“I found an old classmate in a chat room online,” Cindy told her. About six months ago. My first big love. Jimmy. He’s a Lutheran pastor in California now, very miserable, wrong line of work, wrong wife, wrong place, his kids are strangers to him, and he wants to get together with me. He says he’d been thinking about me for years. He says he always thought of me as a kindred spirit and maybe a person only gets one of those in a lifetime and I’m his.” The Sidewinder serves half-pound cheeseburgers and the fries are really good. The place is dark and smells of smoke and beer and the furniture looks like it’s been thrown around. The bartender stared at Liz. A guy with blond streaks in his hair, who was a little too aware of his own prettiness. Was he pursing his lips or was he puckering in her direction? Hard to tell. She was wearing her clerical collar. Jesus. Contain yourself, wouldja? Cindy said she thought she was falling in love with Jimmy and that she wished she could find a way to meet him for a weekend in San Francisco. She was in a chat room with him last night for an hour and he said he wanted to quit the church and take a job waiting on tables in Seattle and go to acting school. “What should I do?” she said. Liz was right there. Take responsibility for your own actions. When you meet him online, you are choosing to go deeper into the woods. If you met him in San Francisco, you’d cross the river. This is a choice, it isn’t happenstance. But whatever you choose to do, it’ll be better if you do it with a whole heart. The whole heart is a cheerful heart, not divided against itself. One thing at a time. One day at a time. Whatever you do, do it heartily, as unto the Lord, and not unto men. Liz took Cindy’s hand and said a prayer for gratitude. Give us gratitude, Lord. Fill our hearts with gratitude. Cindy was weeping. That was a good thing. But Pastor Jimmy is a shithead to be preying on an old friend online. The Internet is a swamp where mischievous people can cause all sorts of pain and misery. Liz paid the bill. “No, no, let me pay,” said Cindy, after Liz had already put a twenty down and the smirky bartender had come over to pick it up. “How was everything?” he said. “Stupendous,” said Liz.
“You from around here?” he said. She shook her head. “I’ve seen you before,” he said. “In your dreams, sir.” That shut him up.
• • •
I felt bad about missing Lois’s confirmation so I dropped by their farm. Eight cars and two pickups parked in the yard. I snuck around to the front of the house. They were all gathered in the living room, Daryl and Marilyn and the kids and relatives I couldn’t identify and they were just about to cut the cake. Lois has grown four inches this year and now is five feet eight and one-half inches tall, a shy girl with long brown hair she has learned to tie in an elegant bun, and creamy skin that she keeps beautiful by frequent blushing. She happened to be in a sensitive mood that day, having gotten a six-page single-spaced letter from a boy in church telling her that he thinks God has written their names together in the Book of Love. The cake was on the coffee table in front of her, white with the Scripture verse in blue frosting: “Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” It was a large cake. Lois didn’t know how to tell everybody that she wasn’t sure that she believed in God. She was pretty sure that she might’ve lost her faith and though she was hoping to get it back, she didn’t know how. It happened Friday night when she was babysitting at the Christiansens’ and that boy came over and she let him in, though she wasn’t supposed to have guests, and they sat on the couch watching men in khaki uniforms beat people senseless with rifle butts, and she said, “Oh my God,” and the boy took her in his arms, to console her, but then started kissing her and unbuttoned her blouse, and told her how much she meant to him. She took his hand out of her shirt and she prayed that he would go away and heard something like an echo, as if the prayer had been dropped into a deep well. And suddenly it seemed to her that the world was in the control of dark powers, working senseless evil on the innocent, and this boy was capable of evil too, a potential rapist, and that prayer went up in the air like smoke.
