I think often of John Updike, who lovingly re-created the backyards and clotheslines of the 1940s small town and described a snowstorm as “an immense whispering” and wrote beautifully of his father bidding him goodbye on a train platform and astonishing him by planting a kiss on his cheek. I last saw John on the New York subway, riding from 155th Street down to 72nd, a white-haired gent of seventy-five grinning like a schoolkid. At 110th a gang of seminarians boarded and crowded around him, chattering, not recognizing him, and he sat soaking it up, delighted, surrounded by material.
The film director Robert Altman is a hero of mine—shooting a movie in St. Paul though he was eighty-one and in the throes of cancer and barely mobile. He loved his work and so put his mortality on a shelf. If you have flown a B-24 bomber, that screaming unheated boxcar of a plane, on fifty missions in the South Pacific at the age of twenty as Bob had, there is not much left to be afraid of. I remember him sitting in a canvas chair at 4 a.m. on the corner of Seventh and St. Peter in St. Paul, on a Sunday in July, directing a scene in which Kevin Kline gets up from a stool in Mickey’s Diner and walks out the door and scratches a match on the doorframe and lights a smoke and walks across a rain-soaked street. Bob was pushing to beat the sunrise but he loved studying that walk and lighting it, angling it, instructing the man with the hose, the man in the cherry picker with the spotlight, all the while offering running commentary to his audience of grips and extras. He was a happy man.
I am grateful for the work—more now than ever, the pleasure of scratching away on paper. I sit in my office and look up at a photograph over the fireplace of the old schoolhouse where Grandma taught a hundred and some years ago and I’m sure she hoped I’d go into a more distinguished line of work than this, but I must say in defense of comedy that it does give good value. There are plenty of discouraging facts around—e.g., half of all people are below average—and jokes relieve some of the misery. A man walked into his house with a handful of dog turds and said, “Honey, look what I almost stepped in!” (That’s a joke, but I know people like that.) Solomon said, “Whoever increases knowledge increases sorrow.” That’s a joke, too. And “The rivers run into the sea and yet the sea is not full.” That’s a joke. And also “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” And how about this one? “The race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong nor riches to men of understanding, but time and chance happeneth to them all.” That’s the essence of comedy in less than 25 words. You’re fast, you trip and fall down; you’re strong and you poke your sword in your left foot; you’re smart and you go broke. Solomon said, “The thing that has been is the thing that shall be; and the thing that is done is that which shall be done: there is nothing new under the sun.” That is true and I know it, but I look forward to tomorrow morning and rising up, making coffee, watching the sun rise as it keeps doing day in and day out, and resuming the race, boats against the current and so forth. It’s all been done before and it needs doing again.
I tried doing the News from Lake Wobegon sitting on a bench but my natural inclination is to pace. And sitting felt stagy. And people asked me if I was not feeling well. Pacing stimulates the mental processes. You walk in the darkness, spotlight in your eyes, along the lip of the stage, glancing down into the first row to avoid stepping off the edge and into their laps, and if your mind goes blank, you think of something better.
I
THE NEWS FROM LAKE WOBEGON
In 1970, I moved to Stearns County with my wife and little boy to live in a rented farmhouse south of Freeport, an area of nose-to-the-grindstone German Catholics, so we could live cheaply—I was supporting us by writing fiction for The New Yorker—and we found a big brick house on the Hoppe farm in Oak township that rented for $80 a month. With the house came a half acre we could plant in vegetables. It was a fine snug house, four rooms down, four rooms up, a mansion by our standards. A room for Mary’s piano and a room for my Underwood typewriter and a small back room for the baby and two guest rooms for our writer friends from the city who liked to come and soak up the quiet and drink beer at night and lie on the lawn and look up at the stars. To the north of the house was a dense grove of spruce and oak where we got our firewood, and beyond this windbreak was a couple hundred acres of corn. Cows stood in a nearby meadow and studied us. The Sauk River was nearby, to canoe on, and Lake Watab to swim in. It was a land of well-tended hog and dairy farms on rolling land punctuated by tidy little towns, each one with a ballpark, two or three taverns, and an imposing Catholic church, and a cemetery behind it where people named Schrupps, Wendelschafer, Frauendienst, Schoppenhorst, and Stuedemann lay shoulder to shoulder. There were no Johnsons or Smiths to speak of.
