GK responds to queries on topics from childbearing to potato salad, with a little bookstore fetish in between. Here's your chance to ask GK your most pressing questions—about the writing life, the radio life, Lake Wobegon, Guy Noir, whatever you like. Also, feel free to send feedback about the show. Honest comments and criticism are always welcome! Send your own post to the host.

Bunkum, fit, hale,
right, sane, sound,
whole, wholesome --
Lusty! Well, robust.
Thriving, vigorous, rugged, stalwart,
strong, sturdy, tough;
agile, chipper, spry.
Fit as a fiddle, in (top) condition,
in fine fettle,
in shape, in trim,
sound as a dollar,
up to snuff.

Hope you're feeling better soon. Love & positive thoughts,

Robin

Robin--- Agile and sturdy are not what I see when I catch a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror. More like aged and shaky. But it's only the first few days after the operation and there is anecdotal evidence that things improve, even for the near elderly. And hope is supposed to be good for you.

The PHC website says that you are "resting comfortably
after a routine open-heart procedure."

Having spent a great deal of time in hospitals due to a bleeding disorder, I know that "resting comfortably" is a Minnesota-style fib; I believe you meant to say "eating bad food, watching boring television, and enduring more anxiety from distant relatives and friends- of-the-family than humanly possible." I suppose this will all end up as grist for the mill on the show, and I look forward to it. Don't forget to highlight your favorite on-the-border-of-gross hospital story.As the cards say: get well soon.

Nadine
A Minnesotan in Paris

Dear Nadine, Sorry you've had to spend much time in hospitals. I haven't, and am only now starting to make up for a lifetime of good luck and cowardice. The food was okay, better than okay actually, thanks to putting the dinner plate into a sort of thermal basket that kept your haddock and boiled potatoes warm for an hour. Television, of course, is truly, mind-blowingly boring. It is astonishing that, with fifty channels, you can't watch anything you really want to watch. I managed to keep the relatives away by going out of town for the operation; they came down to make sure I was alive and then I was free for a week. But I hate that term "routine procedure," it denies the patient so much sympathy to which he is due. Or, in your case, she. So when I tell the story of my dramatic open-heart surgery, I like to emphasize the painful parts. Almost always this includes myself strapped to a conveyor that is moving towards a millsaw. We are lumbering people here in Minnesota and we do things our own way.

Greetings Mr. Keillor:

I hope that you are feeling much better after your operation. I have to tell you that my husband and I have shared many Saturday nights listening to your show. I just learned today that I will probably have the same operation as you. Hope you have a fast recovery.

Sincerely,
Verna Molina
A Norwegian Lutheran.....

Verna, it's an operation that surgeons are very capable at and that promises an extremely high probability of you feeling much, much better. It took me about 30 seconds to decide to go ahead with it. When you blow out a valve, you get breathless doing the simplest things, and I had to do two shows, at Tanglewood and Wolf Trap, feeling I was half-suffocating. I can feel the difference now, even though not recovered from the trauma of the operation. The surgeons' part, of course, is done while you're asleep, and what really matters to you, at first, are the folks in I.C.U. waiting to pick you up out of the fog. I got some first-rate nursing. The professionalism of these people is vastly higher and yet the fundamental kindness is there, too, and when you come out of the anesthesia, you want a kind person there to meet you. Don't hesitate to say, "I need more morphine." You want to stay ahead of the pain and not try to catch up with it later. It's hard for Norwegian Lutherans to ask for pain medication, which makes them fear they'll wind up in a doorway planning the next stick-up. Ask for it. It's good for you. And on morphine, sometimes, you can talk to your old grandmother.

Garrrison:

I have been enjoying your show ever since I lived in Minnesota & also now that I live on the High Plains of Eastern Colorado.

I love the Powdermilk Biscuits theme; I have to get up and dance everytime I hear it. Is it a real song? I mean does it go on past the part we hear. If not, could you please expand it into an entire song? thanks

love, Jackie

Jackie, It's a pretty basic folk chorus, similar to "Roll In My Sweet Baby's Arms," and "Mama Don't Allow" and a hundred other songs. Never thought of expanding it, but it wouldn't be hard to do.

Garrison,
Thanks for the heartwarming eulogy that you offered for Chet Atkins. I began listening to Chet when I was a teenager. I was forced to listen in secret because all of my friends and classmates were listening to The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Chet Atkins' music will always have a place in my heart. I hope his family can appreciate what a comfort this man and his music was to all of us.

Jack Stargel
Dayton, Ohio

Dear Jack, I've been listening to old tapes of Chet on the show and later this summer we'll rebroadcast a couple of them. He was such a loving and funny guy and we hope to put out a CD of Chet on PHC. He never had a bad night, I believe. And he was the same man on stage as he was off, just edited a little for the family audience, don't you know.

Mr. Keillor:
Would you be willing to go out on a limb and list your opinion of what states comprise the mid-west? A recent newspaper article listed Oklahoma as a mid-west state, using that more as a state-of-mind label rather than a geographic location. As a New Englander, I would have thought of OK as a western state, having a greater connection to the cowboy tradition of the west rather than the farming that most of us associate with the mid-west. And how far south does it go? Does anyone think of Louisiana as a mid-western state? Where do you draw the lines, east, west, and south?

Pat Clancy

Pat, I don't see any way Oklahoma can be considered a Midwestern state. I'd include Oaxaca or Tuscany before I'd say Oklahoma. The Midwest consists of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the eastern thirds of Nebraska and the Dakotas. Missouri is not the Midwest and of course Kentucky isn't either. And when you get into the high plains, the Midwest is all over, in every way.

Dear Garrison,

My question: Did you grow up hearing the hymns you often sing (This World is Not My Home, How Great Thou Art,etc) in your church? These are the hymns I grew up with and I learned to play piano from listening to a variety of "instinctive" musicians play in our church. I was raised Baptist and the Baptist think they invented these songs and gospel music. Are you sure there's not a "Baptist in the woodpile?"
Karen

Karen, I didn't hear them in church. The Sanctified Brethren stuck to a more doctrinally pure hymnology, one in which the words were all-important and the music less so. (This could also be seen in our singing.) There was a little by the Wesleys and Toplady and Isaac Watts and a whole lot of pretty clunky stuff that wasn't all that easy to sing, and so for comfort and sheer pleasure, we'd sing (in secret) those great Baptist quartet numbers with the bass echoes and the high tenor and all. I've got lots of Baptists in my woodpile but they were Canadians ---- Joseph Crandall was one of the cornerstones of the Baptist movement in New Brunswick a hundred fifty years ago. I doubt that he ever heard those hymns.

Dear Mr Keillor:

Do the deer hunters of Duluth really drink the blood of the first kill of the season as a Duluthian friend tells me? Do they do this in Lake Wobegon? Is this a tradition from the Old Country? Have you ever been deer hunting?

Very truly yours,
L. MARK LUSSKY

L. Mark, you have been gulled. Duluthian hunters, even the most bloodthirsty carnivores among them, would never drink blood. What they do is use the blood to make blood sausage or blood pudding, which are the sort of delicacies that when you put them out on the table, everybody reaches for the salami instead. I've never been deer hunting in my life, have no interest in going, but I do know a lie when I see one.