Saturday night in New York, a skinny lady in a stylish coat walked toward me saying, "You did a terrible, terrible thing and I can never forgive you. I'm done with you. You hear me?" She was furious. Then I noticed the cellphone in her hand. So she wasn't angry with me. Not this time. Other women may be but not her, thank goodness.

In New York people can express anger in a frank and open way, Christmas or no Christmas, and surely this is a good thing. A man in a big gray SUV was outraged that I stepped off the curb on West 43rd Street and walked in front of his vehicle and he went to the trouble of rolling his window down and shouting the name of a bodily orifice. "Use the sidewalk!" he said. I pointed out that his behemoth was blocking the sidewalk. "So? What's wrong with waiting, Orifice?"

He was probably in a hurry to visit his ailing mother and was torn up with anxiety about the old lady, so I didn't point out that the street he was trying to enter, was jammed tight with cars idling, waiting for the green light, so I wasn't exactly detaining him from the swift completion of his appointed rounds. I just said, "Merry Christmas." This irked him. He told me to go molest myself.

Well, that's just how it is. You can't go through life without making some people angry: keep that in mind and you'll save yourself a lot of misery. Even though you practice the Golden Rule with a vengeance, you cannot be so kind and gentle as to avoid giving offense. So when people hiss at you, nod and smile and wish them a good day.

Somewhere, someone is furious at the Dalai Lama. Probably there were people in Calcutta who thought Mother Teresa was a showboat. Back in 000 A.D., some people looked at the Infant Jesus and said, "What's with the ring of light around his head? Why should we capitalize his pronouns? The little bugger loads his pants same as any other kid."

When I was 11, I asked my elders if Our Lord did defecate and was there such a thing as holy excrement, and that upset them and there was anguished discussion about whether I was perhaps unsaved and bound for perdition, and then they decided to ignore the whole thing and put supper on the table. Food was how we solved a lot of problems. Supper was grilled cheese sandwiches and Hormel chili from a can. A wonderful meal, and it took the edge off their anger.

In New York the night I was yelled at, I polished off six Malpeque oysters, a bowl of pumpkin bisque, a mound of mushroom risotto, and a chocolate sundae with walnuts, and felt charitable toward all mankind, until the maitre d' said, "You're looking good." People only say that when you're old and saggy and it just irritates the bejesus out of me. I'm a few years older than Bruce but I'm not ready to be beloved quite yet. I gave the little weasel a knee to the groin and he fell face-first onto the stinky end of the cheese cart. No honors for me, sweetheart. I'm not done yet.

(Garrison Keillor is the author of "77 Love Sonnets," published by Common Good Books.)

© 2009 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.

The clerk at the front desk looked at my Minnesota driver's license and chuckled, which I found annoying. "Pretty cold up there, huh?" he said, implying that any sensible person would leave the frozen tundra for the sunny Southwest. We Midwesterners get this a lot, especially from ex-Midwesterners who've deployed to the Sun Belt and now talk as if a light frost would break their hearts and the thought of arising on a 10-below morning and starting the car is simply unthinkable, like dying and going to hell. These poor deacclimated souls have come disconnected from their own culture.

Christmas is supposed to be white. Dashing through the snow does make your spirit bright. You put Santa in Speedos and a tank top and you've ruined the whole thing.

Christmas is one of the bulwarks of Life As We Know It, and in these parlous times we cling to its classic truth, which is: Rejoice, be not afraid, and show mercy to the poor and outcast, for it was through such people that Jesus came into the world. Dickens' ancient novella, written in a big rush because he was low on cash, is on the silver screen again, and Scrooge is moved by the Spirits to share the wealth with his downtrodden clerk. Meanwhile, the truth of Christmas is tested in Washington as we move toward some sort of semi-universal healthcare against the near-unanimous opposition of Republicans. Given the chance to be shepherds or angels, they chose instead to be Herod. Spooked by the victory of Barack Obama, they decided to fight him on all fronts, even though Americans will die as a result.

A new study, "Health Insurance and Mortality in U.S. Adults," published by the American Journal of Public Health, tells us what everyone already knows -- the uninsured are in a dangerous place. An estimated 45,000 deaths a year are associated with lack of health insurance. Uninsured Americans of working age run a 40 percent higher risk of death than those of us who are covered. If you have diabetes or heart disease, and you can't afford to see a doctor, you're in deep trouble.

The big lie that Republicans have inflicted on us, starting with St. Ronald, is that government is a morass of inefficiency, and private enterprise is the Enlightenment. (Republicans have practically disappeared from the Snow Belt. I just point this out.) My own experience is that when I go to get a new driver's license in St. Paul, or deal with the city inspector when a sewage line breaks, or walk into a post office to mail letters, or talk to the police when our house alarm goes off, I find public employees to be cheerful and competent and highly professional, and when I go for blood draws at Quest Diagnostics, a national for-profit chain of medical labs, I find myself in tiny, dingy offices run by low-wage immigrant health workers who speak incomprehensible English and are rude to customers and take forever to do a routine procedure. An hour in a Quest office will ruin your whole day.