When Marilyn cut the confirmation cake and served it with butter-brickle ice cream, Lois thought she ought to say something about her loss of faith, but couldn’t do it, she just couldn’t. She excused herself and went upstairs and put on jeans and a white jacket and walked out across the cornfield toward the road and the ravine to think about her faith on this cloudy day, and, walking west over a little rise, she saw, just beyond the ravine, a white car she’d never seen before, and a strange man in a trench coat standing beside it. She walked toward him, thinking of the parable of the Good Samaritan, thinking that perhaps God was calling her to go witness to him and thereby recover her faith. He stood and pitched stones up over the trees, and as she got closer, he turned and smiled, put out his hand, and came toward her. She saw her mistake. Something glittered in his mouth. She stopped. He was a killer come looking for someone, it didn’t matter to him who it was, anyone who came down the road would do. He walked toward her; she turned and fell down and said, “Oh please no, please God no.”
I hadn’t seen her for five years. I said, “Lois, Lois—it’s me.” I helped her up. How are you? It’s good to see you again. We shuffled along the rim of the ravine, looking for the path down, and she told me about her confirmation, which I have a godfatherly interest in and also because she was named for my favorite aunt, whose favorite nephew I was. She was my youngest aunt and loved to pretend and sometimes we played a game called Strangers, pretending we didn’t know each other. We’d sit and make up stories about ourselves and usually she was a missionary in Africa and I was a novelist. It was exciting for a while and then it was scary, Strangers.
Lois Tollerud asked me, “Why did you stop here?” I told her I was looking for a spot where our Boy Scout troop used to camp and where Einar Tingvold the scoutmaster got so mad at us once, he threw two dozen eggs one by one into the woods and when he ran out of eggs he reached for his binoculars and threw them. We scouts searched for them for a whole afternoon, thirty years ago.
“That’s not a true story, is it?” she said. “No, it’s not.”
I stopped there because, frankly, I’d had a lot of coffee, but I couldn’t tell her that. And she had appeared before I could pee, so when she invited me to the house, I said, Sure.
We walked in. I got a fairly warm hello, and was offered coffee. “In a minute,” I said. “Excuse me, may I use your toilet?” They cut me a slice of cake that said “Con but for,” a little triangle out of her verse.
Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed. Our lovely world has the power to make us brave. I was afraid to see the Tolleruds but needed to empty my bladder. I enjoy being someone else and then it isn’t enjoyable anymore and I need to be known and that’s when I come home. So my mind can be renewed by what is so familiar, the old hymns, God watching the sparrows, the gates of thanksgiving.
II
ICONIC PAJAMAS
People ask, “How do you ever think up all that stuff for a weekly radio show?” and the answer is, “Steal from your old work, and if your mind is blank, do parodies.” The Supreme Court ruled in favor of satire in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. (1994), saying that parody is “transformative” and is protected as fair use of copyrighted material. In other words, you do not have to pay for the privilege of making fun of people, a beautiful idea. Thus we swiped Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”:
And Larry still is sitting, pleading as I do my knitting,
Though I’ve said, “You must be kidding. You’re a bozo and a bore.”
And still he gets this feeling and his eyes roll toward the ceiling
And then suddenly he’s kneeling, weeping, facedown on the floor:
“C’mon, honey. Please, let me come back. I implore.”
And I say: “Baby. Nevermore.”
Plus the Bible stories, the Beatitudes, Ginsberg’s “Howl,” Frost’s “Stopping by Wood
s,” Hamlet, A Streetcar Named Desire, and famous American sacred songs:
Don’t come angel band
Hands off my prostate gland
I’m not ready to go quite yet
But if you say this is it
Bring me a carton of cigarettes
I’m sorry that I quit.
The canon of the familiar is vast and it’s all available to the parodist. You can do Bob Dylan:
May you grow up to be beautiful
And very rich and slim
May God give you everything you want
Though you don’t believe in Him
May you stick your finger in the pie
And always find the plum
May you stay forever dumb.
