When I heard the news that GK would retire this year, I responded with a mixture of sadness and skepticism. Keillor has threatened to retire many times before. More than once, I’ve purchased tickets for the “Annual Farewell Tour” – largely because of my appreciation for the clever oxymoron. How can a farewell tour occur annually?

Keillor has been on the verge of quitting radio ever since I started listening. What else is new? Or, is this really it?

Such is the nature of cyclical Keillorian humor.

Last week, at a fine hotel in Panama City, I bid a warm farewell to a colleague who lives and works in the UK. Over the past few years, we’ve become good friends. We share a common perspective on many issues – we can speak openly with one another. Everywhere else, we necessarily maintain our guard. So as I headed back to my room for my final pack up and checkout, we expressed our appreciation for rare camaraderie and wished each other Godspeed home – me to LA, him to London. We both circled around the Lobby in different directions, but a few minutes later, we found ourselves on the same elevator – for a second awkward farewell, in the company of the other captive passengers.

So is Garrison Keillor leaving, really? Or will there be yet another farewell?

It doesn’t matter.

I’ve been an incurable fan since the mid-seventies. Back then, Tom Brokaw gave “A Prairie Home Companion” (PHC) high marks and confessed that he is an unapologetic enthusiast. Somehow, the endorsement of my favorite news anchor legitimized my affection for the perennial storyteller. Then, as though I needed more, TIME’s cover story in 1985 sealed it.

Keillor’s Prairie Home has been my companion since those turbulent years, just coming off the cataclysmic resignation of Richard Nixon and then every decade since. During one phase in my development as a PHC groupie I made an (illegal) recording of every show, and compiled a vast digital collection of my own. While driving across town, I would revel in the Adventures of Guy Noir and the Lives of the Cowboys and then finally “It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown…” It was the comfort food of entertainment for me – and I’ve tried to figure out why. Hurtling down the freeway, there would be a slight smile on my face, and the smile went well beyond the corners of my mouth, as though my spirit smiled, just to be there near the town square and the Chatterbox Café and Sidetrack Tap, escaping into that nostalgic world created by Keillor, populated by characters I felt I had known all my life.

A few years back, I worked on a church staff and shared my fondness for PHC with my colleagues. One, about my age, had never heard of Keillor or Lake Wobegon or Pastor Ingqvist or Val Tollefson or Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility Catholic Church, much less Powdermilk Biscuits or the Professional Organization of English Majors (POEM) or the Ketchup Advisory Board. He told me he’d give PHC a shot. A Clive Cussler reader, my fellow staff member was partial to adventure novels. He came back to a staff meeting the next Wednesday morning and announced that he had, as promised, listened in to PHC that prior Saturday night.

“Boring,” he declared. “That guy (what’s his name?) talks really slow. I almost fell asleep.”

So not everyone shares my devotion.

In the early days, Keillor’s Lake Wobegon enjoyed a huge audience among my fellow evangelicals. His “Gospel Birds” made the rounds, revealing GK’s intimate acquaintance with evangelical church life in the 1950s, so reminiscent of my childhood. (That was back when no one knew what the word “evangelical” meant.) He captured the absurdities and humor of it all, and at the same time, affirmed the deep value of a familiar gospel – so welcoming and affirming – at the heart of our mid-western church life.  But many of my evangelical friends dropped off the bandwagon as Keillor’s journey took him beyond the self-imposed boundaries of evangelicalism. He committed the cardinal, unforgiveable sin when he announced out loud that he is a liberal.

Well, a prairie liberal.

Just a few weeks back, Keillor appeared for the last time at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul. Were it not for PHC, the old theater would have been scrapped. Built in 1933, known then as the Shubert, silent movies were screened there; ornate, balconies and side-boxes mainly for the elite to be seen and a massive pipe organ provided the sound. By 1980, the broken down opera house had long lost its pipes and five keyboard console. Plans for the demolition of the old structure went before the city council when Keillor proposed that it be the Public Radio program’s new home. The renamed Shubert was revived and became the Fitz. Several years ago, Carolyn and I were right there with some Minnesota friends, live and in person, to watch Keillor work from close range.

I met Sue Scott back stage, and in the presence of a woman with a thousand voices, an enormous talent, I went tongue tied, barely able to express how much I admire her work. Truth be told, I’ve had a secret mild crush for years. Her sultry impressions of the women who break into Guy Noir’s investigations have increased my heart rate more than once. But I couldn’t tell her that, especially with Carolyn standing there beside me. So I shook her hand in a professional manner and she seemed to appreciate my sudden shyness; and after all, that’s what Powdermilk Biscuits do – help shy persons do what needs to be done. It was an unforgettable night for us all to be there in St. Paul for two hours in the Fitzgerald Theater that began with Keillor singing, “I hear that old piano down on the Avenue, I smell the coffee, I look around for you; my sweet sweet someone, coming through that door…”

So the thought that Garrison Keillor might really be heading off into the sunset fills me with an unexpected sadness. A touch of grief? A mourn filled sense of loss? Maybe all those things.

