Saturday, October 2, 1999
Listen
(GK: Garrison Keillor, SS: Sue Scott, TK: Tom Keith, TR: Tim Russell, RD: Rich Dworsky)
The secret is not a calm disposition
It isn't a deep inner strength
It isn't yoghurt or yoga or a good physician
The secret of longevity is length.
Each hour, each day, each step you take
Creeps slowly like a crustacean,
Until the candles on your birthday cake
Become a major conflagration.
Before the lights come up and the fat lady o-
Pens her mouth, it appears
You've been on the radio
Twenty-five years.
You put up twenty-five on the scoreboard
And they stop the game and give you an award,
Though it's no big secret how your career was made:
You just kept putting one minute after another minute.
It's like getting the prize for Tallest Boy In The Sixth Grade,
You stick around long enough, you're bound to win it.
Every day Tolstoy sat down for fun
And wrote two pages at least
And before he knew it, it was done
War and Peace.
Dinner waited on the table
And Mrs. Melville paced the floor
As Herman worked his little fable
Slowly into something more.
Jane Austen's family felt utterly wretched as
She slowly brought forth Pride and Prejudice.
Dostoevsky over time
Found a punishment to fit the crime,
And slowly as a centipede trots off
He wrote the Brothers Karamazov.
Years passed until Mrs. Joyce cried out for bliss, "He's
Finally done it. He wrote Ulysses."
James had supper, took a break,
And started in on Finnegan's Wake.
Slowly, slowly, page by page
Emerge the epics of the age;
You write and take your time: you're liable
To make a good book, if not a Bible.
Churchill with his memoirs written
Started in on a history of Britain,
A handsome multi-volume set
Covering more than a millenium,
Written in blood and tears and sweat,
Starting every day about ten a.m.
What worked for them can work for you.
Sit down and do what you must do
And write your piece, and by and by,
Someday you'll be as old as I.
(c) 1999 by Garrison Keillor
