Running on Loyalty
On loyalty, community, and resisting the urge to optimize everything.
When I was growing up on Sundays after church, my family shuffled out from the sanctuary into the churchyard for small talk and maybe a Dixie cup of lemonade. Eventually, we’d load up into our minivan and head home, driving along the leafy Charlotte streets past the American Legion stadium built in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration before turning onto the Brookshire Freeway toward I-77 and the suburbs where we lived.
When we reached the highway, my dad would flick on public radio to catch the broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion. Depending on the length of the sermon, we’d tune in right as Garrison Keillor began sharing the “News from Lake Wobegon,” stories about a fictitious town in Minnesota that existed out of time, a setting for nostalgic comedy about life in the Midwest.
Lake Wobegon was a vehicle of sorts, letting Keillor talk through the virtues and vices of small-town America with both satire and sentiment. Sitting in the back of the van with my brother, I ruminated on the weekly monologues. They undoubtedly shaped how I think and write, though I’m nowhere near as good a storyteller.
Keillor’s voice is so distinctive: a comic melancholy runs through his humor, streaked with both resignation and optimism. Indeed, his best work from the 1980s and 1990s remains devastatingly funny. I think his story about rhubarb pie—about the paradox of deprivation and desire—is one of the cleverest ever told on radio.
“How is it that the bringer of good things stands with a wooden heart unable to enjoy what everyone else enjoys?” — Garrison Keillor
Maybe that’s why, feeling a bit gloomy with the new year, I picked up his 1985 Lake Wobegon Days, a novelization of his Wobegon stories.
The novel lays out the history of Lake Wobegon—a village begun as an abortive attempt to develop a university town on the Minnesota frontier that fails due to land speculation, diphtheria, and the fact that no one running the school actually had an advanced degree.
The town is saved by Norwegian immigrants, who bring vitality with hard work, loyalty, and a yeoman’s willingness to accept that life might be better elsewhere—but hey, this is where we are, so we might as well make the best of it, and don’t you go thinking you’re better than this, OK?
It’s not a deeply political book, but it does articulate a form of politics that’s fallen out of fashion: small-town communitarianism.
Keillor writes:
“Lake Wobegon survives to the extent that it does on a form of voluntary socialism with elements of Deism, fatalism, and nepotism … You need a toaster, you buy it at Co-op Hardware even though you can get a deluxe model with all the toaster attachments at K-Mart in St. Cloud. You buy it at Co-op because you know Otto.
Glasses you buy at Clifford’s which also sells shoes and ties and some gloves. Though you might rather shop for glasses in a strange place where they’ll encourage your vanity … nevertheless you should think twice before you get the Calvin Klein glasses from Vanity Vision in the St. Cloud Mall. Calvin Klein isn’t going to come with the rescue squad and he isn’t going to teach your children about redemption by grace. You couldn’t find Calvin Klein to save your life.”1
If you live by comparison shopping, towns like Lake Wobegon go bust. You’ve got to take communities as a whole; they survive on loyalty.
I find Keillor's words, 40 years after he wrote them, compelling. Jeff Bezos has built a brilliant platform, one that will send you a nice pair of running shoes for a better price than you can find down the street. But he won’t come help when you need someone to watch your kid for an hour. When you’re sick, you could Uber Eats some soup, but it will taste better if the soup is handmade and delivered by a friend.
I wish our politics could recognize this. Folks on the right often make the mistake that markets can replace relationships. Crypto, betting apps, and parasocial ties formed through short-form video show how spiritually thin that bargain can be. Meanwhile, people on the left sometimes assume the state alone can fulfill our needs. It can’t—politics is local, contingent, irrational, and textured by the nuance of the personal.2
I often fall short in supporting the living community around me. I comparison shop because I’m stressed and short for time. I skip the group run and jog by myself so I can get in more work. I compare myself with other writers, which leads me to try to optimize each second, hoping to squeeze out more value instead of rolling with the moment.
Resolutions are not my jam, but I’d like to try to be around people more this year: do more favors, reach out more often, invite people to dinner, join a few more group runs, go to a few more story times at the library with my daughter. I’d like to keep the laptop closed more often and, I dunno, maybe go bowling.
Here in the newsletter, I’d like to write more personally: to be less authoritative and more authentic. A little less Noah Smith, a little more Sarah Lavender Smith, if you will. (Sarah’s recent fabulous post should be on your reading list.)
Mostly, I just want to capture some zest, verve, and messy humanity in my life and work. Wishing you the same as we enter the new year.
You can find Garrison Keillor’s latest writing in his weekly column, Garrison Keillor and Friends, which includes a monologue-type podcast.
Coming up this month
Why is my Oura ring telling me everything is going to be fine?
On reverie and push notifications
Bike lanes and the Abundance agenda
More from Footnotes
Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days (New York: Penguin, 1985), 95-96.
I think partisans get confused when they succeed at the polls, confusing the ethos driving their campaigns for interest in their ideas. I have a hunch that both the Trump and Mamdani campaigns energized people more because each got neighbors out canvassing together in ways that felt genuinely good and decent and less because those people felt at their core that tariffs or municipally run grocery stores would make their lives better.
Sam, thank you so much for recommending my recent unfiltered story—I'm really touched and grateful.
I relate to so much of what you wrote about community and connection, and it's why I make a point of getting out of the house to work in our local library on most days, where I inevitably see someone I know and chat with him or her. So many of us work remotely or independently from home, and it's lonely. I'm blessed to have a library in town that's a community hub with drop-in events for anyone.
Your essay made me think of my hometown of Ojai, California, which was much more Wobegon-ish in the 1970s when I was a kid, the kind of place where my mom was active in a gardening club, my dad was on a bowling league and in Rotary, and everyone knew everyone. My mom and her friends opened up a retail shop to sell kids' clothing and books, until high rents in the early 1990s drove them out of business. Now Ojai is a sought-after celebrity hub choked with day-trippers from Los Angeles, its shopping row full of expensive boutiques and galleries. Except for one store—which gives me hope and connection to my past. A locally owned general store called Rains somehow still is in business, as it has been since before I was born. It's the kind of place where you can still buy pants and underwear, gardening tools, and a housewares gift for your mother-in-law, all at a reasonable price. I think to myself that as long as Rains is still in business, the town is OK. Every time I revisit there, I make a point of stopping in and buying something.
I loved "Lake Wobegon Days" as a kid. One of the few books I read voluntarily during my school years. Thanks for the reminder... time to pick this one up again.