Grandma lived on the farm with Uncle Jim and they didn’t read the paper or listen to the radio much. Uncle Jim had a crystal set in his room but I don’t recall them ever discussing politics. Presidents came and went, and the great and famous, on a stage very far away from their thoughts. (In 1961, the year before Grandma died, I made her sit down and watch John Glenn’s rocket blast into orbit, but nothing could make her believe it was true. Pictures held no truth for her, and Walter Cronkite was nobody she believed whatsoever; after all, she’d never met him.)
My dad had left the farm when he was 23 and eloped with my mother and went to work in the post office. After the war, he bought an acre of cornfield north of Minneapolis and started building us a house with money borrowed under the GI Bill of Rights. We were living in Minneapolis where big yellow streetcars with cane seats rumbled down Bloomington Avenue past our house and we rode the trolley to Como Zoo and the great glass-domed Conservatory and the old green wooden ballpark to see the Millers and to Grandpa Denham’s little stucco bungalow on Oakland Avenue under the elms overarching the green yards, the peonies and marigolds, the cast-iron lawn chairs, the bird bath, the gazing globe, the trim grass, a world of perfect order, the streets numbered and the avenues alphabetical from Aldrich, Bryant, Colfax, Dupont through Washburn, Xerxes, York, and Zenith. In my memory, my movie-star-handsome dad stands in his wool overcoat, a gray fedora on his head, smiling at the Revere movie camera in Mother’s hand as a streetcar passes in the summer of 1947. He smiles, like Gary Cooper. We children stand perfectly still in Grandpa’s yard and then we perk up and smile—someone off-camera has told us to—and like good children we do and my sister waves.
Dad dug the basement for the new house in the clay and loam, poured concrete, lay concrete block walls, put a roof over it, and we left Minneapolis and lived in the basement for five years while he framed up the house and finished it, a three-bedroom Cape Cod, white, blue shutters, from a blueprint he’d seen in Popular Home. The whine of the power saw, the smell of sawdust, the rhythm of the hammer. He worked for the Railway Mail Service, sorting mail in the mail car between St. Paul and Jamestown, N.D., going off to work in the afternoon, in overalls, with a government-issue .38 revolver in a holster, and put in a 12-hour shift, slept at the Cran Hotel in Jamestown, then boarded the eastbound for another shift.
To our Keillor cousins, we were city people and looked upon with some suspicion so we tried to win their approval and pitch in with chores, shovel cow manure, do our part, not flinch. My mother, a city girl, learned to dip a dead chicken in boiling water, rip off its feathers, take a butcher knife and gut it, without comment.
The big hurdle for me was the outhouse, sitting there and dropping your dirt into a hole and hearing it plop on other people’s and at night, if your bladder was full, feeling your way to the end of the bed and locating the chamber pot and squatting on it and doing your business. Our house that Dad built had indoor plumbing of course and this permitted great delicacy in regard to personal matters. You locked the door, ran water in the sink to camouflage other sounds, and nobody was any the wiser. It was a shock to go to the farm and sit in the old two-holer and be joined by your cousin. At first you tried to pretend nothing was happening, that you’d only come here to peruse the Sears catalog and its fine selection of sporting goods, but then events took their course, your bowels opened, a great stink was launched downward, and you were initiated into the great democracy of the latrine: WE ALL DO IT.
Living in the basement, climbing the stairs to the muddy cornfield, piles of sand and gravel, I got my first inkling that we were poor. Startling to a boy of six. Other people live in houses with carpets and antimacassars and dresser scarves and figurines and we live in a bunker in the ground. Bunker, bunkbed. How poor are we? I don’t know. We had a half-acre vegetable garden and in late summer Mother canned. In the laundry room stood a wall of shelves with rows of Ball fruit jars, filled with corn, beans, and stewed tomatoes. In early spring, Dad and I drove north to Lake Superior for smelting late at night: a bonfire on the shore near the mouth of the Lester River, a crowd of men in hip waders, and when there was a run of smelt rushing for the river to spawn, the crowd waded in with landing nets and hauled up pound after pound of the little fish and we took ours home in big milk cans and filleted and froze them, to be eaten over the summer, breaded and fried. This seemed to me to be poor people food because it was free.
