50 years of NPR!!! Love it or hate it.... when did you start listening to their programs??

[betsuni]

31. My parents listened to their classical music programs.

The summer of 1980 was my best NPR memory. After high school I'd gone out into the big wide world to pursue a performing arts career but found the big wide world too much to handle, returned to my small hometown feeling fragile with no idea what to do next.

Saturday afternoons were my favorite time of the week, listening to "A Prairie Home Companion" while preparing dinner (discovering that I loved cooking now that I could eat like a regular person). Stories from Lake Wobegon were funny but also sometimes made me weep. There were songs about cats and Bertha's Kitty Boutique, jokes about Lutherans and Norwegian bachelor farmers. Garrison was the only one to ever mention shy persons. Even though I don't like folk, country, gospel music or hymns, if it's on the show, wonderful. PHC made me happy. He became one of my favorite authors and a big influence. "Leaving Home" is one of my favorite books:

"When I was four years old, I fell through a hole in the haymow into the bull pen, missing the stanchion and landing in his feed trough full of hay, and was carried into the house and laid on my grandma's sofa, which smelled like this quilt, and so did a warm shirt handed down to me from my uncle. When I was little I didn't think of grownups as having bare skin; grownups were made of wool clothing, only kids were bare-naked; now I'm older than they were when I was little and I lie naked under a quilt made of their clothes when they were children. I don't know what makes me think I'm smarter than them.

"Everything they went though: the loneness, the sadness, the grief, and the tears -- it will happen to us, just as it came to them when we were little and had to reach up to get hold of their hand, when we knew them by the shape of their legs. Aunt Marie had fat little legs, I held her hand one cold day after a blizzard, we climbed snowdrifts to get to the store and buy licorice whips. ... She complained about nobody loving her or wanting her or inviting her to their house for dinner anymore. She sat eating pork roast, mashed potato, creamed asparagus, one Sunday at our house when she said it. We were talking about a trip to the North Shore and suddenly she broke into tears and cried, 'You don't care about me. You say you do but you don't. If I died tomorrow, I don't know as you'd even go to my funeral.' I was six. I said, cheerfully, 'I'd come to your funeral,' looking at my fat aunt, her blue dress, her string of pearls, her red rouge, the powder on her nose, her mouth full of pork roast, her eyes full of tears. Every tear she wept, that foolish woman, I will weep every one before I'm done and so will you. We're not so smart we can figure out how to avoid pain and we cannot walk away from the death that we owe."