The gift of Miss Helen Story, remembered

Garrison Keillor's Podcast

Prairie Home Productions

Society & Culture, Fiction, Comedy Fiction, Improv, Comedy

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 3 February 2024

⏱️ 8 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

But I found my glasses today. They were in my jacket pocket. Sometimes they’re in a shirt pocket, sometimes perched on top of my head. The frenzy ends, the problem solves itself. The comedian is grateful. He looks around and appreciates the beauty of the day, the here and now. It’s 5 a.m. My love is asleep in the bedroom, my daughter in her bedroom. I look out at the lights of New York. I make coffee, take my meds. The day awaits. There is work to be done. Then daughter Maia and I will take a brisk walk around Central Park. There will be lunch, a nap, a phone call, perhaps from cousin Elizabeth explaining how Our Lord, though omniscient and omnipotent, nonetheless experienced our mortality with all its sorrows and pain, or maybe cousin Joyce planning our trip to Scotland, or cousin Richard reminiscing about his travels in Africa. I am rich with cousins. My love has only a couple of second cousins. I have dozens. Cousin Stan is 90, my mentor. Elizabeth is my conscience, Dan my doctor, Susie my family historian, Janice my authority on cheerfulness. Dad had six siblings, Mother twelve. This connects me to hundreds of people, including a month-old great-nephew.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The time that I have spent looking for my glasses in the years, the 70 years since I got
0:21.7	glasses in the fourth grade must add up to a couple thousand hours
0:28.8	roaming near-sighted from room to room, bathroom, bedside table, desk, kitchen counter, coffee table.
0:37.0	Maybe it's six months of eight hour days a person could train for a triathlon in that time. You could find a cure for
0:47.1	foot fungus. You could write a memoir. And yet, looking back over this endless series of ridiculous frenzies, I see now what a classic
1:00.2	comedy it is the half-blind man searching for his sightedness, and how can the regular
1:10.4	reenactment of comedy, do anything but make a man cheerful, I ask you.
1:18.0	Add to this my other blunders stumble-ups, and snafoos, and family life, and professional career, political
1:29.7	path, real estate, good Lord, the majestic apartment I remember on Trumtymskeda in Copenhagen
1:39.5	that I bought 13 foot ceilings, elaborate molding, a view of Ersteds Park and you could have entertained
1:49.9	royalty in that dining room and negotiated the union of Denmark and Sweden.
1:56.5	I quit my radio show at the peak of its popularity and I took my Danish wife to live in
2:05.2	splendour and sit with her friends speaking my
2:10.3	kindergarten Danish, my mind boggles what was I thinking and the right, the problem was that you had too much money.
2:28.0	And the reader is right.
2:31.0	But nonetheless, what happened to the frugality of my parents, John and Grace, shopping
2:40.9	at Sears, darning socks, the meals of fried smelt, the hand-meads, why did I throw this
2:51.9	overboard?
2:53.3	It's comedy.
2:55.1	Pure and simple.
2:57.2	The man walks out his front door.
3:00.1	He is drenched by the neighbor's water sprinkler.
	...

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