That Time of Year

A Good Life

I CALLED HER IN THE fall of 1991 on the advice of her older sister, who was a classmate of my younger sister at Anoka High School. She and her sister were violinists, one with the orchestra in St. Paul, one a freelancer in New York. She lived on 102nd, a ten-minute walk away, and I asked her if she’d like to have lunch with me and she said she wished she could but was about to leave on an orchestra tour in Southeast Asia. “Okay, some other time, good luck with the tour,” I said.

I asked no questions, where in Southeast Asia, what orchestra, what repertoire?—if “Southeast Asia” was the best excuse she could come up with for not meeting a stranger for lunch, okay, but I did think I would call again in a few months when she returned, if indeed she were going away. She sounded lively on the phone, funny, unguarded. I didn’t know her family except that her dad, Ray Nilsson, was clerk of district court in Anoka, an elective office, and I’d seen his campaign signs on the road to my Aunt Jo’s. Jenny knew me, at least she’d been to a show of mine with a friend, she said. “Oh,” I said. I thought, “A friend.” She could’ve said, “My boyfriend,” but had not so if it had been with a boyfriend, perhaps he was one no longer.

My mind did not go down that path, nor did I tell her that I had a girlfriend, a Dane named Dorrit, a singer and teacher and tennis partner, who wanted a decision from me, and I had decided that, though we were good together, I could not be responsible for the happiness of another Danish woman in America. It was complicated. She went back to Denmark, taught at a gymnasium, married Thorkild. I still loved her. A few months went by, thoughts were thought, I looked out from the terrace across the rooftops, spring came around. In May 1992, I had lunch with Jenny Lind Nilsson at Docks seafood restaurant on 90th and Broadway, at a table by the window. I ordered scallops, she got a lobster roll. There was wine. I liked her smile, the wit of her thrust and parry, her dedication to music. She was thirty-five, had lived in New York since she was seventeen, making her way playing on City Opera tours and at Glimmerglass Opera and whatever else presented itself. She was quick and never at a loss for a comeback.

Jenny.

She told me how, on tour in Asia, she had hiked up into the hills above Kuala Lumpur to see a Hindu temple and saw dozens of wild monkeys who were adept at picking tourists’ pockets. She talked about Japan and Brunei and Malaysia. I’d never been to Asia. She talked about the eccentrics in her family, which included everyone, so it was centricity, not eccentricity. Her great-grandfather John emigrated from Sweden to become a streetcar conductor in Minneapolis, and her grandfather Ragnar taught violin at his music school on Lake Street and played in pit orchestras in theaters. Her parents were pianists, and her two sisters and brother were violinists, too. She loved the freelance life—from opera tour to pop show to Broadway pit to church gig; she’d played for Leonard Bernstein and also for the Lipizzaner horses—and though she lived on the edge of poverty, she had no complaints, living with roommates, sometimes their dogs, in tiny apartments in buildings where you might step over junkies asleep in the foyer and the oven is used for a closet and cockroaches pass without comment, and you learn to cure bouts of discouragement by taking long walks. A slight young blond woman, she knew what it felt like to be two steps removed from homelessness. I did not. I had offered myself up to New York back in the summer of 1966, looking for a job, and wasn’t offered one: I couldn’t have endured living on the edge in New York. Jenny did it and thrived on it. Lunch lasted three hours.

I fell in love with her out of admiration. No money, loved music, no complaints, no regrets. She loved going out at night, and I took her to the Rainbow Room and we danced on a revolving floor to a big orchestra. Alone, I was lost in New York, but as Jenny’s escort, I had a plan and a purpose. She loved to be going places, seeing things. Saturday night, after the show at Town Hall, we strolled across Times Square and up to Picholine restaurant, me in a tux with a classy woman on my arm, an Anokan from Rice Street who’d become a real New Yorker. We went to a manic Fiddler on the Roof and the Brahms Fourth at Carnegie. As a child, she’d been taken by her dad to see Carmen and stood through the whole opera, dazzled by Grace Bumbry, so I took her to see Renée Fleming in Der Rosenkavalier singing to the young lover Octavian and proclaiming her erotic fervor for him and at the same time setting him free—and I, the middle-aged man with the young woman up in the cheap seats, was moved to tears. Opera is the impossible art, an outpost of melodrama in an age of irony, sung in foreign languages by abnormal voices, and it can take you by the shoulders and shake you. And in Rosenkavalier, Octavian is my love Jenny Nilsson and I am the Marschallin warning her not to fall in love with an old man, it will only lead to heartache, but I hope she won’t listen.

I’d been married twice, and that surely raised questions in her mind. I was the past imperfect, and she was the present indicative, but we were good together and she accepted me. I took her to supper at Café des Artistes, with murals of naked ladies gamboling in the woods, and that night she told me she lived with a guy in a walk-up and went to the trouble of explaining that he was a roommate roommate, nothing more, so now I knew she was interested in me and we eased into a life together. I had a big sunny apartment on 90th, she had a futon in an alcove of a dim room on 102nd. I was brought up to share, so we packed her up and she moved twelve blocks south. No reason for delay. I wrote to my friend Thatcher: She’s a violinist, slight and athletic, cheerful by disposition, passionate about music and opera and art, close to everyone in her family, eminently adaptable after years of touring in foreign places, a woman of simple needs after years of supporting herself as a New York freelance musician, and we love each other.

It was a big year, 1992. She came to my fiftieth birthday party in St. Paul, though I didn’t introduce her as my love. I wanted her to observe my friends and family and not be inspected critically. I got us a big room in the St. Paul Hotel. She took me to Anoka to meet her parents, Ray and Orrell, who were warm and welcoming and generously so, considering their youngest daughter had an older twice-divorced boyfriend who made his living in radio comedy featuring horn honks and glass breakage and seal courtship. They loved classical music and I was a writer of limericks. As clerk of district court, Ray knew that Keillors were not criminals so far as authorities were aware, and he knew my uncle Lawrence was president of the First National Bank, but still. Their warmth was touching. Literally. They were huggers, unlike us Keillors.

