The Keillor Reader

by Garrison Keillor

  In 1947 Dad got a GI loan and built us a little white house on an acre of cornfield north of the city, a stone’s throw from the Mississippi, so he could have a garden, farm boy that he was. He loved fresh vegetables, sweet corn and tomatoes especially, and he felt that work was a privilege, and he wanted his children to grow up privileged. Brooklyn Park township was a boys’ paradise. We made our own ball field in January in a vacant lot with a chickenwire backstop and shot baskets, sliding around on frozen gravel driveways wearing cotton gloves with the fingertips cut off. Beyond the backyard gardens lay a twisting ravine, site of Civil War and Three Musketeers reenactments (sacre bleu, mon Dieu, unhand that rapier!), that led to a stretch of sandy riverbank under the cottonwoods. Grown-ups seldom ventured there. We got to run naked through tall corn and skate on the river ice, but we were only five miles from the big city, which after the war was still a streetcar city—at the end of the line, the city stopped short; the country began. From the thirty-first-floor observation deck of the Foshay Tower downtown, you saw farmland and silos to the north and west.

  When I was twelve, I rode my bike alone into the city, past the lumber mills, foundries, machine shops, barrel factory, and printing plants, along Washington Avenue and past a meatpacking plant where bare-chested men wrestled whole beef carcasses hung on hooks on little overhead trolleys along a rail and into the waiting trucks. I pedaled up Hennepin Avenue, past dirty-book stores, penny arcades, walk-up hotels, Augie’s Theatre Lounge and the Gay 90s, men slumped in doorways clutching empty bottles, to the magnificent old public library on Tenth across from White Castle, home of the 10-cent hamburger (“Buy Em By The Sack”), and climbed up to the reading room, skipping the swimming lesson at the Y Mother had paid for so I’d learn to swim after cousin Roger drowned in Lake Minnetonka; but the Y conducted swim class in the nude and I was shy, so I went to the library instead and met the book that changed my life—transformed, diversified, turned it upsy-daisy, too—Roget’s International Thesaurus, supplier of idiom, lingo, jargon, argot, blather, and phraseology that transformed me from nerd and nobody to visionary, sporting man, roughneck, and raconteur.

  Growing up in the Brethren neighborhood, a boy was ever aware of worldly temptation, and from that comes a keener interest in the world. A school field trip to the Milwaukee depot where the Hiawatha stood throbbing, waiting to depart for Chicago, steam hissing from the locomotive, the luxurious club car blue with cigar smoke from slick gents in three-piece suits—for the Brethren boy, an electric vision of worldly success and glamour. When I was fourteen, I got a tour of the Moderne headquarters of the Minneapolis Star & Tribune: upstairs, pencil-neck geeks like me, and down below, the giant presses roaring, miles of newsprint flying out, chopped and folded into the afternoon Star, bundles of papers conveyed onto trucks and rushed to the readers, and the thought rang like a bell: I could be one of those guys upstairs. There were the neon lights of Hennepin Avenue and the promise of naked girls at the Alvin Theater, which our family passed on Sunday morning on our way to church. This last attraction was lost on me, a boy for whom dating girls was like exploring the Amazon—interesting idea, but how to get there? Writing for print, on the other hand—why not? And then came the beautiful connection: You write for print, it impresses girls, they want to drive around in a car with you.

  A boy named Frankie drowned in the river one spring at the sandy bank where we boys hung out. I was eating supper when the fire truck went by, and I wanted to go see, but Mother said, “There’s no point in a bunch of rubberneckers standing around gawking.” She said it was unseemly to look upon the sufferings of others if you were powerless to help. Years later, a photographer at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, where I worked on the copy desk, writing obits, showed me his collection of pictures of dead people, drowned or shot or crushed in cars, but I did not look at them long. (I wanted to, but I didn’t want him to think I was the sort of person who did.)

