The Keillor Reader

by Garrison Keillor

  I was transferred to the stroke ward in the morning and took a long solo walk down the hall and back, in pajamas and bathrobe, towing my IV apparatus on wheels, and felt okay. Legs worked fine, balance good. Passed a thirtyish woman, slender, wistful, with a pronounced limp, slim, scared, sliding her slippers along, gripping a walker, her mother at her side. The daughter looked like somebody’s beloved third-grade teacher. Heartbreaking, but the mother had a brisk, let’s-get-it-done air about her, and what else can one do? Take the blow and go to rehab. Walking down the hall, you tell yourself over and over not to glance in through open doorways, which seems rude and crude, and then you do it anyway. I mean, the doors were open after all. And these are my brethren, the Order of the Stricken, fellow petitioners at the Throne of Mercy. Dear Lord, thank you for my life and please may it continue. In the rooms I saw elderly persons, some my age, who had been smacked hard and now lay speechless in bed, or moved slowly around the room like a lobster trying to claw its way out of the tank at the restaurant, or slumped in a chair, awake but not alert. (“Hello, I’m not here right now. Sorry. Tell someone else.”) And here I was waltzing along, lightly grazed by the bullet, the sinner who escapes scot-free while the righteous languish. Now that I was up, I didn’t think morbid thoughts anymore. The one thought that can bring me to tears is the thought of my little daughter losing me, living without her daddy’s love and protection, but weeping is not appropriate now, and I put the thought away.

  • • •

  So I had a thromboembolic stroke likely due to atrial fibrillation. A bomb lands in Wyoming; a few Herefords are startled; a twelve-foot crater in the scrub brush. The prognosis: Who knows? What you want to know—When will I die?—the doctors can’t tell you, which is okay because you don’t really want to know. In the afternoon, a lady called from the paper to update my obituary. She was very very nice. “We just want to update our information,” she said. “You’re on your third marriage—is that correct?” Yes, ma’am. “Anything big coming up in the fall?” (LOCAL AUTHOR, 67, SUCCUMBS ON EVE OF GREAT SUCCESS.) No, ma’am. “How are you feeling, if you don’t mind my asking?” I don’t mind. I feel fine.

  And then the next day and the next. Lying around, reading The New York Times, working on my laptop, drinking coffee, normal life except in a hospital with electrodes stuck to me. Rochester is fifty miles from the Cities, which discourages casual visits by friends and relatives, which is all right by me: they mean well, surely, and it is a good deed and all, but I am okay, thank you very much. Quite happy to be here, in fact. I got plenty of social interaction from nurses, brisk, cheerful Lutheran women, small-town girls, who strode into my room, took the blood pressure, noted the urine flow chart, asked the questions, prepped me on upcoming events. “How are we doing today?” the nurses asked, and I said, “Doing great. Never felt better.” The appropriate thing to say, unless you’re paralyzed and your eyeballs have popped out of your head. The neurologist and his entourage arrived with more questions about my brain, and I began to feel solicitous for this beloved organ. The heart is only a muscle, and my lungs, scarred by twenty years of smoke, are doing the best they can, but my brain is where I live. Maybe more meteoroids were on their way—blammo—boomboomboom—ker-blam—the frontal lobe, the parietal lobe, the sensual lobe, the Bobo the Clown lobe, all damaged, and there I am, slumped in a chair at a table with large wooden blocks as a therapist named Meghan leads me through the unit on shapes, just like in kindergarten, and her voice makes me tingle, except I can’t come up with the word tingle.

  O my brain, beloved brain, beautiful lumpy gelatinous organ ambitious to do great things still, O do not abandon me now. I would rather be homeless, on social security, living in a series of shelters in church basements, subject to the brutal charity of the righteous, but with my marbles intact, my memories of autumn in New York and Trondhjemsgade in Copenhagen and the beaches of Patmos and the north shore of Lake Superior—O sweet Sarah Bellum, don’t leave me to rattle around in a panic of fog and rumbles, only knowing a vast dimness where the city of memory used to be—I would rather die, Sarah. And you know it’s true because, Duh, you’re my brain.