I guess I saw it coming. If you’ve been listening to the same public character for several decades, you’ll hear the change in the voice, like another character in my life – Chuck Swindoll. At age 82, he still delivers the mail, the sermons as clear and sharp as ever. But the voice – you can hear the affects of aging. For Keillor, it’s been awhile now that his “s” sounds are accompanied by that whistle of age. “Sally sashayed into the sweet shop…” and you can hear the inescapable whistle of a professional voice that has passed the ripe old age of three score and ten. It’s a signal that retirement is approaching. Maybe it hits hard because I’m not far behind, wondering when that whistle will accompany my speech, too.

Go back and listen to the old tapes. Same familiar voice, but now it sounds so youthful.

We’ve passed through the decades together. Keillor doesn’t know me, but I know him.

As I prepared to write this essay, I stumbled across one of his books I had not read. After writing about half this essay, I picked it up, read the whole thing, and then returned to my essay. The book only reinforced the influence Keillor has had in my life. He wrote it back in 2004, when George Bush ran for a second term and won in a basic landslide. In some ways, it was a coming out for Keillor – Home Grown Democrat. He engages American politics directly, lets out all the stops. He might as well have written it this year.

Last night, my iPhone alerted me to the violence in Chicago at a massive Trump rally, cancelled by the presidential candidate for fear of a runaway free-for-all. The republican race has been an embarrassment to a freedom loving people. The campaign looks like a Jerry Springer show. Keillor’s Lake Wobegon seems a world away – but is it really? Kindness. Courtesy. Accommodation. Care. These qualities are there, too. For Keillor, it’s the Democrats who favor the social contract, who work toward community and an inclusive spirit while Republicans prefer protectionism, de-regulation, dismantling public services, closing down libraries and defunding the arts, building the walls and intimidating the rest of the world into acquiescing, deferring to our Greatness, or better said, Dominance.

At the presidential level, for both parties, civility seems to be a lost art. Mass market media depends on ratings, and no better way to build ratings than to feature train wrecks and derailments and collisions of every sort. If we spend enough time with that media, we get the impression that vitriol, ad hominem, us/them, irreconcilable differences and perpetual infighting are all standard operating procedure.

But our real world is a whole lot more like life at the Chatterbox Café than the crucible of Presidential debates. Most all of us travel at pretty much the same speed out there on the highway, we agree to the stated price while checking out at the market, we pay our bills, file our tax returns, we smile and let people step ahead in line, we generally avoid conversations about religion and politics, we greet folks of other ethnicities, we nod when passing on the hiking trail and call it a beautiful day, we give gifts and hugs and we listen and say we understand. We chase after prodigals, show up at memorial services and smile when we see a bride and groom getting their photographs out there in the park. We offer to help moms to get the stroller though the door; and we offer a knowing, affirming look when she’s dealing with an unhappy child.

That’s what makes America great. Not impenetrable walls. But Lake Wobegon.

So these last PHC episodes really do seem like a farewell. There’s a new guy who has been hired to carry the Keillor mantel. The whole crew ought to stay employed, and this young guy has talent. He’s a Nickel Creek original. But the show will of necessity stray somewhere else with Keillor gone. All good, but it will never be what it has been all these decades with GK at the helm.

It’s not just age. These past few months, he’s sad, too. Like me. As he transitions, his voice goes quieter, almost melancholy. A rich, deep baritone, dependent on the microphone to pick up the considerable nuance in both his grammar and his mood. He’s less scripted. He knows he lost some of the edge, and it’s OK. There are more hymns in the weekly playlist of PHC; more gospel. He quotes poetry; and scripture. He’ll rewrite the lyrics, paraphrase the Good Book, but at the core, it’s a kind of revival; an affirmation of those early days of his childhood, meeting in the living room for a gathering of the Sanctified Brethren to sing from the hymnal, cite biblical passages, share testimonies and pray. GK has traveled far and wide, but as he closes out a long career as global trotter, author, master of ceremonies, chronicler of small town America; those formative days of connectedness with neighbor and friend, all in the company of amazing grace – it comes back like a sonnet.

So in a recent report of the News from Lake Wobegon, GK takes us to the LW Lutheran Church for the pot-luck supper. (The following is a direct quote.)

It’s a communal supper, following the Lenten service at 5:45. After a forty-five-minute program, you come back down to the basement for bars and coffee, onion dip, split pea with ham soup, mandarin orange Jello salad. People sit close to each other. 

We talk. All these Lutherans. Adherents of a faith that is a complete mystery. Half the time, we have no idea what it is that we believe in. We believe in the impossible, which we believe God is perfectly capable of bringing forth – assuming he exists – which we think he does… because, we found letters, you know, from God… all through creation… we found them.

At yet at times our faith just disappears like a mist. Like a rainbow. You go to point it out to someone, and where is it? What happened to it?

Well, it’s there.

We’re all together there in this basement with this group of people. Our people.

I belong to a writer’s group. We get together for dinner every so often, and all these solitary men and women who have been working so hard in dim, dark rooms all by themselves – we all come together and have a meal and we talk. We never talk about our work. Ever. We talk about our kids; we talk about when we were kids. But we’re all there, together.

And if this is all we have left – to be, well, seals, to be a group of seals on a rock, to be primates out in the forest picking fleas off each other…  

Then, that’s what we have. 

(And that is enough.)

That’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking and all the children are above average.