Garrison Keillor with his daughter, Maia: “I am even more interested in longevity now that she is 15 and I am 70” © Stormi Greener

All through my twenties and thirties I assumed I’d die young in a car crash like James Dean and thereby become immortal, but then I got too old to die young and anyway I hadn’t done anything to be immortalised for and so forgot about it until, at age 55, I started to get interested in longevity instead. That was the year I begat a little girl, whose arrival in the world gave me a larger stake in the future. She was a cheery little thing. She beamed up at me and laughed when I carried her on my shoulders and twirled her around. Once she wrote “daddy” in enormous letters in green chalk on the driveway and for several weeks, despite a hard rain, I could see it when I backed the car out of the garage. I saw her clear one spring afternoon, swinging high into the air on the neighbour’s rope swing, laughing like a crazy person because her head swung up into the branches of an apple tree—it scared me to death and she laughed and laughed. I was standing in the kitchen door, about to run over and make her stop, as her head disappeared in the blossoms, and then she put her feet down and skidded to a stop and toppled over in the grass, laughing.

I am even more interested in longevity now that she is 15 and I am 70. A man is pained at the thought of abandoning his young to the coyotes and alligators and so I instructed my doctor to make sure I get to see 85 and he is doing his very best. (I had quit cigarettes already and a few years later I got nice and drunk one night and said goodbye to alcohol.) My blood is thinned to ward off strokes, I take a beta blocker to suppress atrial fibrillation, and 12 years ago a surgeon named Michael Orszulak stuck his fingers inside my heart to sew up a mitral valve that was flopping around which would have done me in. I enjoy many advantages that my grandfathers did not, who both succumbed in their early seventies, and so, having recently buried my 97-year-old mum, who outlived my father (88), I allow myself thoughts of 90 and even 95. And now medical science has announced that soon it will be quite ordinary to reach 100. Lovely. I think I am ready.

YOU'VE HIT THE LIMIT

You have now reached your limit of 3 free articles in the last 30 days.
But don't worry! You can get another 7 articles absolutely free, simply by entering your email address in the box below.

When you register we'll also send you a free e-book—Writing with punch—which includes some of the finest writing from our archive of 22 years. And we'll also send you a weekly newsletter with the best new ideas in politics and philosophy of culture, which you can of course unsubscribe from at any time

Email

Prospect may process your personal information for our legitimate business purposes, to provide you with our newsletter, subscription offers and other relevant information.

Click to learn more about these interests and how we use your data. You will be able to object to this processing on the next page and in all our communications.