  For days after Frankie drowned, I visited the death scene, trying to imagine what had happened. He was paddling a canoe with two other boys and fell in, and the current swept him away. I imagined myself saving him, imagined his mother’s gratitude as the lifesaving medal was pinned on my chest. I don’t recall discussing this with the others. We were more interested in what lay ahead in seventh grade, where (we had heard) you had to take showers after gym. Naked. As in with no clothes on. And it turned out to be true. Junior high was up the West River Road in Anoka, the town where I was born, 1942, in a house on Ferry Street, delivered by Dr. Mork. After seventh grade I was suddenly too old for the ravine and the riverbank. The next summer I worked on nearby truck farms, hoeing corn, picking potatoes. Other boys inherited the riverbank. I worked. At eighteen I proceeded directly to the University of Minnesota downriver and the smoke-filled classrooms of Folwell Hall and football Saturdays and the glorious blare of the Rouser and old alums in their forties lumbering lead-footed toward Memorial Stadium. I spent six years sorting through various personas (Boy Scholar, Embittered Poet, Dangerous Radical, Wry Humorist) and wound up with the one that paid a salary: Friendly Announcer. I did all of this a couple miles from the Brethren, which made for interesting collisions. Standing outside the 400 Bar, smoking a Pall Mall, and a car honks, and it’s Aunt Jean and Uncle Les. Drop the smoke, walk to the car, say hi, smile, try not to exhale. And now devout Muslims from Somalia live in the old Brethren neighborhood; robed women and somber elders watch teenage Somali girls go by in short shorts and daring tank tops and product in their hair. Same play, new actors.

  From the U, I traipsed down the long winding trail of adulthood, walk-up apartments, dingy offices, cheap cafés, public library, softball diamonds, beer joints, and Grand Avenue, the street I drove down to work at 4 a.m. to do the morning shift on KSJN in a storefront studio on Sixth Street, then the dramatic climb to home ownership on Goodrich, then Portland, then Summit Avenues, all on Cathedral Hill in St. Paul where I’ve lived most of the last twenty years, where you drive up from I-94 past Masqueray’s magnificent cathedral whose great dome and towers and arches give you a momentary vision of Europe and up Summit and the mansions of nineteenth-century grandees and poobahs in a ward that votes about 85 percent Democratic today. You look out the kitchen window at McKinley’s America, and then three slender young women go running by, ponytails bouncing, wires coming out of their ears. In all, I count twenty-six places I’ve lived in the Twin Cities, about half on the west side of the river, half on the east, all within a few miles of each other: a restless fugitive for so many years, mostly within Hennepin and Ramsey counties, now in a neighborhood where Mother, at seventeen, sold peanut-butter cookies door-to-door during the Depression on a ridge above the river I loved as a boy.

  The Old Resident mourns for the Old City, though he understands that his classmates and cousins wanted to raise their kids in rambling houses with big leafy yards like the one he grew up in, not dinky apartments, and so the cornfields were given over to settlements of ramblers on curvy streets with romantic names like Yosemite Avenue, Emerald Trail, Everest Path, and Evening Star Way, and the earthmovers gouged out the Interstates, the east–west 94, the north–south 35, and the downtowns dwindled and urban renewal wiped out whole blocks of Victorian stone edifices, old picture palaces, department stores. And the planners created an infernal system of “skyways”—glass bridges connecting buildings at the second story—in effect turning buildings inside out, wiping out streets of little shops and show windows and the jingle of the opening door in favor of implacable corporations with brutal blank exteriors (he mourns this but learns not to see it). Instead, look up at the First National Bank building in St. Paul, the enormous numeral 1 on the roof outlined in flashing red neon—as a child, I thought it designated St. Paul as the number 1 city in America, a dazzling discovery for a child who was brought up modest. Pride goeth before a fall, so deprecate yourself lest others have to do the job for you. On the fourth-grade class trip to the Capitol, we all stood on the roof of the
bank, and I explained the significance of the 1 as a yellow streetcar rolled past a grassy square with a fountain in the middle, old men lounging on park benches, smoking, looking into the distance. I wondered then what they were thinking, and now I am old enough to know.

  When a man has lived in one place for sixty years, he walks around hip-deep in history. He sees that life is not so brief; it is vast and contains multitudes. I drive down Seventh Street to a Twins game and pass the old Dayton’s Department Store (Macy’s now but still Dayton’s to me), where in my poverty days I shoplifted an unabridged dictionary the size of a suitcase, and fifty years later I still feel the terror of walking out the door with it under my jacket, and I imagine the cops arresting my twenty-year-old self and what thirty days in the slammer might’ve done for me. From my seat above first base, I see the meatpacking plant where those men wrestled beef carcasses into trucks and the old Munsingwear factory with the low rumble and whine of machines, and I feel the fear of spending my days at a power loom making men’s underwear. I think about this along about the eighth inning if the Twins are down by a few runs.