I started writing sonnets that summer and fall, and a few years later PHC conducted a sonnet contest for St. Valentine’s Day and received piles of them. I was not eligible to win a prize, but I did enter one under the name Gary Johnson.

Up in the sky we lovers lie in bed

Naked, face to face and hip to thigh,

Your leg between mine, my arm beneath your head,

Our hands clasped together, up in the sky.

In the dark, Manhattan lay at our feet,

A blanket of glittering stars thrown down.

Beyond your bare shoulder, 90th Street,

Your elegant leg lit by the lamps of Midtown.

We came to the city for romance, as people do,

And with each other we scaled the heights

And now, united, we lie at rest, we two,

The bed gently rocking in the sea of lights.

Are you asleep? I think you are. So silently

I promise, my love, this is how it ever shall be.

That fall, the name American Radio Company was dropped and we resumed being A Prairie Home Companion, since it was really the same show, and we moved back to our old theater on Exchange Street between the Methodists and the Scientologists, looking up the hill at the great dome of Cass Gilbert’s state Capitol, and the Coffee Club was replaced by the Guy’s All-Star Shoe Band, or GAS band, with Pat Donohue and Peter Ostroushko, but mostly Jenny and I lived in New York. She went on another Asian tour. She returned to me.

The actor Sue Scott came aboard in 1992 to play all the female parts, smothering mom, Edith Piaf, witch, weary waitress, whispery New Age herbalist, and a year or two later, Tim Russell, a radio veteran, took over all the male roles, hipster, cowboy, punk, various pretentious gasbags, Winston Churchill (We will fight on the beaches and in the fields, we will hide behind the trees and sneak up on them from behind and we will poke them with big sticks), and when I wrote Unintelligible voice in the script, he did an amazing echoey voice of male authority so perfectly unintelligible it reduced the audience to rubble. Rich Dworsky at the keyboard improvised the music cues on the script—Urban Hustle—Big Western Horizon at Dawn—Aztec Liturgy—Parental Alarm—and Fred Newman at the sound-effects table with the bells and buzzers, coconut shells, gravel box did his vocal effects, the singing dolphins and bullet ricochets, deadly snakes, bagpipes, talking horses, jet flyovers, Southern evangelists, p.a. feedback, operatic loons, and growling stomachs.

Tim Russell, Sue Scott, Walter Bobbie, 2008.

The three of them covered the waterfront, though we brought in Erica Rhodes, thirteen, to play the daughter in “Raised By Psychologists,” the story of a child whose parents know too much. She came home sobbing, having been pushed by a boy and spit at, and her mother the Ph.D. said, “And how did that make you feel?” and talked about passive aggression that invites pushing and spitting. Erica also played an 85-year-old woman who, tired of being around elderly people and their incessant complaining, got a fabulous surgeon to pull her skin taut and do a larynx makeover and now she could pass for eighteen and enjoy being hit on by young men, but she said, “They can redo the face and the boobs, but it’s hard to pretend you don’t know what you know. You know? Just once I’d like to sit down and have lunch with people who remember Clark Gable and were around for V-J Day. August 14, 1945. Remember? Remember that?” And she sang, “Happy days are here again, the skies above are clear again,” except it wasn’t Erica, it was Sue Scott doing a cracked old-lady voice. I said, “Are you okay?” and the old lady voice said, “I need to take a deep breath and let the vocal cords relax.” I said, “You still look great.” The old lady excused herself to go lie down. The sketch wouldn’t have worked on TV, but it was good on radio.

We were America’s Last Live Radio Variety Show and, as if that weren’t enough, we became America’s Only Live Outdoor Broadcast From Unlikely Places. There was a thunderstorm show in an outdoor arena in Oklahoma, the audience holding garbage bags over their heads. At the Starlight outdoor theater in Kansas City, we did the show in 105-degree heat and 78 percent humidity as stagehands sprayed the audience with a cold mist. There were blizzard shows, like the one in Birmingham, Alabama, with thirteen inches of snow by showtime. I stood on the stage of the Alabama Theater with the Shoe Band looking at an audience of a hundred who’d managed to make their way downtown. No guests had arrived, the soundman’s mother and girlfriend were working the lights. The audience kept straggling in and a gust of wind blew in as the stage door opened and Emmylou Harris came in, just off her bus, and she and I sang “From Boulder to Birmingham,” no rehearsal. A gospel group, the Birmingham Sunlights, made it in by the end of the monologue and finished the show. A fine show backed up by sheer heroism, and it gave Minnesotans a chance to admire Alabamans. At the Kansas State Fair, on a stage on a dirt track, a mighty wind came up during the Guy Noir sketch, featuring Governor Kathleen Sebelius, and blew the scripts out of everyone’s hands and we had to improvise while blinded by a cloud of dust that made your hair stand straight up. At a country ballroom in Gibbon, Minnesota, we did a polka show with four bands and hefty couples in bright matching outfits twirling on the dance floor, and there was dissension between spectators who’d come to see and dancers who’d come to dance and twirl, and so that was the last polka show we ever did. Couples in matching outfits are not shy about defending the right to polka. At a tent show in Wyoming, the lights went out and a dozen men ran to get their pickups and park them around the front of the tent, and we did the show by headlights. At Yellowstone, a buffalo lay down by the satellite uplink dish, and a stagehand asked a park ranger how to move the animal and the ranger said, “We don’t try to tell them what to do.” In Juneau, I did the News from Lake Wobegon in which someone’s aunt went to Alaska and found gold and I got tangled up in storylines and could not extricate myself, and I could hear the Inuit dance troupe behind the curtain, getting warmed up for the closing number, as I kept talking and finally the stage manager came out and pointed to the clock and said, “Just say goodnight,” and I did and the ON THE AIR light went dark. One could mention the Walker Art Center rooftop broadcast, which went dead at 6 p.m. when a museum guard turned off the power at the usual closing time: it took five minutes to dash down three flights and find the circuit box and flip the switch on.

