Garrison Keillor piece

Garrison Keillor's novel, Wobegon Boy, contains a piece on bachelor Lutheran farmers that is SO true, so funny. Living in a rural farming area, I can relate to this. In fact, I'm afraid my husband, who grew up in a rural farming area, totally can identify with this bachelor farmer. Here's what Keillor has to say:

"A bachelor farmer is all body rhythms. He wakes up in the morning and gets dressed in his old clothes and does a few chores, lets out the cat, pitches the empties from last night onto the pile beside the garage, toasts him a couple frozen waffles and slathers them with butter and syrup and they're good, so he has two more, and all this time nobody has said to him, 'Why don't you ever talk to me anymore?' He has a right to remain silent. That's his body rhythm. He puts on his barn jacket and goes out and works for a couple hours on projects for which there is no logical explanation, he sorts out coffee cans full of stuff, he shores up things, he pours some concrete, and then maybe he crawls back in the sack for a couple hours or he reads a book, and suddently it's three in the afternoon. There is nothing special about three P.M., it is only a point on the clock, no law says you can't have lunch then. He opens a can of beans and eats a few off the top and shakes some ketchup on and horseradish and turns on the radio and the weather forecast is for more snow, which is fine with him. He puts mustard on a wiener and eats it. He feeds the cat and drives to town and parks the truck and goes into the Sidetrack Tap and gets a beer and a bump and now he may speak his first words of the day. Or he may not. It is up to him. This guy never had a social security number or a bank account. Never paid income taxes. The government never knew he existed. He keeps a big dog around the place, who goes after strangers like a werewolf. He hasn't bathed today and maybe not yesterday. Why? Because he knows who he is. He may or may not support the President on any particular thing, he may be an atheist, or not, but one thing is sure: this man is not driven by fear of his wife. You can see this in the way he walks into the bar. You can see that this guy is not operating on a strict schedule. Nobody is going to burn his butt if he doesn't get home by six o'clock. Nobody is going to rant and rave if he has a beer and brandy on his breath. Moral disapproval is not a big factor in his life."