  • • •

  Being in the stroke ward surrounded by the stricken, it seemed like a good idea to think about a funeral and spare the family the guesswork, so I scribbled a few notes (Episcopal low mass, no eulogies, none—hire a choir—“Abide with Me” and “O Love That Will Not Let Me Go” and Mozart’s Ave Verum and “The Blind Man Stood in the Road and Cried”) and that made me think about sex—any monastic situation would, I suppose—and brought to mind that first-floor apartment on Jagtvej in Copenhagen in October 1985, and the time in waist-deep water off Oahu and once at the Ritz in Boston. The screened porch in the log cabin in Wisconsin, the bed suspended from the beams on chains. The fifty-seventh floor of the hotel in New York. Recollecting the quality of light, the presence of music or sound of insects, the feel of skin, the urgency, the taste of sweetness, I left behind the fluorescent bulbs, the tile floor, the dangling tube connecting the bag of blood thinner to the needle in my forearm.

  I revisited Anoka, Minnesota, in 1954, the swanky window of Colburn-Hilliard men’s clothiers and their wool sportcoats, the soda fountain at Shadick’s, the front window of the Anoka Herald, where I typed my sports stories, the ice cream shop across the street. I remembered how it felt to ride a bike no-handed. I remembered Mrs. Moehlenbrock, who gave my fourth-grade class the essay topic “What would you do if you had one day left to live?” We had just read an inspiring story about the rich, full life Helen Keller led despite being blind, deaf, speechless, and rather homely, and Mrs. Moehlenbrock suggested we write something inspiring about appreciating the ordinary things of life but I wrote that I wanted to get on a plane and fly to Paris. I had never flown anywhere in my life and Paris seemed like a cool place to go. Mrs. Moehlenbrock pointed out that it would take a day just to get to Paris. I thought that I could live with that. Maybe I could get a good tailwind and glimpse it for an hour before I died. Maybe the prospect of seeing Paris would cure my fatal illness.

  • • •

  They kept me in the hospital for five days of observation, and I tried to be as normal as I knew how to be. “Fine,” I kept telling them when they asked. “Great. Wonderful.” Mr. Neurologist put me on the blood thinner Coumadin, and sent me home, and here I am. Every other week I prick my finger and squeeze a drop of blood onto a metal strip in a wallet-sized device that measures blood thickness. Thin blood makes sense if you’ve been struck (stroked, stricken) by a blood clot, and I wondered if I needed to cut back on caffeine—change my life entirely, become slender, virtuous, nimble, dutiful, pure of heart and deed? They shrugged. They were MDs, not doctors of divinity: the stroke was an accident, like a drive-by shooting, and maybe you increase your risk somewhat by living in a bad neighborhood and sitting out on the stoop at 2 a.m. as the bars are closing, but that isn’t what pulled the trigger, and meanwhile, be glad the bullet hit your left buttock and not your heart.

  I came home to St. Paul and went back to work. Unfortunately a story appeared in the paper saying I’d had a stroke, and that was the day all sorts of people started treating me with great deference. I walked into the corner coffee shop and kids with spiky hair and fishhooks in their eyebrows looked at me with sympathy and nodded as I passed. There was admiration in their bloodshot eyes, as if I were a wounded vet, returned from the front; two people jumped up and offered me their table. I sat with my coffee and newspaper and felt people looking my way. Stroke survivor. Stroke is a powerful word, especially to people in their twenties. It means you were on Death Row, the Raven perched on your mantel, you heard the gentle voices calling “Old Black Joe.” But I don’t feel that way myself. I don’t think much about death because I thought about it all the time when I was young. I wore it out.

  The only reason I’d want to know my departure date is so I can savor those Last Months, throw away stuff, give awa
y the books and clothes, burn the letters, resume the bad habits, and wind up at that Last Day I first wrote about for Mrs. Moehlenbrock’s class. We’d skip the luncheon and weepy speeches and the proclamation from the governor, skip the fond farewells, and simply get on the plane to Paris, my sweetie and me, and I’d order a martini over Wisconsin and the steak entrée with a glass of Barolo and a snifter of Armagnac over Newfoundland and into the darkness we’d fly and land at Charles DeGaulle at 8 a.m. and pass swiftly through Customs, no baggage (who needs clean underwear when you’re close to death?), and tell the taxi driver to step on it, and there’s the Louvre and the Tuileries and take me to the Ritz, please, a big opulent suite with gilded armoire and 15-foot ceilings, hang the expense, let the heirs get by on leftovers, and call room service, darling, order a bottle of Champagne and a dozen oysters, make that two dozen, and I will lie down and nap for a moment, just hold my hand, don’t pull the shades, I want to look at you, just as I did in the beginning.