There are several reasons why you’d rather record a show and edit it rather than perform live. (I’d rather you read what you’re reading now than the first draft of three years ago.) But the audience loves liveness, and so you take a deep breath and do it live, which makes the show extraordinary, which means you can do a show about ordinary things. You can sing about coffee: Coffee helps you do your duty in pursuit of truth and beauty. No reason to debate it, just be sure it’s caffeinated black coffee. You can pay homage to sweet corn and egg salad, the pleasure of sitting beside a river, the beauty of snowy mornings, the joy of friendship. I sang:

Friendship is a beautiful blessing as through life we are progressing.

Be kind to strangers, high or low—you were a stranger once, you know.

Life is just a brief rehearsal, then we go to the universal.

And there, my friend, you will find out:

Love is what it’s all about.

Outsiders assumed it was stressful to do a weekly show, and I let them assume that because to me, a flatlander, it is unbecoming to show personal pleasure lest you cause pain to the sorrowful. But it was mostly a great pleasure. We had a few unhappy employees who wanted the show with its big audience to advocate for noble causes, but every time I did that, it felt creepy whereas when the audience got happy it felt right as rain. I did 1,557 performances and walked downstage without a script— who needs a script to talk about your family—and told Lake Wobegon stories, and because I was so nearsighted, I never felt stage fright. There wasn’t another show like it. It was like owning the only root beer stand in town: if people liked root beer, they came to us. For a sermon or a discussion about parenting or a gin martini, you went elsewhere.

Public radio kept a lectern between it and the audience. Prairie Home removed the lectern. Public radio wanted to sound literary, and Prairie Home spoke in a Minnesota voice and people remember when they are spoken to. Sometimes, people walked up to me weeks, months, later and repeated an elaborate Lake Wobegon episode involving multiple characters and transactions and misunderstandings and it astonished me. With New Yorker stories, people might say, “I liked that story about the mid-life crisis of Dionysus,” and that was all, but with radio, they remembered the story itself. Once I talked about Pastor Charles Ingqvist, and a hundred people reminded me that he is David, not Charles. Also, that Roger Hedlund’s wife is Cindy, not Elizabeth. “Or did he dump Cindy?” someone wrote. Nope. My mistake. People told the Tomato Butt story back to me and the truck stop and the twenty-four Lutheran pastors on the pontoon boat for the weenie roast and their ecclesiastical dignity as the boat sank slowly under their weight—it showed me that I was in the right line of work. Literary prizes look nice on your bio, the Booker, the Hooker, the Pullet Surprise, but what matters is saying what you have to say to people who hear it and hold onto it. I’ve been in The Atlantic and Harper’s and The New Yorker to be glanced at by people in neurologists’ waiting rooms, and I prefer to stand on a stage in Worthington, Minnesota, and tell stories to 700 people to whom this will mean something.

A Prairie Home Companion was the result of purely fortuitous timing: the satellite uplink system made it a national broadcast in 1980, and twelve years later public radio still had an amateur spirit and people who loved radio were still in charge, people like Bill Kling. Eventually he retired and the coroners took over, but Bill was a man who got excited about what he admired and wasn’t afraid to show it. His successor would’ve been happier as the CEO of a dry-cleaning chain. Kling loved a good time. He encouraged our annual season-opening street dance with meatloaf and mashed potato dinner, a series of contests (loon-calling, Bob Dylan impressions, Minnesota accent, Beautiful Baby, a joke-telling contest for kids, a dance contest, an overacting contest) and then the street dance and the host got to sing “Great Balls of Fire,” which once almost came true when the piano player’s coat caught on fire from a space heater on stage. It was festive and friendly and it was free. People looked forward to it year after year. We did it because we enjoyed being around our listeners—the sheer variety of them, including a great many who don’t look at all like public radio listeners but they were. The coroners felt insecure out in the open and preferred to work behind closed doors among familiar male faces and nobody speaking out of turn.

Street dance on Exchange Street, 2007.

The show’s success gave us the luxury to ignore management and all we needed to do was to have fun. The show observed all the major holidays. On Labor Day weekend, we honored working people, especially those unlikely to listen to public radio:

O the plumber is the man, the plumber is the man.

Down into the cellar he must crawl.

He is not sleek and slim but we don’t look down on him

For the plumber is the man who saves us all.

When the toilet will not flush and the odor makes you blush

And you cannot use the sink or shower stall,

Then your learning and your art slowly start to fall apart

But the plumber is the man who saves us all.

