Garrison Keillor's Podcast
A podcast featuring Garrison Keillor's reflections, stories, and commentary. The show blends humor, sentiment, and occasional controversy as Keillor shares thoughts on daily life, culture, and current events. It is produced by Prairie Home Productions and carries the familiar storytelling style of A Prairie Home Companion. Listeners are often directed to Keillor's Substack for additional writing and updates.
Episodes
The one-armed man at the concert
Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 in C Major, the “Jupiter,” was his last, a symphony he never heard, composed in the summer of 1788, three years before his death, along with two other symphonies, a piano sonata, other chamber works, by a 32-year-old genius deeply in debt, having lost the favor of his noble patrons, caring for his ailing wife, Constanze — it’s heartbreaking to hear the tenderness of the da
Gearing up to go on the road
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
An old man's winter night
A Times story reporting that college students in a writing course do better when they go offline for a month makes perfect sense to me, same as if you say a writer does better at a laptop in the public library than shnockered on a sailboat in a storm, but the idea of persuading students to go offline strikes me as quixotic, like Amish evangelism or banning the use of chairs. The internet is here a
Remembering you but not the rest
I remember when I was a kid, our family driving home from Sunday night gospel meeting and stopping at A&W for root beer floats, how beautiful they were after an hour of contemplating eternal damnation. I remember being sent to Aunt Jo’s house when my mother was having babies, a house with a wood-burning stove and outhouse like in Little House on the Prairie. I remember my first time on skis, s
What we learn from air travel
This all came crashing down last Monday night at JFK when I boarded a Delta flight to Seattle around 5 p.m. I consider JFK to be as close to a prison camp as I care to get. The Delta terminal is vast and crowded and ugly, endless lines at Ticketing, TSA agents whose badge entitles them to freely express hostility and contempt, miles of concourses lined with souvenir shops, the smell of bad food. N
My weekly walk to church and back
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for moreMy weekly walk to church and backThe Column: 04.04.25Garrison KeillorApr 4READ IN APPShareWe seem to be in a war against science and research, which is causing anxiety among us geezers grateful for anti-seizure meds that guard against us suddenly shaking uncontrollably on the street corner and strangers having to remember first aid from 4-H to keep us f
The sweet day draws near
And now I worry, as old people do, about the kids I see who are growing up in the dreadful clutter of American life, the gizmos and social media bullying, and can they find delight as I did in skating on the frozen Mississippi and discovering Liebling and Jenny found listening to Prokofiev and Brahms. I pray for our kids to be lighthearted. The darkness is out there, and Christmas becomes utterly
The perils of pedestrianism
And so you have men on bikes racing through narrow gaps on jammed avenues with a backpack full of shrimp curry and pad thai, meanwhile an elderly man (me) on his way to the drugstore to pick up some Alka-Seltzer stands on the curb, peering into the darkness for some glimmer of light, some sign of motion, some clue as to approaching bicycles. This is the adventure of life in Manhattan, serious bodi
My plan for the next four years
Life is good once you master the art of Deletion. Every day my laptop is full of emails asking for money to do worthwhile, even noble, things, which, if I donated to them, I’d soon be living in a cardboard box in a vacant lot, and so I click on “Unsubscribe” and they go away for a while. Instead, I google “What is the prospect of international peace and understanding?” and find that the U.N. think
Mother the queen of my heart
I was not a good son. A good son is one who visits his mother regularly and I was too busy to do that. I ran around a lot. Sometimes I traveled in fancy company. I was once in a movie directed by Robert Altman and financed, in part, by the Pohlad family. Carl Pohlad, the richest man in Minnesota, sat next to my mother at the premiere, and the two of them carried on an extensive conversation, which
Living in the present, a day at a time
I live in the present. If I were to think about the future, I’d be alarmed about the utter demise of journalism and the self-degradation that many U.S. senators are eager to accept and the use of cryptocurrency to enrich the Chief Executive by tech tycoons kicking back 20% of their federal contracts, but instead I spend the day in my laboratory experimenting to design AI software to let me chat wi
