What you don’t want, throw out

I’m such a sappy-hearted Midwesterner that most weekends I listen to A Prairie Home Companion twice: once on Saturday night, and again late Sunday morning. Garrison Keillor’s voice has a calming effect on my nerves, though I hate his singing.

His writing is also wonderful because it conjures up rich images that link me to my own past. When he writes about his uncles, taciturn and with very little to say at the family reunions, he could be writing about my now-long-gone uncles too. In his latest column, “The Old Scout,” he riffs on cleaning house, and he ties it to our upcoming election. The last paragraph resonates:

I think of when I was in college and owned about three cardboard boxes of stuff and a corduroy sportcoat and six pairs of jeans and a Webster's Third Unabridged and an Underwood typewriter. I can't be that guy again, but sometimes when life is too much, you want to walk out the front door and leave it all behind and start over. That's how I feel about this election. The White House is a vacuum. The man is a mistake on two legs, a national wrong turn. Stop the car and turn around.

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