We celebrated Halloween with a menagerie of monsters, demented dentists, psychotic school bus drivers, evil evangelists, and “Her Blood-Crusted Fingers Tore at His Throat,” in which a lady director auditioned actors for a horror movie, had them do blood-curdling screams and blood-chilling gasps and evil chortles, and when they failed the audition they were hurled into a vat of boiling oil or eaten by rabid banshees, their choice. It was thespianism at its best. A month later we did Thanksgiving with Brunelle and Sutton and Janis Hardy improvising a gratitude cantata from slips of paper collected from the crowd, which was so much better than your standard cantata about love and peace, etc.—ours got into favorite recipes, useful skills, new appliances, specific behavioral traits. We moved to New York City for December, with a version of “Hush, Little Baby” with new verses about Papa taking Baby to see the sights, and new rhymes (hayseeds/ Macy’s, oysters/Cloisters, solemn muse/St. Bartholomew’s, blue cheese/Balducci’s, etc.). We did the annual Talent from Towns Under Two Thousand show with an array of giddy performers thrilled to stand on the Town Hall stage in front of a New York crowd unafraid to show wild enthusiasm. We did a Christmas show in which we ridiculed holiday songs we hate: I sure hate this song, pa rum pum pum pum. I hear it all day long, pa rum pum pum pum. I think it’s awfully dumb, goes on ad nauseam, I’d like to kill the bum who plays the drum. Let’s break his thumbs. And it ended with the audience singing “Silent Night” a cappella, four verses, which made everyone mist up; I got tears in my eyes and could hardly sing the words about radiant beams and redeeming grace. I couldn’t talk afterward, so we hummed a verse and I said, “Merry Christmas, everybody,” and the band struck up “Joy to the World” as a fiddle hoedown and we clapped ourselves off the air. We came back to St. Paul in January to earn the right to talk about winter, which our Southern audience was eager to hear. We did a Joke Show, the radio audience our main research resource, skirting the danger zones of humor but Unitarian and Norwegian jokes went over well. And a medley of sung jokes, all of them dark:

My daughter brought home a boyfriend

With great big ugly tattoos

And long black greasy hair

And Lord how he hit the booze.

I said, “Darling, I’m sure he’s nice,

But something makes me nervous.”

She said, “He’s extremely nice.

He’s doing 500 hours of community service.”

For Valentine’s Day, we wrote new love songs:

I’ve got you under my skin.

You are some kind of a skin disease.

I’ve taken drugs and other remedies

And now you’re in my heart,

And I may need surgery—

I’ve got you under my skin.

We did a couple shows down South, took a break in March, during which I generally came down with the flu, and then back to Minnesota for the spring run, broadcasts from Moorhead, St. Cloud, Bemidji, or Duluth. And thereafter, a June Picnic Tour of big outdoor venues, the old amphitheater in Chautauqua, New York, Wolf Trap on Memorial Day weekend, Ravinia near Chicago, Marymoor Park in Seattle, the Greek Theater in LA, Red Rocks in Denver, and we wound up at Tanglewood in the Berkshires. When you play to 3,000 or 6,000 or 8,000 persons outdoors, you must focus on Clarity, do joke jokes, lean on the SFX man for buzzard shrieks and elephant cries, but keep an opening for sheer beauty—the crowd sits holding their breath as the soprano sings “Ave Maria”—so familiar, so brave, so perfect—or a guitarist plays the Don McLean tune “Vincent”— or a solo cello plays a Bach adagio and nobody talks and no dogs bark. At Tanglewood, the crowd spread their blankets on the sward of grass beyond the Shed and after the broadcast they pushed down front as the swells headed home and we stood around singing old campfire songs for an hour or so. It was pure pleasure. We sang Amazing grace, how sweet the sound and I saw a young woman with a crooked arm in a wheelchair, her mother leaning close and singing into her daughter’s face, looking into her daughter’s eyes. There were several families with young adult children with severe disabilities, their parents’ arms around them. It felt like a healing service, which I don’t offer, but music works in its own mysterious ways.

In the course of time I learned that people like to be paid attention to so I tried to write a song about every city we performed in. Baltimore, for example:

John Waters, Pimlico

Little houses in a row

Mencken, Tyler, Mister Poe.

Oyster buffet on the Bay

Crabs fried or sautéed

Fifty different combinations

In the city of crustaceans,

Baltimore.

Many people have written songs about Milwaukee, but when I sang mine in Milwaukee to Milwaukeeans, they felt warm inside.

Down on Polish Flats,

Near the brewery where they made Blatz,

And there is a bar on every block.

So you’d never drink and drive, you’d walk.

You could make some stops

At Leon’s or Kopp’s

For brats with mustard

And frozen custard

And deep-fried cheese curds,

Maybe seconds or thirds.

Which is why people in Milwaukee

Tend to be stocky,

Not delicate like me the poet,

But when Milwaukeeans put their arms around you, you’re going to know it.

No city got off song-free: I sang,

I could sing about the glory that was Greece, or Rome, or Florence in the time of Lucrezia Borgia

Or the glory that is Columbus, Georgia.

A good life, flying around, doing shows hither and yon, talking about my hometown on the edge of the prairie—“Not the end of the world, but you can see it from there.” A big tent with a circus of musical talent, and we prized old songs (The little boy stood in the barroom door and he cried, “Oh Papa, come home. Benny is sick and the fire has gone out and Mother is waiting alone. We’ve sent for the doctor and he cannot come, the fever’s a hundred and two. Benny is worse and is likely to die and, Papa, he’s calling for you.” ) and it ventured into the near-bawdy (There was a young girl of Madras who had a remarkable ass—not soft, round, and pink, as you probably think—but the kind with long ears that eats grass.) and gospel songs (There’ll be joy, joy, joy, up in my Father’s house) for an audience that included a goodly portion of ungodly. Gospel is what I grew up with, and I am moved by His Eye Is on the Sparrow and He Wipes the Tear from Every Eye. I don’t feel the same for Gershwin as I feel for How Great Thou Art because Gershwin wrote for the handsome and prosperous and gospel is for people who know distress up close. The comedy didn’t require that you be a Democrat or a college grad or under forty. So we rolled along broad avenues with the redoubtable Tim Russell, the sterling Sue Scott, fearless Fred Newman, and dependable Rich Dworsky, and mostly it was clean but then I’d toss a verse into “Deep Blue Sea”—

Lucy, she was very deep

It was Willie what got drownded in the deep Lucy.

