• • •
I am a cheerful man though I don’t look it. I walk down the street and see a gloomy man in a shop window and it’s my reflection. People often ask if I am ill.
The long face I got from hearing serious gospel preaching in my youth, all about man’s wretchedness and the Last Judgment when we shall stand before God and all shall be revealed, every slimy thing I ever did, and my aunt Eleanor and aunt Elsie will be there to hear it, not a smiley feel-good message. It also comes from listening to radio shows in which voracious beings from other galaxies came up the gravel path to the little cabin where Buddy and Sis lay whimpering under the bed. I got scared and turned off the radio and never heard the happy ending, so the horror lingers still, unresolved. And then there was a mean boy in the fourth grade who told me my teeth were rotten and green and said it with such authority that I believed him. I didn’t smile so much after that.
• • •
It was a happy childhood as childhoods go. My parents were tender with each other and there was no yelling in our house, no alcohol, no looniness, some worries about money but nothing like poverty, always plenty to eat, so we were sheltered from the dark side of life. The Sanctified Brethren were strict: Separate yourself from the things of this world—only what’s done for the Lord has meaning and merit. We Brethren had been entrusted with the true Word and we must avoid any association with false doctrine, including the very nice Lutherans. (Like most separatists, the Brethren rotted from the inside out rather than outside in, dissolved into schisms, prompted by feuds between alpha males equipped with the 18-point antlers of righteous dogma. But anyway.) Theater, fiction, dance music, comedy, spectator sports, partisan politics, wining and dining with unbelievers—none of it glorified the Lord and so had no worth. Worldly entertainment was shallow, empty, without real pleasure. Nonetheless we cheerfully tiptoed around these barricades—I read the books I wanted to read and had unsanctified friends and was not reproved; my favorite uncle kept a TV in the closet and rolled it out when the coast was clear to watch NFL football on Sundays, a sin for sure; and my mother slipped across the yard to the neighbors on Monday night about the time I Love Lucy was coming on and also Saturday night for The Honeymooners. These little inconsistencies were a revelation: we respected dogma but were not ruled by it and my parents did not share the harsh black-and-white dogmatism of some of our relatives. Perhaps this was due to the scandal of their love affair: she was pregnant by Dad when they eloped back in 1936 and their families were furious with them. My mother carried the shame all her days; their wedding anniversary went uncelebrated, and when, after fifty years, she consented to a dinner in their honor, it was on one condition: immediate family only, no aunts or uncles. The scandal was a blessing: it made them kinder people, and our lives were easier for it. I was not a good boy. My mother had to call my name many times over and over before I got up from the couch, put down the book, and went to pick beans. As a small boy in Minneapolis, I once fingered a dollar from the porcelain dish where Mother kept her cash and hoofed it down the alley to a little café on East Thirty-eighth Street and ordered a hamburger. Before it arrived, my father walked in and took me into custody. Mother told him to paddle me and gave him a yardstick for the job but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. We stood in the garage, he and I, and he told me he was terribly disappointed in me, which was worse than being hit. I went through childhood without a hand being laid on me in anger nor even the threat of it. My mother simply said, quietly, “You are driving me to a nervous breakdown.” And let it go at that. We grew up snug and well-loved (though parents back then did not actually declare their love), and all of us kids did well in school. We were expected to and we did.
My parents were cheerful folks. They came of age during the Great Depression, when everyone they knew was hard-pressed and scraping to get by, when frugality was the rule, and you did not complain about your misfortunes because, hey, everyone else was in the same boat. Dad graduated from Anoka High School in 1931 and went to work for his uncle Allie, a stonemason and carpenter, then at Uncle Lew’s Pure Oil station in town. Nepotism in action. My mother sold peanut-butter cookies door-to-door in St. Paul. Money was not discussed in front of us kids. I worried that we were poor, I was ashamed of frugality, and they were not. They raised vegetables and canned the excess in glass jars. Mother darned socks and mended and patched. They bought day-old bread as a matter of course and watched the Star for department store sales and shopped around for the cheapest gasoline and slaughtered their own chickens. Dad cut our hair. Once in a while he would cry out against waste, against a thermostat turned up too high or a door left ajar, lights left on in an empty room (How can anyone walk out of a room and not turn the light off?? You kids must think I am John D. Rockefeller! You must think we are Hollywood stars! Well, we are not). But in general they kept their troubles to themselves—backaches, headaches, jittery stomachs, marital spats, ungrateful children, scarce money, disappointing vacations: Why dwell on it? Be of good courage. Into each life some rain must fall. And so what? Sew buttons on your underwear.
