What We Crave, Above All, Is What's Real

By Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website

16 July 21

he books about No. 45 are coming out and one says he was deranged and another says that his own people feared for the country, neither of which I doubt for a minute, but I’m not up for reliving those years for the same reason I don’t plan to spend January in Norway: been there, done it, life is short, no need for reruns.

The January in Norway is a story my wife tells so much better than I can. I was sick with the flu in a hotel room in the town of Tromsø above the Arctic Circle; she was the one who went dogsledding and ice fishing in the arctic twilight in a cold rain and the sun never shone and the food was gruesome and everyone worked hard to be upbeat and detached from reality, and now when she recites the miseries of that week, people laugh like crazy, whereas I was in bed, mostly sleeping. The trip was my brilliant idea and I missed out on it and her telling of the story is brilliant, epic but brisk.

We have no plans to return to Tromsø. It has served its usefulness as an example of how unfounded enthusiasm combined with loose cash can lead to a dark place.

I experienced vast self-confidence in my twenties, which may have been a necessity for an aspiring writer. I hung out with other young writers, hoping to absorb talent by proximity, same as you’d catch the flu. We met at the Mixers bar near campus and I drank Scotch because that seemed like the right liquor for the writer I wanted to be. And I smoked unfiltered Luckies. What we knew about writers was that they were prodigious drinkers. Eight or ten of us crammed into a big booth and drank while disparaging any and all successful living writers from Bellow, Updike, and Roth on down. The combination of alcohol and disdain boosted our confidence. I imagine there are bands of writers doing the very same thing today. I don’t want to join them, any more than I long for Tromsø in January or want to read a book about Mr. Yesterday.

What I long for is to go back to last Sunday when I had planned to read to my daughter a long passage I wrote about her birth and childhood and how she developed into a big personality, loving, jokey, reading other people’s feelings, keen about details, but events intervened, and then Monday was furiously busy, moving her into a new apartment in a distant city, and then suddenly it was time to go and we hugged and she burst into tears and so did I. I’m not a weepy person. There have been many farewell moments when I should’ve wept and did not. What moved me was the depth of her love for her mother and me, the emptiness of the apartment, the strangeness of the city. “You’ll be fine,” her mother said. My daughter hugged me and wiped her nose on my black T-shirt, which amused her and so she did it again. I said, “Is it snot? No, it’s not.” She laughed. I walked to the door and on the way I passed gas and she laughed harder and then resumed weeping. I went out the door, tears running down my cheeks.

We drove away in grievous silence, my wife at the wheel. I searched the map on my phone for a Dairy Queen, thinking that I deserved a Butterfinger Blizzard but there were none nearby. Since Monday we’ve gotten reassuring texts from her that she’s doing well but I’m still miserable. This is an experience I share with millions of other parents. Who ever realized that simple concupiscence could lead to so many interesting stories and such deep feeling? I think of her on a swing, swinging as high as she could, laughing in the moment of weightlessness on the upswing. I think of her tonsillectomy where I gently, over her protests, placed the gas mask on her and held it until she sagged and closed her eyes, and afterward, seeing me in the hall, she stuck out her tongue. I think of how hard she laughed on the raft ride when a wave sloshed me and it looked like I’d wet my pants. I miss her. She’s entitled to independence, we being mortal and all, but I cherish the moment, our arms around each other, weeping. Did I say I miss her? I do.