One day, helping Dad bring groceries into the basement from the car, I carried two big three-gallon glass jugs of milk, one in each hand, as I’d seen Uncle Jim carry milk cans from the barn. Toted them down the back stairs and then lost my balance, pitched forward, dropped the jugs, which broke. Six gallons of milk sploshed on the concrete floor. I picked up the shards of glass, deeply ashamed, and slunk into the room I shared with my brother and lay on my bunk and sobbed into the pillow. I had wasted food. We were poor. What would happen to us now? The pillowcase was wet with my tears. Our old black cocker spaniel, Capadocia, lay at my feet. We are poor. On the other hand, I had books, a tablet and pencils, a radio, a pair of binoculars. Clean clothes.
When the garage got built, I liked to put a little piece of plywood on the floor and stand, bat in hand, and wait on the 3-and-2 pitch and swing, driving Whitey Ford’s fast-ball over the centerfield fence in Yankee Stadium to win the seventh game of the World Series for the New York Giants. I earned $100,000 a year and had bought a fine home for my family, a real showplace with chandeliers, and all my aunts and uncles were proud as punch, and I had a wife, a beautiful one but vague, faraway in the stands, cheering, waving a hanky.
I sometimes tried to help Dad with building the house, but he wasn’t a great teacher. He got disgusted if you made the same mistake twice. So I holed up in my room and read books, Richard Halliburton’s sailing expeditions to the Far East, Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, Black Beauty, Heidi. And then jumped to Main Street and Babbitt and Fitzgerald and Studs Lonigan. Writing was respected in our family. Not necessarily fiction, but literary endeavor was honored by my mother and father, who revered the King James Bible of course and enjoyed a clever turn of phrase in the newspaper. Mother followed Cedric Adams’s tales of his boyhood in Madelia in the Star. Writing was something of a black art, and there were bad characters in that line of work, drunkards, infidels, adulterers, but the power of language was respected. I was honored when my father asked me when I was 19 to write a letter for him, setting out his qualifications to be a rural mail carrier, and I did a good workmanlike job on it, though he didn’t get the position. Qualifications didn’t matter so much; it was a patronage appointment, and Dad didn’t know the right people.
My father sat at one end of the table, my mother at the other, six children, three on a side, and we passed the stewed tomatoes, the green beans, the liver and onions, and I kept wondering, Are we poor? We went up to the farm in Anoka to kill chickens, which seemed like a poor-person thing to do. The chickens ran like halfbacks through the lilac bushes and into the cornfield, but I ran most of them down and hooked them by the ankles with a wire hanger and brought them flapping and croaking back to Dad, who dispatched them with an ax on a bloody stump. I held the carcass until it stopped dripping and gave it to Mother for defeathering and evisceration. Dad said that store-bought chicken didn’t taste as good to him and Grandma said you could never be sure whether store-bought meat was properly handled. No, it’s because we’re poor. On long car trips, my mother made sandwiches on a cutting board across her lap sitting in the front seat, cheese and baloney or peanut butter and jelly. She said the prices you pay for food in restaurants are outlandish. Poor people. Up on the farm, I washed my face with Lava soap in cold water in the morning and wiped it on a towel on a roller. I collected eggs and brought them in for breakfast, fried in a black crusted skillet on a woodstove, with a thick slice of Grandma’s bread. Once I swung on a rope through the dusty air of the haymow and leaped onto a stack of bales and skidded down the side of them through the open hatch a
nd into the bull’s pen and cracked my head on his feed trough and was carried into the house and laid on the couch and Grandma put brown paper on my head. I thought I should go to the hospital but she moistened this brown paper and placed it on the contusions and said it’d make me feel better. We are poor people, I thought. We cannot afford to go to a doctor. Other people would take their children to be x-rayed after a bump on the head but in our family we put paper on them and say a prayer, Help Us Again Amen, and that’s the end of it.
