Sir:

Just doing some math and it seems you and Bob Dylan are close in age. And you both went to U of Minn. Did your paths ever cross back then? Did you ever catch his act at "The Ten o'Clock Scholar"? 

Thank you. 
Joe Herald
Cincinnati

--

Mr. Dylan arrived at the University a year before I did and he left about the time I got there and went to New York to find his fortune. I gravitated to Dinkytown and McCosh's Bookstore and the Scholar, places where he hung out, and I heard stories about him from old folkies who had known him, Maury Bernstein and Jon Pankake and others, but I doubt that our paths crossed. My main path was from Dinkytown to Eddy Hall, where I worked at KUOM, and Vincent Hall, seat of the English Department, and Murphy Hall, where the office of the Ivory Tower was. His path was along  Bleecker and McDougal Streets in the Village. And 4th Street, of course.

Dear Mr. Keillor,

I'm halfway through college, and I realize what I want to do. I want to be an adventurer. To travel, to meet people, to gain experiences, to work, to suffer, to live.

And to have some really great stories.

I'd like to have 50 different jobs before I die. There's so much to do, and know.

My question, and fear: Is that selfish? Is that enough?

Taylor Zabloski
Amherst, VA

--

You got the right idea, Taylor. Somebody has to be an adventurer, we can't all be drones and mercenaries. I don't think it's selfish at all -- you will go off to South America, Africa, Asia, India, Nevada, anyplace ending in A, and you'll see astonishing things and file posts on Facebook, and your thousands of friends, classmates, cousins, will read these and feel envy, amusement, horror -- you will be a bright flashing light in their humdrum lives. I have a friend in Kenya who is a peace worker, mediating between rebellious tribes and the government, and her family, while they worry about her constantly, is terribly proud of her gumption and bravery and resourcefulness. I notice you didn't ask me HOW to become an adventurer: you sense, correctly, that I am not one myself. I travel cautiously and avoid dealing with unpleasant people and rent cars rather than hitchhike and never stay in accommodations that do not have a private bath. And I don't drink the water.

You'll be able to have 50 different jobs so long as you're willing to work for cheap, which, being an adventurer, you will be. (An adventurer does not have a mortgage or car payments.) And so long as you report on your adventurers, you are earning your keep and more. But don't go looking for suffering. It will find you soon enough. And good luck. 

Dear Mr. Keillor,

In Wikipedia, "the Lake Wobegon effect" is defined as "a natural human tendency to overestimate one's capabilities, [and it] is named after the town. The characterization of the fictional location, where 'all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average,' has been used to describe a real and pervasive human tendency to overestimate one's achievements and capabilities in relation to others."

But as I've listened to your stories over the years, I've come away with a different take. You speak often of how shy the residents are and how little they toot their own horns. I grew up among older Norwegians and Swedes who, rather than overestimating their capabilities, often downplay them and turn the conversation in another direction. If anything, they indulge in a little false modesty in order to avoid seeming to boast.

Have I just misunderstood at least part of the theme all these years?

Heavens.

Gary Engstrand
Minneapolis

--

You're right about the reticence of Wobegonians in keeping with their Scandinavian heritage ("Don't think you're somebody") and their genuine modesty and their tendency to step away from any sort of praise. I share that tendency and I try to understand it because at times it seems rude of me -- if someone says "That was a good show" and I hurry to point out what was wrong with it. (And it is rude. And I've learned to say, "Thank you" and shut up.) I was brought up to be modest, though I secretly entertained delusions of grandeur, imagined being heroic, saving lives, winning games, setting world records. In a small town such as Lake Wobegon, the social fabric of the community is so important that the members are careful to avoid attracting too much attention that might turn into envy. Your life might depend on your neighbors and if you get a reputation as someone High and Mighty, people might not come to your aid as readily as they ought to, figuring that you're much too capable to need their help. Look at the rich and famous who have died in stupid accidents because people nearby didn't dare warn them. I think of my dear friend Corinne, a brilliant teacher, an irrepressible lefty, a quick wit, a staunch friend, whose friends didn't recognize the depth of her depression -- because she was, after all, Corinne -- and then she killed herself. So the "Lake Wobegon effect" is a bunch of hogwash where Lake Wobegon is concerned. And the slogan about all the women and all the men and all the children is so obviously not about overestimation -- when you say that all the children are above-average, you are saying that tests and grades and intellectual measurement are not, in the end, so important. If everybody is above average, then you have junked the idea of averages. That "pervasive human tendency to overestimate one's achievements" is found in New York and Los Angeles and in Wikipedia, but it doesn't have anything to do with the Little Town That Time Forgot.

