Garrison Keillor's Podcast18 Jan 2025

Happiness and the price of groceries

I like Trader Joe’s because the clientele is half my age or less and I stand with my cart in a long double line with college kids and mothers of tiny children and I listen to fragments of phone conversations that are fresh and fascinating to me. These people lean toward eagerness and curiosity with a streak of satire; my people tend toward dismay and resignation. The lines move fast at Trader Joe’s because the store has 24 checkout cashiers and as I come toward checkout, this being New York, I wonder how many of the cashiers are hoping to be actors, writers, artists, dancers, composers, and I worry about them as I catch sight. I was a dishwasher when I was their age and I hoped to be published in The New Yorker where my heroes Updike, Perelman, Thurber published. For me, the magazine was the Big League and I needed to climb out of the Minors and when I made it, at 27, I bought filet mignon.The Bigs are still around but the young and ambitious have found new roads — podcasting, for example — in which you pitch your own tent and invent your brand and see who stops to look at the goods. I find this sort of astonishing and wonderful. I look at the young and see how their ambition is to make their own good and productive life rather than win the silver trophy or be admitted to the Big Shot Society.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit garrisonkeillor.substack.com/subscribe

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(111)

The one-armed man at the concert

Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 in C Major, the “Jupiter,” was his last, a symphony he never heard, composed in the summer of 1788, three years before his death, along with two other symphonies, a piano sona...

11 Apr 7min

Gearing up to go on the road

Some days I glance at the front page and see the name RUMP in three or four places so I flip back to the Lifestyle section and maybe find a wine review, “Fresh and vivacious with chewy tannins and bur...

14 Feb 7min

An old man's winter night

A Times story reporting that college students in a writing course do better when they go offline for a month makes perfect sense to me, same as if you say a writer does better at a laptop in the publi...

7 Feb 7min

Remembering you but not the rest

I remember when I was a kid, our family driving home from Sunday night gospel meeting and stopping at A&W for root beer floats, how beautiful they were after an hour of contemplating eternal damnation...

18 Okt 20258min

What we learn from air travel

This all came crashing down last Monday night at JFK when I boarded a Delta flight to Seattle around 5 p.m. I consider JFK to be as close to a prison camp as I care to get. The Delta terminal is vast ...

13 Sep 20258min

My weekly walk to church and back

Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for moreMy weekly walk to church and backThe Column: 04.04.25Garrison KeillorApr 4READ IN APPShareWe seem to be in a war against science and research, which is cau...

28 Jun 20258min

The sweet day draws near

And now I worry, as old people do, about the kids I see who are growing up in the dreadful clutter of American life, the gizmos and social media bullying, and can they find delight as I did in skating...

12 Apr 20257min

The perils of pedestrianism

And so you have men on bikes racing through narrow gaps on jammed avenues with a backpack full of shrimp curry and pad thai, meanwhile an elderly man (me) on his way to the drugstore to pick up some A...

5 Apr 20257min