It's never too late to be normal
The lust for world domination does not make for the good life. It’s the life of the male raccoon who battles for preeminence and winds up in a ditch being pecked at by crows. It’s not for sensible people. Be at peace, read books, cherish your friends, take walks, love life until the first coronary walks up and slugs you in the chest. Charisma is pure fiction, and so is brilliance. It’s the dummies
A wonderful night in Lubbock
I intend to enjoy defeat and go back and read Shakespeare, whom I wrote C-minus term papers about in college using terms like “well-structured,” “complex,” “buttery.” I’m going to travel to Dublin, Stockholm, Rome, where a person can become absorbed in the immediate surroundings, be engrossed in the moment. I want to hear The Marriage of Figaro again and the Fauré Requiem. I want to walk in the pa
A tale about close neighbors
I do not understand the neighbors, actually, such as why their summer house has LANDSCAPING and LAWN ORNAMENTS. A summer house is for relaxation, it isn’t to demonstrate craftmanship. You are supposed to sit on the porch and read Proust, you are not supposed to create a home that Proust would’ve envied.And I don’t understand why a copy of Foreign Affairs sits on their kitchen counter. In the den,
A man on the porch by the river
When I was 12, I was a teacher’s pet, so I was a target for playground bullies. A boy told me my teeth were green and rotten and I believed him and stopped smiling. And I believed that the Second Coming was imminent and though I was a Christian I wasn’t sure that God realized that. Brother Frank could preach a sermon that made me feel like a war criminal.But you grow up and experience the generosi
A primer for my friends of middle-age
There is always an excuse for not exercising, a religious prohibition, some hereditary syndrome that makes you feel desperate when you breathe hard, an allergic reaction to your own perspiration, but these can be overcome with help. My excuse is that I hated high school phy-ed with a passion, the chin-ups, the rope climb, the running somersault, the running dive over the horse, the wrestling, the
It's never too late for a revelation
My steak arrived and I hated it. It was tender to the point of being gelatinous. It was rare, not medium rare. It wasn’t chewy, as steak should be. It was sort of like eating raw liver. But when the waiter came by to ask if everything was okay, I said, not wanting to be a complainer or seem unworthy of this great delicacy, “It’s wonderful.” Other Midwesterners have this same problem. Hauled to the
Happiness and the price of groceries
I like Trader Joe’s because the clientele is half my age or less and I stand with my cart in a long double line with college kids and mothers of tiny children and I listen to fragments of phone conversations that are fresh and fascinating to me. These people lean toward eagerness and curiosity with a streak of satire; my people tend toward dismay and resignation. The lines move fast at Trader Joe’
A good weekend in Georgia
I’m grateful that, as a kid, I got to experience “visiting,” when the family got in the car and dropped in at someone’s house and sat around and visited. We kids sat quietly and listened to the elders reminisce about their childhoods, which could be a true revelation, hearing their different versions of history, who looked out the window of the schoolhouse and cried, “Our house is on fire!” and th
Thank you for reading this
Cranberries are the heart of Thanksgiving dinner. You don’t want a gourmet dinner that distracts you from your life blessings, so you serve turkey, a profoundly average dish. Every turkey dinner is about as good as any other turkey dinner. Same with pumpkin pie. But cranberries are terribly exciting. They are the Robert Frost of fruits, the Flaubert, the Frank Lloyd Wright, the Gabriel Fauré. You
A father speaks, after the day has passed
I’ve known some great fathers, my brother Philip for one, my nephews Will and Douglas, my friends Mark and Tony and Sandy and Fred. Patience is one of their virtues, optimism, a willingness to look the other way: in other words, a sense of humor. Had I been a postal clerk or a plumber, I’d’ve maybe been a better father but I got engrossed in show business and for a few years was fairly popular and
News from December 24, 1983
A little gift for our Garrison Keillor and Friends subscribers. In the Back Room (paid subscribers) you receive a monologue from the 80’s weekly.12.24.83It was bitterly cold in Lake Wobegon this week. Thirty below and cars wouldn't start. Everyone in Minnesota has jumper cables. Kids even get them in decorator colors as graduation gifts. If cars don't start, they use the cables to spell SOS in the