Science reports that brain cells transplanted from mice to rats can extend their normal lifespan two-fold, at least. They can live a lot longer than the body that originally hosted them. Over the past few years more than a few of your stories have alluded to end-of-life concerns. And at 64 years myself, I understand. Before your "pen has gleaned your teeming brain", would you be interested in another 80 or 100 years, if science could offer that to you? Or would you decline, indicating things are going pretty much the way you expected them to go, and, therefore, the way they should go? You seem so interested in observing and writing about lives (yours and other people's), would you want it to go on for...awhile longer??

Phil Luecke
Bellevue WA

--

Back when I was in college I expected to die young and gloriously, like James Dean, and attain immortality, but I didn't have a car that would go fast enough to kill me, and then I got too old to die young, and then, at 55, I got a little baby girl and got interested in longevity. At 70, I'm still interested. I think I'm too old to take advantage of regenerative medicine, though. I think that's for people who now are in elementary school, who will likely live to 120 or 150, God bless them. I just don't know that I'd be a useful contributing member of society at an advanced age. And I would rather not be a carnival exhibit or a biology experiment. So I think I'll stick with the plan, which is: three score and ten and everything after that is a gift and a blessing.

Will you retire or will you abdicate? I'm just wondering if PHC will fade away or if you are planning to pass the torch like the Queen or Pope. Abdication sounds much more royal or upscale.

Maria Hoshaw
Baltimore

--

"Abdicate" is much too dramatic, Maria, and in my experience we use it -- "He abdicated all responsibility" -- to mean desertion, going AWOL, whereas "retire" is rather graceful. You slip away from a party and put on pajamas and bathrobe and come back downstairs and announce, "I think I shall retire. You all go on having a good time and I'll see you in the morning." That is what I would choose to do with PHC. The show started out with musicians who liked to come to my house and play music because we had a little gazebo in the backyard -- they lived in apartments in a cheap rundown part of town and my wife and I rented my brother's house in St. Anthony Park after he and his family moved to Madison -- and it was pretty simple to shift the party to a stage (though of course we suffered terrible self-consciousness and the host was sort of unbearable for a long while). And that urge to party is stronger than ever. When young musicians like Sara Watkins and the Punch Brothers and Old Crow Medicine Show have wound up in my living room after the show, they can stand around and play for hours off the tops of their heads and you hear The Weight followed by Sitting On Top Of The World and Old Joe Clark and The Old Home Place and Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone. So when the time comes, I'll step quietly into the wings and the show will quicken and get bolder and more boisterous. The trick is to do it before too many other people start thinking that you should. You want to appear Inimitable and Tireless and Astonishing right up to the end and then wave goodbye and disappear.

Years ago Garrison Keillor talked about the Catholic Church in Lake Wobegon, Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility. I cannot remember the name of the nun and it drives me nuts. Sister.....?

Marcia Trentz

--

The head nun, so to speak, was Sister Arvonne, who directed the Christmas pageant and kept a weather eye on Father Emil and then Father Wilmer, but there also was Sister Brunnhilde and Sister Hildegard, who came through at various times.

A Prairie Home Companion has been one of the lasting staples in my life. My first memories of listening to Richard Dworsky and Fred Newman's musical and sound effect genius began when I was merely a toddler. My family would attend five o'clock Mass at St. Joseph's Catholic Church along the Old Mission Peninsula of Traverse City, Michigan. Mass would end promptly at 6, and our family would hustle to our wood-paneled Buick Roadmaster in time to flip on the local NPR affiliate just in time to hear you start to croon Tishomingo Blues. The crowd would applaud, and you would let us know that, once again, you were coming to us live from downtown St. Paul, Minnesota. At that moment, I knew everything was going to be all right. It was Saturday, the band was playing, and I couldn't ask for more.

