The News from Manhattan: Thursday, May 13, 2020

By Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website

17 May 20

How long will this corona stay?
I’m sleeping ten hours a day.
How long will I be
Writing limericks daily
When I don’t have much left to say?

t’s a useful time when people learn what keeps them going in stressful times. Family, conversation, books, jigsaw puzzles, work — life is reduced to basics and you get a new view of your own life, uncluttered. Conservatives have been campaigning against a powerful federal government for decades, and now they’ve found the perfect way to prove their case: elect a world-class fool to the presidency. His comments yesterday were the stupidest of any president in my lifetime. The emperor is naked and the country will get through this by individual enterprise and ingenuity and leadership on the state level, which is what conservatives have been saying for years. The White House is a joke and the reporters in the briefing room may as well be writing about squirrels in the park.

I come from anxious people and quarantine offers a life without anxiety. I am not going to die from this and be buried wrapped in plastic and instead of pallbearers, a fork lift. It isn’t going to happen that way. I’m married to a fabulous woman and I have a happy daughter who falls apart laughing when she catches me out on the balcony and throws a glass of water at me. I assumed I’d get a dark neurotic daughter who writes angry incomprehensible poems and instead I get one who screams with laughter when her dad has wet pants. I’m writing a funny novel and it’s going to come out in September because my people found a daring publisher who wants to take me on and maybe do the memoir too. My friend George read the first fifteen pages of the memoir and gave me the first glowing compliment he’s ever given. The man is from Schenectady, a very rough town where kids learn to curse by the age of five, and he is an agnostic and he is 85 and has seen everything and is not easily impressed, but he told me over the phone that he loves me. I was shocked and had to go lie down. If a Schenectadian is willing to express same-sex affection, either he is on powerful medication or you’ve done something worthwhile. A happy day to you. Spring is on the way.