Juvenile, yes, and them what got it, grinned, and the others went on, unmolested. Meanwhile, Dusty and Lefty rode the arid plains in search of a woman who wanted a pair of boots under her bed and Guy Noir searched for the answers to life’s persistent questions. Word had gotten around in the rodent population at the Acme that I was not a killer but a conscientious objector. The one time I set a mousetrap it caught a mouse by the ankle and he walked with a limp after that. I took care of him. Fed him. He became very fond of imported bleu cheese so I named him Mister Bleu. We became close. I made him a wheelchair out of a child’s roller skate. I found a vet willing to care for a rodent. He was on dialysis for a year. What can I say? I have his ashes in a little medicine bottle on my bookshelf. When the show was over, the crew loaded it into the semitrailer and Russ Ringsak headed for the next town.

Parody was a staple of the show, as it was back in my high school years, and now I used it to remind my generation that it was aging, using the Stones’ “Honky-Tonk Women”:

I found a long tall woman in New York City

She stood behind the chair that I sat on

I said I want my hair to come down on my shoulders

She looked at me and said, Those days are gone.

It’s the long tall hair salon woman

Gimme, gimme, gimme a very hard time

I took the delicate sensitive “Teach Your Children” of the law firm Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and made it more relevant:

You who recall this song

It’s been a long time since the Sixties

Your hair is thin up there

Your memory’s very dim and misty

Hear your children say,

It’s moving day, today we’re giving

Orders to you, today you move,

You’re going to assisted living.

You can argue, you can cry, but the Sixties have gone by,

It’s a sharp stick in your eye, but we love you.

We played to an audience of parents and we did our best to play on their anxieties.

I met you on the Internet

A chat room called EZ2Get

It was lowercase and phonetically spelled

We talked for hrs and we LOLed

You offered me a JPG

I said I don’t have one of me

You sent me yr entire file

Yr blu blu eyes, your HD smile

Someday when I’m out of jail

Done doing time for stealing mail

When I get out and back on the street

Maybe you and I can meet.

In my late fifties, I set out to write love sonnets, seventy-seven of them. Helen Story required me to memorize for English class Shakespeare’s “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” and the cadence sticks in the mind. My sonnets were pretty good but when I recited them to a crowd, the response was muted, but a poem that began and people fell apart. I submitted it to The New Yorker and the poetry editor, Alice Quinn, said, “Oh, Garrison, you know we can’t print that!” but so sweetly that a friendship bloomed. She suggested I do poetry on the radio, which led eventually to The Writer’s Almanac, a five-minute summary of This day in history followed by a poem and a blessing (“Be well, do good work, keep in touch”), which led to poets like Maxine Kumin, Ron Padgett, Billy Collins, Rita Dove, Robert Bly, Donald Hall performing on Prairie Home Companion. I was a good reader of poems thanks to my lack of theater training. I read them as one would read Scripture and every poem I read could be clearly understood even by listeners scrambling eggs for unruly children. I chose the poems for clarity. And if the poem is not clear, then it needs to be fascinating. I did the Almanac daily for almost twenty-five years on public radio, then continued it as a podcast. It was the best good deed I ever did, putting poets out in public view, and it was all about clarity, the idea of poetry as powerful speech. Read Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” or “A Summer Day” and you’ll see what I mean. She said, “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination.” She said, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” No poet ever asked me that before and meant it. I plan to create written work that gets wilder and that some people will value, perhaps one or two hundred.

O what a luxury it be,

What pleasure, O what perfect bliss,

How ordinary and yet chic,

To pee, to piss, to take a leak.

And I wrote to Jenny:

My dearest Jenny—I’m not myself without you, and it isn’t my life I’m living when you’re not here, it’s a refugee life. We belong together. Otherwise my feelings don’t work right unless we’re together. You and I have a conversation that goes on and on. Will you marry me? We could marry in September in New York. I’m in love with you. You are extraordinary and beautiful and I feel sad without you, even when I’m having a good time. We have come through all of our awkward times without any ill feeling whatsoever and we have come to love each other more and more. I am crazy about you. You need to play music, and I need to sit in a quiet room and write but I can’t endure that quiet unless you’re near. Well, sweetheart, that is all for tonight. I will see you tomorrow after your show. I am so much in love with you.

In the spring of 1995, I wrote a letter to my mother, telling her I would marry Jenny in the fall. In my family, third marriages are unknown, and it helped matters that Jenny was from Anoka and her sister knew mine. Her people were within our constellation though not in the same orbit. Some of my teachers went to their church. One of Jenny’s childhood friends had been a Brethren girl whose aunt was married to my Uncle Jim. Jenny’s mother was behind the Great Books program in Anoka and knew Catherine Jacobson, mother of my classmate Christine. We had connections. We had been brought into the world by the same Dr. Mork. Marrying her was to marry Anoka to Manhattan, to belong on 90th Street and still hold Minnesota in my heart. And when I took her to meet John and Grace in Minnesota, Jenny threw out her arms and held the old lady close and then the old man, and that was that, no more needed to be said. They had not been huggers, except with grandkids, but they were delighted to feel her affection. Jenny stayed a Nilsson, didn’t take my name, but she was accepted as a Keillor from the moment she met them.

We merged into marriage on November 21, 1995, in a side chapel at St. Michael’s, Amsterdam at 99th, the bride elegant and jittery, kneeling under pre-Raphaelite apostles on the Tiffany windows, and we were blessed by a West Indian priest and heard Jenny’s sister Elsa play Elgar’s Salut d’amour on violin and Jenny’s mother read, from Colossians, “You are the people of God; He loved you and chose you for His own. Therefore, you must put on compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience.” We said our vows and Philip Brunelle played a rousing Bach postlude that incorporated the Anoka High School fight song, and we hiked down Broadway, Jenny in her lacy ivory dress carrying a bouquet of freesia, and passersby smiled and we got good wishes from numerous panhandlers. The wedding lunch was at La Mirabelle on 86th, about forty of us, grilled sole, with wine, and Roy Blount made a speech in which he told the joke about the man who described to his wife her two main faults and she said, “Those are why I couldn’t get a better husband.” Roland Flint recited the poem about love as “an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken; it is the star to every wand’ring bark, whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.” And the waitress, Danielle, serenaded us with “La vie en rose,” with rich Piafian vibrato. We ate the cake and hung around for coffee and lingered and talked and walked home.