We would pull out of the Church's parking lot and make a stop at Tom's Grocery to pick up tomato sauce to go with our spaghetti and homemade garlic bread: Saturday evening's entrée for over thirty years. We would park, and I would wait in the car stealing precious moments with my dad listening to the News from Lake Wobegon. I would close my eyes and picture the scenes of a made-up town whose story was not too distant from my own.

Those weekends with my family have passed, as have some of those family members. The memories have not faded, not for a moment. Now, more than twenty years later with my own family, we tune into the show that is still brought to us by Bebop-A-Reebop Rhubarb Pie. The show has not lost any of its flavor, and still seems to fit perfectly in our lives after 5 o'clock Mass. The musical guests are still just as proud to be playing for us live at the Fitzgerald Theater, while we listen out on the edge of the prairie.

In a world that seems to move too quickly, in which people are too busy, it's nice to slow down and check-in with that little town where the women are strong, the men are good looking, and the children are above average.

Benjamin Richardson
Colorado Springs

--

It's kind of you to write, Benjamin, and to remember the good things and forget the shows that disappointed you. My memory tends to focus on darkness and failure and so its good that I don't have a clear memory of those early years at all. Gone in a blur. I sort of remember last week and remember some awkward transitions, especially in the first half hour, when I suddenly, instead of introducing the banjoists who were standing there, launched into a peroration about winter and bad drivers and the Chicago congressman who used campaign funds to buy a Rolex. Weird. But someone who tunes in the show right after Mass would probably forgive those things. Thanks again.

Sir:

Could you settle a conjecture? Since you obv. write for the show, when credits are read at end, Sarah Bellum is always mentioned. Is that your nom de plume? Does she live off the coast of the Isles of Langerhan? Sea of Cortex? Just for a lil' Pariety? Obv. have picked my brains.

Van 

P.S. I am leader/founder of Reno/Tahoe string quartet, The String Beings. I am known as the Supreme Being!

--

Van, Sarah is a good friend and not bad as a writer though as she ventures into her seventies, the synapses don't click as nicely as before. Other writers have come and gone, Natalie Dressed, Xavier Onassis, Cora Spond, Justin Case, Mike Rochip, Lou Pole, Gloria Rome, and Ginger Lee Dunn, but she is still banging out the scriptage while I sit and watch.

Hi Sir,

Within the span of three months, I have been laid off from my (amazing) job and my boyfriend broke up with me. How do I keep moving ahead when everything feels so wrong? What I thought made me who I am is now gone. I feel scared and sad about the future. Do you have any thoughts about starting over? 

Kristina

--

Scared and sad is pretty normal after you've taken a couple hard bumps but you know that the job and the boyfriend didn't make you who you are. So maybe you should sit down and write yourself an essay about who you are, leaving out the job and the boyfriend. A little exercise to clear the mind. Your best memories and most dismal ones, your strong qualities and what you need to work on. Regrets and hopes for the future. Don't bother with literary touches, just dash down an honest appraisal of yourself. If you haven't done some cost-cutting, you'll want to do that -- an interesting exercise: what's important to you and what can be dispensed with. I think you should plan a trip for yourself, a sort of cleansing experience and a chance to think about the future. Get out of Orlando and head for a place you love and hike and bike around for a week or two or three. Finally, I recommend that you enter into a new phase of militant discipline. Put your mind to achieving a few things you want to do for yourself -- it's a perfect time -- to learn a language or a new skill, to lose weight, to kill off a bad habit, to accomplish some things that make you feel good about yourself. Militance is a great tonic. Start with a daily workout, a brisk walk, and go from there. Women tend to take longer than men to get over a romance, so we want to get you through the next six months (maybe more) and make it count for something. You can do it. 