The astonishment of mornings on the river last week
I tell jokes because I remember a time in my life when I crowded into a booth at a bar with eight other guys and some guys leaning over us and we told jokes and now I don’t see people doing that anymore. It’s a guy responsibility — women are worriers, men are kidders — and I remember one afternoon, over rounds of beer and bumps, that we told 75 different How Many Whatsis Does It Take To Change A L
News from December 18, 1982
Here is a little gift to our GK and Friends subscribers. (In the Back Room, the paid subscribers receive a monologue from the 80’s weekly)12.18.82Calm falls over LW the week before Christmas, yet there still are no Christmas lights on Main St. GK went back after school was done and went to Christmas Eve service with the eldest Ingqvist daughter (they had been chatting through the fall). He was any
The story of my life, a brief version
My bio in 100 words is as follows: My parents were in love with each other, had six kids, I was third, an invisible child. I had no interest in crashing into people so didn’t play football or hockey and avoided brain damage. I dabbled in poetry and when I was 14, I read A.J. Liebling and decided to be a writer. I went into radio, which requires no special skill, and took the sunrise shift, which t
Floating down the canyon through the rapids
I accept the fact that I am a back issue, a relic, and that younger people have taken over. Eight years ago I played the Hollywood Bowl; a few weeks ago I played a 200-seater in Menomonie, Wisconsin. It was fun. People in the seats talked back to me. We hung out in the lobby afterward. I caught influenza from one of them. Do Taylor’s fans get to share their germs with her? I doubt it very much. Th
What's with this winter anyway?
I come from pot roast people and the past two months have been rough on me, when, doing penance for the holidays, we’ve been on a bunny rabbit diet, grazing on bowls of greenery. My mother made pot roast for Sunday dinner, which made me think of it as sacred food. She put chuck roast in a covered pan in the oven at low heat when we left for church and when we returned four hours later, the kitchen
A love note to Texas, Sweetheart
I loved my five days there. I encountered keen politeness. The truck stop guy who said, “I appreciate your business” when I paid for my two Butterfingers. The hotel clerk. I walked a long hall to my room and three cleaning ladies looked up and said, “Good morning.” When I left Austin on Monday, a man walked up to me in the airport and said quietly, “I want to thank you for all the pleasure you’ve
Losing my mind in New York and then finding it
And then around midnight a woman walked in, a civilian, no blue on her except her eyes. She was a Unitarian minister, making rounds, saw my name and remembered a column I wrote back in the Bush era saying what a terrible mistake the Iraq War was. My one good protest column and she remembered it all these years later. I told her I’m Episcopalian and that I’ve read Emerson and decided not to come fo
The bag may not inflate but oxygen is flowing
I’m a historic guy. They could put me in a museum. I went to college when tuition was $71/quarter so we didn’t have to ask our parents for money so we got to go into the arts. There were no laptops, no iPhones, no Airplane Mode. I regaled the Lovelanders with stories about the Fifties, back when Minnesota winters were ferocious. I lived through the bitter winter of 1948 when the temp got down to m
A round table in St. Paul
It’s an amazing feat, turning the party of rectitude and personal liberty into a unified body of citizens totally devoted to one man, obedient to his self-absorption. He is down on the country, has never praised his wife or intentionally said anything funny, has never hugged a small child in public. But it was so good of these young people to give their old great-uncle a big burst of faith in Amer
Don't name a library after me, please, I'm still writing
George Latimer, the chatty New York lawyer who moved to St. Paul in the 1960s and went on to rejuvenate and transform the capital city in 13-1/2 years as its charismatic and visionary mayor. Latimer died on Aug. 18 at 89. 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
Open the doors, let the young mingle among the treasures
Some of these kids at the Met will wind up in law school and get a serious education in civil procedure and come away with due respect for our system of justice: trial by a jury of one’s peers, the rules of evidence, witnesses testifying under oath aware of the penalty for perjury. The lawyers defending the Famous Man were so taught and they stand silently by his side as he bellows his contempt to