And Paul Simon—
Hello darkness, my old friend
It is nighttime once again
I’ve been sleeping since this morning
Because this town is very boring
I am tired
Of the tedium and silence
I want violence
I love the sound
Of sirens
Parody is a game of patience. And it’s a tribute to the parodee. Only true originals can be parodied, and that eliminates 95 percent of the poets and songwriters out there. I saw a kid do a parody of me once—he was fourteen, he wore a white suit, red socks, red shoes, a big straw hat, and he spoke in a flat voice very slowly and the story he told was about vampires and werewolves. It was hilarious. Up to a point.
1.
HENRY
I discovered Thoreau in high school, as a member of the Film Operators Club, a bunch of geeks who ran the projectors for classes. I sat in a little booth in the back of the auditorium and threaded the film onto the sprockets and through the lens and onto the take-up reel and sometimes sat and watched it, Our Town or Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, and once the sophomore English classes traipsed down for a movie about Thoreau’s Walden. He was a geek, too, awkward, shambling, a loner, hiding his loneliness behind a curtain of disdain, and he and I became very close for a couple of years. Very close. When I read that he had traveled by steamboat to St. Paul and Minneapolis in 1861 and hiked around Lake Calhoun, I was absolutely thrilled.
Mr. H. D. Thoreau
c/o Mrs. John Thoreau
Concord, Mass.
Dear Henry:
I wrote to you at the pond but the letter came back marked “Not There Anymore. Skedaddled” so I am sending this to your mother’s house. I hope this finds you enjoying good health and the society of your Concord friends. And thank you for allowing us to see the manuscript of Walden; Or, Life in the Woods.
All of us here at Weiden & Longman are great fans of your work and so there was great excitement when the book arrived.
Let me just say that there is so much to admire in Walden—the energy, the certitude, the elegance of the writing—that I am terribly sorry to report that we cannot publish it as it stands.
When you told me two years ago that you were going to the woods to write, I assumed it would be on the order of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer and so did my colleagues who kept asking, as they made their way through a long chapter about beans, “Where are the Indians? Where is the narrative?” The book keeps jumping around. The first twenty pages are slow going, you must admit, with all the preaching about the evils of materialism, a subject that God knows has been covered elsewhere, and then bang, suddenly you’ve got the axe in your hand and you’re building the cabin, and that’s great, and you give prices on nails and boards and all, but just when the reader might like to see a floor plan and maybe some advice about preventing dry rot, suddenly we’re hearing about beans and nature and then it’s woodchucks and then reincarnation, and the reader quietly closes the book and goes back to Dickens. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” okay, maybe so, but most men will never read that line because they got quietly desperate a hundred pages earlier reading about man’s innate goodness. What this book needs is structure, and what I’m thinking, Henry, is that we try to make it into a calendar, on the order of Poor Richard’s Almanac. One page per month, one aphorism per day, one of your quickies like “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in” or “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes”—both great. The one about marching to your own drummer. Great stuff. Nobody writes sentences better than you do, not even Emerson—it’s the paragraphs and the chapters where you run into trouble. So let’s do a book of aphorisms, epigrams, adages, pithy sayings, whatever you want to call them. “There is no remedy for love but to love more.” I can see us developing that into a series of greeting cards—are you familiar with those? Very popular in England. Or “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.” Simply beautiful. I read that aloud to my colleagues and they said, “Let’s have more of that and less of the transcendentalist stuff.”
As you yourself say in the book, “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify. Simplify.” That’s all we’re asking you to do, Henry. Simplify: make it a calendar. People get inspiration, they get a space to write in doctor appointments and birthdays, they get some etchings of trees and leaves, and along the way they start to wonder, “Where can I read more of this Thoreau? He’s not bad.” And then we bring out your next book, which I hope is going to be less about the universe and more about you. And about Emerson, Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, personal anecdotes about the homely lives of the celebrated. As you yourself say, “Only that day dawns to which we are awake.” In other words, if nobody buys your book, then what’s the point? Think about it. Let’s aim for an 1855 calendar. That would give us plenty of time to line up advertising. Would you have any objection to Winchester rifles or a company that makes woodchuck traps? Let me know. Meanwhile, I remain,
Your faithful friend,
Edw. Wheeler
Senior Editor
2.
