It was 1984. I was driving a car. My Mom and Dad were with me. That morning, we had just driven from Pocahontas up to Kansas City to get “my things.” I had “come out of the closet” the week before, to my wife, to my folks, in an explosive rebirth that left the world a shambles around all of us. We’d gotten ourselves to Olathe, we’d packed up what bits of mine I’d been told to take. We were on our way back, along about 5:30 in the evening. It was dusk. It was November, the week of Thanksgiving.

(The couple times in my life when I’ve blown “the walls off” for some reason, it always seems I do it right around some major holiday, ensuring for all a happy memory of that year.)

We were driving Hwy. 13 south and east of Harrisonville, MO and I dialed the knob of the radio and came across Prairie Home Companion. Having never before heard it, of course, I didn’t know what it was.

Whatever it was that evening, it took all of us in the car. We laughed out loud for the first time in a week. For a while the ‘cloud’ that had hung over us, lifted, for the while our reception of the station lasted.

It was months, or a year or two later, I figured out who Keillor was, and began on occasion to listen once in a while. I never hear some part of his broadcast, that I don’t think of that evening. And somehow, that lift I felt back then accompanies the thought.

Call me what you will, insipid sentimentalist, or some such worse, I kind of like the old guy.