A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor

The Minnesota State Fair show (9/22/07) was so beautiful I've replayed the tape over and over again. The music was grand, but it was the monologue that stays in my mind. How the coming of fall, with its shorter days and cool, crisp temperatures, transported Clarence back 42 years to a bittersweet time of unrequited love.

It was 48 years ago now when I was a college freshman in a small Missouri town, where the entire shopping district surrounded the courthouse on the square. One grocery store, an insurance company, one restaurant a few steps down from the sidewalk , a lumber yard, a few clothing stores, and twenty-five churches. Soon after school began, I met a young ministerial student and there was an immediate mutual attraction. Frank had no money (the most he ever spent on me was 25 cents for a bottle of Coke) and no car but he made me laugh, and we spent our date nights walking hand in hand under a starry sky, talking and laughing.

One night we stopped by a statue of the town's namesake. It was the perfect autumn night—cool temperatures, a starry night, a golden harvest moon rising just above the horizon. As I leaned against the wrought iron fence, he stroked my hair and said tenderly, "You should know how much I love to run my fingers through your silky hair.. And your face...your skin is like velvet to touch. And your eyes, those beautiful brown eyes....you remind me of my hound dog." Aside from the fact that my eyes were green, he paid me the highest compliment he could muster when I rated up there with his hound dog.

We talked of marriage, but that was not to be for several reasons. One, I didn't like the socks he wore. They were an old man's socks--shiny and they came up just above his ankles. I soon was drawn back to the boy back home (he wore argyle socks), whom I later married, but the romance of that college love never left. When summer is over and school begins and the days shorten into cool evenings, there comes a rush of memories of those times with Frank.

Several years ago, he found my unlisted telephone number and called. We talked about where our lives had taken us. Though my marriage had ended, I was happy. He, on the other hand, had left the ministry, was unhappy in his marriage, and it sounded as though his life and choices had spiraled downward. I felt sad for him that things had turned out this way. And instead of wishing to revisit those times with him, I thought instead of a song that would forever mark our romance—Garth Brooks' song called "Thank God for Unanswered Prayer."

It took several more years after our conversation before I could look favorably on our time together. And now, with the coming of autumn, I feel again the sweetness of it all. It's more a memory of innocence, of the romance that comes with first love, of college days, of shared laughter, of clear starlit nights and the brilliant color of maple leaves in October. I think I was just in love with autumn. Each fall, those memories visit me again; how they are cherished.

Yet the words Garrison sang of unrequited love, "I meant nothing to her; she means the world to me," is a simple lament I feel, too, for many things that were lost—innocence, youth, dreams that were not to be.