Garrison Keillor's Podcast Prairie Home Productions

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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He asked about North Dakota, so I told him. Yes, the winters are long and the land is flat, but the people are the salt of the earth. Decency and humor.  No pretense. Nobody lives here to show off. The man in the greasy jacket and barn boots might be a multi-millionaire farmer and he will be friendly without patronizing you, and you can tell him what you think and---- I got sort of rhapsodic, though I am not considering moving to North Dakota myself.A man choosing between Singapore and North Dakota has opened up a broad range of options. I saw him again the next day ---- Grand Forks is the sort of town where you keep running into people ---- and he had a big grin on his face. The cold weather seemed to energize him. And he had met other members of his math tribe. He looked good, a free man, the world his oyster, nothing to hold him back.    

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