Garrison -

I just returned from a vacation on Maui, during which I walked a lot of beach listening to your CDs on my MP3.  I'd forgotten some of the earlier stories, most of which kept a smile on my face (Alaska made me laugh out loud) that some passers-by mistook as a greeting to them.  But it made me wonder...are you able to laugh at these stories when you write them?  Do you get to enjoy them that 1st time you come up with the great lines?  I know you can tell if it's funny, but do you actually amuse yourself with the humor?  Or is it more work which, though you recognize it as funny and good, you don't yourself laugh at it??

Phil Luecke
Bellevue, WA  

--

What an intriguing question. The answer, generally, is No, I don't laugh at my own stuff. Laughter comes from surprise, same as fright, and its not easy to frighten yourself. I think there have been times when I chuckled, or snickered, at something as I wrote it, but outright ha-ha-ha laughter, I doubt it. People who knew my hero A.J. Liebling say that he sat typing in his office at The New Yorker, chortling at what he had written, and I've pondered that fact for years. I think maybe laughing is a skill, like singing, and I had a somber youth and didn't develop the muscle of laughter to the same extent as normal people. I am a dreadful audience member for any comedian and so I never sit down front. It'd be painful for a comedian to look at my long face for an hour ---- he or she might quit the business and go into accounting. I do laugh sometimes, big laughs, but seldom at jokes unless they're really well told, usually at surprising turns of phrase that I hear, dry humor, the humor of dark people. Certain people make me laugh, old men, my daughter, a few friends. But there is nothing I enjoy more than making other people laugh (or smile) and I'm glad you enjoyed the CDs. The most startling thing is to be on the New York subway and a woman gets in the car and recognizes me and her street face breaks into a smile. That makes my day, absolutely.

I too majored in English and have written extensively on a variety of subjects.  As soon as I finish a piece I put it away because it always seems childish, silly, or just uninteresting.  Years later, I often look back on my writing and realize, "Hey, that was pretty good."  Does this happen to all writers?  Do you ever second guess yourself only to look back later and realize that you have actually done a pretty good job?  Thanks.  

Susan Colmenares
Waterville, ME

--

This has never happened to me, Susan. Never. First of all, I do not put a piece away after finishing it ---- I send the piece to whomever assigned me to do it and they send a small but satisfying check for American money. Back when I was at the University of Minnesota, I wrote fiction and poetry and satire for the campus literary magazine ---- and was paid money for it, enough to pay for supper and a couple bottles of beer, and this established a habit of writing for dough that has continued for fifty years. When I'm writing a piece, I usually can detect if it is uninteresting and can cut out those parts and substitute interesting stuff. (Silliness, on the other hand, is what I am paid for. And sometimes childishness.)  I don't often look back later, Susan. There doesn't seem to be time to sit and savor my own work, and also I am afraid that if I looked at it, I'd find a lot of uninteresting stuff. Times change, the tide comes in and out, many winters have passed, and what interested me back in 1978 is not so much on my mind anymore. Keep looking ahead, is my advice. Get up in the morning and deal with that day and enjoy whatever work you put your hand to. Silliness comes harder and harder as the English major ages, Susan, and it's worth working at.

Mr. Keillor,

I am in a pickle. I have a great paying job in San Francisco, good friends and lots of big city activities -- have had for 20 years -- but my family and my beloved Sierra Mountain home are far away and I have been homesick for awhile, thinking about moving back. There is no work back home and I will probably give up a great job to be a clerk in Mrs. Gumble's grocery if I go back.

If you were presented with such a decision, what would you decide and why?

Robert S

--

A few years back, Robert, the missus and I decided to leave Manhattan for St. Paul, Minnesota, and it was an easy decision: we had an infant daughter, both our families were in Minnesota and all four grandparents, and we wanted our girl to grow up with aunts and uncles and cousins. What you're talking about sounds to me more like retirement. San Francisco is a great city -- the chill fogs of summer, the ocean air, the fabulous diversity of faces on the street -- but if your hometown is calling to you, I think you should listen. It can be a great pleasure to be with people who've known you since childhood -- no need to give the back story -- and as you get older, you may find that your youth becomes more and more vivid to you. But think of this as retirement and plan accordingly. You don't want to be a carry-out boy at the age of 65. And give the hometown a few short tryouts before you make your decision.

