Dear Mr. Keillor,
Do you recall any Burma Shave signs gracing the roads around Lake
Wobegon when you were growing up?
Glenn Andrew.
I remember "Don't look like literary men ---
Get a shave, be smooth like Glenn ---
Did any folks in Lake Wobegon get the travel trailer bug in the 60s?
My dad did. He said we would save so much money on vacations. It turned
out that we only used it for one vacation, and after that the trailer
took up formal residence in back of the house. My dad started using it
as kind of a private retreat. You know beer, chips and the football game.
Do you care to comment?
Wayne of Hershey, NE.
This sounds like Wally of the Sidetrack Tap,
who bought a motor home back when Winnebagos were first popular
and convinced Evelyn that they were about to see the world. It
too became a clubhouse. Which is a noble use and all, and I don't
fault him for it, or fault other men for their big dreams about
boats and trailers and, Lord help us, buses. We are a romantic
gender, and then, when the bubble bursts, we turn to recycling.
I'll bet the trailer behind your house was good for your folks'
marriage, but if your father had proposed buying it for that purpose,
of course it would have been taken the wrong way, as a complaint.
Some wonderful solutions cannot be achieved directly in a straight
line.
Dear Mr. Keillor,
We are writing this letter because we like your book, 'The Man Who Loved
Cheese'. We wrote a poem for you:
Your book is very funny,
Do you dip your cheese in honey?
Do you have any girls or boys,
Who like to play with toys?
How old are you?
Do you ever get blue?
Do you have a wife?
Do you have a good life?
You are a very creative man.
Please write back to us if you can.
Sincerely,
The Second Graders of Scott School
Merrill, WI
Thanks for your note. I eat cheese
in a grilled sandwich and sometimes in pasta. And sometimes with
a fork, after dinner. I have one boy and one girl and the girl
plays with dolls and the boy plays with a John Deere garden tractor.
I am 57. I get blue, especially when I'm on vacation and it's
sunny and I wish it were raining and I were back home writing
in a little room under the roof. I do have a wife and we have
a very good life, and I hope you have one too.
Dear Garrison,
Lake Wobegon reminds me so much of the town that I grew up in. I was wondering
if you could settle an old argument for me? One of my good Southern friends
insists on calling the last meal of the day dinner. I prefer to call it
supper, which is the word I always heard growing up. I save dinner for
the noon meal. When do you eat dinner?
Christopher Knutson
I eat supper in the evening and at noon, if
I eat, I call it lunch. The noon dinner is a holdover from farm
days, when the farmhands sat down to a big spread, called dinner,
and the evening meal was light and called supper. I call it dinner
when we have guests over and when I go to some trouble, and it's
also dinner when I put on a suit in the evening and sit at the
head table and get up during dessert and make a speech.
In your on-line photo album I noticed that while all the other actors
wear headphones you do not. As a former jazz dj at WPBX in N.Y, I found
it almost impossible to do a show without headphones. Was this picture
staged because you don't like to be seen with this appendage or can you
actually monitor the goings-on without them? I would feel naked without
phones, like driving a car without a steering wheel. How do you do it?
Chris Roberts
East Hampton, NY
I use phones in the studio but prefer not to
onstage and luckily we have a very fine sound man, Sam Hudson,
who provides a special mix for the stage monitors that makes a
person feel fully clothed.
Dear Garrison,
I've been seeing the same girl for over two years now and I feel the growing
urge to ask her if she'd like to grow old with me. We've discussed it
a bit before, but her opinion is that we should wait to get married until
we get a little older (I'm 18 and she's 20) and we save up a little money.
As a hopeless romantic(from my mother, of the ELCA) and a hopeless rationalist(from
my father, of the LCMS) I have since been full of internal conflict over
how I should handle this. Any suggestions? What would you do if you were
me?
Nat
Dear Nat,
She's right, so you do what anyone does when confronted with wisdom that
goes against your own impulse: you put the impulse in a drawer and close
it. You don't forget it, you don't feel defeated, you simply wait for
the right time. A writer sometimes has a big inspiration to write a book
that he simply isn't ready to write. You put it into a drawer and wait
for your time to come. Have a good summer.
Dear Garrison:
I made the mistake of falling in love with a Lutheran man who is 16 years
older than I am. The problem is that he says he's too old for me and that
he doesn't deserve to be happy, he just needs to be comfortable. Is this
a Minnesota, Lutheran trait again? Should I keep trying or is it a hopeless
cause?
Crazy in Love
A Lutheran may say things that he doesn't believe,
as an incantation against high hopes. "I don't deserve you" may
mean that he's afraid of losing you and so must keep himself stable
against the big wave of disappointment when you leave. That's
one way of looking at it. One could also conclude that it's pointless
to fight a Lutheran man who is trying hard not to be in love.
I don't know the gentleman, so I don't know what to think.
Garrison,
I always see caricatures of you smoking a pipe. As a pipe aficionado myself,
I was wondering if you have a favorite pipe and tobacco. Do you have any
"pipe tales" you would like to share?
Jerry
Cartoonists have big imaginations. I haven't
smoked a pipe since graduate school. In cartoon vocabulary, I
suppose, pipe-smoking represents thoughtful maturity. Don't know
if that's true either.
Garrison,
It was the spring of 1964, in the basement of Murphy Hall at the U of
M, I was a grunt reporter for the Minnesota Daily scurrying to handle
my assignments and often looked longingly toward the office of the Ivory
Tower, the literary magazine, where you sat there, alone and quietly contemplative
with your feet on the desk. And now, I read on the web site that you regard
a day at the beach as purgatory and seem to be obsessed, like me, with
the Scandinavian dread of inactivity. What went wrong? Is there hope for
peaceful sunset years? What's your dream for retirement?
Evelyn (Hovda) Anderson
(BA Journalism, U of M 1964)
I was semi-retired back when you knew me, Evelyn,
and what appeared to be contemplation was actually quiet desperation.
I was hobbled by indecision and fear of embarrassment and the
terrible self-absorption of youth. Now I've entered into a new
phase common to a lot of folks my age, in which life seems much
simpler and happier and more productive. No therapy involved,
no big ideas, but when narcissism fades, when one gets bored with
thinking about what other people are thinking about you, life
smoothes out, and a person wants to use these years to accomplish
something good and useful: retirement is the last thing on your
mind. At some point, it's obligatory, of course: you're supposed
to get out of the way and let someone else have their turn. And
when the day comes, I plan to stay here in St. Paul and write
and be quietly contemplative.
