Letters to the Editor
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Hey Keillor
Get out of your heated garage and leave your car behind; trudge down the unshoveled / icy sidewalk on University Avenue to wait at the bus stop (no covered shelter, of course) for the Route 16 to Minneapolis. It's a -20 wind chill today - and the bus, as usual, is 10-15 minutes late.
Then tell us all how magnificent Winter is.
(Better yet: move into a low-income neighborhood where only on-street parking is available...and wake up one morning to find your car towed by the plow Nazis. Enjoy the 4 weeks of nothing but Ramen you'll be eating because the $200 impound lot fee took away most of your grad student stipend.)
^^^^^^^^^^^
Leave behind your McCottage on the banks of Lake Woebegone - ya know, the one with the heated floors and high-insulation windows and walls - and move into a 100-y.o. studio apartment in Dinkytown. You know, one of those old fourplex houses that are all U students can afford rent-wise - an apt. which is so drafty and poorly insulated that all the Saran Wrap in the world can't block out the cold around the window edges...
Then come home to your studio one day to find that, like clockwork, the old radiator furnace has broken down AGAIN...and your absentee landlord isn't answering his cell - AGAIN.
Then tell us how magnificent Winter is.
^^^^^^^^^^^^
Reality check: if you're rich enough to live comfortably, then Winter in MN is probably indeed like a frickin' wonderland.
But for the rest of us? It is an icy hellhole where we struggle just to make it through to April...with our sanity, health and meager funds intact.
But don't mind me and my alternate winter experience. Enjoy your chestnuts and hot cocoa.
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What the...?!???
Totally incomprehensible.
And I even know what the Rapture is, thereby having an edge over what I'd wager is a large majority of Salon readers.
But it's still totally incomprehensible.
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In December, magnificent; by mid-February, not so much.
When I saw the tag line, "Why do people complain about winter, which is really quite magnificent?", my initial feelings were much like those of Anonymous poster #1, as I grumbled to myself, "Yeah, easy to like winter when you've made a handsome living, doing pretty much whatever you want, for the past couple of decades. YOU probably get to CHOOSE whether to brave the elements during a howling winter storm, unlike us wage slaves whose corporate master tell us that we'll get docked, or worse yet, fired if we don't make the trip into the office!" I, too, have eaten plenty of ramen noodles this winter, not because I had a 200-dollar towing fee, but because I just couldn't bring myself to dig out the car and brave the bad roads and lousy drivers one more time to make a trip to the grocery store.
Then I read the article and saw the (not so) offhand remark about the brain MRI, and realized that Garrison, with his Midwestern reserve, is likely expressing gratitude for surviving a health scare and being allowed to grace the planet for a while longer.
Best wishes for your continued health, sir! But, dude -- simultaneously speeding, talking on the cell phone, and fiddling with the CD player whilst commandeering a two-ton vehicle?!? You may have pleasant thoughts of being swept up in a white snowy Rapture, but should you spin out of control, the other drivers you take out might not be so keen on being violently and prematurely thrust into the afterlife!
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Anonymous
Then leave Minnesota, Anonymous. No one's forcing you to live here. I take the 94 a few blocks away from where you meet the 16 on Uni, and I'm managing just fine.
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But...
P.S. I liked the Keillor article—except for that Rapture cameo. Ugh.
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Garrison Keillor
I am a longtime reader (pre-subscription era) and subscriber to Salon, and one of the columnists who I consistently look forward to with anticipatory pleasure is Garrison Keillor. His insights are always so dryly, pithily Midwestern and witty. He seems to capture what it is to be human (and American) with so little effort. He is a national treasure. Thank you Garrison, and Salon.
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Anger can keep you warm
I suspect that the writer of the extensive angry rant writes extensive angry rants elsewhere, and often. This wasn't the greatest piece of writing about winter, but it didn't make me angry.
Living in nearby Wisconsin, I have found myself appreciating winter more than I have since I was young. In order to stay alive I have to walk, and it is usually at night. Sometimes the snow is so beautiful at night I'm almost in tears. Actually, I'm in tears often, because the wind forces them, so it would be hard to tell the difference.
I also have learned to appreciate the drive to work, though begrudgingly. It has become a test of my survival skills, and each safe arrival is a reassurance that my driving skills are still intact. The number of cars that end up in the medians and ditches is amazing to me. I think there are two factors: small cars and cell phones - a deadly combination.
My only lament this winter is that I am not young and chipper enough to engage in some winter sport, like cross-country skiing, or, in my dreams, dogsledding. To be on a sled behind a team of dogs, now that's living.
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on appreciating winter
I don't appreciate cold winters. I moved.
Nice essay, though.
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The Anonymous from "Hey, Keillor..."
is undoubtedly someone who has listened to Keillor a long time, and qualified to criticize.
There is something to be said for underclass hostility. In fact, it's the sort of thing that neither commercial broadcasting, or those corporate-sponsored zombies of "public broadcasting," talk about. There are two unfortunate parts about it. First, people like Anonymous can only speak without printing his/her name, for fear of being fired. Those opinions can only appear in places like Salon or those gay-dating-and-massage-parlor-sponsored "weekly newspapers" that are the last gasp of liberal opinion in the American press.
The other unfortunate part is that Anonymous is probably an unemployed college student or an anorexic, Prozac-medicated goth, someone who couldn't get the will or the strength to overcome the corporate oppressors he/she rants against. He/she is an unfit warrior to throw against comfortable, warm, rich Garrison Keillor.