Hi, Mr. Keillor

I'm convinced I've met the love of my life but my timing is awful. I've just started a new job and am moving across the country. Normally I would approach this rationally but she is perfect and makes the best strawberry pie. To provide any more details would drive men from across the country right to her doorstep.

It's not that great a job. Should I go back?

Nathan

--

No. Call her, text her, write letters on parchment with a quill pen, and beg her to come and visit you. This will tell you whether you are the love of her life. If you aren't, at least you have a job.

Dear Garrison,

I have begun writing a book. I really want to create a mood where it is both funny and beautiful. When I write more towards the evocative and descriptive it seems not as funny. When I write more towards being funny I feel I lose some of the beauty.

Any tips?

Adam

--

My advice is to write funny, Adam. If you can make people laugh, that's a gift not to be ignored. If you have a good curve ball and a 90 m.p.h. fastball, why would you play second base? Evocative is for older guys like me who have lost our fastball long ago and sit up in the bleachers and evoke and evoke and evoke. Why hang out with this pathetic crowd of poetic has-beens? You belong on the field.

Dear Garrison,

I love telling myself stories. When I'm alone, I'll talk about interesting little things that happened during my day, and I feel terribly witty, but when I try to tell other people a story, I lose confidence, get nervous and cannot let loose. Any suggestions for how to have a good time telling a story to others?

Raj Katti
Minnetonka

--

You're trying too hard, Raj. You are rehearsing a performance that then feels awkward in the context of conversation. Performance and conversation are two different things. If I were riding in the car with my friend Tom and I launched into a Lake Wobegon monologue, I'd feel weird and so would he. When you're with other people, accept that storytelling is a ragged, impromptu, interactive piece that depends on cues from the others, does not stand alone, and, hey -- maybe you're hanging out with the Wrong People.

Hello,

We have a beautiful and wonderful two-year-old daughter. As a new father I have a set of fears that are haunting me. What kind of person will she be? Am I doing a decent job? What if something bad happens to her? What kind of world will she be in when we're gone? The list goes on and on.

Did you feel these fears when you had your child? Do you still have them? How do you deal with them?

J.B.

--

Still have them, J.B., and mine are all the more acute because I am an elderly dad -- I was 55 when my little girl was born -- and so the worry about What Will She Do Without Me is rather keen. And I am nobody's idea of a good father. I'm gone a lot, I'm too busy, I'm restless, etc. My father was a good dad according to his own lights and provided for us and was a man of absolute integrity, though I can't remember us ever talking about important things and he and I never "bonded," whatever that may mean. I have known several men who were excellent fathers and who made big sacrifices in order to spend plenty of time with their kids and I berated myself for not being as good as they and then one of them died suddenly and I was sort of shocked by the grief of his kids, who were well grown by then -- their sense of shame that they had disappointed him somehow. So it's always complicated. Enjoy your little girl. Be playful. Be demonstrative. Be foolish. You'll find out who she is and it may surprise you. And I don't know how to deal with fear, except that the day is too short to spend much time on fear, and fear is not nearly as interesting as your daughter is.

GK,

Here I am, enjoying my small-town summer, and still reeling from my freshman year at college in Philadelphia. I always envisioned myself spending a few years in the city before coming home to settle down in the country. But the big city has really awakened in me a love of all that a sprawling metropolis has to offer. I miss the ability to walk outside and get lost in the crowd, or to go to the art museum and be surrounded by the Impressionists, even the simple joy of discovering a new book store. And I'm a biology major! But when I'm in the city, I miss the quiet solitude of living in a farm community, hearing the horses grazing from my bedroom window, visits to the local market, and stomping around barefoot. As you can see, I'm conflicted. I know that the country will always be my home, but how can a country girl like me satisfy my big city yearnings?

Regards,

F.R.

