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Comments from the week of 02.18.24

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Dear GK,

I like your desire to travel the country selling Guy’s Poems.

These days my traveling is limited while recovering from a knee replacement. I don’t have a blue Dodge pickup, but my son has a 1969 Chevy with a great rusty patina that you can have cheap.

Here’s a limerick for you:

Good luck on your journey,

Bill Stein from Lard Lake

Nice limerick, thanks. Hope the knee is improving and that you are obeying your PT and not cheating. The dream of the blue Dodge pickup was a momentary delusion, after a spell of influenza, and now I feel tremendously good and intend to go on doing shows. Did two in Texas that were superb, and I’ve never used the word “superb” before in connection with myself. Two beautiful audiences and I got to sing with Heather and Christine, a little triangle of faces, singing from the heart. Anyone who gets to do this shouldn’t dare wish for anything more. GK

I have a blue pickup. It is 4dr crew cab. A 2011 Ford F-250 Super Duty. It is the largest crew cab made in the 21st century. I love to drive and detest the interstates. I have driven from the furthest point west in the lower 48 (Makah Indian Reservation near Neah Bay in Washington state) to the easternmost point of the lower 48 (Lubec, Maine, at the West Quoddy Lighthouse). I drove only secondary two-lane roads exclusively. I have driven from the southernmost part of the 48 from the southern terminus of U.S. Route 1 in Key West, Florida, to Fort Kent, Maine, at the northern terminus of U.S. Route 1. The only extreme edge of the 48 states I have not been to is the Northwest Angle in Lake of the Woods County in Minnesota.

I am retired with time on my hands. I do not smoke, nor drink and do not use rough/off-color and/or rude language. I am the father of seven and am retired law enforcement. I would really like to drive you around the United States. Just say the word. This is a serious offer. We could go in my Lincoln Town Car for ultimate comfort.

Steven Napier

Steven, you’ve compiled a pretty fabulous driving résumé and they should put up a monument to you, maybe in the center of the 48, in Kansas. As for me, I’m a writer and I feel most at home at a desk in New York. I don’t drive due to double vision but I take the subway and of course there are taxis. I like my life very much these days and hope you find a good person to ride shotgun with you. And I hope you consider writing about what you’ve seen of America, for the benefit of those of us who travel in small circles. GK

I was a traveler on all of the cruises and was more than pleased with your staff than of your musicians! Yes, I am a dreaded Southerner until you chose to layover in Carrollton and found the “nice” Southern people. I turn 79 in a few weeks and enjoy your ever comments about aging. Stay with us as long as you can. A life without our brilliant GK would be unlighted and terribly sad.

Kay Pickett
Atlanta, Georgia

Kay, nobody accused me of brilliance before and I’m trying to deal with that. Thanks for joining the cruises; I miss them. I love doing shows in the South because then I can stand on stage and sing How Great Thou Art or It Is Well With My Soul and hear the hall fill with four-part harmony, an enormous chorus. This wouldn’t happen in New York. GK

Mr. Keillor,
I’ll gladly be your pilot for that aimless car ride. The conversations would be great.
You’re in charge of music and snacks.
Charles Herbert
Bangor, Pennsylvania

The idea of aimlessness is better than the reality, which I well know. I’m a worker, not a wanderer. I belong at my desk and sometimes on a stage. But it’s fun to imagine it. GK

Hello, Garrison.

Have you ever considered taking a train trip across the U.S.? You could meet a lot of new people that way as well. The scenery west of the Mississippi is wonderful. You could buy a roomette and get all your meals free. Just a suggestion.