  When we graduated from Anoka High, my classmate Corinne Guntzel drove her dad’s white Cadillac Eldorado convertible with rocket tailfins at high speed down the West River Road and into the city on a street just beyond right centerfield, and I stood in the front seat and sang, “That’ll be the day when you say goodbye, Oh that’ll be the day when you make me cry,” and now she and her parents, Hilmer and Helen, lie in Crystal Lake Cemetery on the North Side beyond left field; thoughts of them click into place whenever I pass the Dowling Avenue exit on 94. Corinne was a suicide twenty-five years ago, a professor of economics who hit a rough patch and paddled her canoe out on a lake and drowned with rocks in her pockets, and I still love her and am not over her death nor do I expect ever to be. If I drove a visitor past the Dowling Avenue sign, I wouldn’t say a word about this.

  I drive my little girl to school, a lovely ritual, and the route takes me through my Dangerous Radical years and past the place where my virginity went up in a burst of flames—the house replaced by an on-ramp to I-35W—and past a steep slope below Ridgewood Avenue and the house where Mary and I decided not to be married anymore, only to find out that she was pregnant, so we decided not to not be married. A bell tolls as I pass. My daughter says, “Tell me a story,” so I tell her about riding the school bus in seventh grade, my gravel road the last stop, the bus packed with smelly children bundled in heavy mackinaws, no empty seats, nobody moving over, the whiskey-soaked bus driver yelling at me to sit down, dammit, which is maybe why I have such a poor self-image even today and flinch when people look at me and which naturally drove me into radio broadcasting instead of something more distinguished.

  She says, “Tell me a funny story”—my daughter who never had to fight for a seat. I say, “So . . . there were these two penguins standing on an ice floe,” and she says, “Tell the truth,” so I say, “I like your ponytail. You know, years ago I wore my hair in a ponytail. Not a big ponytail. A little one. I had a beard, too.” And she looks at me. “A ponytail? Are you joking?” No, I did. It was only for a year or two, around 1972. And she realizes I am telling the truth. And she laughs and laughs. My father never drove me to school. It was unheard of back then, so he never got to know me that well, just as he never wore his hair in a ponytail. Back in his day men who wore their hair in a ponytail were given electroshock therapy, which made them forget what day of the week it was. Today is Monday, and I am driving my daughter past Lake Calhoun, where, back in the ponytail era, I went skinny-dipping with a woman who now is a distinguished surgeon in town. I doubt that she remembers, but I do.

  • • •

  The great American myth is the hero who leaves home to remake himself in another place: James Gatz leaves North Dakota to become Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island; Robert Jordan leaves his teaching job in Montana to fight in the Spanish Civil War; Huck Finn took a raft, Dorothy flew off in a tornado, Sister Carrie rode the train, Jack Kerouac hitched rides—and so forth—but in my experience the Cities have been quite roomy enough for a restless, impulsive person. I never felt stranded here. Sometimes I felt the pull of the roads going west, Highway 7 out of Excelsior and Clara City toward South Dakota, and Highway 212 through Chaska and Granite Falls, and Highway 12 through Litchfield and Willmar and Benson and Ortonville. And now and then, just for a glimpse of freedom, I’d drive out west late at night through the little towns and stop around 2 or 3 a.m. at a crossroads and get out of the car and walk around in the dark for a while and then head back to do my 6 a.m. radio shift. After the University I spent part of a summer in New York City, thinking that a young writer ought to live there, but Minnesota was a better place to be poor. You can go to your mother’s for a huge supper, and she’ll send you home with a big bag of vegetables from her garden.

