A Prairie Home Companion

It’s a pleasure to be doing our show in Chicago today, where we have come to visit some old Wobegonians who’ve moved down here—check up on them, see how they are doing. People who used to call us and write us and say, “If you are ever in Chicago, be sure and stop in”—of course never expecting we would. So when we called here the other day and said, “Hi, are you home?” they said, “Yeah, why don’t you come on over.” So we did. We were down in the lobby of their apartment building anyway, so why not go up. We got up there and we were about to rap on their door when we heard vacuum cleaners going at top speed, smelled furniture polish, heard someone yelling to pick up the socks, and we tiptoed away came back an hour later.

It’s kind of odd when you know them when you were kids, because when you are kids you just walk right into somebody’s life without thinking about it. I think back to home and all the houses in Lake Wobegon you just barge into without even knocking. And even when you did knock nobody is running around with a vacuum cleaner straightening up. Some people had socks on their couches, some people didn’t—just how people are. Some people, if you look at their couch, you would see no sock would dare to go up in there.

Existentialism is a powerful thing when you are 18 years old. It gives you the feeling that you… understand the world but you just can’t explain it to other people.

She had that feeling thinking of what she had written in her paper on Kierkegaard. We can only live life forwards, but we understand it backwards. We cannot endure and yet we must endure. We can only be what we are but whether we are or not we will live to regret it.