Dear Mr. Keillor,When I was a little girl, my father would take me on Saturday night to the McDonald’s to buy Happy Meals and he timed it so that we listened to PHC. So all those precious alone times in the car with him, you were there too, and I grew up loving you both so much.
My dad died unexpectedly this year. He fell and hit his head in just the wrong way and there was nothing anyone could do. I was lucky that at least I got to sit next to him in his hospital room for a few hours as he died. When I ran out of things to say, I read him the Writer’s Almanac.
I loved my dad so much, and there was so much about him I didn’t understand. I think he loved me and I know there was so much about me he didn’t understand. There was so much we couldn’t say to one another, but we both liked you.
I always wanted to send one of those greeting messages from me to him during the show — but I could never think of anything clever enough. And then the show went off the air and now he’s dead. But when I read your words, I always feel like it’s the three of us again.
Please keep writing,
Kate
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Kate, I thank you for your letter, which is completely mysterious to me and also beautiful, like an October sunset. I’m stunned. I didn’t understand my dad and we didn’t have much to say to each other, but I have clear memories of the time he took me with him to New York when I was eleven. My mother made him take me, but I loved being alone with him and seeing the city. He’d been stationed here during WWII, a Minnesota farm boy in uniform in Manhattan, and he told me about those good years. He was worried about losing me in crowded places and so he held my hand, the only time in my life I remember him doing that. My other memory of him is of taking my little three-year-old daughter to visit him as he lay dying. She grabbed for his big toe under the blanket, and he moved his foot away from her hand and she was delighted by this game of hide-and-seek. She kept trying to grab it and he pulled it away and finally she got hold of it and both of them were laughing. She knew nothing about death, and he knew that he’d never know her as a person, but in this little playful encounter they did sense each other’s humorous nature. I feel so privileged to have been that invisible voice that mysteriously drew you and your father together. A great mystery, and it amazes me as it does you.
GK
from "Pardon me if I talk about back where I'm from"
Garrison Keillor's newletter, March 24, 2021
