My Weekend in Manhattan: A Memoir

By Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website

19 August 18

string of blazing summer days in New York City and after the sun went down, perfect summer nights, diners in sidewalk cafes along Columbus Avenue, dogs walking their owners, and my wife walking me. “You need to get out and move around,” she says. “It’s not healthy to sit at a desk all day.” And she is right. I am stuck on a memoir I’m writing, pondering the wrong turns of my early years. How much do you want to know? Are you sure?

Manhattan is a long thin island, so we don’t need a car here, and among pedestrians, one is surrounded by good manners. Biking is dangerous. A young woman from Australia was killed Friday when she swerved on her bike to avoid an Uber driver pulling out into the bike lane and she was struck down by a truck. Her name was Maddie Lyden, she was 23, she had just graduated from college and given herself a trip to America, her dream trip. She died a mile from my apartment and I didn’t know about it until Monday.

When I moved into this apartment back in 1990, I was struck by three deaths that happened in my vicinity. A former Rockette was killed by a demented man as she walked her dog early one morning on 69th Street and Central Park. A young woman working in a Gap store on 57th was killed by a robber as she opened the door for business. A young man from Provo, Utah, was killed on the 7th Avenue B-train station platform, defending his mother against a gang of muggers. I think of the three of them whenever I pass the places where they died.

We’re interconnected here.  I sit in a café and the woman across the room tapping on her laptop may be writing a novel that will be a best-seller and here I am, trying to remember Frayne Anderson, the English teacher in Anoka, Minnesota, who gave me a copy of The New Yorker when I was 14.  A certain decorum is observed. I don’t ask her what she’s writing, she doesn’t ask me, but we’re connected. I once boarded a downtown B train and sat down and noticed that the black lady across the aisle was reading a book of mine. She looked like a lawyer. She didn’t laugh but she kept reading. It was hard watching her for fear she’d make a face and slam the book shut and I got off the train. It was 7th Avenue.

Writing a best-selling novel was once my fairy tale, but I’m over it now. I’m engrossed in the memoir. It’s my obligation, seeing as I grew up in America after World War II, when children roamed the countryside freely, no cellphones on them for their parents to ascertain their whereabouts, and we worked hoeing corn for truck farmers and learned about drudgery and if we wanted to go to town, we hitchhiked and sometimes got a ride from a drunk who was speeding and cursing his wife. I’m not nostalgic about this. I’m grateful to have survived more or less intact.

I think of the novelists I know and if I were to turn my back on the factual and think fiction I could make myself into a tragic hero, misunderstood by old friends and family, but the truth is, my life is one piece of good luck after another, the most recent being my wife of 23 years who is walking alongside me down Columbus toward Lincoln Center, setting a brisk pace. A good marriage is worth more than a best-selling novel, take my word for it, I’ve been there.

“My Fair Lady” is playing at the Center. We saw it and she said she’d like to see it again. “Fine,” I say, as I’m thinking about Maddie Lyden who was struck down on her bike one block east of here, at 66th and Central Park West. The Uber driver was careless, the truck driver was ticketed for DUI, Maddie was riding a rental bike and didn’t get a helmet.

It’s hard to put all this in one rational column, the tragedy of Maddie, the summer nights, the reader on the train, my good wife, “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly,” but now I’ve reached 750 words, my limit, and must get back to work on the memoir. That’s life in New York. Take care. Look both ways always.