--

Welcome to life itself, F.R. This lovely conflict is shared by half the human race, thus the hankering of Philadelphians to own a weekend house in the Poconos, thus the great pleasure of my Manhattan friends to rent a house in Vermont in August and sit on a porch with their morning coffee. And thus the pleasure of my Minnesota cousins trotting around Central Park, visiting the Met, riding the A train, seeing Cole Porter's "Anything Goes".  Working out this conflict will only make your life more and more interesting, and one day you'll go to Barcelona and fall in love with things Spanish, or wonder if an Inuit village on the northern tundra isn't where you were meant to be. Good luck with all that. Just know that in majoring in biology, you chose right, kid, and thank goodness you didn't major in Communications. Or in English, God help us. The people I know who majored in biology seem happier and retain a keen interest in birds and bugs and protozoa, whereas my humanities friends burn out on all the b.s. It sounds to me like you're going to be happy wherever you are, kid.

Hello Mr. Keillor,

I have such a desire to sing and play the guitar but I just can't do it in front of people. I have close family members who have become very popular in the bluegrass gospel field and I'm terrified that people will expect my voice to be perfect like theirs when I know it's not. I really want to fulfill this desire to step out. Any advice?  

Joni

---

It's hard to venture into a field where your relatives have made a mark. That's why I'm not a baker ---- because my aunts did that so beautifully. I baked a couple of loaves of bread that were like bricks and never attempted it again. Self-criticism can be withering, and that's why you dread singing in front of people: you're afraid of yourself and how you would punish yourself for your own mistakes. But it's a long way from singing in your room and singing on a stage for people ---- there's a lot of space in between where you could be perfectly comfortable, making music with friends. Sitting and picking guitar with people of like mind and like abilities. It's a wonderful place to be, in someone's living room, scootched down between other people, singing. I remember a magical evening at my house in St. Paul where Sara Watkins got into it with Old Crow Medicine Show and Pat Donohue and some others, and they wailed for two or three hours, and nobody was self-conscious at all. You could do that. It might satisfy that urge you have, or it might give you self-confidence to go on, or it might be something you'd do once or twice and then decide to take up baking or do standup comedy or ride a bike from coast to coast or write a novel. Good luck, Joni. 

We're going to Denmark! My husband, adult daughter, her partner and I are off later this month. None of us has ever visited Denmark before and we are wondering if you have any suggestions. My Grandma (Bedstamor) lived in Copenhagen until she was 25. She was a storyteller and wielded a mean aebelskiver pan.

Carol Beeler
York, PA

--

You'll probably land in Copenhagen, Carol, so you can look around there. See the Hirschsprung Museum, a small art gallery with some gorgeous 19th Century paintings, and skip the big State Museum. You can find Hans Christian Andersen's grave in the big cemetery on Jagtvej. The statue of Gefion near Kastellet and the English church is magnificent, much more impressive than the little mermaid person.  Tivoli is fun, but even more fun is to take an S-Train north to Klampenborg and the huge Royal Deer-Hunting park (Dyrhave) with a hunting lodge in the middle and nice stands of beech trees and a great amusement park and also a horse-racing track nearby.  The trains and buses are excellent and you can get almost anywhere in the country. The clothing-optional place to sunbathe is Frederiksberg, if that's of interest. I recommend heading for the island of Fyn and the town of Svendborg from which you can take a little ferry boat over to Aero and Langeland, two islands which are great fun to ride bikes around. Rather flat, fields of grain, little villages of 18th Century cottages with tile roofs and little vinstuer, wine rooms, where you can get a simple traditional meal, the herring (sild) followed by pork (fleskesteg) or the rather rare hamburger (Fransk boeuf) or the Danish goulash (biksemad). The Danish Miami is in the north of Jutland, at Skagen. All worth seeing. A good country for hiking and biking.

What would you recommend as the best way for an actuary to break into show business?  

A. Morri
Lynnwood, WA

--

Approach it rationally, consulting the statistics ---- the ethnic background, education, geographic origins, of people successful in show business and their age, height, and weight when they broke into the business ---- and what you'll find is that you're too old and too well-educated to go into show business and you should be happy right where you are.