LITTLE HOUSE ON THE DESERT
I wrote a fan letter to Laura Ingalls Wilder when I was ten years old and got back a form letter from Harper & Row saying that she appreciated hearing from me but that she was too busy to answer all the letters she got and hoped I would understand. I did not understand. My letter was longer and much better written than other children’s letters and I expected Mrs. Wilder to appreciate that fact. What Harper & Row did not say was that she had died the year before, a fact I learned years later. I guess they thought that this knowledge would detract from our enjoyment of her work. I adored her work. When I heard that she had passed on, I wished that Harper & Row would ask me to write some sequels and keep the Ingalls family saga going. I would have been the best person to do that.
Many years ago, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Carrie and their dog Jack left their little house on the prairie of Minnesota and packed their clothing and some furniture in the wagon and Pa hitched up the team and they headed for Arizona. Ma was pretty sick with chronic fatigue syndrome and Doc Williams thought that Tucson would do her good, the warm desert air and the yoga classes. Ma couldn’t do yoga in Walnut Grove because it was considered a form of witchcraft. So off they rode through Nebraska and Colorado and when they came to Arizona, Laura said, “Pa, this land is too dry to raise corn on.”
Pa chuckled. “That’s right, Laura, and I’m not going to raise corn. I’ve got a job building patios.”
When they reached Tucson, Pa found them rooms at a motel with a swimming pool. “What does it look like?” said Mary.
“It’s like a castle, with turrets and a high wall and a moat,” said Pa.
He winked at Laura. Mary was blind and couldn’t see that the motel was a one-story cinder-block structure that resembled a shed. Pa was always pulling stuff like that.
After supper, Laura sat on the edge of Ma’s bed.
“You seem better, Ma.
Is your chronic fatigue all gone?”
Ma smiled. “Don’t tell your pa, but I was faking the whole thing. I’m not sick. Just sick of Walnut Grove. Tired of calico and gingham dresses. I want to live where there’s fresh ground coffee and fresh arugula.”
“Arugula?” said Laura.
“What do you think of this?” said Ma. She threw back the covers.
“Wow,” said Laura.
Ma was wearing white silk pants and a painted silk top, big silver bracelets, turquoise earrings, and her hair was pulled back with a silver clip.
“It’s time you should be in bed, Laura,” said Pa. He had slipped into the room without them hearing him. “You’re gorgeous, Caroline,” he said softly. He pulled out his old fiddle and played “Just a song at twilight while the lights are low” and Laura sang along with the fiddle.
“Go to your room, Laura,” he said.
“Yes, Pa.”
She went into the next room, where Carrie and Mary lay on a rollaway, the blanket pulled up to their chins. “Is Pa coming in so we can say our prayers?” said Carrie.
“Pa is busy,” said Laura.
“Doing what?”
“Guess,” she said.
Laura dreaded the thought of Ma having a baby and she, Laura, having to feed the thing and clean it and keep it amused. And worse, a baby brother who would inevitably take her place as Pa’s favorite—it made her want to gag herself with a spoon. She was planning to write a book about the family—a family of five was just about perfect for a novel, with herself as the leading character—and one more child would wreck the whole thing. Laura went out in the hall and banged on Ma and Pa’s door. “What about our prayers?” she hollered. They stopped messing around and pretty soon Pa came out in his night shirt, looking cross, his hair tangled up, and came in and knelt by Mary’s bed and they all said their prayers. Laura added a silent prayer of her own that she would become a very very wealthy author. Pa said good-night and went back to his room. “You go stand guard at their door,” Laura whispered to Jack, “and if you hear any sound from their room, bark as loud as you can.”
The Keillor Reader Page 13