40 episodes

Funny, poignant, sentimental, and sometimes controversial thoughts of the day.

garrisonkeillor.substack.com

Garrison Keillor's Podcast Prairie Home Productions

    • Society & Culture
    • 4.8 • 1K Ratings

Funny, poignant, sentimental, and sometimes controversial thoughts of the day.

garrisonkeillor.substack.com

    The winter blues has got me bad, mama

    The winter blues has got me bad, mama

    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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    • 7 min
    Me and Maurizio, ships in the night

    Me and Maurizio, ships in the night

    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.    

    This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

    • 7 min
    Crossing the flats, looking for mountains

    Crossing the flats, looking for mountains

    In homage to my ancestor David Powell, I’m riding a train across Kansas heading for Colorado, his goal in 1859 when he left Martha Ann and the children behind in Missouri and headed for the gold rush. Kansas is a state of vastness, some of it seems undisturbed since David rode across it. Here is a little farm near the tracks with no neighbor for several miles. A good place for an introvert like me. I could tow a trailer out on the treeless prairie and pull the shades and sit there and slowly go insane, buy a couple rifles with scopes, and yell at the TV about government oppression.David was an extrovert. He was a leader of his wagon train and organized the lashing of wagons together to cross the rivers. He hunted antelope with the Arapaho and traded with them. He arrived in Colorado too late to get rich and instead sat in the territorial legislature and helped draft a state constitution. At age 62, an old man in those times, he settled here in Kansas and wrote to his children: “I built a house 21r x 24r, one-story of pickets, shingle roof, 6 windows and 2 doors, divided and will be when finished one like my house in MO. Dug a well 20 feet deep, plenty of water, and put up a stable for 10 head of stock, covered with hay. We have done very well with oats and I have 25 tons of timothy hay, not yet sold. I am very comfortable, the times are fair here in Kansas, we are all well except for a touch of influenza. Our love and best wishes to all, yours affectionately.”

    This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

    • 7 min
    Sunday morning, back in the fourth pew

    Sunday morning, back in the fourth pew

    A man stopped at my table who recognized me from my radio days. “Have a seat,” I said. He’s from Ohio, retired high school English teacher. Like everyone my age, he’s worried about young people. “They’re so busy with sports and activities and social media and video games and whatnot, it got so I couldn’t assign reading, they just didn’t have time for it.”“We were lucky to be born when we were,” I say. We had the advantage of boredom, which led us to become readers. And we launched into memories of our long-ago youth.

    This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

    • 7 min
    As I keep telling myself, life is good

    As I keep telling myself, life is good

    The birth of the spotless giraffe at a zoo in Tennessee, the only known one on earth, is important news to those of us who grew up as oddballs, seeing the spotted mama giraffe nuzzling her child, remembering the kindness of aunts and teachers who noticed our helpless naivete and guided us through the shallows.And then there was the story of the cable car in Pakistan that lost a couple cables and dangled helplessly hundreds of feet in the air with terrified children inside. A nightmare in broad daylight. A rescuer harnessed to the remaining cable had to bring the children one by one to safety.

    This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

    • 7 min
    What endures is decency, believe me

    What endures is decency, believe me

    I hear people complain about police and city planners and the health care system, but never about firemen or EMTs, and few complain about slow delivery of mail, perhaps because so few people write letters these days. I do and delivery is prompt. This morning I wrote a postcard with a limerick for a new father:Byron is his child’s wiperAnd poop does not make him hyper,He cleans the behindWith a calm focused mindAnd fastens a fresh tiny diaper.A phone text would be eco-friendlier but a written message has the hope of being taped to the fridge, maybe saved in a drawer and 50 years from now the infant’s children will find it and be amused. Fundraising appeals are tossed and paid bills but the little poem about defecation will give pleasure long after I am gone: this is the hope.

    This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

    • 7 min

Customer Reviews

4.8 out of 5
1K Ratings

1K Ratings

Saskat-Seismo ,

Our country’s greatest storyteller

I’m a devoted fan of all his work. A lifelong legacy of American heartland stories. I’ve listened to his Lake Woebegone tales over & over and I never tire of entering this imaginary world which always feels like going home. I’m so glad he continues to spin ideas and images to enrich our souls. Hooray for Garrison… Thank You!

bob0828 ,

Enjoyable

Always make be chuckle!

Uffda5 ,

Garage Logic

Loved your interview on the Garage Logic podcast. Listened to all of it and loved every minute. Will try to catch one of your live appearances. Would love to listen to PHC shows from years past if available on You Tube or similar service. Thanks for making yourself available.

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