We spent a week in Rome on our honeymoon, and the grandeur of it, the narrow twisty streets and the magnificence rising on both sides, was perfect: when you’re in love, why would you want to be anywhere else? Thanks to our friend John Thavis, we met Father Reginald, the Pope’s Latinist, who gave us a little Vatican tour, including the world’s only ATM in Latin. We came home to do an open-air Prairie Home at Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, Jenny’s old school where she was inspired to make music her life and where bats nesting in the trees got excited by the music and flew in big dramatic loops over the stage. I looked at the audience during the monologue, and they were looking up with sheer dread, thinking of vampires. We flew home in a small jet through a storm front, lightning to the north and south, around high cumulus clouds, a full moon above, and into Minneapolis between two layers of cirrus clouds, sunset to the west. We started writing a novel together about a small-town girl, Rachel Green, who loves to play violin. We hired Norzin, an undocumented immigrant from Tibet, and suddenly our apartment had flowers, and her cooking was like my mother’s, noodles and meat. We paid her well and she saved her money and she and her husband brought their children over, hired a lawyer, they all became legal, and they moved to California. When she left, she took our hands in hers and cried louder than anybody I had ever said goodbye to. She left a long white silk scarf tied to the door handle, a Buddhist prayer scarf, and ever since then, I’ve had good fortune.

Our marriage was happy. Jenny was never at a loss for words; everything I said got a quick comeback. She made me laugh. I missed her when she went out for a long run, training for a marathon. I edited James Thurber’s collected works for the Library of America and talked them out of doing it unabridged. Everyone, even Thurber, needs abridgment. We, however, set out to expand and become parents. There were lab tests of my sperm’s motility. A man assumes his sperm are good swimmers, but I’m not and neither were they. To compensate for my defective sperm, I had to inject progesterone in her thigh, I sang, Close your eyes, pretend I’m a Beatle as I stick you with this needle so that our seed’ll create something fetal. And finally, a lab guy named Ron injected my sperm into her egg under a powerful microscope. And in due course science worked.

I was driving home from a speech in St. Cloud when the car phone rang and Jenny told me she was indeed pregnant and the baby would be born in December. I was delighted, also shaken, as a man should be, and turned off the highway in a daze, and spent a while being lost on county roads, rolling this mystery around in my mind, fatherhood at 55, a stunning fact, a clutch in the heart. Friends of mine were parents and they’d set out to be beloved and wound up as parole officers, listening to angry offspring listening to a band called Degenerate Thrombosis. Others produced daughters devoted to mathematics and practicing Chopin. Hard to know where the apple would drop. I got home and we sat on the side of the bed, arms around each other, not saying a word. I knew she wanted this child, and I knew I wanted to bring the child up in Minnesota among relatives.

We were in New York in December 1997, as her due date approached. The baby was moving around, and I put my hand on the bulge and made contact. A nurse told us the fetus looked like a girl, nice and compact, no dangly parts, which was fine by me. We didn’t need any Christmas gifts except the Infanta herself. We lit a few candles and sat in the dusk and looked at each other, two characters in an ancient drama. Christmas dinner was a light lunch, the little tree sat on the coffee table. She arrived on the 29th at 9:06 p.m. at New York–Presbyterian Hospital on 68th and York. The obstetrician examined the mother and gave her a pep talk and the nurses did the delivery, comforting the mother, easing the child’s descent, and she emerged, took a breath, turned pink, aced the Apgar test, was loosely swaddled in a receiving blanket, and at 9:11 was handed to me, her arms and legs swimming, her dark eyes shining, her mouth prim, her long slender fingers grasping my finger, a kind of luminosity about her. Her heartbeat appeared as spikes on a graph on a TV monitor. It was a religious moment. I have hiked the Grand Canyon, seen Pavarotti in “Pagliacci,” dined with S. J. Perelman, sung with Emmylou Harris, and once, on national television, I tossed a basketball over my left shoulder without looking and hit a swisher at twenty feet, but none of those compared to holding a five-minute-old daughter in my hands. I was struck by dumb wonder, the thought that this is how everybody comes into the world, just this way, and turned to my wife, who did not have the same sense of wonder I had. She looked like the victim of an assault.

We named her Maia, after Jenny’s Swedish grandmother, and Grace, after my mother. I walked out of the hospital, thinking dumb profound thoughts, and walked a couple miles in a daze before I saw I was going the wrong way and I jumped into a cab at 14th and rode home. Carlos the elevator man said, “How’s it going?” I said, “It’s a beautiful little girl.” I reached to shake his hand and then he hugged me. Carlos is Mexican; he knows that you shake hands on a real estate transaction, a new father needs an embrace.

She was a remarkable little girl, not a hobby baby you could shoehorn into your busy schedule. She lived on Australian Standard Time, ate like a wolverine, stored up pockets of gas not easily jiggled out of her. Sometimes she pooped while feeding, the entire digestive tract engaged at once. She fought off sleep, not wanting to miss out on anything. When her tiny head touched the pillow, her eyes flew open, she keened and wailed. She had no midrange; she was louder than anyone else in the family. When it was my turn, I slung the spit rag over my shoulder and walked the floor with her, a foot soldier in the old campaign, an exhausted, poorly informed man nobody would ever hire to look after a child.

