Love Me (32 page)

If this is death, I say, GIVE ME MORE LIBERTY JUST LIKE IT.

Of course there is the problem of word loss. A sad infidelity.

Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Dementia.
Dementia who?
I have no idea. Ask me again.
Dementia who?
You gotta be crazy.

I haven’t discussed my little Pedersen problem with Iris, but surely she knows—otherwise, why is she so nice to me?

She brings me coffee in my favorite cup and takes me in her arms. She calls me Baby. We were going to have a baby. Then we didn’t. Long long ago.

I am that child. It took a long time but here I am. Arrived at last.

I love her so much. She walks in light. She is entirely beautiful and fitting. She suits me so well. After all these years, she is the most suitable person I know. Praise the Lord. Thank you for your mercy to me, a sinner. I am going to go lie down now. If the phone rings, it isn’t for me. That much I know.

 

 

 

 

THE END

The enterprising Larry Wyler is frustrated with life in St. Paul and his marriage to an earnest Democrat out to save the world. His best-selling novel,
Spacious Skies,
earns him a ticket to Manhattan, a million-dollar apartment with a fabulous terrace, and an office at
The New Yorker
magazine among the writers he admires and the legendary editor William Shawn. But that doesn’t save Wyler from writer’s block after his follow-up novel,
Amber Waves of Grain,
bombs badly. (“Why did I write so much about soybeans in the first chapter?” he wonders.) An invitation to write a newspaper advice column, “Ask Mr. Blue,” provides a much needed distraction. It’s a low rung on the literary ladder, but writing commonsense advice to the lonely and the frustrated initiates Larry’s own long recovery. He doles out wisdom to
Exasperated,
whose wife gives up her judgeship for figure skating;
Nice Lady,
who is abusive to the obese; and
Secular Humanist,
who suddenly notices his girlfriend is Amish. Slowly, painfully, Wyler finds a measure of clarity for his own life, and then he sets out to win back his wife’s affections.

 

 

An anthology of poems selected and arranged with marvelous style.
Good Poems
includes poems about lovers, children, failure, snow, death and transcendence, and the color yellow.

“The unerring ear that has earned Keillor admiration on public radio translates perfectly onto the page.”—
The Houston Chronicle

 

 

 

Lake Wobegon Summer, 1956
depicts the most harrowing time of life in Lake Wobegon—adolescence. With his trademark gift for treading “a line delicate as a cobweb between satire and sentiment”
(The Cleveland Plain Dealer),
Garrison Keillor brilliantly captures postwar America and delivers an unforgettable comedy about a writer coming of age in the rural midwest.
ISBN 0-14-20093-0

 

 

In the twenty-five years since Garrison Keillor first brought it to life, the rural Minnesota town of Lake Wobegon has become a national treasure. In this lavishly produced photography book, word and image combine to illuminate the real Minnesota town’s life, landscapes, and people who inspired its creation.
ISBN 0-670-03037-6

 

 

A portrait of small-town American life emerges in a novel of humor, sadness and tenderness, songs and poems.

“Lake Wobegon Days
is about the way our beliefs, desires and fears tail off into abstraction—and get renewed from time to time ... this book, unfolding Mr. Keillor’s full design, is a genuine work of American history.”—
The New York Times

 

 

John Tollefson, the son of Byron and Mary of Lake Wobegon, leaves Minnesota for upstate New York, to manage a public radio station at a college for academically challenged children of financially gifted parents. He makes a pleasant bachelor life for himself in New York. Yet, he feels rootless, restless, joined in no struggle, with nothing at stake. Can a romance with a historian named Alida Freeman give his life the nobility and grace it lacks?

“A masterful portrait of the sort of small-town world that many of us Americans believe we grew up in, or would have liked to.... A wonderfully readable tale.”—
The Washington Post Book World

 

 

Revisit the beguiling comic world of Lake Wobegon. In this collection of Lake Wobegon monologues, Keillor tells readers more about some of the people from
Lake Wobegon Days
and introduces some new faces.

“Leaving Home
is a book of exceptional charm ... delightful ... genuinely touching.”—
The Wall Street Journal ISBN 0-14-013160-4

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