“Those are reflectors,” a man in a parka told me. “The light is good, so we don’t need to bring in lights, anyway, thank goodness. Otherwise, we’d be even further behind than we are.” He was a makeup man. As a beautiful woman in a long black coat approached, he studied her, and when she sat down—in a canvas chair labeled “Michael”—he went over and touched up her left eyebrow with a pencil. Her coat almost concealed white running shoes and thick pink socks. Other chairs were labeled “Zena,” “Nuzo,” and “Don.” A man wearing earphones fiddled with a stack of recording gear near a pile of equipment boxes. He jumped a little when a man clapped his hands near the boom mike—a man in a blue baseball cap, faded blue jeans, white running shoes, and a gray sweater with a long red stripe down each arm. “Pay attention, folks,” this man said. “Let me give you some direction.” All the mourners stopped gabbing and listened. They wore black suits and coats, some had black hats. Most of them seemed to be young men with oiled black hair and good-sized beaks. I asked the makeup man if this was a gangster movie.
“You got it,” he said.
“Places! Places, everyone!” somebody yelled.
I watched them shoot one scene four times: The priest, who wore a pink skullcap, said, “Let us pray. Lord Jesus Christ, by the three days you lay in the tomb you made holy the graves of all those who believe in you.... Give our brother peaceful rest in this tomb,” and sprinkled the coffin with holy water, four shakes. The mourners crossed themselves, and he turned to them and said, consolingly, “It’s nice to see the family pull together in this most tragic moment,” and a moment later, as the back row of black figures began to move down the slope toward the limos on the road (drivers standing at attention beside them), the woman in the black veil threw herself grief-stricken upon the coffin and wailed, “Gino! Gino! My bambino!” On each succeeding take, the mourners crossed themselves (top, bottom, left, right) a little more smoothly, and Gino’s mom missed him more.
Before each shot, somebody yelled, “Places! Places everyone! Same shot!” and the mourners took their places, and the director said, “Rolling!”—the word relayed by outlying sentries (“Rolling!” ... “Rolling!” ... “Rolling!” ... “Rolling!”)—and then said, “Action!” and the priest prayed and sprinkled, the crowd of black coats crossed themselves, he consoled, they moved away down the slope, and she threw herself and wept. Every single time, she hit the grief right on the money: “Gino! Gino! My bambino!”
“I’m getting an awful lot of rustling when they come down through the leaves,” the sound man said. “We gotta lay down some rubber mats. ”
I was the only bystander. Everyone else had a job to do. Some people wandered around between takes, but when the man yelled, “Places!” everyone jumped to attention, even the limo drivers in the background—everyone but me. I hung around and watched some closeup takes, including two more Gino-Gino-my-bambinos, and finally, feeling definitely out of place (and it was 11:30), I hiked out past the line of limos and then past the temples and fainting stone figures to the subway terminal and caught the No. 4 express downtown. I was alone in the next-to-last car until a bunch of teen-age girls got on at 183rd. They whooped it up and talked about parties and dancing and boys all the way to 42nd. I’ve never heard girls talk as dirty as that, and after the mausoleums it sounded wonderful. I’m telling you right now, I want to be cremated, and no tombstone, either. Just take what’s left of me up to Trott Brook where my grandma and Uncle Jim are, make them scoot over, put me down in the middle, and put back the sod.
EPISCOPAL
IGOT INTO THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH one summer living in Copenhagen when I suddenly became lonely for English. I had gotten good enough in Danish to be able to say things like “Yes, thank you, I have it well to be the weather and we well shall enjoy to possess the summer here. It is delightful to me for speaking on Danish and find your wife extremely amusing,” but I missed English and often recited stuff as I hiked around that stately gray city, like Bible verses and sonnets and country songs, for the beauty of them, and one Sunday morning, hearing the bells, got dressed up and marched over to St. Alban’s, at the opposite end of Langelinie park from the statue of the Little Mermaid, near the moat and the great star-shaped medieval earthworks called Kastellet. All the tour buses stop there. The museum of the Danish Resistance is just across the lawn, and next door is the fountain of Gefion, one of the most massive and exciting fountains in the world, in which the lady, having turned her four brothers into oxen, carves out the land of Denmark with a single-bottom plow. Most Americans walk right past this magnificent fountain and hardly see it, because they are intent on finding the famous Mermaid statue, which they know from their map is nearby and which they imagine to be as big as the Statue of Liberty but which turns out to be a small damp sad person in the midst of a personality crisis. Gefion, well armored, holding her whip high, getting the job done, is more like Danish women today.
