Garrison Keillor has written a really nice column this week for Salon. It’s just beautifully worded, like everything Keillor ever writes. Despite his embarrassing efforts to get a T-shirt maker to stop selling a shirt that’s emblazoned with “A Prairie Ho Companion,” Keillor remains one of my favorite humorists (alongside Michael J. Nelson, both of whom are, oddly enough, from Minnesota).
In this week’s column, he writes about fall and Halloween, naturally, but only as a thematic clothesline from which to hang his point: We are who we are, even when we’re not. Or something like that.
We made our choices in life, based on lousy information, and got stuck being who we are. You: attractive, impetuous, with bedroom eyes and a savage wit. Me: rumpled, preoccupied, shambling, dropping things. And do we regret this? No, not really. A person only needs to be truly understood by two or three people. Everyone else is audience. Passion is in your head. Two people can be married for a dog’s age and despite all the aches and bruises of matrimony they still look at each other and get excited. Nobody else understands this. Nobody else needs to.
So, on the Eve of All Hallows, let us paint our faces and put feathers in our hair and venture off along the curve of the earth and be somebody else.