For three years, I sat in my room and wrote short fiction and shipped it to New York. After a shipment, after a week or so, I’d watch for the mailman every day with more and more interest. He came around 1:30. I’d walk out the driveway to the mailbox and look for an envelope from The New Yorker—a large gray envelope meant rejection, a small creamy one meant acceptance. Acceptance meant another three months’ grace. Eventually I ran out of grace and we moved to the Cities and I went back to my radio job and a couple years later started A Prairie Home Companion and the Lake Wobegon saga. When I invented Lake Wobegon, I stuck it in central Minnesota for the simple reason that I knew a little bit about it and also because my public radio listeners tended to be genteel folk who knew the scenic parts of Minnesota—the North Shore, the Boundary Waters, the Mississippi Valley—and knew nothing at all about Stearns County. This gave me a free hand to make things up. I put Lake Wobegon (pop. 942) on the western shore of the lake, for the beautiful sunrises. I said it took its name from an Ojibway word that means “the place where we waited all day for you in the rain,” and its slogan was “Sumus quod sumus” (We are who we are), and to the German Catholics I added, for dramatic interest, an equal number of Norwegian Lutherans. These don’t exist in Stearns County but I bused them in. The Norwegians, ever status-conscious, vote Republican and the Germans vote Democratic to set themselves apart from the Norwegians. The Catholics worship at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility and the Lutherans at Lake Wobegon Lutheran church, home of the 1978 National Lutheran Ushering Champions, the Herdsmen. On Sunday morning, everyone is in church, contemplating their sinful unworthiness, the Catholics contemplating the unworthiness of the Lutherans, the Lutherans the unworthiness of the Catholics, and then everyone goes home to a heavy dinner.
If anyone asked why the town appeared on no maps, I explained that, when the state map was drawn after the Civil War, teams of surveyors worked their way in from the four outer corners and, arriving at the center, found they had surveyed more of Minnesota than there was room for between Wisconsin and the Dakotas, and so the corners had to be overlapped in the middle, and Lake Wobegon wound up on the bottom flap. (In fact, the geographic center of the state is north of there, in Crow Wing County, but never mind.)
Anyway, “Gateway to Central Minnesota” is the town slogan. And through the gateway over the years came a procession of characters. The three boys who drive to Iowa one February morning when they hear of Buddy Holly’s plane crash and their discovery of his blue guitar in the snowy field. The stolid Father Emil, who said, in regard to abortion, “If you didn’t want to go to Chicago, why did you get on the train?” and the town handyman Carl Krebsbach who repairs the repairs of the amateurs, and Bruno the fishing dog, and the irascible Art of Art’s Baits and Night O’Rest motel, its premises studded with warning signs (“Don’t clean fish here. Use your brains. This means you!!!”), and Dorothy of the Chatterbox Café and her softball-size caramel rolls (“Coffee 25¢, All Morning 85¢, All Day $1.25, Ask About Our Weekly Rates”), and Wally of the Sidetrack Tap, where old men sit and gradually come to love their fellow men by self-medication. It was Wally’s pontoon boat, the Agnes D, on which the twenty-two Lutheran pastors crowded for a twilight cruise and weenie roast. When the grill capsized and the Agnes D pitched to starboard,
they were plunged into five feet of water and stood quietly, heads uplifted, and waited for help to arrive. It’s a town where the Lutherans all drive Fords bought from Clarence at Bunsen Motors and the Catholics all drive Chevys from Florian at Krebsbach Chevrolet. Florian is the guy who once forgot his wife at a truckstop. Her name is Myrtle.