I think of my mother at the sink peeling potatoes and looking out at the snowy garden and the wash frozen stiff on the clotheslines, and she is angry at my dad who has criticized what she spent for Christmas presents. She defers to him, though she works as hard as he, maybe harder. She does the laundry in a washing machine with a wringer and hangs it on the line and scrubs the floors and cooks and vacuums and in late summer she takes all the bounty of the garden and cooks it in a pressure cooker to be canned in jars. You make a mistake in the canning process and you run the risk of Clostridium botulinum, which is so deadly that an ounce could kill 100 million people. One jar of asparagus, the equivalent of a medium-range nuclear warhead. (You tap the lid with a knife and if it rings, then the seal is good and the angel of death will pass over, and if it thuds, you throw that jar away.) She puts up a hundred jars of tomatoes and a hundred quarts of corn and makes pickles and jam, all for frugality’s sake, and she doesn’t remind him of the money he spends to buy a new car every few years. She can’t mention this for fear he will turn silent, which is his weapon. Hers is weeping, and lamentation, his is walking away and getting busy with something. She was one of those women who never read fashion magazines, never updated their look, never used hairspray, just put on a scarf. One of those women who got up every morning and got the kids off to school and did the wash and every spring went at the house in a fury of soap and Lysol and scrubbed and scraped and rendered everything shining and new and yet had not much say in things in general, having been brought up to be of service and accept a rough road without complaining, women of great kindness.
My grandma had no luxuries and no expectation of any, but her children felt the gravitational pull of prosperity. They left the farm and got jobs in town and wore town clothes and street shoes and didn’t necessarily read Scripture after breakfast or kneel and pray, just a quick rote prayer over the food, because they had to be to work on time. They lived cheek-to-jowl with strangers and learned to make small talk and bought chicken at Super Valu and got a TV set and started believing Walter Cronkite. But still they thought about God all the time. A plaque hung on our dining room wall (CHRIST THE UNSEEN GUEST AT EVERY MEAL, THE SILENT LISTENER TO EVERY CONVERSATION) to remind us that we were on His Mind and after dinner we circulated the little plastic bread loaf with the Scripture verse cards and each person at the table drew a card and read a verse. We know that all things work together for good to those who love God. Chuck Berry was cruising along in his Coupe de Ville and Elvis bumping and grinding and the Beach Boys sang anthems to California, but the basic question in my mind, then and now, is What does God want me to do? I think about this every day. Or I try not to think about it and thus think even harder about it. Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy might. And love thy neighbor as thyself. I sit and ponder this with the trash culture bumping and grinding outside the window and the powerful undertow of narcissism tugging, and I believe I serve God and my neighbor by paying diligent, prayerful, and playful attention to my peculiar gifts, such as they are, and doing good work that supports the weak and lightens up the heavy. I belong to the Church of Work and Prayer. I was young in the time of hippiedom and flittery-skittery tie-dye people in flowing locks with their dreamy take on things and long yawps about illusion/reality and druggy sitar-ridden music and they were not from my church. I knew an English major drop-out who felt a holy calling to raise sheep and live like a medieval serf in a makeshift yurt while making helpless animals miserable whom he had no idea how to herd or care for. Not my church. Coke and speed and marijuana didn’t interest me for some reason and we Christians have no need of barbiturates, we are sleepy enough as it is.
My politics doesn’t come from the Sixties, it comes from my parents’ generation who stepped out of high school into the Depression, hoed corn, drove truck, pumped gas, made do, bopped around on not much dough, went off in 1942 and fought the good war and came home and enjoyed the democratic prosperity of the Fifties. Satirists portrayed them as anti-intellectuals and raging conformists in love with plastic and the color beige, but I think they were just happy they had come through so much trouble and danger and had a roof over their heads and food on the table. They were public-spirited, joiners of committees, school board stalwarts, volunteer firemen, softball coaches, Scoutmasters, Sunday School teachers, and the women—this was back before it took two people working 60-hour weeks to support a middle-class family—were ferocious do-gooders in the community, the angels of the library, the muscle behind the school bond issue, the church ladies, the surrogate mothers, organizers of festivals, tireless fund-raisers. Sometimes satirists are dead wrong. What seemed like conformity was really a low level of narcissism and no taste for flamboyant behavior: my parents and their contemporaries believed in a sort of public happiness that found full expression at Anoka High School graduation—the wave of warm buttery emotion at the playing of “Pomp and Circumstance” and the singing of the national anthem, the flashbulbs popping as the children processed in, the good feelings for teachers and school and community, even if the speaker was a dud and a windbag. The loyalty to the community was palpable.
