“It’s
been a quiet week in Lake Woebegone, my home town…” That half sentence can only be spoken in one
voice in my mind, that of Garrison Keillor, originator of the public radio
program “A Prairie Home Companion.” For
those of us with certain sensibilities, Keillor’s creation, both the program
and the imaginary place in Minnesota, has been a safe haven for decades. But this past Saturday night was Garrison’s
last turn at the mike, and what life is going to be like without him is a
bewilderment.
He retired before, taking the whole
show with him. But public acclaim and
hunger brought him (and the show) back.
This time his exit appears to be for real, as health issues have put him
on notice that his life-long understanding of himself as terminal is also for
real. The show will stay and transform;
Garrison will go onward to write until his air runs out, letting us hear his
voice in our heads until our own air runs out.
There were interviews with his show
co-hosts on public radio last week, and I listened, rapt, whenever I
could. One musician who had worked with
Keillor for the past 15 years said he is still in awe of his genius, not
something everyone can say about their boss after that long. He also said he still can’t imagine life
without Garrison, which gave me the title for this column.
The beautiful thing about Keillor’s
words, whether they be printed or spoken, is that they are infused with the
understanding that we are all terminal, part of the flow of life, and that it
is exactly this flow that brings us the experience of beauty. Garrison specializes in the exceptional
beauty of every-day happenings in “unexceptional” lives, beauty that is
democratic at root, available to all. No
matter where I was living, whether Berkeley, Long Island, Davis or Lindsay,
many Saturday evenings I was brought to tears welling up from that very truth.
For a long time I thought the
program’s attraction to me was that it was rooted in what it means to be
rural. For some people, that makes it
feel nostalgic, as if rural life has no traction any more. I don’t believe that, but even people living
in Minneapolis are far enough removed from that reality to feel like they’re
looking “backward.”
David Brooks’ new book, The Road to Character, offers another
frame to look through, however: an American cultural shift from self-effacement
to self-promotion. Keillor’s Lake
Woebegone belongs to the older order, and for those of us raised with that
sensibility, it feels more like home than where we live now.
Something one of the co-hosts said
in an interview, however, gave it a more spiritual lens. The interviewer had remarked how interesting
it was that, though Garrison himself doesn’t look back, he asks us, his
audience, to look back all the time. The
co-host changed the interpretation: he said “Garrison’s work constantly points
to the gap between God and man.” When we
find ourselves in that appropriate relation, it feels holy.
When I left Long Island to come back
to California and start over as a rural advocate, I wanted to paint the words
“Lake Woebegone or Bust” on the left flank of my old Datsun. With this new understanding of why the words
that came out of Garrison’s mouth meant so much, I think it’s still a desirable
destination, an immortal goal. May Mr. Keillor
enjoy the tail end of his tenure here, reward for a job well done.
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Trudy
Wischemann is a rural advocate who writes.
Thanks to Larry Ginsberg for reading my words. Send your favorite stories from Lake
Woebegone to P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a
comment below.
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