𝓓𝓲𝓪𝓻𝔂 𝓸𝓯 𝓪 𝓟𝓸𝓭𝓬𝓪𝓼𝓽 𝓙𝓾𝓷𝓴𝓲𝓮 — How like a winter hath your absence been¹

    Garrison Keillor resumed his daily Writer's Almanac podcast last July 23, but I just subscribed last week, on January 30.  Not because I was debating the sexual misconduct allegations that prompted Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) to sever ties with him on 11/29/17; more on those later.  The truth is that MPR's canceling his show was like losing a good friend with no warning, with no possibility of appeal: and I coped by telling myself that over meant over. Then after the Writer's Almanac Support Group appeared on Facebook, I told myself that a few ragtag diehards were trying to resurrect a few souvenir editions.  I joined, but ignored the posts until last week, when something inspired me to look carefully at their page.  And there they were, instructions about how to subscribe in iTunes.

    The little comfortable things I depended on before were much the same, although I could hear the bite of age in GK's 76-yeard-old voice.  The theme music was still Richard Dworsky on the piano playing Ge mig en dag ("Give me one day" in Swedish). After the opening bars GK said "And here is the Writer's Almanac for Wednesday January 30.  It's the birthday of Richard Brautigan …."  GK has a knack for capturing something pity about a person in a brief quote, presenting a parade of unique souls with one thing in common: they managed to find words for important thoughts. As in "Mae West, who said 'When confronted with a choice between two evils, I pick the one I haven't tried yet.'"  As in "James Joyce, born in Dublin, who said 'The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.'" For the depressed counter-cultural icon Brautigan, who died by his own hand, the quote was a short poem:
30 Cents, Two Transfers, Love

Thinking hard about you
I got on the bus
and paid 30 cents car fare
and asked the driver for two transfers
before discovering
that I was
alone.

    After the "It's the birthay of <name>" segments, and the "On this day in <year>" segments, there's a pause—one gets to know that pause well, to depend on it, like the theme music. There follows my favorite part, which GK introduces with "Here's a poem for today."  On January 30, it was the Idea of Living by Joyce Sutphen, which ended with lines that you could take as a plea, or rebuke, to Brautigan:

…You need to be breathing
in order to eat paella and

drink sangria, and making love
is quite impossible without

a body, unless you are one
of those, given – like gold –
to spin in airy thinness forever.

    How I missed this daily poetry dose! The Slowdown podcast with U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith does have its moments, as does A Poem a Day from the Poetry Foundation. But GK has more of the poems I like best, the accessible ones, with bite.

    GK and me actually only go back to 1998.  I was introduced to Prairie Home Companion by my wife Jean, who was an ardent fan.  To her, and then to us, GK embodied the concept of "Minnesota nice," with the understanding that niceness can be lively, interesting.  In our imaginations, he agreed with us that monogamy is a racy secret two people share, that everyday heroes are the only kind of heroes there really are.  In 2007, Jean helped her mom Sylvia realize a life-long dream by escorting her on a Prairie Home Companion cruise to Norway.  On the cruise she met Chuck and Kathy Zehner from Chicago, who stepped in to help when they saw Jean had her hands full caring for her mom.  They became our good friends, sticking by us when Jean had her brain tumor.  In 2016, after much sorrow, they invited me to GK's final Chicago concert in Highland Park.

    OK, the #MeToo thing. In my opinion, GK did not behave well, although he wasn't exactly Harvey Weinstein either. He described the flirtation as "mutual," but that word doesn't fully apply when one party's job depends on the other.  And he was not candid; he originally said that the whole mess was about a pat on the back gone awry, but turns out there were a score of flirtatious texts and emails.  Then he said " I can’t justify it," but that's far from an adequate apology.  See this article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune for a detailed statement of the case against GK.

    But truthfully, there were worst parts for me than any of that. One part was confronting the fact that GK was not so happily married after all, that he had distanced himself from everyday people.  Alas, the world is under no obligation to conform to one's illusions about it.  The other was understanding that GK was guilty of one of the three great crimes an American can commit, along with being poor or fat: he had let himself get old. And was doing stupid things so he could imagine himself as a younger man.

   And also truthfully, none of those failings deterred me from binge listening after we reconnected.  I've gone back as far as early January, and found this gem on the January 11 show: "William James, who said … 'A sense of humor is common sense dancing.'"


¹Of course in Sonnet 97 it's actually "How like a winter hath MY abscence been/From thee," see https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45101/sonnet-97-how-like-a-winter-hath-my-absence-been.  Hey, does my poetic license include forgiveness for creative misremembering?  Sound like a joke possibility for GK's "Professional Organization of English Majors" routine.