampshades, I’ve chosen one pleasure after another, and when noon approaches, I have a lunch wagon in mind in Bryant Park, which offers an Italian sausage in a bun. Walking around the park eating a sausage with mustard is my idea of what a real city guy does, a guy with places to go and things to do, so why waste an hour and a half sitting at a table with a tablecloth with three people who are outraged by something in this morning’s paper and eager to share their umbrage, which is sound and fury signifying nothing, whereas my heart is beating, I can form words even if I choose not to, and my Grandpa is with me, a stern old Scotsman incapable of saying “I love you” to a child, but he loved marmalade and so do I and that, my dears, is all I can ask for.

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New Yorkers have this ability, to express despair and municipal pride in the same sentence. I over-tipped him and hiked 12 blocks to my doctor who took my blood pressure and said it was excellent, so I owe Joe for getting me to exercise. I was so surprised though by his language describing his likely November opponent, which I read in a paper I won’t name, a two-word term, a participle of concupiscence modifying a word for a common human orifice. Joe, unlike the other guy, is a churchgoer and if my chest had a bazoom, I would clutch it, but it doesn’t, not yet. I just wonder, where are we headed?

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We need to commemorate heroic acts of invention and creativity that have improved our lives vastly over those of our ancestors. I see that Microsoft has a little museum at its campus in Redmond, WA, and there are various rock and roll museums. I’ve googled around for a museum celebrating the first successful open-heart surgical operation, which took place at the University of Minnesota in 1952, a great technological feat that has extended the lives of millions, including me, and I don’t find it.Is there a Google museum somewhere? There’s a Motown Museum in Detroit but it sounds like more of a gift shop than museum. Muddy Waters’s old house in Chicago is now a museum, which is good, but more needs to be done. You set aside 6,000 acres in Pennsylvania to preserve the high-water mark of the wretched Confederacy — why not take that land and create a park devoted to the music of Black people who made the world dance and gave it soul? Nobody knows you when you’re down and out. Everybody needs someone to love. So rock me, mama, rock me. And I’ll fly away, O glory.

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