If the government took over this miserable operation, paid the people decently and trained them to smile and speak softly to the clientele, civilization would be advanced. If we simply extended Medicare to anyone who wished to sign up for it, the vast Kafkaesque bureaucracy of for-profit insurance would come crashing down, and the public would be healthier.

Instead, Democrats fashioned a patchwork plan, trying to meet the objections of Republicans, who then opposed it anyway as socialistic. As long as any sort of reform is going to be attacked as socialistic, why not go ahead and be socialistic, just as Social Security is. It is Big Government and runs pretty well, and I don't see many Republicans calling for it to be privatized. Mr. Obama needs to learn that it is a foolish goose who attends the foxes' church. Don't worry about bipartisanship, please. Just do what's right.

(Garrison Keillor is the author of "77 Love Sonnets," published by Common Good Books.)

© 2009 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.

And that's the challenge of Thanksgiving -- to gather among our kin who know us a little too well and have an amiable occasion enjoyed equally by all, at which nobody is stabbed through the heart with a carving knife.

We're a mobile and over-caffeinated people, and at every family gathering, amid the ancient aroma of turkey and sage and squash and sweet potatoes and a few pounds of butter, you'll find some edgy individualists, someone who knows the true story of what happened on 9/11, the story that the mainstream media have suppressed. A tea party devotee or two. Someone who believes that yeast is the secret of happiness. People capable of harangues and diatribes, but nobody wants this.

The family liberals smile at the family wingnuts. The vegetarian daughter-in-law produces her tofu loaf, which looks as if a large animal such as a buffalo came by and dropped it hot and steaming on the plate. We don't comment on this. She believes that the treatment of turkeys is a moral blight on America, but she does not say so. The Unitarian cousin listens to the fervent Lutheran prayer and murmurs Amen. The Viking fans and the Packer fans sit side by side.

It is the dinner of all dinners, generous and comforting and completely predictable, and a true test of civility, and we do it in gratitude for the simple goodness of life. Our consumer society is all about need and craving, and politics is so much about complaint and resentment, and here is a day devoted to something else.

My family gathers in the house that Dad built in 1947, by the fireplace that Great-Uncle Alfred, a stonemason, built when he was 80. He lived to be 90, and whenever you saw him and Aunt Millie, they were holding hands. Joining us will be cousin Dorothy Bacon, who recently told me that my grandfather James, who died before my time, loved to read and even out in the field raking hay with a team of horses he had a book in his hand; that he was often seen kissing Grandma; and that every night, until he was very old, he carried her in his arms up the stairs to bed. Good to know these things.

In my day, we went outdoors after dessert and ran off our dinner and when it was dark, were allowed back in the house, and we flopped down on the floor and listened to Uncle Lew tell about the night their house burned down in Charles City, Iowa, and afterward watched "The Bell Telephone Hour" on television with Robert Merrill and Patrice Munsel singing "Dear Hearts and Gentle People," and then a horn honked in the driveway and my sister came down from upstairs where she'd been primping in the bathroom and Mother said, "Tell him he has to come inside and pick you up, he can't sit in the car and honk." And so the boy came in. Sheepish, tongue-tied, hair oiled and swirled around on top, he stood as close to the door as possible and we inspected him as a potential relative and thought, "Naw. She could do better."

I remember the urgency of that horn honking. It meant that Thanksgiving was over. The family that had gathered in a tight circle around the feast of tubers and turkey was now breaking up, in search of something finer. The call of the grown-up life. We all hear the honk and run away in hopes of finding a major romance and adventure and grandeur, and good luck with that, and meanwhile, life is good. Be grateful for it.

(Garrison Keillor is the author of "77 Love Sonnets," published by Common Good Books.)

© 2009 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.

I've been here before. The sweet woman loves galleries and French impressionists and the sunny gardens of Pierre Bonnard. While looking at them, she is likely to say something about color and texture. But I am an American man and color and texture are not my strong suits. And so I staked out my aesthetic at the start. I said, "I see no reason to paint flowers. You can buy fresh flowers. Still lifes are only an exercise. And abstract expressionism is for the lobbies of big insurance companies. The true calling of an artist is to paint women and the greatest challenge is the naked female form. That's what separates the true artists from the wallpaper-hangers."

I said this in the room that houses some rather erotic Georgia O'Keeffe flowers and "American Gothic" with its squinty lady, and I spoke on behalf of American men everywhere. At the age of 67, I have stopped apologizing for looking at naked women. I don't stand directly in front of a nude and stare at her, lest I be taken for a pervert. I stand in front of the painting next to the nude and sneak sidelong glances, but nonetheless I am moved by her. Deeply.

