Episodios

  • Mature man available for speaking, easy terms

    Mature man available for speaking, easy terms
    Aug 24 2024
    I don’t require luxury accommodations. I’m fine with economy hotels. I prefer not to be put up in the home of a family with small children. A Holiday Inn Express is fine; they serve a nice scrambled-egg breakfast buffet. A coffeemaker in the room would be nice and I’d prefer a shower whose Hot and Cold knobs are not directly under the showerhead so that one must stand naked while figuring out which knob is which, dreading the possibility of being scalded and having to call 911 and moaning in pain as EMTs haul me to their van, and I know that I will now become their anecdote (“You won’t believe the call we got this morning …”) and they will google me and find out that I hosted “Pie Aroma in Microphone” and am in the Academy of Arts and Letters and yet I didn’t know to Stand Outside The Shower While Turning On Water. I don’t want to become a joke, okay?

    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
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    7 m
  • Waiting at Gate 28

    Waiting at Gate 28
    Aug 17 2024
    I don’t talk to many young people — so many of them wear headphones or earbuds and they look stressed out. I’m guessing the music they’re listening to is narcissist pop about Me, Myself and I, my need for more Me time, my exorbitant rent, boring job, bad boss, crowded bike paths, long wait times at climbing walls, the fear of arterial plaque caused by foods containing GMI and DMU, and if I smile at them, they’ll take me for a privileged white male and give me the middle finger.

    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
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    8 m
  • Hard-earned wisdom passed on at no charge

    Hard-earned wisdom passed on at no charge
    Aug 10 2024
    Mostly I live in a comfortable bubble, enjoying my morning coffee, avoiding bad news that’s beyond my power to affect, bloody wars raging in Ukraine and Gaza, brutal civil wars in Myanmar and Africa, waves of migrants trying to escape violence and poverty — I am mostly oblivious. The Christian missionaries who set out to save souls in Africa and South America saw the world much more clearly than I do. The Ecuadorean moms selling candy bars in subway stations know more about real life than I do. A person could walk along the little shops in low-rent neighborhoods and talk to immigrant entrepreneurs and learn more about the world than if you went to grad school for a Ph.D., but nobody I know does.I ignore my relatives who are loyal to Mr. Presidefendant who is as removed from reality as I am. I went to high school with a Jim Jordan, a Matt Gaetz, a Mike Johnson, but my classmates don’t hold public office, they just hold a mug of beer in the corner saloon while they grouse about the unfairness of life. A nap would do them good.

    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
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    8 m
  • Man walks out on stage as storm rolls in

    Man walks out on stage as storm rolls in
    Aug 3 2024
    I loved that audience dearly and gave them a good ninety minutes and afterward a distinguished man stopped by to shake hands. Back when, he’d heard me on the radio. I said, “I detect an air of authority about you. You’re the president of something.” He said he was a retired Army major; he’d commanded a tank battalion. “Where?” I said. “Vietnam,” he said. I said I’d never heard of tanks used in Vietnam. He said, “That’s because they would’ve sunk four feet down in the Delta and so they were useless. When we got there, we became infantry.”I said, “You’re looking at a draft dodger.” I felt I owed it to him. I said that I was ordered to report for induction and I wrote to the draft board and told them why I wouldn’t go and I didn’t. I waited for the knock on the door and it never came. So I did a radio show for fifty years without using my name. He looked me in the eye and said, “You did the right thing.” It was a profound moment. I felt that an accommodation had been made. I was forgiven by a man who had earned that right. There was no need to say more.

    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
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    7 m
  • The meaning of the freestanding life

    The meaning of the freestanding life
    Jul 27 2024
    Aging is a beautiful natural process, the wisdom gained, the growing sense of gratitude, the amusement of seeing young people make your same dumb mistakes, but one thing that bothers me is the difficulty of putting on underpants while standing and not leaning against a doorpost. It’s a graceful moment, left leg held high and poked through the hole, then the right, freestanding, no wobbling, which I’ve done since I was a kid, and now at 81 I can sometimes still perform the trick, but then comes a bad experience — the left foot catches the underpants crotch and you lose your balance and suddenly you’re headed for a tragic accident.I do not want my obit to read “The author died at home of a concussion, while trying to pull on his briefs. No foul play was suspected.” And so after a near fall, I sit down on the bed and practice safety, but still there is a sense of loss. Trousers are easier but not without risk.

    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
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    7 m
  • A Letter from Greenville, S.C.

    A Letter from Greenville, S.C.
    Jul 20 2024
    I spent last week gadding about the Carolinas doing shows and enjoying the South, eating eggs and grits and hearing the waitress say, “Can I get you more coffee, darling?” and encountering Republicans, a tribe rarer than Mohicans on the West Side of Manhattan where I live. I miss them. My uncles tended Republican, believing in personal responsibility and fiscal reality, and at church on Palm Sunday, at coffee hour, I heard the word “taxes” uttered contemptuously and a gentleman in his sixties was saying, “Everything government touches, it messes up,” a genuine living Republican. Twenty minutes before, at Mass, he had been forgiven his iniquity, and I wanted to put my arms around him.

    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
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    7 m
  • A morning walk along Columbus Avenue

    A morning walk along Columbus Avenue
    Jul 13 2024
    Now I’m an old man, in no rush, keeping an eye out for curbs and crevices and treacherous slabs of sidewalk, hoping not to make a spectacle of myself, knowing that in New York I am surrounded by writers, real or imagined, who would find the crash of a tall elderly author rather satisfying. Once I was swift afoot and long astride, and now I amble along, accepting distractions, my barber Tommy, a sculptor of hair, at work in his shop, and the newsstand, a historic relic, in the Online Age, and the security woman in her yellow vest at the schoolyard gate, and these beautiful children, apartment kids growing up on crowded streets, learning social skills. I had the Mississippi River and woods to go wander off alone in and so I picked up a pencil and a Roy Rogers tablet and wrote, as I am doing now.

    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
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    7 m
  • A lucky man admits to happiness, and why not?

    A lucky man admits to happiness, and why not?
    Jul 6 2024
    Ask a Midwesterner, “How are you?” and we tend to say, “Not bad” or “It could be worse,” feeling it’d sound glib or boastful to say, “Delighted,” and we men in particular tend to adopt an easygoing grumpiness as suitable for all occasions, but I think it’s bad luck not to acknowledge that I am very fortunate to have added my tongue to the other 999 at church, to lift my voice with the two women’s in trio to an audience in Vermont, to see that ecstatic little boy finding the joy in pablum that the Dead tried to find in acid. I am tired of conversations with fellow libs that start with ritual lamentations about the horrors we read about in the paper. We are right to be aware of the horrors, but the display of outrage at cruelties I haven’t experienced strikes me as show-offy. Donate money to organizations that relieve suffering. Volunteer at the food shelf, visit the sick, tutor the needy children, do good where you can, and count your blessings.

    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
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    8 m