How I survived the solar flares
We live in an Age of Disgruntlement and when I dine with grumpy people, I listen to their gripes and when they stop to take a breath I talk about the great progress made in my lifetime, which of course irks them no end. For one thing, the cash card. We used to go into the bank and hand a check for cash to Mildred the teller with her pert hairstyle and starched blouse, her specs hanging on a chain
The beautiful winding road
This is one of the happiest summers of my very long life. My wife installed WhatsApp on my phone and it dings and I pick up and she talks to me from the wine country of Portugal where she’s hiking with her brother and his wife, on their way to a baptism and pig roast. Sometimes my daughter comes on and says, “Make me laugh,” so I tell her about the woman at Yellowstone Park who was chased by a bea
Standing on the sidewalk shaking hands
What remains powerful is love. My parents loved each other dearly and I witnessed this and it remains large in my life. When I was six, I was a slow reader — when you’ve grown up trying to read Hezekiah and Jeremiah, it does crimp your style — and my teacher Estelle Shaver noticed and kept me after school to read aloud to her from Dick and Jane. When Bill the janitor came in to empty the wastebask
Looking ahead down the road
History is a complicated business. There are high plateaus and also a good deal of swamp. The Little Bighorn battlefield in Montana was preserved in honor of General Custer who there gave his life along with his men of the Seventh Cavalry, a sacrifice that no longer strikes anybody as noble. What is the good of preserving an enormous site of military stupidity in an unjust cause? The granite monum
It's never too late to learn
like hamburgers. I went into a McDonald’s the other day and ordered a Double Quarter Pounder and thought it was good. At McDonald’s you do not have the carcass of the cow on a spit by the drive-up window, the eyes glazed, the tail hanging down, and the workers don’t gouge the meat from the cow’s rib cage. The hamburger is handed to you wrapped in paper. So after my night in Maine, I believe I will
News from September 18, 1982
09.18..82 This week in Lake Wobegon, the Whippets had a big celebration at the Sons of Knute lodge to celebrate a final game win against the Avon Bards. Hjalmer Ingqvist spent time at the party drinking whiskey because his wife told him about her plans to do a makeover of the house, including peach and apricot.Some men of the lodge were down in the basement building giant duck decoys to be used at
A perfect summer night in Manhattan
I was brought up by Midwestern stoics who drummed the lesson into us: Don’t think you’re somebody because you’re not. You’re not so smart as you think. You’re the same as everybody else. So buckle down and get your work done and don’t fall behind. So I turned into a hard worker. But sitting on this terrace at night with my daughter, and then my wife comes out with her glass of wine, this sandwich
What an awesome August!
Thank goodness the Americans won men’s basketball over the French. It’s our game, Americans invented it. To lose would be like English Sauvignon Blanc beating out French. Some English wines have beaten out French in blind tests but who says vision-impaired persons are experts on wine?My event is the old man’s 90-minute stand-up storytelling with some poems tossed in and my routine had an intellige
Friendship is what it's all about
I spent a couple hours on the phone the other night with a man I haven’t seen since high school, he in Northern California, I in New York City, two old men recalling our youth in Minnesota. I love the telephone; it can be so intimate — like radio, which is the business I was in for years — the voice carries so much humanity, even the silences speak……And then, on the phone the other night, it was 1
Mature man available for speaking, easy terms
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 whic
Waiting at Gate 28
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 a
Hard-earned wisdom passed on at no charge
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
Man walks out on stage as storm rolls in
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 Vie
The meaning of the freestanding life
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
A Letter from Greenville, S.C.
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 Sunda
A morning walk along Columbus Avenue
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 sc
A lucky man admits to happiness, and why not?