Dave Axtell

I took a trip almost all the way across, from New York to Chicago to Colorado to see the Grand Canyon, and I didn’t meet many people. I sat in a roomette and wrote and the high point was watching the flatness of Kansas go by. At the Canyon, I walked along the Rim in a crowd of photographers taking pictures of geology. You’d think there are enough pictures of the G.C., that the world doesn’t need more, but no. Taking pictures of natural magnificence with your cellphone? I don’t get it. GK

G-man,

Decades ago, I heard you tell a story about a high school girl athlete, sitting in a kitchen, who was kicked off her team because she was at a party where alcohol was present even though she left as soon as she found out about it. Very unfair.
I have no recollection of the transition, but somehow, we end up with a couple linemen driving a cherry picker out to do a repair before a snowstorm hits. They finish and begin the trip back as the storm hits. It gets worse, and worse, and more difficult to drive until they are barelycreeping along. They stop and decide to walk back to the bar they had just passed to wait it out. As they climb out of the truck, they discover the reason why they’re moving so slowly. The wind had caused a loose corner of the tarp to flap against the “raise the bucket” lever and the bucket had been raised so that every line they’d driven under has been caught by the arm of the bucket and is now being dragged behind the truck. (It STILL brings tears of laughter to my eyes imagining the scene decades later!)
Solution? After getting the wires off the truck, putting the bucket off to the side of the road and bouncing it in the snow while slowly driving forward. Then, after getting the truck all ready to go, running into the bar yelling “Big Foot!” and pointing out the foot prints on the side of the road. Then driving off.
I would LOVE to hear that story again if it was available anywhere. And thank you for something that has brought me joy so many times over these decades.
A fan,
Ray Woods
Lombard, Illinois

You have an excellent memory, Ray. The story is called “Cherry Picker” and it’s on the 20thAnniversary PHC CD. I’ll bet you can get it for free online. GK

Dear Garrison,

No apologies needed for your recent imaginative column proposal, “Eliminating those states would reduce the U.S. Senate by 20 seats, which could only improve it, and likely send the Republican Party careening into history, which it has been seeking for some time now. And who can name the last great senator from Kansas or South Dakota?”

But a lot of us CAN proudly name the last great senator from South Dakota. It was U.S. Senator George McGovern. And if you ever pass through his hometown of Mitchell, stop by the excellent McGovern Legacy Museum, an inspiring place that celebrates the life and legacy of McGovern, who died in 2012 at age 90.

Pretty amazing life story for the SD native, who returned from piloting 35 missions in a B-24 in WW II to teach history at Dakota Wesleyan University and then in the 1950s lead a successful revival of the Democratic Party for years in the then-and-again-now deeply red state. If you can’t get to Mitchell, check out McGovern's autobiography, Grassroots: The Autobiography of George McGovern, Random House, 1977.

As for recalling the last great senator from Kansas, most of us can recall Bob Dole but without the same level of fondness.

Enjoy this day!

Mark Larson

Arcata, California

George McGovern was a great man, a war hero who pursued world peace as only someone who knew violence firsthand could. He viewed the acceptance of hunger and poverty and homelessness as a betrayal of our values. I got to meet him once and tell him how much I admired his book about his daughter Terry, a lively and ambitious young woman, a mother of two, who died in a snowbank in Madison, Wisconsin, of acute alcoholism. A heroic thing for a man to do, to write honestly about a beloved and trouble daughter. He was ridiculed by a great many people on the right and I respect the Republican senator John Thune of South Dakota for showing McGovern the respect due him. GK

GK,

I suggest an ode to a beautiful and overlooked part of Creation, the butternut squash. How beautiful its unusual shape! Its graceful curves, its flawless skin! Its super-hardness and heaviness! Its affinity to cinnamon!
Bob Martin
Halifax, Canada

You’re halfway there, Bob. Write the dang ode. GK

To GK,

Sorry to be a Danny Downer. The Hyperloop Company is out of business, laid off employees, selling assets. I could give you a number of tech reasons why it died, but that would be an essay in itself.

John Holland
Ret. Engineer
Overland Park, Kansas

I am only a radio announcer (ret.), John, so I have no basis on which to disagree with you. Someone should warn the authorities in Minnesota who are considering that project to connect St. Paul and Rochester. But I stand by my point that the country needs some big technological leap to revive our optimism. Landing tycoons on the moon doesn’t fill the bill. GK

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If you want to hear the Cherry Picker story that Ray mentioned above — along with many other great Lake Wobegon stories — you can find it on the A Prairie Home Companion 20th Anniversary Collection.

CLICK HERE to buy the CDs or download today!

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