A Letter from Greenville S.C.

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I spent last week gadding about the Carolinas doing shows and enjoying the South, eating eggs and grits and hearing the waitress say, “Can I get you more coffee, darling?” and encountering Republicans, a tribe rarer than Mohicans on the West Side of Manhattan where I live. I miss them. My uncles tended Republican, believing in personal responsibility and fiscal reality, and at church on Palm Sunday, at coffee hour, I heard the word “taxes” uttered contemptuously and a gentleman in his sixties was saying, “Everything government touches, it messes up,” a genuine living Republican. Twenty minutes before, at Mass, he had been forgiven his iniquity, and I wanted to put my arms around him.

I am comfortable in the South. I’m okay with not talking politics with crazy people. Yes, in the rural areas, they display the Confederate flag, but I’ve got junk in my closet too. I see no need to remove statues of Civil War heroes: just paint their uniforms olive drab and enlist them in the U.S. Army. A good summer job for teenagers.

I love the warmth of the people. At my shows, I like to have the audience sing, just for the sensuous warmth of it. We sing “My country, ’tis of thee” and in the South we can sing a hymn or two a cappella and it’s amazing to observe this from the stage, people who are surprised and delighted and moved by the beauty of their voices mingled with the others. They learned this as Baptist kids and then (I imagine) lapsed into secular humanism and went through doctrine therapy and devoted themselves to vintage wines and dark coffees and French baking, and now, as I sing “When peace like a river attendeth my way and sorrows like sea billows roll,” the words come back to them and they sing like risen saints at the Sunday camp meeting and they dab at their eyes with a hanky. After that and “Amazing Grace,” I can get them to sing the Battle Hymn of the Republic and lay down their arms.

For the stand-up part of my act, I grieved over the mild winter in Minnesota, the lack of ice fishing, snowmobiling, the loss of the Fellowship of the Jumper Cables, the lack of adversity that gives us northerners our sense of identity, and I brought Carolinians (many of them exiled northerners) to genuinely feel the loss. And having accomplished that, I set out to convince them that aging is the best thing that can happen to them and why they should embrace it. It’s an impressive feat when you get millennials to buy into this.

And then my singing partners Heather Masse and Christine DiGiallonardo joined me in singing songs by my fellow octogenarians Jerry Garcia, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, McCartney & Lennon, and when we sing in three-part harmony, “These are the days of the endless summer, there is no past, there’s only now,” I believe in it though I’m twice my singing partners’ age and have so much past from back before they were born.

And in the course of doing these shows I feel a profound mystery: it’s much more fun being an old has-been than it was to be a big success. When I was briefly a big success forty years ago, people stood in line to interview me and ask how it felt to be so admired. It felt fearful, like looking over the edge of a cliff and a thousand feet down to rocky beach and surf.

Four decades later, I’m wading in gentle surf, singing “Under African Skies” and “In My Life” and “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” with Heather and Christine and Richard Dworsky at the piano. He is Jewish but plays gospel very very well. We do “Nearer My God to Thee” and people in the front rows are ready to come forward.

A showman gets old, the audience goes into assisted living, the crowd shrinks, and I can see I’m coming closer and closer to what my mother prayed I would be, a preacher. When I’m 90, I’ll be standing on a street corner in Greenville, South Carolina, Bible in hand, preaching, “Give thanks to the Lord for He is good, His mercy endureth forever,” and if you hear me singing, come stand close by and join in. There’ll be no collection, just sing with me, darling.

Garrison Keillor © 04.01.24