I never went to an Episcopal church before in my life, but there I was in Denmark, and when it comes to worship, the English language has always been real important to me. We didn’t speak in tongues in the Plymouth Brethren back in Minnesota, just English, same as our Lord and His Apostles, so in I went that Sunday and then every Sunday thereafter. A few Americans were there, obviously American, earnest, anxious to please, to befriend, to share, to be relevant, but most of the worshippers were Brits, including a bunch of tweed-clad couples in their early seventies who strode in like they’d just killed a fox that morning and knelt down, addressed the Lord, got the thing done and taken care of, and got up and went home to dine on beef. I liked them. They said, “Keillor, that’s a Scottish name, isn’t it?” “Uh, yes, it is.” “Mmmmmhmmm. Very good. But you’re American.” “Yes.” “Mmmmhmmm.” And that satisfied their curiosity. They were stodgy and warbly and wonderful in every way, and I walked home from mass feeling rejuvenated, whistling a Fats Waller tune, and making up words to it.
I’m slow to anger, don’t covet or lust.
No sins of pride except sometimes I really must.
Episcopalian, saving my love for you.
The theology’s easy, the liturgy too.
Just stand up and kneel down and say what the others do.
Episcopalian, saving my love for you.
Anglicanism was what J. N. Darby and the early Plymouth Brethren revolted against in 1831, for its worldliness, its lack of prophetic vision and lack of millennialist fervor for the Second Coming of Christ, its unholy union with the state, and when they pulled out of communion and became the Brethren, they took nothing Anglican with them. They left behind the Gothic architecture, the chanting and choral music, the liturgy, the ecclesiastical order, the high altar, the clerical garments, incense, candles, statuary, the kneeling and blessing, the bowing and genuflecting, and every other scrap of papist paraphernalia. At Grace & Truth Gospel Hall, on 14th Avenue South in Minneapolis, where I attended every Sunday for twenty years, the walls were white and bare, the seats plain, facing a small table in the middle with bread and wine on it. No musical instrument was allowed. Men stood up as the Spirit moved and read from Scripture or prayed impromptu prayers—the thought of reading a prayer off the page seemed weak and unmanly—or called for a hymn from the Little Flock hymnbook, which contained plain, modest doctrinally-correct verses sung to a few plain melodies and none of Protestantism’s greatest hits. Sunday-morning meeting lasted up to two hours, and the mood of it was solemn, plain, with long silences. A boy who grew up in the Brethren is an easy mark for the Episcopalians: they march into the dim cathedral chanting ancient things in their beady gowns and blowing smoke at him and next thing you know he is reading prayers out of a book.
I bless myself with a flick of the wrist.
You’d never know I was raised fundamentalist.
Episcopalian, saving my love for you.
I don’t have the manual dexterity to be a true Episcopalian, who must juggle the prayer book, hymnal, and the order of service, and sometimes a speci
al mimeographed Kyrie or Sanctus; the music sounds thin and sharp to someone brought up on the Wesleys; the bowing and kneeling are odd—in the Brethren we just clomped in and sat down, and there was no incense in the air, just cologne, and no statuary (though some of our members were less lively than others); and then if, on top of that, the sermon is about revolutionizing our awareness of homeless gay handicapped Nicaraguans, the Episcopal church is more exotic to me than anything in Scandinavia.
There’s white folks and black, and gay and morose,
Some male Anglo Saxons but we watch them pretty close.
Episcopalian, saving my love for you.
Back in Minnesota, where words like “tuna hotdish,” or “chicken,” or “Lutheran” always got a laugh and a great joke might be one about Lutherans eating tuna hotdish and feeding the rest to their chickens, “Episcopalian” was also mighty funny, especially if a Lutheran became one. To me and to my little radio congregation, a Lake Wobegonian moving to Minneapolis and turning Episcopalian was a case of social climbing straight up the hill, no doubt about it. Our clear picture of Episcopalians was of wealthy people, Yale graduates, worshipping God in extremely good taste. Episcopalian was the church in wingtips, the church of the Scotch and soda. So, when I moved to New York and walked into Holy Apostles, I was surprised to see no suits. Nobody was well dressed. A congregation of a hundred souls on lower Ninth Avenue, a church with no parking lot, which was in need of paint and the sanctuary ceiling showed water damage, but which managed (I learned the next week) to support and operate a soup kitchen that fed a thousand New Yorkers every day, more than a million to date. Black faces in the sanctuary, old people, exiles from the Midwest, the lame and the halt, divorced ladies, gay couples: a real good anthology of the faith. I felt glad to be there. When we stood for prayers, bringing slowly to mind the goodness and the poverty of our lives, the lives of others, the life to come, it brought tears to your eyes, the simple way the Episcopalians pray.
A woman stood in the aisle, to the rear, and led us in prayers, stopping after each call to leave a long silence where anybody could breathe a word or two in response—a prayer in which the people fill in the blanks. She called us to pray for the Church (help this church, God) ... for peace and justice in the world (stop the drugs, the corruption of government) ... for all those in need or trouble (for the sick and the dying) ... for all who seek God (for my family and all the Plymouth Brethren) ... for those who have died (Corinne, the people on the Iranian airliner) ... and offer our thanks. Thanks for bringing me here. Thank you.
