Hello Garrison—
My family is going on the PHC cruise around Norway's fjords in July. What a scenic place and maybe the most scenic spot on our withering planet. So why would so many Norwegians break away and trek to the barren prairie of North Dakota and Minnesota when they had so much going for them over there?

It's only a few weeks before the cruise. And if it's half as good as the last one to Alaska, the misses and I will feel we got our money's worth.

Ron B.
Grand Junction, CO

A good question, Ron B., and I suppose the answer is: bitter poverty and hunger. You can't eat rocks. The mountains and fjords with 3000-foot sheer cliffs are glorious to look at, but generations of young Norwegians grew up there with no good prospects for a decent life, shackled to a rigid class system that was backed up by the church, and so they lit out for America. They were glad to go. They suffered terrible loneliness and culture shock, especially when they hit those treeless prairies, but the Red River Valley that you call "barren" is the richest farmland on God's green earth. It was Canaan, compared to Bergen. They longed for Bergen once they were free of it, and they kept their artifacts, but they made a life on the prairie they could not have made in Norway. Now, of course, Norway is a different country. But in 1880, Fargo looked awfully good to a young Norwegian. They were no fools. But we can discuss this further in July.

Dear Garrison:
My sister-in-law, Lisa Silverberg Starr, has recently been appointed Poet Laureate of Rhode Island. I am in a quandary as to how to properly address her now.

Do you think Lisa, Her Poet Laureateness, is correct? I tried to "google" an answer but to no avail. Then I thought, there is one person who knows the answers to life's toughest questions: Garrison Keillor!

Hope to see you next year at the 5th Annual Block Island Poetry Project.

Rosie B.
Chepachet, RI

Billy Collins, a former two-time Poet Laureate of the United States, was on the show last weekend and with Billy I just say "Serene Highness" and that's all that's necessary. Of course I do not look him directly in the eye unless he looks me in the eye. And there is some bowing involved. I don't know if all of this pertains to Rhode Island, a state that is more like a county. Maybe you should simply address her as O Starr and then hum.

Block Island? Is that around here? And why a "project"? Why not a festival?

Dear Garrison,
In your most recent Old Scout column, you mentioned an 80-year old friend of yours who has written a memoir. Did she write it for publication? I'd like to read it, if so. I love to sit and listen (and read) to the life stories of the seasoned. And, I'll sit and look at anyone's old photographs, whether I know them or not. I think that's because my parents hardly took any photos of me (an only child). It just didn't occur to them. A friend of mine recently sent me a picture of her, her sister and me when we were about 8 or 9 years old. It was early spring or summertime, maybe just after supper—I am squinting at the sun, and we are wearing the pedal-pushers of the early 60's. Her mother had found it at the bottom of an old box of pictures. There was a part of my life I could hold in my hands, not just try to reach back and try to remember. I cried for an hour.

It's good to listen and look at another person's life and experience. It's one way to learn. Sometimes, I've found that all of our lives really aren't so different. And then sometimes, they are, and then, it's pure entertainment.

Let me know, if you can, and thanks.

Angela C.
Genoa, IL

The friend is Arvonne Fraser who has been a big player in the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party of Minnesota for more than fifty years. She started out working for Hubert Humphrey when he was starting out, and then married Donald Fraser and ran his campaigns for Congress — he was elected to many terms from Minneapolis, later was mayor of Minneapolis — and she and Don have always represented the basic decency and patriotism of most people in politics, Democrats or Republicans. Her memoir is entitled She Is No Lady and it's coming out in the fall and I find it quite an astonishing book for its frankness and its wit and its sheer grasp of detail. The woman has a clear mind. It's the best political autobiography I've read in many years and I'm just proud of her.

Post to the Host:
I'm just now discovering that you wrote some of my favorite songs from your shows and recordings. We never see you playing an instrument, so how do you go about writing such beautiful melodies? Do you play any instruments, or sight read music?

Just for the record, I thought the beard made you look younger.

Have a good summer. Hope to see you in Iowa or Nebraska some time soon. Your most recent trip to the Iowa State Fair was perfect.

Eli H.
Omaha, NE

The Iowa State Fair was perfection itself and it was fun to walk around and see it. I suddenly felt disloyal to Minnesota but Iowa's struck me as nearly perfect. As for songwriting, you'd be amused if you could see a Friday band rehearsal when I walk in with a fresh lyric in hand and sing it to Rich Dworsky and he tries to notate it. It wobbles around a lot, and usually it winds up either sounding like "Blue Bells of Scotland" or "When Last I Roam'd Through Tara's Halls" or some other fragrant old chestnut. And it's almost always in the key of C. So Rich plays it and then I sing it differently from the first time and he revises his notes and then I sing it yet a third way. Accompanying me at the piano is trying to hit a moving target. But sometimes the results aren't bad. Rich's song to his mother "Shirley World" last Saturday was a real gem, though. My offering was a parody of "Mama Tried" by Merle Haggard which the audience found puzzling, and then the little opening paean to mothers, "Almost Everybody Is Trying To Be Nice" which I wound up doing acapella because I couldn't remember how I'd sung it in rehearsal and so did a new version which was a mystery to the band. The audience was so taken aback that when it ended, they forgot to applaud. You'd think a show would be better prepared, wouldn't you?

