By Garrison Keillor
I dearly love these autumn days and so do you unless you live down South and must endure the 70s and now many of you have elected radical Marxists to public office who will tax the shirts off your backs and confiscate your guns, leaving you defenseless against illegal migrants who will eat your cats and dogs, but up here in the North we are doing just fine, thank you.
When the Pilgrims came on the Mayflower in November 1620, they intended to land in Virginia and were blown off course and landed at Plymouth Rock instead and found themselves in a heap of trouble immediately. There was no climate change back then, so it was bitterly cold, and canned food hadn’t been invented, nor antibiotics, so many perished from malnutrition and pneumonia — but luckily for them, there were no Stephen Millers among the Wampanoag along the coast, no Indian Culture Enforcement (ICE), because half the Pilgrims died that first winter, there were hardly enough to care for the sick, so they could easily have been driven into the sea, but Squanto, Massasoit, and Samoset brought them provisions and helped them get settled, and that’s why Governor Bradford proclaimed the first Thanksgiving a year later.
He issued a proclamation, “Whereaf … the Almighty in Hif great beneficence and wifdom haf brought uf to thefe rocky fhores and fupplied uf with geefe and fhellfifh, let uf abandon fellfifhneff and hold a great feaft of Thankfgiving,” and so we do the same today, except with esses instead of effs, and turkey instead of shellfish.
The Pilgrims had separated themselves from the Church of England because it was too catholic, and they settled in the Netherlands but then faced the reality that their kids would grow up speaking Dutch and put Hollandaise sauce on their eggs and everyone would have to pay their own way, go dutch, and so to keep their families intact, they made the miserable two-month voyage across the Atlantic arriving at the exact worst time and almost becoming extinct. This was not a triumphant feast; it was a celebration of bare survival.
It’s important that we realize this: the Anglo experience in North America began as a big mistake and we survived only by the kindness of strangers who had every reason to be cruel.
And so, this month once more we sit down to give thanks. We slaughter the turkey, the stupidest and ugliest creature on the planet, and we thank God Almighty that we’ve so far survived another year of dependency on Microsoft Word, Google, and smartphones. Many people need GPS to find their way around the block; children are growing up unable to read maps. Podcasting is replacing publishing, imaginative literature is disappearing, I feel I am the only person still writing sonnets, AI is advancing and those of us with Average Intelligence will soon be unemployed except perhaps for crowd scenes in movies.
I am thankful I grew up without the smartphone and so spent hours sitting by the Mississippi in dreamy contemplation without Siri or Alexa to answer my questions with their irrelevancies.
And thank God we are not British and we speak a vastly superior English with words such as cool dude, I’m in, Yikes, You’re telling me, I don’t buy that, schlock, schmegeggy, schmutz, and my new favorite word, meh. You don’t like it? Get lost. Blah blah blah.
I am 84 and I am thankful that I lived when I did. I grew up at a time when people told stories. I was a shy kid, especially around girls, and was cruelly teased by a classmate, but when my mother sent me to the YMCA for swim lessons, and we were told we must attend class in the nude so that our leg movements could be closely observed by the instructor, which we knew made no sense, and the instructor made fun of us and called us “girls” and so I skipped class for the whole month and went to the library instead and found The New Yorker magazine and read S.J. Perelman and James Thurber and so became a writer instead of a swimmer, and so far this has worked out okay. I come to the age of 84 and give up regret and am grateful for my entire life up to this point. I live with the woman I love, I enjoy my work, we have a darling daughter, and every day is a gift. Thanks for listening. E5P