The stories always start with the line “It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon” and then a glimpse of the weather. It’s a fall day, geese flying south across a high blue sky, the air sweet and smoky, the woods in gorgeous colors not seen in Crayola boxes, or it’s winter, snowflakes falling like little jewels from heaven, and you awake to a world of radiant grandeur, trees glittering, the beauty of grays, the bare limbs of trees penciled in against the sky, or it’s spring, the tomatoes are sprouting in little trays of dirt on the kitchen counter, the tulips and crocuses, the yellow goldfinches arriving from Mexico, or it’s summer, the gardens are booming along, the corn knee-high, and a mountain range of black thunderclouds is piling up in the western sky. And then you go on to talk about Norwegian bachelor farmers sitting on the bench in front of Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery or the Chatterbox, where large phlegmatic people sit at the counter talking in their sing-song accent. So how you been then? Oh, you know, not so bad, how’s yourself, you keeping busy then? Oh yeah, no rest for the wicked. You been fishing at all? I was meaning to but I got too busy. How about yourself? Nope. The wife’s got me busy around the house, you know. Yeah, I know how that goes.—And so forth. And you slip into your story, and take it around the turns and bring it to a point of rest, and say, “And that’s the news from Lake Wobegon,” and that’s all there is to it.
1.
BUS CHILDREN
I was a bus child, living in the country, and on schoolday mornings, fall, winter, spring, walked up our road to the highway and stood waiting for the bus to take us up to Anoka to school. My stop was the last for this bus and so all of the seats were full and I had to find one with smaller people in it so I could squeeze them in and get a few inches to sit on. Town kids walked to school and were able to stay after school for sports or to edit the school paper or rehearse for the play. They seemed hardly aware of us bus kids and ran the school and were homecoming royalty and we bided our time and looked forward to college. Whenever I drive in the country early enough to see kids waiting for a bus along the road, I feel affection for our tribe.
Out on the prairie so wide
The school buses wending their way
From the towns they travel
For miles on the gravel
An hour before it is day.
And the winter wind blows
Cross the corn stubble rows
Where the dirt has turned the snow gray.
And the children walk down to the road
From the farmhouses’ warm kitchen glow,
Stand waiting and yearning
To see the bus turning
And the sweep of the headlights’ glow.
And they climb up inside
And away they all ride
Past the farms and the fields full of snow.
And they think about math as they go
And the chemistry of atmosphere
And unequal equations
And French conjugations
And the sonnets of William Shakespeare
And then up the drive
At the school they arrive
On the darkest day of the year.
And in due course they will fly
Away, young women and men
With mixed emotions
Cross mountains and oceans
And become what we could not have been.
We will tenderly kiss them
Goodbye and miss them
And never will see them again.
2.
GROWING UP WITH THE FLAMBEAUS
I invented John Tollefson, the hero of Wobegon Boy, during a time of domestic happiness on West End Avenue & 90th Street. A roomy apartment on the fifteenth floor with a kitchen that looked out at the Hudson River and the barges and scows and now and then a sail. We whomped up big dinners in a dining room with a wall of books where we sat with friends, including the two who lived across the hall, and it was very easy and charming. So I wrote a novel about a charming Midwesterner in love with a New Englander on the Upper West Side, in homage to the good life in New York.
I am a cheerful man, even in the dark, and it’s all thanks to a good Lutheran mother. When I was a boy, if I came around looking glum and mopey, she said, “What’s the matter? Did the dog pee on your cinnamon toast?” and the thought of our old black mutt raising his hind leg in the pas de dog and peeing on toast made me giggle. I was a beanpole boy, and my hair was the color of wet straw. I loved to read adventure books and ride my bike and shoot baskets in the driveway and tell jokes. My dad was a little edgy, expecting the worst, saving glass jars and paper clips, cranking down the thermostat to keep our family out of the poorhouse. On cold winter days, he felt that if you couldn’t see your breath, the heat was turned up too high. He walked around turning off lights and announcing that he was not John D. Rockefeller. But Mother was well composed, a true Lutheran, and taught me to Cheer up, Make yourself useful, Mind your manners, and, above all, Don’t feel sorry for yourself. In Minnesota, you learn to avoid self-pity as if it were poison ivy in the woods. Winter is not a personal experience; everyone else is as cold as you are; so don’t complain about it too much. Even if your cinnamon toast gets peed on. It could be worse.