My politics is somehow descended from the kindness of my aunts, apolitical though they were, from tireless Aunt Elsie who kept a lovely home, so clean and fragrant, her perfect Sunday dinners, her exquisite hospitality, and Aunt Ina with her collection of seven hundred sets of salt and pepper shakers, and Aunt Ruth, short and round with sweet little chins and fat creases at her wrists, like a baby’s, her plump feet in high heel pumps, the first photographer in the family, and Aunt Josephine with her well-kept garden, the handsomest woman in the family, and Aunt Bessie, the family historian and wit, and Aunt Eleanor who marshaled the big Keillor family Thanksgivings for years, an outdoorswoman who skied and kept horses and cut trees and drove around to check on her elderly neighbors almost up to the day she died, in her kitchen, fixing Thanksgiving dinner. I do not remember these Christian women as judgmental or sarcastic or authoritarian: they were the soul of kindness and their spirit points to the politics that sees to children, the sick, the poor, the wayward, the downcast, and lets the slick and the strong do for themselves.
Yes, my ancestors made a bigger impression on me than any of my contemporaries did, especially the addled ones. I’m conservative. I went to the contemporary service at church where the young minister played guitar and the kids sang, “Wherever I am, you’re near me, nobody cares for me as you do, you give me all that I need. Thank you, Lord, for helping me as you do.” And I really do prefer Rock of Ages cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee. It’s better writing, no matter what anybody says. My ancestors told me, in plain Protestant fashion, to Work, Achieve, Be Somebody, Question Authority, Don’t Be a Chip on the Tide, Be Your Own Man. The glib Sixties talk about the system being broken struck me as juvenile and silly: if water flows from the tap and the buses run and the mailman brings the mail and the newspaper lands on your porch in the morning with a fiery editorial against ignorance and corruption, the system is working okay—the rest is up to you. I could appreciate the Christian aspects of hippiedom, the communalism, the embrace of poverty, the love of the land, the tolerance, the cheery potluck suppers and the singing and barefoot dancing, the open-heartedness, but the writing—oh my God. A thin soup of mystical noodles and no salt, pages and pages of transcendent dishwater and nobody home.
My generation went from the pretentious Bob Dylan to arguing about wine and cheese and the virginity of their olive oil and the merit
s of vintage balsamic vinegars, coffee beans and designer jeans and shiatsu vs. reflexologic massage. They lived most intensely through media, were happy jargonizers, and sadly self-absorbed—they could talk for hours about a romance gone sour and pick at an ancient grudge against their father and ponder their fate until you were desperate for an excuse to leave. No, my politics comes from my parents, who believed in keeping your yard nice and paying your taxes and looking out for people in trouble. The descendants of the narcissist New Agers are the narcissist Republicans. People with too much money and too little character, all sensibility and no sense, all nostalgia and no history. It’s the Republican Party that followed its nose and swung to the right and I am standing where my people stood back when this was one country, before the deluge of delusion.
Chapter 4
ANOKA HIGH SCHOOL
IAM A CHILD of public education. My parents had six children and there was no choice but to put their trust in the Anoka public schools. They packed me off to Benson School on the day after Labor Day, 1948, with lunch money in a small brown envelope and a tablet and pencils in a pencil box and told me to keep my nose clean and do what the teacher said. Mrs. Shaver was my first grade teacher, St. Estelle, who noticed I was slow to read and kept me after school to read aloud to her as she corrected papers and made me feel I was doing this to keep her entertained, not because I was dumb. Though I was. At movies, when the text rolled down at the beginning, “Many years ago in Europe during the era known as the Dark Ages, bands of knights roamed the countryside . . .” I was lost and other kids were not.
Parents did not supervise their children’s schooling then, just as they didn’t manage our social lives—”parenting” wasn’t a verb and children didn’t have “play dates,” we just went out the door and fell into some company or other, a band of robbers, or the Confederate cavalry, or an Ojibway war party, and as for school, Mother looked at the class projects I brought home and commented on the penmanship, and she looked at the report card when Mrs. Shaver sent it home, but teachers were deferred to back then. And so, amazingly, we learned “Frankie and Johnny” in the fourth grade, a traditional ballad about a pimp and a prostitute—unthinkable now—including the lines:
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