Musing

I have a love-hate relationship with Garrison Keillor. I suspect that he is something of an egotistical so and so. If he is, he is a brilliant egotistical so and so. His essays always ring true for me. Maybe it's that upper-Midwestern sensibility. This one caught my eye this morning: Eulogy for the Winnebago. Keillor wrote:

So we will need to amuse ourselves in new ways. I predict that banjo sales will pick up. The screened porch will come back in style. And the art of storytelling will burgeon along with it. Stories are common currency in life but only to people on foot. Nobody ever told a story to a clerk at a drive-up window, but you can walk up to the lady at the check-out counter and make small talk and she might tell you, as a woman told me the other day as she rang up my groceries, that she had gotten a puppy that day to replace the old dog who had to be put down a month ago, and right there was a little exchange of humanity. Her willingness to tell me that made her real to me. People who aren't real to each other are dangerous to each other. Stories give us the simple empathy that is the basis of the Golden Rule, which is the basis of civilized society.

I had to laugh. My kids are frequently embarrassed by my habit of chatting with store clerks (as I was by my mom.) 3 years ago we added a screen porch to our house, and it is my favorite place to be. (We had to argue with the project designer to get it. "Are you sure you don't want a sunroom?" right up to the day we were signing off on the final plans.) And right now it's a guitar, but we have a banjo that is going into the repair shop sometime soon. And an accordian, that sits in a corner of the living room calling out, "Suzy, learn how to play me ...." (Ha! We'd be avenged for our two closest neighbors' obnoxiously loud air conditioners!)

While there are many scary things associated with passing peak petroleum, and it's hard to find justification for the gas prices when you know that it is all going to obscene profits for the oil corporation CEOs, beginning to plan for life on a more human scale isn't such a bad thing.