Listening to the last Prairie Home Companion from the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota, this past weekend I thought back to the March night in 1999 when I sat in the audience wondering if I would get to talk to Garrison Keillor after the show. I had been told to go up on stage after the close, which I did, watching as performers and friends hugged and the host held his daughter in his arms. Eventually he handed her back to her mother and we walked downstairs to an empty room. Keillor was visibly tired from the show, but he graciously, if aloofly, chatted with me, mostly about writing: his days at the New Yorker, the difficulty of producing light humor pieces as one got older, the chronological problems inherent in memoirs, which he was then working on. "It was in the fall of ..." he said with mock pomposity, so I understood.
I came home and wrote my story, which also included the state's then new governor, Jesse Ventura. Two totally different men, they also shared, as I pointed out, certain similarities. After the story was published I sent it to Keillor. He never responded.
I still listened to his show; meeting him had only deepened my fascination with him. There was something reassuring in his always being there on Saturday night (whether you were or not) and his unfussy love of music, language, humor, and a world gone by.
