The official site of Garrison Keillor
I think I speak for all Americans when I say that it’s good to have some rules and to know, after last week’s primaries, that if, in your adult life, you posted online that Thanksgiving is a celebration of colonialism and should be canceled, you’re not going to win the Democratic nomination for governor, at least not in Wisconsin. These are weird times with the president being off-loaded in a food…
So I’m working on a new book and then suddenly I’m engrossed in an online story about a 5-bedroom 1.5-acre, $7.5 million home for sale in the Hidden Hills gated community in L.A. and what I loathe about it compared to where I am with my sweetie, in Manhattan in a 2.1-bedroom with a little terrace with hydrangeas where a mourning dove family has raised its young. This didn’t happen back before…
The maker of my favorite candy bar, the candy I’ve loved my entire life for its salty sweetness — the Pearson’s Salted Nut Roll — is closing its only factory, on West Seventh Street in St. Paul, Minnesota, and laying off eighty workers. I live in New York and Pearson’s Salted Nut Rolls can’t be found here so when I fly out to Minnesota on the 12th, I hope there are some left in stores for me. The…
Call me a fool but I just sent a hundred bucks to a guy named Trygve Hammer running as a Democrat for Congress in North Dakota, which is delusional like supporting an attempt to climb Niagara Falls, but the name Trygve tells me he’s Norwegian and he’s an ex-Marine and wasn’t the cellphone delusional at one time? You saw them in the comics, called walkie-talkies, and detectives had them and now…
A sunny day in New York and we left the doors open to our balcony and suddenly I heard flapping, a sort of panic of wings, and a teenage robin was in the living room bumping off the ceiling. I guess he’d never experienced a ceiling before. We have mourning doves nesting on the balcony, the mama roosting on the nestlings, the papa out shopping for seeds, and a pair of mockingbirds has raised their…
Ours is a country with a great tradition of eccentrics and wackos from Robert Johnson who sold his soul to the devil and Carry Nation with her tavern-busting hatchet and the man who wrote a book with no punctuation and Hetty Green the Witch of Wall Street and the freak-show man P.T. Barnum down to our Current Occupant fascinated by tariffs and vengeance and putting his name on things and his…
The skies are clear over New York, the smoke from Canadian forest fires has dissipated, so the End of the World has been postponed, and the 50,000 fans who packed the Great Lawn of Central Park to watch the World Cup final have left, and the mourning doves on our balcony are taking turns sitting on the nest where the eggs have opened, leaving the tiny fledglings blind, helpless, covered with light…
I come from studious people, Anglos, suspicious of dream merchants and rainbow salesmen, people who, if you put us on a beach at sunset with tubs of beer on ice and a steel drum band and a fabulous buffet of roast pork and fresh fruit and a hundred people dancing with hands over their heads, my people would get busy collecting trash and cleaning up. We aren’t party people. I wander around the…
It’s a shock to realize I’m the same age as Mitch McConnell the ancient turtle-faced senator who gave us the Supremes and the Second Coming of Trump and I am 13 years older than the late Lindsey Graham the joyful senator who told Trump to go to hell and then became such an intimate pal that the Leader seemed to express actual human feeling at his passing, at least he made an attempt to. It goes to…
One beautiful aspect of the digital age is its advancement of democracy. Back in the newsprint age, you had William Safire, Maureen Dowd, George Will, Russell Baker, Molly Ivins, and if you wanted to tell them how dense and dim-witted they were, you had to put pen to paper and address the envelope and put a stamp on it and drop it in a mailbox and weeks later it might appear in Letters To The…