  11.

  HOME

  National Geographic was the magazine of choice in our home, a gift subscription from Uncle Lew, a monthly compendium of exotic sights we did not expect ever to see in real life—New Guinea, Antarctica, the Serengeti, Calcutta, a woman with bare breasts—and I was honored when they asked me to write about Minneapolis and St. Paul, my hometowns. Uncle Lew was long gone from the world, but I still wanted to impress him even posthumously, I could imagine how pleased he’d be, he’d read it slowly beginning to end, and say, “That’s not bad. Not a single word misspelled.” The Geographic photographer Erika Larsen came and lived with my family for weeks while she shot the pictures around town—she’d just finished a book of stunning photos of the Sami people of northern Sweden and had just returned from Peru but seemed enthused to be in Minnesota and in fact made elegant pictures that to me looked like Provence or the Lake Country or the steppes of Russia except it was Anoka and Lake Calhoun and the prairie west of Minneapolis, shooting on a big old 4x5 view camera not so different from what Mathew Brady used at Antietam.

  Flying in to Minneapolis–St. Paul Airport from the east, the plane descends over the green fields of Wisconsin and the St. Croix River downstream from the sandbars where gangs of youths including me played volleyball in the shallows, into Minnesota just above the farm in Denmark township where my teenaged mother and her sisters spent summer days on her sister Margaret’s farm—Grace and Elsie and Ina in white summer dresses, squinting in the bright 1934 sunlight—and passes south of downtown St. Paul and the gleam of steel rails that carried Dad in the mail car of the Empire Builder departing Union Depot for Seattle, a .38 snub-nosed revolver on his hip, and past the cathedral near where I live and the hospital where I walked in one day and said, “I think I’m having a stroke” (and I was), and we bank over Mendota, where back in my drinking days I heard New Orleans jazz luminaries like Billie and DeDe Pierce and Willie and Percy Humphrey, and we come in low over the Minnesota River where I learned to hate canoeing thanks to an OCD scoutmaster who wanted the canoes of Troop 252 to be evenly spaced and in a straight line, and as the plane touches down on the runway, I can see the hill where I used to park in a car with a girl and watch planes land and also make out back in the days of the bench seat where two people could get involved with each other in thrilling ways. A one-minute aerial tour of my life. Once I was on a plane that aborted the landing and ascended northward over downtown and the University and up the Mississippi and over my hometown of Anoka and I saw forty years of my life go by.

  There’s a newer north–south runway, and on that approach I don’t recognize a thing. It’s all road tangle and strip malls, and we descend below 5,000 feet, and still I can’t get my bearings—it could be the outskirts of Dallas or Atlanta—and I start to feel I’ve lost my place in the world. I was born here. I’m seventy-one years old. I’ve lived most of my life here. I refuse to use a GPS here. And it is distressing to come home and not know where I am. A sort of dementia, the strangeness of the beloved familiar. But driving east from the airport, we cross the Mississippi, and I am reoriented.

  My grandma Dora Keillor was riding in my dad’s car one winter day in 1957 when the car spun out of control on an icy highway and did a doughnut or two and stopped, still on the road. Grandma didn’t cry out; she looked straight ahead out the windshield and said, “John, which way is north?” I share that need for clarity. When a man has lived in one place for a long time, he has his landmarks. The Stone Arch bridge and the old flour mills. Seven Corners. The basilica of St. Mary. Porky’s drive-in. The white tower of the Horticulture building at the State Fairgrounds and the grandstand and the remains of the racetrack where auto thrill show drivers drove late-model Fords off ramps to leap through flaming hoops. When Northwestern Bank was sold to a banking conglomerate and their brass decided to dismantle the beloved Weatherball on the bank roof (“When the Weatherball is white, colder weather is in sight”), it was like a death in the family. It was like the German commandant in Paris, 1940, had decreed that the Eiffel Tower come down.