Dear Garrison,
I was looking at pictures from your April 28 performance in Columbus, GA and it would appear that you are growing a beard? Please say that this is poor eyesight on my part. I don't mean to be dismissive but it's not going to work. I speak from experience, it's just not going to work!

If your daughter hasn't told you (your wife won't, at least not until someone else does) then you should hear this from an admirer. I feel it my duty. Of course if my eyesight is failing me and you're not growing a beard, then never mind.

Al E.
Vicksburg

I started a beard a few weeks ago and it was on its way to becoming semi-distinguished and then, on a sudden impulse the other day, I had a barber shave it off. It was a grayish beard and similar to one that Kevin Kline grew for "King Lear" and he was my inspiration. His was gray and trim and gave him a sort of moral grandeur that we all aspire to. So I started in and kept at it. I had a beard back in college and then again in the early years of the show. So this was a retro beard. Nobody at home said a word against it, and a few people intimated that they liked it, but of course most people chose to ignore it. They looked at me and thought whatever they thought and decided not to comment. An interesting episode, all in all, to take a long step toward becoming somebody else. The way you do when you put on dark glasses, or a cowboy hat. I may do this again but no time soon.

Post to the Host:
My husband, David, died early Monday morning from myeloma, a type of cancer. We brought him home from the hospital to hospice care on Saturday morning and at about 2pm he started asking what time it was. I reassured him that he didn't have to worry about time any more and that he could just rest. At 3pm he asked again. And then again at 4:00 and 4:30. Finally at 4:55 he said, "I want a radio." It clicked with me-he wanted to listen to his last Prairie Home Companion show. It was the most important thing that he did that day (besides being with his loving wife and the rest of the family, of course.) He loved the joke show and the Penguin joke and an Ole and Lena joke will be a part of his Memorial Service. We've listened to the show for 27 years and Dave couldn't leave this life without hearing it one more time.

Karen M.

I am sorry to hear about David's passing and my thoughts are with you and your family. You write cheerfully about a hard thing and that is brave of you. As you may know, the show is named for a cemetery up in Moorhead, with the word Companion tacked on, the sort of morbid joke I used to make back then, when I was in my thirties. We used to joke more about aging when we were young, before we figured out where the parade is heading. For some reason I feel younger now than when I was 35 or 45, and the joke show helps and so did that People In Their Twenties show and the young people one meets in the theater afterward. So onward we go. I never heard an Ole and Lena joke at a memorial service before: this may astonish some and surprise the others. Thank you for your letter, which is very dear, and for giving us this thought of David to tuck into our memory.

Post to the Host:
My daughter graduates from high school in a few weeks. She has good writing skills, a creative imagination, an ability to perceive correctly feelings and situations, and a keen curiosity. She will attend a small liberal arts college in September. She wants to study English with the hope of becoming a writer, especially an author of fiction, but most of those who hear her plans tell her that an English major has no value unless you want to teach and that all writers, except for the lucky few, starve. Can you give her some thoughts regarding an English education and a
life dedicated to writing?

Ed G.
Scottsdale, AZ

A fiction writer needs an anguished childhood, of course, and you may have failed her there, Ed. Maybe it's not too late. You could at least do your part and try to bully her into investment banking or corporate law so she can fight you and test her own resolve. But okay, an encouraging dad — I guess we can work with that. She should go to college without hard and fast plans and take an English course or two that requires some serious writing and find out how that does. A great many college English departments are still under the control of people who don't care for literature and who like to torture it, and that's not an education that's worth much. It's like studying economics with old Marxists: interesting, but a great deal is left out. I am an old English major and should be true to my school, but I honestly can't recommend it for writers. In my experience, which is limited, teachers have far too much sway, the students sit and soak up what they can. Whereas in the study of history, the student is more likely to get her feet on the ground and be able to argue her own point of view, which is good for a writer to do.

The qualities you attribute to your daughter are precious and I just don't want her to get bullied by jerks. But someone who perceives situations well can probably stand up for herself. Writers of fiction have come from the sciences, from the law, from history — not many from the social sciences, but a few — and of course there are the English majors. I wish her well and hope to read something by her, so send that along when the time is right. I need somebody to step in and write Guy Noir. I wish she would hurry up.