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
Spring is here, time to get to know each other
Myself, I have a bias in favor of public education because that was my experience. I came from very exclusive fundamentalist evangelicals who looked down on Methodists and Lutherans as Scripturally off-base, so when I left home and walked into public school, I found myself among — O my gosh! — Catholic kids, boys who took the Lord’s name in vain and told dirty jokes, girls who hung out with those
The beauty of falls that you walk away from
I fell twice crossing 89th Street, once in the middle of the street, once at the curb. I misjudged the step, crashed down on my hands and knees and chin, and once I walked into a tree branch on the path around the Central Park Reservoir and got plonked on my keister, and each time strangers rushed to my side to ask if I was okay and I said I was and jumped up but now I see these falls were a turni
On the road again, meeting folks again
It’s an age of dread, the news perpetually discouraging, TV and media merchandising ugliness, and either you join the Greek chorus of gloom or you go with the American choir of cheerful resolve, and I choose cheerfulness. I am capable of dismay: I’m dismayed by the Working From Home syndrome that is leaving our big office buildings half empty. I call up an office to get answers to difficult questi
The critic who lit up my week and more
I’m still writing books but haven’t been reviewed by anybody in ages, maybe because I’m an Old White Male and our time is up, or maybe I’ve written too many books, and I’m okay with unreviewing — going way back to Veronica Geng’s caramel custard review of Lake Wobegon Days in the New York Times in 1985, the reviews have been warm and sweet, which is nice for the publisher but for me, the hardworki
Let's talk about honesty, grrrr, rrrfff, rrrfff
The fact is that when I was a kid in Minnesota, struggling my way through six-foot snowdrifts to school, long before lightweight down coats were invented — I was an 82-pound fourth-grader wearing 42 pounds of heavy woolens and corduroy, and one day I was caught by a pack of coyotes who carried me away to their den where I remained for several years and learned their language of growling, snuffling
THEY WERE SO YOUNG
Monday is Memorial Day, a day that got lost when it was turned into a weekend, and someday we’ll turn it back into a day, which it was for a hundred years. Decoration Day. After the bloody Civil War, flowers were placed on the graves of the war dead. One of those times when the country is united. This is our observance of Memorial Day, a poem entitled “They Were So Young.” This is a public episode
All of me loves olive oil and this is why
No, it’s been a hard life and I didn’t mention the time I was kidnapped by coyotes. But I’m grateful. I tell myself, “It could be worse. I could get old and lose my mind.” The other day, I forgot the word “cognitive” for hours, I thought, “Alert? Informed? Awake? Attentive? Cerebral? Incognito?” The very word for the skills I’m scared of losing. And then I made a salad with olive oil and vinegar d
Epictetus on Fifth Avenue, a week ago
The world’s longest parking lot is Fifth Avenue in New York at midday and a week ago I found myself stuck in it, in a cab driven by a devout Sikh with headscarf and big beard, whose religion evidently taught him to Yield, so we moved at a glacial rate from 86th to 43rd Street where I had an important lunch appointment. Had I taken the B train I would’ve been there in a few minutes but that mistake
My personal journey towards self-minimalization
These days we’re in the era of the Personal Position Statement as we saw in the recent National Book Awards ceremony in New York. There is no NBA for humor because the event is all about Taking Ourselves Very Seriously As Compensation For Slights We Have Suffered From The Uncomprehending World. The winner of the poetry prize, a man from Guam, accepted it on behalf of the poets of the Pacific islan
Singing to the Lord to save Herschel
So what happened to joke-telling?For one thing, some of the best jokes are about death. The old Republican is dying and tells his wife, “I’m going to switch parties because I’d rather it happen to a Democrat than to one of us.” These are maybe less funny when you get to be my age. For another thing, a politician came along in 2015 who isn’t funny. This was a first. There were dozens of George Bush
Tim Russell's selection from BRISK VERSE
Dear Brisk Verse Buyers,Garrison Keillor’s latest book, Brisk Verse, is (as he says) “good for reading aloud to friends and associates, neighbors, colleagues bartenders, passersby, even strangers in libraries or on airplanes.”Let’s put that to the test — and spread the fun. When you receive your book, if you are so inclined, pick a favorite poem. Then share it by videotaping yourself reading it ou
Launching Garrison's newest book, BRISK VERSE. Send your video too.