  • • •

  When my mother was nearing the end of her ninety-seven years, what was most vivid to her was her youth, and she ventured into the shadows to commune with her dead, which was a comfort to her. At seventy I sometimes forget last week, but I clearly remember the big house on Dupont Avenue North where Corinne lived one summer when we were nineteen, and I blew smoke on her African violets to kill aphids. She and I had this idea to form a commune of writers all working away in their rooms, doors open, and when we wrote something good, we could walk into someone’s room and tell them about it. A sort of ten-year sleepover. It was a perfect idea, and we didn’t torture it with details such as Who and Where and How Much, and because it never became a reality, it never died. It still exists in my mind. If I reach ninety-seven, I may finally go live there.

  My parents were very clear that they wished to die in their old house and not in a hospital. They wanted family to be with them at the end, holding their hands and singing, “And we shall be where we should be, and we will be what we would be,” as they passed to their heavenly home. The bedroom looks out on the driveway where Dad’s Ford station wagon used to be parked, ready to leave early the next morning to drive to Idaho to visit relatives. My mother stayed up late, washing, ironing, packing, in an ecstasy of anxiety. My father changed the oil, checked tire pressures, adjusted the timing. We stood on the front lawn in the sunrise, watching him pack the car. They made a good team. He was laconic and undaunted, she was prone to excitation. We headed west on Highway 12, the rising sun to our backs, as she deliberated the perpetual question: Had she turned the oven off? And decided she had—and out onto the open prairie we went, with me sitting behind Mother, narrating the trip from the old federal writers’ guide. Now they’re buried in a little country cemetery full of aunts and uncles, grandparents, great-grandparents, and someday, I presume, cousins and siblings.

  “So how was it to grow up there, then?” they say. “Oh, you know. It could’ve been worse,” I reply. If you want to know the truth, I feel understood there. I sit down to lunch with Bill and Bob and my sister and brother whom I’ve known almost forever, and it’s a conversation you can’t have with people you just met last week. You can flash back to 1958 and the island in the river where we used to mess around, and they are right there with you. I come home among classmates and cousins and feel understood. I was not a good person. I have yelled at my children. I neglected my parents and was disloyal to loved ones. I have offended righteous people. People around here know all this about me, and yet they still smile and say hello, and so every day I feel forgiven. Ask me if it’s a good place to live, and I don’t know—that’s real estate talk—but forgiveness and understanding are a beautiful combination.

  12.

  ANGLICANS

  I was invited to sit in on a teen Bible study class at an Episcopal church and perched in the corner and paid attention to everything and was surprised at how much Bible study had changed since my Sanctified Brethren days. The Bible was hardly mentioned in an hour of free-form discussion of the young folks’ feelings about sex, school, relationship
s, parents, sex, social responsibility, and sex. Their teacher, who made a point of not teaching, had told them they were free to say anything they wanted and so they said anything. The Bible has so much in it that is more interesting than our feelings about relationships, etc., and I was sorry that the teacher was not pointing this out. It seemed rather smug to me, and I know firsthand about smugness, I am an expert. I told the teacher afterward that I had seen an interesting statistic, that the proportion of agnostics, 60 percent, is the same in the church as outside the church. I made that number up but he accepted it as the truth, and it gave him something to think about.

  The Christian faith is on a bumpy road these days, as you find out if you stand up in front of an audience and make comic reference to the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Depending on where in America you are, you sense confusion out there in the house, some people trying to remember the parable, others as uneasy about laughing at Christians as they would be if you had made a joke about morons or amputees. We one-legged morons laugh at each other all the time, but unbelievers are squeamish about it. In another twenty years, you won’t be able to tell stories about Lutherans—nobody will know what you’re talking about, it’ll be like reminiscing about the Huguenots or the Hottentots. But that is none of my business, the decline of the mainstream church, the dwindling of true fundamentalism, the rise of the theology-free Happy Gospel churches with the PowerPoint hymns about Jesus the Good Boyfriend—I go to church on Sunday because I want to be there. It’s very cheerful to be with the others who want to be there and hear the Scriptures and chant the psalm together and listen to the sermon or not—sometimes the minister tries too hard to be profound and loses us in the first two minutes and we turn our attention to the hairstyles of the people in front of us—then rise and go sailing through the Nicene Creed and go forward for communion, singing Laudate omnes gentes, and then a big closing hymn, and the pastor stands in back and tells us to go forth into the world where there are things to be done that won’t be done unless we do them, and out we go into Sunday morning, feeling mightily blessed and looking for those things.