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Wednesday, June 23, 2021

On Growing Up

Today’s passage is from Garrison Keillor’s 2014 book “The Keillor Reader: Looking Back at Forty Years of Stories: Where Did They All Come From? Plain Thoughts on Fatherhood, Writing, Politics, and Age”. The whole book is like this.

Life is good when you finally grow up. You find work you enjoy, buy a car that starts on cold mornings, look for love, sing along with the radio, beget children who nestle on your lap and put their little arms around your neck and kiss you. You put away sarcasm. You mow your lawn, read history, learn to cook a few things well, seek out good shoes, converse with strangers on the bus. You find a hairstyle that suits you.

Your taste changes: time goes by and contemporary art strikes you as ditzy and shallow whereas you are moved by Hopper and Rockwell and Nordic painters of snowscapes. Young Sarah Singer-Songwriter only makes you wonder if she is getting enough fresh air and exercise, whereas a Chopin etrude carries visions of women in lamplight, the forbidden kiss, the whisper of silk, the nobility of kind gestures.

You cross the line into your forties, the mortgage years, and the fifties, when you stand weeping at graduations and weddings, and then in the blink of an eye you land in your sixties and now you’re on Easy Street. You become eminent and learn to har-rumph. And then seventy. A golden age. You are wise beyond knowing, you have embraced moderation and humility, your work is triumphant, you pee like a Palomino pony, and your imagination is more vivid than ever before. One can’t wait to turn eighty and ninety.

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