Speaker 1: Man has almost unlimited power to do damage and cause suffering,
as we have been learning lately, and some slight power
to do good. But as we grow up and pay
attention to our surroundings, we see that we are beneficiaries
of great gifts for which we can claim no credit.
And so we have a day of Thanksgiving in November,
just as we're bracing for another winter. My aunt Eleanor
was the patron saint of Thanksgiving, and she rent at
a nearby Legion hall organized a dinner for one hundred
or more keelers back when I was a kid before
cell phones, so instead of taking selfies, we had conversation.
My aunt's told stories about the farm and how Grandpa
drove a horse drawn mower to cut hay with the
reins in one hand and a book in the other,
and the day the house burned down and he raked
through the ashes looking for photographs, and how he drove
home once with his first model ty forward and lost
control of the car and pulled back on the steering wheel,
yelling whoa, as the car slid into the ditch and
he sat in it, laughing at himself. I'm so thankful
for those big reunions, and for my aunt's friendship. I
live in New York City now and have a nineteen
twenty photograph on the wall of Grandpa walking down the
road with my ten year old dad on one side
and tiny Eleanor on the other. I'm grateful for my
first grade teacher, as Still Shaver, who kept me after
school to read aloud to her as she corrected workbooks.
It was remedial reading, but she made it seem like
a privilege, and I felt privileged ever since then. For generations,
women had the easy work of Thanksgiving, which was cooking
the meal, and men had the hard job of making conversation.
They sat in the living room with a football game
on the TV, exchanging monosyllables after a fumble or a touchdown,
as familiar smells drifted out of the kitchen, where women
told family secrets too shocking for men to be able
to handle. And I'm okay with that. I sit and
stare at the screen watching men crash into each other,
and I'm grateful for cowardice. I never played football, so
now I don't have the aches and pains that my
heroic classmates have. I fooled around with drugs in college,
but there were cheap, crummy drugs, not the powerful chemicals
of today that can lead a person to make a
life sleeping in the park. I'm grateful that I was
born late enough so that when I developed mitro valve problems,
open heart surgery was rather common. So I didn't die
in my late fifties as two of my uncles did.
And I never was cursed with the sense of my
own giftedness. People told me I was gifted, but I
knew better. I have successfully avoided literary awards, so I'm
not oppressed by my own eminence. Every morning, I feel
like a beginner. So many blessings and I haven't even
mentioned friendship, sunsets, public transportation, Christian hymnody, anti seizure, meds,
other people's toddlers, baseball, hearing aids, the steady, thoughtful leadership
of my wife, fluoridation, the dairy Queen, heath bar, blizzard,
dental floss, my duet partner, Heather Massey, the psalms of David,
drip grind, coffee, cats, YouTube trees, parks, rivers, the prairie, sonnets, Google,
and cranberries. Cranberries are the heart and soul of Thanksgiving dinner.
You don't want a gourmet dinner that distracts you from
your life blessing, so you serve turkey, a profoundly average dish.
Every turkey dinner is about as good as any other
turkey dinner. Same with pumpkin pie. But cranberries are terribly exciting.
They are the Robert Frost of fruits, the Flowbear, the
Frank Lloyd Wright, the Gabriel Foram. You can overcook the
turkey and serve a pumpkin pie. It is just pudding
with a crust. But if you serve cranberries you're okay.
Just released a Prairie Home Companion's fiftieth anniversary two CD set,
recorded live at the Fitzgerald Theater. Garrison Keeler and the
Gang celebrate with music, sketches, and of course the news
from Lake Wobegon. Get to tales at Garrisonkeeler dot com