Garrison says:

I’m an old Minnesotan, enjoying exile in New York City along with my wife, Jenny. She’s from Anoka too but came East when she was a teenager to study violin and stayed. I met her here thirty years ago ­­— her older sister was a classmate of my younger sister — and I took her to St. Paul where we lived for twenty years or so and produced a daughter, and now we’re back in her town. Fair is fair. In St. Paul I was a big deal and now I’m dependent on her. I am still a working writer and arise at 4 most mornings and sit down at my desk, which is a great blessing. It’s what I do. Thanks to the Web, you can publish yourself, write a twice-weekly column, put out a book when it’s done. I have an editor Hillary Speed in Florida, a copyeditor Stephanie Beck in Minneapolis. I still do shows thanks to my producer Sam Hudson and managing director Kate Gustafson. Not the big venues anymore but I’ve come to love old theaters in midsize cities. At Tanglewood and Ravinia, you’re awed by the audience but at the Paramount, Beacon or Majestic, you’re warmed by them. You stand in the wings, the house lights dim, the clapping starts, you walk out onstage, bow — it’s an awfully good life.

St. Paul was full of reminders of dreadful mistakes I made, grand houses I bought on impulse, impulsive romances, a wretched decision in 1987 to quit the show I loved and move to Denmark, and the disappointment of my Brethren family that I strayed into the field of fiction and entertainment. In Manhattan, a person is clear of all that; you’re an anonymous striver like all the others. I love to go to the Public Library on 42nd Street and sit in the Rose Reading Room at a long library table with lamps with green shades and work on stuff, surrounded by men and women one-fourth my age, half of them Asian, probably children of immigrants, all of us anonymous but feeling encouraged by the industry of the others. I can write for four or five hours and then take the C train home or maybe walk over to Grand Central Station, which makes me think of my father. He brought me here in 1953 when I was 11. He was stationed here during WW2, an Army mail handler. It was the only trip I took with just the two of us and so it shines clearly in my mind. He took me to the top of the Empire State Building where I sang “Jesus Loves Me” in a booth to make a record to give my mother. He and I went to the Oyster Bar at Grand Central and had a fine lunch and he told me how much he enjoyed his New York years. He even went to Broadway shows. My father, a Brethren man, going to the theater to see singing and dancing. I’m still astonished.

I’m working on a novel, which goes well, and have another book in mind, maybe a screenplay, and then I suppose I’ll go to Shady Acres and play Parcheesi. Or not, as the case may be. I don’t look back, don’t wish I were young again. I’m curious about the past, my dad’s hardscrabble boyhood with seven siblings on a struggling dairy farm north of Anoka. My mother, the tenth in a family of thirteen, children of Scottish immigrants in south Minneapolis. I wish I had asked them more questions. The University of Minnesota, which I entered in 1960, the stately buildings overlooking the Mississippi. Tuition was $71 per quarter, which I earned working part time as a dishwasher and parking lot attendant, no need to ask my parents’ approval to major in English. I didn’t get a good education (my fault) but I found a life there, got serious about writing, went into radio.

You get old, the world passes you by, and you watch with interest. In the eighth grade, I read The New Yorker and longed to be published there. I went to see the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville and set out to start a show something like it. A great old American magazine and live radio, two classic platforms, but now there are a hundred thousand platforms, any ambitious teenager can find his or her own, and I feel gratitude to have come up in the Sixties and Seventies. I’m grateful for the pen name “Garrison” I invented in high school. My in-laws Marge and Gene who housed us when I was in-between jobs. The move to a farm in Stearns County, the friends there. The letter from Roger Angell at The New Yorker buying a story. The mistakes fade away; the lucky turns remain clear: the lunch at Docks with Jenny in 1990, the shakedown scam of 2017 that cut me loose to be a freelance. The world gets smaller as you become ancient. You awaken at 4, ease out of bed so as not to disturb the sleeping beauty beside you, go to the kitchen, turn on the coffee. You’ve been awakened by an idea for a poem that must be put on paper lest it be lost. So you do.

O beautiful for cornfields, for little towns and lakes,
For people who speak slowly so they will not make mistakes.
Some think that we are boring for we never raise our voices,
And the menus at the restaurants don’t offer many choices.
The Midwest, O the Midwest, the middle of the nation,
And many never see it for they go by aviation

That being done, the coffee ready, you pour a cup, black, and go to work. There’s a mitral valve from a pig in my heart, keeping a steady beat. Mayo Clinic and Jenny Nilsson have done well by me. The day awaits.