Tuesday, July 30, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)Â
Jeremiah and Garrison, looking to meet on the sunny side of the street
Okay. I know I can get carried away. And I should be writing my own paragraphs, and not sharing so much of what I read too much of the time. But I can’t help it, when it comes to Garrison Keillor. He’s either telling old jokes or making new ones, and sometimes I want to share it all with you.
Here’s part (most?) of his column from July 22, when some of what has happened by now had happened already, and some of it hadn’t. And the Olympics hadn’t begun, but the world was still mostly the same place then as it is now, so I hope the paragraphs Garrison wrote (instead of me) are not too dated … Garrison, by the way, even though he’s getting old, continues to be scheduled through 2024 and into 2025, probably by a scheduling staff much younger than himself.
I turn 82 in a few weeks in the midst of a long tour doing solo shows up Northeast, which is the best way to turn very old, to ride around and entertain beautiful strangers, all of them younger. I do not want to sit at a table of cranks and geezers, each eager to relate his or her own medical history, and then someone wheels in a bonfire of a birthday cake and we sing the old song in our ruined voices and eat melted wax with angel food and someone tells me all about an article they read about carcinoma. I don’t like cake. I’d prefer a pie, rhubarb, with a little tang to it, and two scoops of vanilla. We octogenarians get compliments that sound like eulogies, so go away, stick it in your ear. I’ve had a complicated life with more than my share of wrong turns and incompletes, but I’m in reasonable health, thanks to American medicine, and I have good friends, and I’m married to a smart and funny woman who makes my heart skip when she puts a hand on my shoulder. And I have work to do. God has a purpose for me, yet to be fulfilled, and maybe talking to you, dear reader, is it, so make the best of it. Too bad it’s via internet so you can’t use it afterward for cat litter.
Now let me just stop for a moment and thank our son Marc for his own cat litter, which he brought to our house in two or three double plastic bags so we could use it to block up the groundhog holes under each end of our long backyard shed. Thank you, Marc!
I talk to Him now and then, bargaining about my death. I want to reach 97 as my mother did and be as alert as she and pass from the world in a few days, dozing, listening to gospel music, and He tells me, by way of my wife, that this is my problem, not His, that I need to walk a couple miles briskly every day and eat two meals and cut back on red meat.
Without preamble he begins to talk about the shows he’s done recently, in Boise and Nashville and New York City and North Carolina. In September he’ll be at the North Dakota State Fair, and from there fly across the Atlantic to Ireland, England and Scotland in October. He hopes to be in New Braunfels, Texas, just a short jump out of Austin, in January 2025.
The show is educational. I do 90 minutes from memory and some of it is true and I let the audience decide. I also recite limericks. This is a limerick:
There is a stand-up named Keillor
Who is not a nostalgia dealer
And whose talk can
Be rather deadpan
And also surreal and surrealer.
Actually I think Garrison has a calling or a gift or something to make up limericks, often on the spot. That gift is found neither in Isaiah nor 1 Corinthians nor Romans, but it’s a gift nonetheless. Sometimes even, yes, of the Spirit.
The beauty of octogenarianism is freedom. Your career is over. You’re done. You look out at the crowd and see people googling your name to figure out who you are. It doesn’t matter. Your job is to cheer up the people who are depressed by what’s happening around them. My job this summer and fall is to stay on the sunny side of the street and avoid words such as grump, slump, dump, hump, rump, and sump pump.
I just have to say that last sentence full of ump words is what inspired me to share this column with you. I couldn’t stand for you not to read them for yourself, one at a time and then all together in one long run-on ump-ended uppity dumpity sentence.
Would Jeremiah have taken to Garrison’s way of walking with the Lord? Today’s first lines of the prophet’s reflection on the awfulness of life don’t help me here – poetry that describes disaster witnessed, disaster experienced, disaster for which to weep and mourn.
Let my eyes stream with tears
day and night, without rest,
Over the great destruction which overwhelms
the virgin daughter of my people,
over her incurable wound.
If I walk out into the field,
look! those slain by the sword;
If I enter the city,
look! those consumed by hunger.
Even the prophet and the priest
forage in a land they know not.
Have you cast us off completely?
But is it not you, our God, to whom we look?
You alone have done all these things.
Garrison describes himself as quiet, reflective, looking to be honest with his God. Jeremiah would notice and appreciate that transparency, I think.
Sometimes I come across an audience that wants to sing and we sing “America” or the “Battle Hymn.” And if it feels right, I hum “When peace like a river attendeth my way” and they’re right there with me and we do “It Is Well with My Soul.” Some audiences tolerate this and others are actually moved. I started performing in my thirties for the usual reason, to be the center of attention, but now I hope to be useful. The country is in peril. Most people know this and don’t need me to tell them. I want to give them ninety minutes during which they won’t think about the peril whatsoever and then, driving home, it will dawn on them all the harder. Prisoners need a vacation, just like everyone else.
That’s my advice, sweetheart. Take time off. Go camping, hike up a river canyon, look at the stars at night, play games with children, practice the art of seduction on your spouse, go for days without reading the paper, and when you come back to it, you will be properly alarmed.
I do think both Garrison and Jeremiah will appreciate Psalm 79:
May your compassion quickly come to us, for we are brought very low.
Let your prisoners’ sighing come before you, and with your great power
Free those who are doomed to death.
For the glory of your name, O Lord, deliver us.
We are the sheep of your pasture, your people, and we will give thanks to you forever.
Through all generations we will declare your praise.
 (Jeremiah 14, Psalm 79, Matthew 13)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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