Letters to the Editor
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Geographically challenged
Great and inspiring advice! Too bad for those of us already Out West; a one-hour drive West from here takes me into a two-hour traffic jam in the SF Bay Area. Think I'll head North...
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Scuba diving works too; I'm just sayin'
I find there's rarely anything wrong with me that an hour underwater, looking at baby drumfish, won't cure.
Bravo, Garrison. This one was perfect.
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right... because running away from a problem always works every time
GK has made a mint selling an Aw Shucks fantasy world to the masses. You could drive for hours piloted by the fanciest GPS around and never find the spot where this fantasyland and the real problems of humanity intersect. Please don't take his bloviations seriously, especially if you're looking for any real solace in the face of real problems.
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yes
For me it's the Hernando DeSoto bridge across the Mississippi river from Memphis into Arkansas. At night it's magic. The lights stretch out before you then stop dead at the great wall of night. Memphis stands up high on a bluff; Arkansas is flat, nothing but rice fields for those first few miles, blackness and emptiness and space to think. Think about driving to Little Rock, or maybe as far as St. Louis, or all the way to California.
Usually I'm right in the head by the time I reach the first exit, turn around and head back home.
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Please don't take his bloviations seriously, especially if you're looking for any real solace in the face of real problems.
So where should we look? Where does one find "real solace"?
Fantasy works fine for me--or so I thought. But, if there's a genuine way of transcending the daily shitstorm of "real problems," I'd leap at it. Just tell me where it is.
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Don't you mean the Lakota Nation?
Seems that much of where you'd be driving, Mr. Keillor, is now the Lakota Nation. All hail prime minister Russell Means!
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Not elderly, always something new on the horizon
Interesting that some people think anyone over 50 is elderly and that they are useless. I wonder how they will feel when they are 50? Now I understand that negative objectification of age is alive and unhealthily well.
It doesn't matter what age one is, there is always time for new adventures, whether they occur inside or outside of oneself. The spiritual and the physical become one.
Life changes for all of us and hopefully will change us. Those who believe they will be one age or one person forever will find another type of death haunting them.
Garrison Kiellor is a storyteller, in this story, I feel the need to explore one's blessings, explore one's world and find paths to renew oneself.
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Beautifully put
"Life changes for all of us and hopefully will change us. Those who believe they will be one age or one person forever will find another type of death haunting them."
Thank you, Anonymous; I often reel at the short-sightedness and lack of generosity in some of these posts. As if the poster were some invincible, perennial 22-year-old who had never loved anyone or lost anything. At least Keillor has the humility to know when he doesn't have the answers, and to realize that his solutions are "small."
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I'm with your friend
The holidays are solely for the "haves" to be able to separate themselves even farther from the have-nots.
For those of us who have only loss or who lack essential resources, the lights, sounds and smells of the holidays are cruel taunts.
Even the advice, although you deem them small things - are all things for which I lack.
A car? A long road trip?
With what vehicle, fueled by what?
The make and model would have to be a full size imagination. And mine has been running on empty for far too long.
If only those holiday taunts were in the rearview mirror.
Right now I have to imagine an orange in the toe of the stocking.
I'd have to imagine the stocking, too.
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Unsnarked version
Not elderly, always something new on the horizon
Interesting that some people think anyone over 50 is elderly and that they are useless. I wonder how they will feel when they are 50? Now I understand that negative objectification of age is alive and unhealthily well.
Dear anonymous:
I was snarking. In the second letter here, when I wrote about 50 being elderly. It seemed to me that both Keillor and the first letter writer were clearly saying that past fifty was way too old to really consider new directions. (Real directions, changes to one's life, not a lazy drive listening to Prairie Home Companion.)
He ridiculed his friend ("...in a mournful voice.." and so on) for doing so, and the letter writer took it much further.
I found it incredibly insulting, ageist, all sorts of things-ist.
Get a grip, he was saying, you're too old to think of making any fresh start at 54.
I respectfully (just barely respectfully) disagree.
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Garrison is older than the subject of his essay
Do you all realize that Garrison Keillor is 65? To him, the 50-something guy is young. Keillor has also started over himself a number of times -- and is all about taking the adventurous path.
I think folks don't understand irony these days.
P.S. I am 52 -- and right in the thick of a total reinvention. Life is long, and the choices are myriad.
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I was snarking.
Don't. Do not snark. No matter how loudly some little voice tells you to, don't give in to cheap sarcasm. Today's reflexive snarker is tomorrow's sentimentalist.
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Not buying it for a second
Garrison is older than the subject of his essay
Do you all realize that Garrison Keillor is 65? To him, the 50-something guy is young. Keillor has also started over himself a number of times -- and is all about taking the adventurous path.
I think folks don't understand irony these days.
You're wrong. That he was being ironic or sarcastic or wittily poking his friend up by pretending to complain about him wanting a new direction at 54.
Nope. I agree that he was being utterly hypocritical, but that's about it.
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Elvis is alive and so are we
If you're taking a road trip through America, by Uncle Randy
Elvis is NOT dead and I'm feeling pretty good about it.
Bill Beeny believes.
For the last 17 years, the 81 year old has run the Elvis is Alive Museum. He has FBI files and photographs, along with replicas of the King's casket, gravestone and Cadillac, and a 16-foot sign of a rhinestone-belted Elvis holding a microphone. How much more proof does a body need?
If that's not enough, Beeeny wrote a book, "Elvis' DNA Proves He's Alive!" In it, Beeny says he got his hands on a bit of Elvis's DNA from a Memphis doctor, and that it doesn't match the DNA from the cadaver the FBI claims is Elvis.
Let's put it this way: Ya gotta have faith. Where do you place yours? In a federal agency that, if it ever told the truth it would have to lie to cover it up, or Bill Beeny the Baptist minister?
I thought so.
Like the King himself, the museum has humble roots. It's a converted coin laundry about 55 miles west of St. Louis. Beeny's closing it to launch a ministry for the folks in Warren County, which is growing like Pamela Anderson's bra size after a trip to her doctor's office. Lives change, including Beeny's and Elvis's, but "You have to let go," Beeny says.
Elvis had a great reason to go: He's in the federal Witness Protection Program, which leads us right back to those conspiratorial rascals at the FBI.
So far, Elvis has had no comment, which only further proves Beeny's point.
On the other hand, comedian Vic Henley cites the science of the matter when he wisely points out that Elvis's daughter married Michael Jackson, and if that doesn't get his "jumpsuit wearing ass" out of hiding, nothing ever will.
So as the King so often said, "Thank you, thank you very much."