We brought the little girl home to Minnesota to meet her ancestors. A flock of them came one afternoon to view her, and the sleeping child was passed from one elder to another, Ina and Louie, Joan, Elsie and Don, Jean, each holding her in their arms, the Last Niece. All the other nieces were having children of their own. It was a poignant visit, old aunts and uncles, knowing they would not see this tiny girl reach maturity, which made her all the more precious to them. They held her tenderly, murmuring primeval comforting sounds though she was sound asleep. They also spoke some to me and Jenny, though Maia was the beautiful mystery. Me they could read about in the newspaper. A few months later, Father Bill Teska came to the house in a magnificent black robe and baptized her with great ceremony and snatches of Latin, my old Brethren parents watching in silence as he anointed the infant with oil and water and salt and made her Roman Anglican, her aunt Linda and cousin Dan and friend Gretchen, godparents.

We lived in a cabin in the Wisconsin woods for less than a year. Seclusion was not what we needed; the new mother craved company and support, especially with the father often on the road. One day, heading out the long treacherous driveway, she collided with an incoming garbage truck and broke a finger. Another day, on her way home, a suicidal deer leaped into her car on the county road and cracked the windshield. Obviously for our own safety we needed to move to town so we bought the Doty house on Portland Avenue next door to the Hooleys and their four small children. The New York Times was thrown onto our front steps by 6 a.m. every day, and friends were apt to drop in. The house was designed by the French architect who did the St. Paul Cathedral down the street and looks very French, with a winding staircase and a slate roof. Years before, the house had been owned by the head of Northwest Orient Airline, a Mr. Hunter, and one winter, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, stranded during a big blizzard, had spent two nights in his guest bedroom, a small room with bathroom across the hall. Surely the First Lady could’ve commandeered something grander downtown, but it was wartime and she was a Democrat and duty-bound to set a good example. We spent ten years in that house, had a hundred houseguests, and every one was told about their predecessor, Eleanor. When my mother was fifteen, she lived a few blocks away with Aunt Jean and Uncle Les, and after school she went door to door selling homemade peanut butter cookies to help pay her way in the world, and she remembered going to this big house. “Were they nice?” I asked. “It was the Depression,” she said. “Everyone was nice. Everybody helped each other. People getting off a streetcar would take a transfer and if they didn’t need it, they’d stick it into a crack in a building by the streetcar stop for someone else to use. Little slips of paper stuck in a wall. Free rides.”

My workroom was next door to my little girl’s bedroom. She grieved to be put to bed at night and always woke up early feeling exuberant, and toddled in to where I sat at a computer, a grin on her face. We padded downstairs for breakfast, and she savored each berry and chunk of melon and spoonful of cereal. We shared a love of peanut butter, Dairy Queen cones, cheese curds, and popcorn. We sat in the dining room, by the grandfather clock like the one my dad sang about, that went tick-tock tick-tock until it stopped short, never to go again, when the old man died. I read the prayer painted above the fireplace, O Lord we thank Thee for the food, for every blessing, every good, for earthly sustenance and love bestowed on us from heaven above. All was well for a time, and then we started to worry about our girl not hitting her developmental deadlines, the first utterance of Mama, standing up, walking, the first use of the past participle, etc. There were meetings with the pediatrician when I held my breath, I was listening so hard. And the slow suspicion that maybe we had not gotten the precocious neurotic child we were expecting. We had a sweet girl who adored her nannies Suzanne, Katja, Kaja, and Emily: they were the Sun and the Stars. She lived in the moment, every one. She could amuse herself with a bowl of water on the sidewalk. She got laughing fits easily—at loud belches and pretend stumbles and cries of alarm. She was not a finicky eater: she licked her chops the moment the bib was tied. She laughed as we put her tiny feet into wet concrete when we laid a new driveway. When she was two, I took her around the State Fair, and she touched a newly shorn sheep and looked into the faces of hogs and goats. We slid down the Giant Slide together on a burlap bag, and she laughed the whole way down. She ate part of a corn dog that I pre-chewed for her, and we rode through the Tunnel of Love and she was delighted by her own echo.

One spring we were visited by Diana Cummings, the daughter of Paul Doty, indomitable at ninety, born the year our house was built, who grew up in it. Maia’s bedroom had been her room. She remembered every family who lived on our block in her childhood and remembered hearing people gossip about Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald when they returned to St. Paul for the birth of their daughter in 1921. Diana and my little girl sat together on the couch, holding hands, communing, and the lady said, simply, “I have only happy memories of this house.”

Maia was a fish in water, strong arms, steady kick, little pink goggles rising and plunging. A dog jumped on her when she was three and terrified her, and thus we were spared the burdens of dog ownership. An aunt took her horseback riding, and I worried that the virus of horsewomanship might get in her blood, but no. We kept her away from sports and saved ourselves a lot of trouble. What she loved was to be in a roomful of people talking. She also loved musicals. She loved the Radio City Christmas show in which one Rockette kicked off a shoe and kept dancing though off-kilter; our girl was delighted. She grew up backstage at my show, called me “Show Boy,” adored the women singers, Heather, Aoife, Sara, Jearlyn and Jevetta, her sisters. She showed no interest in performing but was proud of her sisters. We bonded over jokes, musicals, trains, water fights. “Make me laugh,” she said, and I did my best. The best way is to reach for a glass of water and pretend to throw it at her, except if we are in the backyard, I actually do and she goes to pieces. She has a vigilant mother, so she didn’t watch television (except for approved videos) or eat fast food or drink soda pop or use foul language. She was taken to kiddie concerts of classical music and to children’s theater. At bedtime, with a little prompting, she bowed her head and prayed for people. But she loves to laugh, and I have a video of her on a raft ride at the State Fair, watching waves of water wash over the side and onto her father’s pants, and she is convulsed, howling, weeping, like me when I was twelve and read the limerick about the young man of Madras.

