We are Still Married

There's a lot to be said for lack of communication and so many problems we can't talk about simply go away after a while, such as the problem of mortality, for example, but a writer's duty is to keep trying, to wake up every afternoon and saddle up the mare and bear the sacred plume de literature over the next ridge, and here, to show I've been on the job and not just sunning myself in Denmark, is a book, collecting in one neat pile some stories, poems, and letters mostly written at the time of Ronald Reagan, the President who never told bad news to the American people.

I've written for The New Yorker since I was in high school, though they weren't aware of it at the time, and many of these stories first appeared there; most of the letters in Section 3 appeared there, un- signed, in "The Talk of the Town." When I first met up with the magazine, I was thirteen, sitting in the periodicals room at the Min- neapolis Public Library, surrounded by ruined old men collapsed in the big oak chairs, who I took to be retired teachers. 

I read Talk as the voice of inexhaustible youth, charged with curiosity and skepti- cism, dashing around the big city at a slow crawl, and tried to imitate its casual worldly tone, which, for a boy growing up in the potato fields of Brooklyn Park township, was a hard row to hoe, but I tried. The magazine was studded with distinguished men of initials, in- cluding E.B., A.J., S.J., E.J., J.F., and J.D., so I signed myself G. E. Keillor for a while, hoping lightning would strike. 

The summer after . . . . .