Being Lutheran, Mother believed that self-pity is a deadly sin and so is nostalgia, and she had no time for either. She had sat at the bedside of her beloved sister, Dotty, dying of scarlet fever in the summer of 1934; she held Dotty’s hand as the sky turned dark from their father’s fields blowing away in the drought, she bathed Dotty, wiped her, told her stories, changed the sheets, and out of that nightmare summer she emerged stronger, confident that life would be wondrous, or at the very least bearable.
• • •
My great-grandfather landed in Lake Wobegon in the center of Minnesota, from Voss, Norway, escaping from the Great Herring Famine of 1875. Lake Wobegon was a rough town then. All on one block, for five dollars, you could get a tattoo, a glass of gin, and a social disease, and have enough left over to ante up for a poker game, but Lutherans civilized it. They were hard workers, indifferent to carnal pleasures. Their vice was baseball. They were mad for it.
It was a good place to grow up in, Lake Wobegon. Kids migrated around town as free as birds and did their stuff, put on coronations and executions in the deserted train depot, fought the Indian wars, made ice forts and lobbed grenades at each other, dammed up the spring melt in the gutters, swam at the beach, raced bikes in the alley. You were free, but you knew how to behave. You didn’t smart off to your elders, and if a lady you didn’t know came by and told you to blow your nose, you blew it. Your parents sent you off to school with lunch money and told you to be polite and do what the teacher said, and if there was a problem at school, it was your fault and not the school’s. Your parents were large and slow afoot and they did not read books about parenting, and when they gathered with other adults, at Lutheran church suppers or family get-togethers, they didn’t talk about schools or about prevailing theories of child development. They did not weave their lives around yours. They had their own lives, which were mysterious to you.
I remember the day I graduated from tricycle to shiny new two-wheeler, a big day. I wobbled down Green Street and made a U-turn and waved to Mother on the front porch, and she wasn’t there. She had tired of watching me and gone in. I was shocked at her lack of interest. I went racing around the corner onto McKinley Street, riding very fast so I would have big tales to tell her, and I raced down the hill past the Catholic church and the old black mutt ran out to greet me and I swerved and skidded on loose gravel and tumbled off t
he bike onto the pavement and skinned myself and lay on the tar, weeping, hoping for someone to come pick me up, but nobody came. The dog barked at me to get up. I limped three blocks home with skin scraped off my forearm and knee, my eyes brimming with tears, and when I came into the kitchen, Mother looked down at me and said, “It’s only a scrape. Go wash it off. You’re okay.”
And when I had washed, she sat me down with a toasted cheese sandwich and told me the story of Wotan and Frigga. “Wotan, or Odin, was the father of the gods, and his wife, Frigga, was the earth goddess who brought summer, and the god of war, Thor, was the winter god, and the god of peace was Frey. So from Odin we get Wednesday, from Thor, Thursday, from Frey, Friday—Sunday and Monday, of course, refer to the sun and moon—which leaves Saturday and Tuesday. Wotan and Frigga had a boy named Sidney, and Thor had a daughter named Toots, and they fell in love and one day Sidney went to find Toots and steal her away, but Thor sent a big wind and Sidney rode his bicycle too fast and fell and skinned his knee, and that’s why Saturday is a day off, so we can think about it and remember not to ride our bikes so fast.” She gave me a fresh, soft peanut butter cookie. She wiped the last remaining tears from my cheek. She said, “Go outside and play. You’re all right.”
In Lake Wobegon, you learned about being All Right. Life is complicated, so think small. You can’t live life in raging torrents, you have to take it one day at a time, and if you need drama, read Dickens. My dad said, “You can’t plant corn and date women at the same time. It doesn’t work.” One thing at a time. The lust for world domination does not make for the good life. It’s the life of the raccoon, a swashbuckling animal who goes screaming into battle one spring night, races around, wins a mate, carries on a heroic raccoon career, only to be driven from the creekbed the next spring by a young stud who leaves teethmarks in your butt and takes away your girlfriend, and you lie wounded and weeping in the ditch. Later that night, you crawl out of the sumac and hurl yourself into the path of oncoming headlights. Your gruesome carcass lies on the hot asphalt to be picked at by crows. Nobody misses you much. Your babies grow up and do the same thing. Nothing is learned. This is a life for bank robbers. It is not a life for the sensible people of Lake Wobegon.
The Keillor Reader Page 3