Garrison Keillor's Podcast

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 o...

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 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...

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...

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...

I went to see The Magic Flute at the Met last week and dozed through the sleepy parts of it, woke up for the Queen of the Night aria, and again when the Papageno dashed into the audience carrying a stepladder. This almost never happens in opera. My beloved explained it to me during intermission: “It means he is looking for something higher.” “Oh, right,” I said. But several times during Act One he...

I’m at the age when you see the insides of more than your share of health clinics and some are like walking into a meat warehouse but when I walked into New York Presbyterian the other day and then the Hospital for Special Surgery, I was struck by the extraordinary kindness of everyone — even the security woman welcomed me like a friend and the receptionists and the guide who took me back to an ex...

Friday afternoon, I boarded the Lake Shore Limited in New York, bound for Chicago and then the Grand Canyon, along with my Londoner stepdaughter and her husband who are ambitious hikers and eager to experience one of nature’s great erosion projects. We chugged through tunnels under Manhattan and then emerged along the mighty Hudson, on our way to Schenectady and Syracuse, and along Lake Michigan t...

At lunch with a pregnant woman, you talk about ordinary life, family, summer, the food, the elation of the kids at the graduation we’d attended that morning and the pride of their parents, and we never set foot in politics at all. The naked ex-emperor is 77 and he is irrelevant to the life around us so it’s a pleasure to ignore him. By the time this boy gets around to studying American fascism, I...

Thoreau’s great work wasn’t Walden but his daily journal in which he wrote about his walks in the woods and fields, what he saw, what he loved. Walden is blighted by a great deal of pontificating about solitude and independence. If there had been a Mrs. Thoreau, she’d have agreed with him on “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.” And she would’ve scoffed at his nonsense — “If...

Biden needs a sport to put to rest the whispers about dodderiness. It’s nice to see him putting his arms around his dog and his grandkids — his predecessor was no hugger except with a few foreign leaders — but Biden needs to be seen being physically active. The press is waiting, cameras poised, hoping to see the guy stumble, and what you need to do, Joe, is go hiking in a dense forested area in ch...

I’m not nostalgic about olden times. I love these passwords and PIN numbers that give me the sense of foreign agents trying to get into my email, steal my prescription for metoprolol. I am fond of the GPS woman who gives us directions in such a sympathetic tone, not condescending at all. I adore my laptop and have no warm memories of my Underwood typewriter. Someday I believe the GPS woman may bec...

I hung out with the customers before and after (there’s no backstage at this amphitheater so I entered and exited through the audience) and it’s startling to hear middle-aged people tell me they listened to “Prairie Home” as kids, grew up with Guy Noir and Dusty and Lefty, I was sort of a distant uncle to them. I was very busy those years, hosting the show, writing it, touring around, and I was an...

The pleasure of moving is the excavation of the past. I open a box and here’s a photo of my fifth-grade class, the eager neatly-combed-and-dressed boy with glasses sitting behind John Poate is me. I am still that eager boy, heavier but anxious to do well. There is a letter from a fan of my radio show, “Every Saturday at 5 p.m., everything else ceased and we gathered around the radio.” Also, in a b...

When I moved out of Minneapolis, I sorted through personal papers and it struck me that, in hundreds of pictures of me, I am not smiling in a single one. I look like a mortician with a migraine. Partly this is due to the cold. Winter is brutal and you keep your mouth shut so you won’t frost your lungs. Teachers told me that. Plus which, in Minnesota there never were many people around so what was...

10.27.84Carl Krebsbach’s brother, Lyle, bought a new car this week from a St. Cloud dealer. The little red foreign car was not available in Lake Wobegon. Lyle saw a picture of this car in a magazine and he just had to have it. On Tuesday, the car wouldn’t start because someone put a potato up the tailpipe. Lyle has lived in town for twelve years so he’s still seen as an outsider. He needs some fri...

What I found inspiring were two Scripture readings, one from the prophet Micah, where the reader faced the line, “O my people, remember what happened from Shittim to Gilgal that you may know the saving acts of the Lord,” and she slowed down when she saw “Shittim” and got traction and very carefully pronounced it “shi-team.” I was the only one in the sanctuary immature enough to enjoy this moment....

She also loves to look at art, which I can take or leave and mostly leave. I go to museums to overhear conversations between couples, usually the woman telling the man, “You don’t like it, do you” and he says, “It’s interesting,” and she seizes on his lack of enthusiasm for the splashy canvas he’s looking at, thinking “I could’ve done that,” and she says, “If you’d just take the time to learn some...

I interrupted writing for a while today to have a Zoom meeting about estate planning with a couple lawyers in Minneapolis and for a discussion centered on my own demise it was a lot of fun. We laughed a lot. They mentioned “legacy” and I laughed. What legacy? There’s no such thing. Scripture promises resurrection but it isn’t specific about the form we’ll take, whether vegetable, mineral, gas, or...

Prison reform is a truly noble cause because there is no political constituency demanding it. Every time I fly into LaGuardia, I look out at the hellhole of Rikers Island, a prison right out of Dickens’s England, where men languish who are unable to make bail and life is brutal, and the Democratic hacks of New York won’t touch this issue lest they be thought weak on crime. Emily knew all about thi...

The woman came by a little later and said, “How’s your breakfast, dear?” I said, “It’s wonderful,” though actually it was rather mediocre, but I didn’t want to cause her anxiety because — this is going to sound pathetic but forgive me — her “hon” had given me a very warm feeling deep inside. Me, a published author who once got a terrific review in the Times and who’s attended luncheons at the Amer...

There is so much plasticity and pretense in the world today that when I come across the authentic such as a little kid bawling because his sister kicked him, it restores my interest in life. He isn’t trying to sell me something or even raise money for a good cause, it’s true feeling. His sense of injustice is real. I think he should hit her, which might spare his having to go through expensive the...

Texting replaced the postcard mostly, and I have a shoebox full of old postcards from long-departed relatives about the happy afternoon spent in Pasadena or Lincoln’s home in Springfield or the Empire State Building. My people were reluctant to express happiness for fear it might be bragging but I love to think of them writing about the “lovely day” they spent walking around Springfield. The box n...

Journalism is about tragedy and malfeasance and corruption, it’s not journalists’ job to report on happiness, you need to experience that directly, which I did, night after night, standing in dim light among strangers many of whom intensely disagree with me, but I feel their humanity, their love of beauty, their cheerfulness, my fellow Americans, and I shall leave politics to people smarter than I...

I feel that opera should be inclusive and tell the stories of ordinary people and not just European aristocracy and so I am sketching an opera in which the soprano is furious at the tenor and showing him the proper way to clean a bathroom — “Apri gli occhi, guarda dietro le cose” (Open your eyes, look behind things) — and to calm her he proclaims his love for her — “Farò di tutto per renderti feli...