  The geography of MSP is simple: two interlocked cities, Minneapolis (382,578) and St. Paul (285,068) in a sprawling metro area (3.5 million)—the Great River with its rhythmic spelling M-i-ss-i-ss-i-pp-i flowing in from the north, through Anoka and over St. Anthony Falls, past the glass towers of downtown Minneapolis packed tightly around the Foshay Tower, the little skyscraper of my childhood, and the University campus with its long leafy mall and stone columns and the inscription about men being ennobled by understanding. Steep riverbanks, buoys to guide barge traffic toward the downtown locks, river roads lined with mansions, Fort Snelling on a bluff above the Minnesota River where it flows into the Mississippi, which then does a sideways S through St. Paul, its railyards, University Avenue with its entrepreneurial churn of storefront start-ups, Asian restaurants, muffler shops, across town to the great dome of the Capitol with the team of golden horses on the roof, past downtown, where the river bends south toward Red Wing, Winona, Dubuque, down to Prof. Harold Hill and Huck Finn territory. The cities are dotted with lakes—Como and Phalen in St. Paul; in Minneapolis, Nokomis, Hiawatha, Harriet, Calhoun, Cedar, and Lake of the Isles, pools of ease and elegance on the asphalt grid—and Lake Minnetonka, the prairie Riviera, to the southwest.

  This geography was imprinted in my brain in the Forties, back when I learned my alphabet from the avenues of Minneapolis (Aldrich, Brya, Dupont, Emerson, Fremont, Girard, Humboldt, Irving, James, Knox, through Xerxes, York, and Zenith). Superimposed over that geography is the geography of a man’s life, the defeats and pleasures of various locales, the landmarks of experience—the ball field at Diamond Lake where I dropped an easy fly to deep right and let three runs score, the stone rowhouse where I cheerfully committed adultery on February 14, 1976, and ended a ten-year marriage, the street where my car got buried by the snowplow and a woman driving by gave me a ride to my 6 a.m. radio shift, the street where my Danish lover and I walked through waist-deep snow to look at a house and bought it on the spot, Loring Park, where I liked to sit and smoke after a ten-hour day in the hotel scullery where I washed pots and pans after high school. After a day in the steam of the dishwasher, a summer evening was blessedly cool, and the smoke was ecstasy. Girls walked by in loose white blouses and wraparound skirts, and a few stopped and asked for a light and leaned down, holding their hair back, and the lit match illuminated their faces like Renaissance saints, a procession of Botticellis and Michelangelos. In that park I am always sort of eighteen, but driving east on Franklin I get an ache in my gut seeing the building where I helped clean the small dim apartment of my first wife after she died, the souvenirs of our old marriage scattered around, the loneliness of the furniture, the unspeakable sadness of the cupboards full of health foods. I drove to the river and sat by the bridge and wept ten years’ worth of tears.

  My Minneapolis is the South Side, blocks of little Spanish stucco bungalows under majestic archways of elms, small well-kept yards, the
birdbath, the coiled green rubber hose, grape arbor, steel barrel incinerator, and skinny frame garage on the alley, the part of town where my mother grew up around Thirty-eighth and Longfellow with her twelve siblings, most of whom settled in the neighborhood as people tended to do then: you wanted family nearby, should assistance be needed. And if I walk those blocks today, I feel the claustrophobia of Sunday afternoon after dinner, the overpowering fastidiousness (no reading comics on the Lord’s Day, no ball tossing, no worldly music, just sit still and have uplifting conversations), the smell of furniture polish, the radio on the walnut highboy tuned to the Christian station and George Beverly Shea singing “How Great Thou Art,” the good china in the glass cabinets, Grandpa and Grandma sitting contented, nibbling on butterscotch caramel candy. We attended church at the Grace & Truth Gospel Hall on Fourteenth Avenue South, where a preacher spoke with utter certainty on the Chart on the Course of Time from Eternity to Eternity, and I grew up one of the Chosen to whom God had vouchsafed the Knowledge of All Things that was denied to the great and mighty. The Second Coming was imminent, hours away. We walked around Minneapolis carefully, wary of television, dance music, tobacco, baubles, bangles, flashy cars, liquor, the theater, the modern novel—all of them tempting us away from the singular life that Jesus commanded us to lead.