I was five when we drove north from our little apartment in south Minneapolis to the cornfield where Dad was building our house. There was only a basement at first, a low rectangular concrete bunker, where we lived while he framed up the walls above our heads. September 1947, just in time for school, which was a short walk away on the West River Road, the Mississippi a stone’s throw east. The fear of drowning was on Mother’s mind from the moment we arrived. Fear of sirens, people yelling, confusion, panic, and then a fireman carrying a small body (me) wrapped in a sheet. So she commanded me to never go near the river alone. But the riverbank was the Boys’ Mecca, our sacred ground. Adults did not congregate there: our stretch of river was a series of rapids, nobody kept boats there, it belonged to boys, and to stay away would’ve marked me as a feeb, a gimp, a spaz, a shrinking violet, so from the age of five I practiced disobedience. I learned evasiveness at an early age. I snuck down to the river and lied about it afterward so as not to disturb Mother’s peace of mind. Let her be cheerful and imagine that I was practicing the bowline hitch for a Boy Scout merit badge in knot-tying.
Across the road from Benson School, a little shack of a grocery store sold candy, soda pop, and sundries. Through an open door, you could see into the owner’s living room, and once, shopping for Tootsie Rolls, I heard his wife harangue him about the bleakness of their life. She said, “When are we going to get out of this dump? I can’t live like this. One of these days you’re going to wake up and find me long gone, mister.” Her bitterness was a tone I never heard at home. My parents savored their lives. We had a big social circle, all relatives—I had fifteen uncles and seventeen aunts—and we saw them regularly. Big Sunday dinners, especially in the warmer months, cousins sitting in the backyard, plates of chicken and potatoes and gravy on their laps, glasses of grape Kool-Aid. My mother’s family and my father’s were on opposite sides of a bitter schism that split the Brethren—the Boothites versus the Amesians—over a personal rivalry between preachers that was cloaked in doctrinal niceties, and yet we mingled and enjoyed each other and the grown-ups kept their bad feelings to themselves.
Mother was shy outside of her own family but Dad liked to make small talk with clerks, salespeople, waitresses: How’re you doing today? Good. Coffee? Thank you. I believe I will. Black. No sugar. I’m sweet enough as it is. Looks like we’re finally getting spring. We can use the rain, that’s for sure. Boy, that apple pie looks good. You wouldn’t happen to have some cheese with that, would you? Apple pie without the cheese is like a hug without the squeeze. As a little kid, I could see how the old waitress chippered up at his cheery greeting, and how small talk made life more graceful, all the little chirps and sighs and murmurs and birdsong that are the roots of language and that when you learn a new language, this is what they can’t teach you: What do you say to the guy at the newsstand in Copenhagen, other than “I would like a copy of
Politiken”? And American small talk is, almost inevitably, cheery.
I think about the glum poetry I wrote in teenage years (“My life is an owl with a broken wing / flying through pitch-black night / toward a spruce tree he remembers / that was chopped down last week”) at a time when fortune was smiling at me and I was looking down at my shoes. The goodness of a neighbor lady, Helen, my confidante. The editor who let me write sports. Mother’s Christmas that got more and more glimmery. My dad, who cut my hair in the basement, on a stool, bedsheet pinned around my neck, snip-snip-snipping, shaving, trimming, one hand holding my head still, his fingers in my hair: Why did I find this embarrassing—evidence of poverty—and not see it as the loving office that it was?