One morning I heard a shriek from upstairs, a long primeval wail, and there was Jenny on the landing, holding the stiff body of our little girl. I dashed up and took Maia in my arms while Jenny called 911. The child was unconscious, her breathing shallow. She went into convulsions in my arms and her body stiffened, her mouth clamped shut. I thought she was dying. And in about three minutes the St. Paul fire department paramedics arrived at the door.

In those three minutes, the heart of the father got scorched with dread. We were back in the Middle Ages, a peasant family, a dying child. The paramedics came in, four of them, and lifted her out of my arms. They laid her on the floor and tended to her, took her temperature (she was running a fever), put an oxygen mask on her face. One of them began explaining to me about febrile seizures, how common they are in small children, which Jenny knew about but I didn’t. We had bought a dozen books on child-rearing, and Jenny had read them and I hadn’t. And then one of the paramedics pointed out that I was still in my underwear. I pulled on a pair of trousers and we rode off to the hospital and hustled in the door and there was a pediatrician, a short man with a bow tie, like most pediatricians. I don’t remember what he did. We were there for less than an hour, and then we came home with a very tired little girl. For the first time in years, she took a nap and I sat by her bed and watched her breathe.

GK and Maia, 7.

And there was the day we found my heart pills scattered on the floor and didn’t know if she had ingested some, and if so, how many, so she had to have her stomach pumped, three nurses holding her tight while a fourth pumped charcoal down her throat, my daughter writhing in terror. Still vivid to me, years later. And her tonsillectomy. I was the one who wheeled her into the OR and held her head while the anesthetist put the mask on her. As she was wheeled out afterward, she saw me, the Judas, and stuck out her tongue.

In a rash moment, against Jenny’s better judgment, I sold the Doty house and bought a house overlooking the Mississippi, with wild turkeys and raccoons and a red fox living in the woods behind. As the movers emptied the place, I took a last walk around, remembering my son Jason’s and Tiffany’s wedding on the staircase, January 1, 2000, and my little girl crawling under the dining table during dinner, and the garden with the board fence where I spent my luxurious recuperation after heart surgery, reclining on a chaise, coffee in hand, writing on a yellow legal pad:

The secret of a long career is to keep going and not fade

And not think about your reputation for one minute.

It’s like becoming Tallest Boy In The Sixth Grade,

Stick around and you’re bound to win it.

So do your work, keep going straight ahead,

And you can be a genius someday after you are dead.

The new house was built in 1919 for a family who had a cook and a housemaid who lived on the third floor, short women from undernourished countries, so the back stairway had low clearances and I banged my head often. Maia took an upstairs bedroom and sat at an old desk where, twenty years before, I banged out Lake Wobegon Days, which changed my life though not to the extent that she has. We put her in preschool, then into a church school, because the thing we feared most was bullying, and a teacher told us, “Sitting in a class of twenty kids, she isn’t going to learn anything. She needs individual attention.” We searched for the right school desperately as our girl sank into the academic slough and found one that came as a miracle, a school designed for kids with learning challenges, where everyone is an oddball in some way or other and a spirit of acceptance prevails, no bullying. She was not going to become an English major and write term papers about Joyce, but she was joyful and jokey and affectionate. For her, the right place turned out to be a boarding school in New York state, a thousand miles away, and Jenny and I did the painful necessary thing and packed her suitcase and one September day took our girl to her new school and left her, weeping, in the arms of a kind teacher, and walked to the car and drove away in silence, brokenhearted, a day burned into my memory, the day we abandoned our own. She was fourteen. A long quiet ride into the city. She didn’t change her clothes for days because those were the clothes she was wearing when Jenny hugged her goodbye. We had given her a wonderful month of August, and it only made saying goodbye harder.

The next day the school emailed us pictures of Maia, bravely trying to smile. We’d done the right thing, which became clearer and clearer as time went by, but there was little pleasure in it. We missed our girl. Every time I walked past her bedroom door and looked in and saw her stuffed animals, I felt hollow inside. Her sociability got her through the hard times, and she made friends with KK and Nora and Marisa and charmed her teachers and she came to love schedules and look forward to weekend outings, and Jenny and I woke up every morning and saw that door to the empty room. I missed her. The school became her family and we became distant relatives. Sometimes I thought about the brilliant neurotic daughter I’d been expecting, the one who’d stay up late at night writing angry poems. And then I missed the heroic humorous girl away at school, the girl who loved to come up and hug me and who said, “Make me laugh,” and I did.

I went to a dance at her school a year ago, the gym crowded with boys in suits and ties, girls in prom dresses, some with an odd gait, some quirk or twitchiness, a speech abnormality. My heart clutches, remembering what outcasts they would’ve been in the gym of my youth, how cruelly we treated the disabled and gimpy, and now the band strikes up “My baby’s so doggone fine, she sends chills up and down my spine”—the band is five old guys my age, the lead guitarist is going bald with a white ponytail down to his butt, playing “Brown-Eyed Girl”—and I see my daughter’s friend who was injured as an infant and now, at sixteen, is blind in one eye and walks with a lurch, one arm semi-paralyzed, and she is dancing to Van Morrison, utterly transported, dancing like mad, laughing and a-running, skipping and a-jumping, and singing “sha la la la la la la la la de dah,” not the least bit self-conscious. And then a slow waltz and I sing the words to my daughter, “I hear babies cry, I watch them grow; they’ll learn much more than I’ll ever know. And I think to myself, What a Wonderful World.” And it’s true. The world has come a long way in my time, and it looks wonderful to me with her in it.