Garrison Keillor’s New York | Power Line

In December 2021 I went to see Garrison Keillor perform with Heather Massie and Rich Dworsky at the Dakota in downtown Minneapolis. I wrote up a note with a photo, a video, and related reflections on Keillor in “Mr. Socialist confesses…” The following year Peter Tonguette saw Keillor’s show and expressed thoughts similar to mine in the American Conservative column “An Evening with Garrison Keillor in Exile.”

Rich Dworsky is Garrison’s musical director and an old friend. Having spoken recently with Rich, I know that Garrison is still writing and touring (at age 82, by the way). His most recent book is Cheefulness. He writes a weekly column that I find at Jewish World Review.

Garrison is happily married and living in New York. In his current column Garrison praises life in New York, where he says he has “learned to enjoy his insignificance.”

Garrison recalls growing up in Minnesota:

In school, we learned about LaSalle, Marquette, Father Hennepin, Joseph Nicollet, who had claimed the Midwest for France, but Louis XV was more interested in sugar from the Caribbean than fur from the North and so he withdrew and Voltaire said, “All we lost was a few acres of snow.” This remark still stings, centuries later. We could’ve been French and instead we raised corn to feed the hogs.

I don’t think Garrison would rather be French. Even if we were French we would be raising corn to feed the hogs.

It is his memory of studying Minnesota history that prompts me to pause. It dates him as well as me. In my case, we studied Minnesota history for a month with Theodore Blegen’s Minnesota: A History of the State, now kept in print by the University of Minnesota Press. The only Minnesota history kids learn nowadays is the kind that results in shaming and renaming.

That is a digression. I want to focus on Garrison’s version of life in New York:

I left home for New York to make my wife happy, the best reason there is, and here I learned to enjoy my insignificance. Nobody notices me on the subway so I get to look at them. I’ve stumbled and fallen three times and each time four people rushed to my side within three seconds to help me up, not because I’m an author but because I’m human.

I fell on Amsterdam Avenue and whacked my head and lay stunned on the sidewalk for a moment and six people rushed to my side, helped me up and a man hailed a cab for me and they kept asking if I was okay — I was more than okay, I was gratified. In Minnesota I was a motorist, here I’m a pedestrian. I’m aware of a civil society around me: I look out for you, you look out for me.

That’s a nice story, but I wonder. It strikes me as about as realistic as Garrison’s Lake Wobegon. Amsterdam Avenue runs all the way up to 193rd Street. Garrison might have caught a break on the Upper West Side. I seriously doubt “you look out for me” on some stretches of Amsterdam Avenue.

South of 59th Street Amsterdam becomes Tenth Avenue. Bruce Springsteen’s “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” is truer to my experience as a visitor: “Seem like the whole world walking pretty / And you can’t find the room to move.”