I got kicked out of ninth-grade shop class for talking after flunking the unit on sheet metal—just as I had flunked ball-peen hammer, flunked Skilsaw, even flunked plywood. Mr. Buehler was irked at me for talking and also for violating his oft-repeated rule Never sit down on a workbench, which I did and got acid on my pants that ate big holes in them over the course of the afternoon so you could see my underwear. He said, “As long as you talk all the time, we’re going to move you to Miss Person’s speech class,” so I was kicked up to speech. In shop, I was a loser, and in speech, Miss LaVona Person beamed at me from the back of the room when I stood up to speak and so I kept my eyes on her, ignoring the smirking and eye-rolling of classmates in front of me, and I spoke with pleasure. To get kicked out of sheet metal and be punished by exposure to Miss Person’s beneficent smile was staggering good luck.
I left Anoka High and trotted off to the University of Minnesota, ten miles south of my house as the crow flies, and landed in three excellent classes: Maggie Forbes’s Latin Reading: Intermediate, Richard Cody’s English Composition: The Essay, and Asher Christiansen’s American Government. Three teachers who each seemed fully engaged and not merely passing the time. That fall I strolled into the student union and got a job as a newscaster on WMMR, just by asking for it. No experience, just bald-faced confidence.
• • •
I did a daily fifteen-minute noontime newscast, edited with great care from the AP teletype, yellow paper marked up with ballpoint, paragraphs snipped, rearranged, taped together, delivered in an authoritative Edward R. Murrow voice, and in the spring the WMMR engineer made a startling discovery. The transmitter had been out of commission all along—I had been reading the news to myself and the studio walls and nobody else. Somehow this did not discourage me. I was eighteen, invincible, working my way through college, and that spring the campus literary magazine published a poem of mine, and I was hired by a YMCA camp north of Duluth, a sweet summer of tennis doubles and singing “Kumbaya” around a bonfire and canoe trips down the St. Louis River. The key to cheerfulness, I discovered that summer, was forward movement. For me, the calm contemplative life equals melancholy. Keep knocking. If the door doesn’t open, move on. Somewhere there’s a place for you and you will know it when you get there.
• • •
And now, all these years later, here I am, in a house on a hill overlooking the Mississippi, feeling cheerful even though there is ice on the bathroom window and the floor is freezing cold thanks to Nanook of the North, who is offended by the waste of precious natural resources. I crank up the thermostat to a temperature that will support human life and head for the shower. Down the hill, the double row of lights on the High Bridge—a popular spot for suicides if you mean to get the job done. But this morning there are no flashing blue lights; today the desperate have decided to wait and see what develops. It’s Sunday. On Friday I was at the Mayo Clinic, checking out the short list of boring ailments (glaucoma, enlarged prostate, atrial fibrillation, and risk of stroke), and came away with good grades. I feel good, thinking maybe I have a few years before the light dims or the heart blows up, time enough to do something noteworthy.
Madame appears in her thermalwear and says, “The thermostat was set at eighty-five. Do we have elderly people coming for breakfast?” I explain that I had found the thermostat set at 62—“Is this Poland, 1938? Will we start busting up the furniture for fuel?” She says that a house need not replicate the uterus, I say that a room that is toasty warm helps to ward off depression that could cripple a writer for weeks so that he can no longer provide for his family. So we compromise at 65. I am pleased that she looked at my naked body with some interest and clicked her tongue, which is code for you-know-what.
I step into the shower, gingerly, recalling men my age who slipped on wet tile and jarred a vertebra and snapped a muscle into spasm and began a long journey through chiropractic and holistic herbs and acupuncture and then orthopedic surgery and the Vicodin Highway. I ease myself under the warm cascade, into the sacred sweat lodge of my Anglo people. We have a shower gizmo that lets you regulate water temperature precisely, not like our old shower knob, which, in one sixteenth-inch turn, went directly from arctic waterfall to fiery brimstone. With this one, you set the control to, say, 101.5 degrees, and water of that precise temperature shoots on you, the spray adjusted to Needle Sharp or Scattered Showers or Wistful Mist. It is such an improvement over the old days. (And so much of my cheerfulness is due to technological progress and the magical gifts created by methodical people—the marvelous iPhone, GPS, Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, heated car seats.) I love to stand and let the flow of hot water on the shoulders and backside relax the muscles and also the sphincter that has been trained since childhood—Don’t pee in the bathtub—and it opens and there is the pure animal pleasure of urinating in a waterfall. Madame is disgusted by the thought of this. She says, “You don’t do that, do you?” I say, “No, of course not.” And of course I do. What sort of a man steps out of the shower to take a leak?