Dear Brisk Verse Buyers,Garrison Keillor’s latest book, Brisk Verse, is (as he says) “good for reading aloud to friends and associates, neighbors, colleagues bartenders, passersby, even strangers in libraries or on airplanes.”Let’s put that to the test — and spread the fun. When you receive your book, if you are so inclined, pick a favorite poem. Then share it by videotaping yourself reading it ou
Missing Sandra O'Connor, the pragmatic voice
It’s wonderful hearing her at age 78 talking cheerfully about her life. As a young woman, she was hired by the Arizona attorney general, who assigned her to work at the state mental hospital. “To do what?” she said. “Whatever they need,” he said. So she went about organizing a legal aid clinic for the mentally ill, a simple necessary good. Big law firms weren’t hiring women lawyers for fear of wha
A small life has its own distinct moments
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
O what a beautiful evening
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, Mo
The art of writing, lesson one
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 open the fridge and life beckons
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
Last Wednesday, stuck in a traffic jam
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 concupis
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
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, thou
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
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
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 d
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 cal
The gift of Miss Helen Story, remembered
But I found my glasses today. They were in my jacket pocket. Sometimes they’re in a shirt pocket, sometimes perched on top of my head. The frenzy ends, the problem solves itself. The comedian is grateful. He looks around and appreciates the beauty of the day, the here and now. It’s 5 a.m. My love is asleep in the bedroom, my daughter in her bedroom. I look out at the lights of New York. I make cof
Sing on, dance on, good eye, ain't you happy
At the game I sat next to a true Twins fan named Alex who gave me the lowdown on various players and yelled the right things — “Looked good to me!” at the ump who’d called a strike a ball and “Good eye!” at a Twin who let Ball 3 go by and “Throw him the meatball!” at the opposition pitcher who had an 0-2 count on a Twins batter.It was a big pleasure, the proximity to genuine fandom. I’m old and ou
Flying around America, looking at crowds
I imagine that someday at America’s boarding gates, after the wheelchair passengers are boarded and Those Who Need Extra Time, then active military, there will be other categories of merit to be given precedence, Persons Traumatized By Flight, Persons In Need Of Affirmation, Persons Trapped In Bad Relationships, and why not add Unappreciated Poets and Third-Grade Teachers to the list. And then you
The memory is alive with old roots
The simple pleasures of a long close marriage on a perfect October day, leaves dropping from the trees, eating an egg salad sandwich after her long morning walk, playing Scrabble. She talks about who and what she saw on her hike and I, the writer, am silent in thought, having played the word “irony,” which triggers the memory of a day long ago in Saginaw, Michigan.I’d gone there to give a speech —
“Stand up for yourself,” I keep thinking to myself
So my friend’s fussiness about the coffee was, in fact, a tribute to the excellence of the restaurant. (Did I mention that this was in Northern California, in a town where a small bungalow goes for $1.8 million and you can’t get a Tootsie Roll for less than five bucks?) She sent back the coffee with oat milk because it didn’t taste fresh. I’m in awe of that. In Minnesota, we feed oats to horses an
Finding harmony in the midst of chaos
I don’t belong in New York, I’m a loner, I have the social skills of a hoot owl, but I accept the amusement that the city offers. I saw a dog on the subway with earbuds on and I asked the guy holding the leash what the dog was listening to and he said, “Those are hearing aids.” But he said it sort of sarcastically. You get a lot of irony in New York. So I asked my audiologist if there is such a th
Recommended
megahired.com
Hard Knocks Podcast
Effective Weight Loss for Moms | High protein, Strength Training, Lose Weight, Meal Planning, Fat Loss, Healthy Habits
The Human-Animal Connection - Pet Life Radio Original
Infinite Health with Dr. Arasi Maran
The Daily
World News Tonight with David Muir
The Joe Rogan Experience
English Vocabulary Help
TED Talks Daily
Learn English B1 with Daily News | English Listening Practice
Talk About Talk - Executive & Leadership Communication Skills