A man gets to say what he likes. In Chicago, the city of the big shoulders, he does. In New York, where men have exquisite thin shoulders and glossy skin tone, they are more into texture. I glanced at a plaque on the gallery wall, something about "his work references as a multifaceted narrative structure that re-contextualizes the ambiguity of alienation and aims at disrupting the viewer's habits of perception." Well, pardon me for living, but I am fond of my habits of perception. I stroll past the spatter art and angst-ridden photography and junk sculpture, and when I see a naked woman, my heart leaps up.

Is a man's heart not supposed to leap? Should it squat instead?

Rubens did big naked porky women who could lie on a man and smother him, and many artists have done pale, cold goddesses, but I want a sweet woman bathing or reclining on a couch, someone I'd like to know. She makes my heart sing.

She reminds me of beautiful naked moments from real life -- skinny-dipping in the Mississippi, intertwining underwater on Oahu, sitting in hot water in the big round iron tub on the deck in Utah, the sweet woman lowering herself gingerly into the water, slowly, slowly, as her delicate anatomical parts feel the heat rising -- and coming from fundamentalist people in a cold-weather state, nakedness means more to me than to, say, a Southern Unitarian.

We hiked around the Art Institute and didn't discuss texture. I saw a couple of nude women and other women who looked as if they were thinking about undressing, and then we went back to the hotel and, for some reason that now I forget, we went and sat in a steam room together and admired each other's multifaceted bodies and got recontextualized and so on and so forth and that's what happened to me in Chicago.

What does this have to do with healthcare reform and our enormous indebtedness to what used to be known as Red China before Republicans became reds? Everything.

Politics and policy mean more to those who love life itself. We want government to stave off lawlessness and war and chaos and economic misery so that we can wholeheartedly enjoy the pure goodness of life, which, when you come right down to it -- and I come right down to it as often as possible -- is a naked woman lowering herself into hot water that you yourself are sitting in, waiting.

(Garrison Keillor is the author of "77 Love Sonnets," published by Common Good Books.)

© 2009 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.

And then there is Washington. I maintain that Congress would do better work if it moved to Buffalo, N.Y., and the Honorables had to experience blizzards and snow shoveling and cold weather, which stimulate intelligence -- SAT scores rise as you approach the Canadian border. Nothing in the U.S. Constitution says that Congress could not convene in Buffalo.

The Founding Fathers intended the Senate to be a fount of wisdom flowing, but when you consider Saxby Chambliss and Jim Bunning, John Ensign, Jim DeMint, James Inhofe, who look as if they've been banged on the head too many times, and the moon-faced Mitch McConnell, your faith in democracy is challenged severely. Any legislative body in which 41 senators from rural states that together represent 10 percent of the population can filibuster you to death is going to be flat-footed, on the verge of paralysis, no matter what. Any time 10 percent of the people can stop 90 percent, it's like driving a bus with a brake pedal for each passenger. That's why Congress has a public approval rating of 25 percent.

Healthcare is much too complicated for Congress. The whole issue should've been handed over to a blue-ribbon commission of living, breathing economists -- let them draw up a plan and defend it and stand up to the ranters and rug-chewers -- and let Congress do what it does best, which is to uphold virtue and decency and to denounce narrow self-interest and partisanship, and then go to lunch.

The Republican bulls remind me of an old coot who used to sit in my row in the Lutheran church, a guy who favored plaid dress shirts and a string tie with a turquoise clasp and who had an elaborate comb-over, a real piece of hair architecture. He muttered to himself through the sermon and never put more than $1 in the collection plate. I guessed that he attended for the sake of his wife, a plump lady who sat between him and me. What he truly dreaded every Sunday morning was the exchange of peace. To shake hands with people nearby and say "The peace of the Lord" did not come naturally to him.

I didn't like it either. I was young and idealistic and thought those Lutherans had more than enough peace, what they needed was some slapping around, not hand shaking. But I was amused by how wary the guy got when the peace was exchanged and ladies went gallivanting around the sanctuary, hugging, having meaningful moments. He stood facing straight forward and wished everyone would keep their peace to themselves. I always leaned over to shake hands with his missus, and he turned away, avoiding eye contact.

One morning, during the exchange, the lady in front of me, turning to embrace me, lost her corsage. It fell at my feet and I looked down for it and accidentally kicked it and then went to retrieve it and stepped past the plump lady, and the old coot turned, horror-stricken, to see me coming. He tried to retreat but was blocked by other worshippers. My hair was a little long at the time and maybe he expected me to plant a major peace on him -- and then he saw me bend down and pick up the flower. He looked disgusted. It was what they call a transforming moment. I had always looked down on the guy and here he was, upset, because he thought I was going to love him up. He stuck out his hand to fend me off and I shook it.

The way to pass healthcare is for the president to praise Republicans for their courage and foresight and compassion until he scares them to death and they let the thing pass. The way to fight these guys is to make them think you might like them.

(Garrison Keillor is the author of "77 Love Sonnets," published by Common Good Books.)

© 2009 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.