I dry off and put on manly deodorant and black underwear and a white shirt and a suit and come downstairs and look out at the snowy backyard and the Mississippi valley beyond.
I loved winter as a boy because parents didn’t come looking for us when it was very cold; you put on a jacket and slipped out the door and there was a moment of danger when someone might say “Where do you think you are going?” and when nobody did, you were free and clear. No phone in your pocket, no pager, no chains around your ankles. You headed for the river, laced up your skates, opened your jacket and caught the wind and let it blow you south at high speed. Only kids were around; grown-ups stayed in. Nobody told you it wasn’t a good idea to do what you were doing. With spring came more surveillance, but from December to April, a kid was free as could be.
Winter is a chastening time in the north. It scours the soul. Your natural meanness, the urge to bash your enemies and steal their meat, dissipates. I pour honey on my pancakes, the sweetness of life. I write a check to Episcopal Relief, not even knowing what relief Episcopalians need (laxatives? bicarbonate of soda?) and I e-mail a stranger that, yes, I will write a limerick for his pastor’s birthday (A Boston pastor named Manke / Avoided the hanky and panky / But during full moons / She sang ribald tunes / And cheered for the New York Yankees). I pour a cup of coffee, open the paper. While I slept, men and women compiled some of what is known about yesterday, and today there is nothing important. That’s the beauty of the newspaper. Radio and TV are so ponderous, they make the weather forecast sound like the Magna Carta. The Internet can suck you in and you wind up watching YouTube videos of cats sitting on toilets. But with a newspaper one glance tells you: nothing new—negotiations continue, experts disagree, prospects remain uncertain, the rich get richer—so file yesterday away and let’s deal with today. The coffee is dark and suggestive, my skin is clean, the obituary page is about other people.
In good spirits, I go to church to hear the Scripture, chant the psalm, join the prayers, and recite the creed whether today I believe most of it or only some. I arrive late, just in time for the prayer of contrition, and there’s not room in the pew for a tall man to kneel comfortably. I have to twist into position, which reminds me of trying to
make love in the backseat of an old VW. Her name was Sarah; she was tall too. She wore black leggings and fell over trying to remove them, bonked her head, had a laughing fit, which let the air out of the moment. “It’s all right,” she said, apropos of I didn’t know what. We sat and kissed and made out and a car pulled up next to us, the radio playing a call-in show, people moaning about taxes, and that pretty much killed the moment. The homily this morning is on the Prodigal Son, his callow faithlessness, the joyful love of his father, the bitterness of the righteous brother. Like the P.S., I’ve wasted my inheritance in far countries, tried to buy friendship, been disloyal as most of us narcissists tend to be, but have not been reduced to eating pig food. Not yet, thank you. Nor have I bilked elderly widows of their life savings. Nor have I asked a lover to help me kill a spouse, as Clytemnestra did when her husband, Agamemnon, returned from the Trojan War, Perfectly nice people are capable of heinous deeds. That’s what so much of great literature is about. Innocence is not what God expects of us. I used to think He expects us to find a way to self-mortification, perhaps martyrdom. Now I think He wants us to be grateful: in other words, cheerful. Lighten up.
After church, I come home and look through pictures. Mother spent years sorting through her boxes of pictures and somehow the collection got larger and larger, and now I’ve inherited my share of her archive. A picture of Grandpa Denham hoeing strawberry beds in a large garden, looking up at the camera and grinning. I remember him as a fretful old man, fussing, looking pained, but here he is grinning, and why? Because this is Annabel Wright’s garden in Denmark township, near Hastings. Grandpa, a widower for three years, is courting this tall cheery woman and on weekends he takes a Soo Line train out to Hastings and she picks him up in her electric and he hoes her garden, grinning at the lady holding the camera, the lady he aims to marry. That is romance on Grandpa’s face. He needs someone to hold hands with. He is anxious to climb into bed with the photographer. The look on his face says, You will not regret this, I can assure you of that. A man who fathers twelve children is a man of enthusiasm. The picture is a revelation.
The Keillor Reader Page 41