NU ER DER JUL IGEN
ALL OUR CHRISTMAS GIFTS WERE STOLEN, Friday, December 18, about 6:00 P.M. , on the Carey bus to Kennedy, lifted by another passenger evidently. We got off at our stop, bent down and reached into the luggage compartment, and—no big black suitcase. Forty pounds of treasures. The driver shrugged (“Hey, pal, that ain’t my problem”), we ran for the plane, caught it, crossed the Atlantic and landed in Copenhagen at 8:00 A.M. feeling blue, feeling robbed, bushed, beaten. We took a cab to the apartment and slept. We walked down along Langelinie to the King’s New Market (new for a couple centuries) and looked in shop windows on Strøget. We talked to our Danish son, Morten, who had just dropped out of business school and was in high spirits. Nuts to statistics. He had applied for a job as a helper in a kindergarten. I couldn’t forget the black suitcase, the lost gifts. My Danish wife said, philosophically, “Whoever stole it is going to have a darned nice Christmas, that’s for sure.” I bought her an Italian sweatshirt, red stockings, and a big ceramic fat lady with wild red hair, head thrown back, singing a high note, like “glory, glory, hallelujah,” and then it was the 24th, the big day in Denmark and also a short one. The sun rises about 9:00, muted by clouds, and murk sets in about 3:00. Our other Danish kids, Mattias and Malene, had arrived, and Elly, my mother-in-law. We went to church at four.
The intonation of ministers is the same in Danish as in English, deep with long meaningful pauses, and the sermon, which could have been about forbearance or the seven-headed beast or the need for more comprehensive urban planning, set me to brooding over the stolen American treasures my kids would have enjoyed so much, but after we got home and lit a few candles and put dinner on the table—roast goose and pork with the skin on and red cabbage, potatoes and gravy, red Spanish wine—the suitcase faded. After dinner we sat in the living room around a solitary candle on the coffee table, except for Morten, who disappeared into the hall, where the tree stood. I forgot to mention the tree. An eight-foot spruce—no, ten-foot—hung with glass balls and strings of little red paper Danish flags and forty candles as thick as my little finger.
We five sat in the dark, and my wife recited a poem called “Peters Jul” that the kids knew so well their lips moved as she said:jeg glæder mig in denne tid;
nu falder julesneen hvid.
så ved jeg, julen kommer.
Min Far hver dag i byen går,
og nar han kommer hjem, jeg star
og ser hans store lommer.
(I become so happy this time of year, / now falls the white snow, / so I know that Christmas is coming. / Every day my dad goes into town, / and when he comes home, I stand / and see his bulging pockets.)
She recited a bunch more; then suddenly the door to our dark room opened and there stood the tree, its candles blazing, the only light in the apartment, and so brilliant and gorgeous we piled into the hall like lost hunters come on a bonfire. I could feel the heat from the candles as we stood around it. The little flames flickered, and their reflections in the glass. We took songbooks, walked around and around the tree, singing in Danish about the lille barn Jesus lying in the krybbe and the stjerne in the sky and engler singing halleluias, and we even sang “Rudolf med den Røde Tud,” and we sang “Stille Nacht” standing still. And then, as my Danes have done every Jul since they were lille born, they all joined hands and I hooked onto the end and we ran hand in hand from one room to another in the dark singing over and over a little song, “Nu er der jul igen” (Now is there Yule again, of course). From the hall into the dining room and through the living room and the bedrooms to the kitchen fragrant with goose grease and back to the dazzling tree and back into the dark, slipping and sliding over rugs and around chairs, around and around. When finally we flopped down around the tree to parcel out the presents, the black suitcase had disappeared completely.
GLAD BAGS
MARCH BEING NATIONAL FROZEN FOOD MONTH, I bought a box of Glad-Lock Heavy Duty Reclosable Freezer Bags and a Freez-ette plastic freezer dish with locking lid at Sloan’s the other day and took them home, thinking I might whomp up a couple of gallons of spaghetti sauce and freeze most of it in quart-size portions for future reference. I saute chunks of chicken in butter and garlic, dump in tomato sauce, and add mushrooms and zucchini, and serve it over spaghetti—a good piece of cuisine I call Pasta à la Pete. I cook it, I eat it, and after a couple of forkfuls I say, “It’s good, isn’t it?” Other people around the table say, “Yes, it’s good.” It’s not a dish that you need to trouble yourself to frame a major artistic compliment for—it’s just good food, that’s all. Anyway, it’s good enough, like Glad-Lock bags themselves. Made of clear plastic, they lock okay. They hold food. So I was surprised to see on the Glad-Lock Freezer Bag package “Free TWA Air Miles Inside, Save ’Em or Trade ’Em for Cash” and to discover that my purchase of twenty quart-size freezer bags had won me five free miles on TWA and a chance to win hundreds or thousands of additional miles, perhaps even “unlimited free air travel for one year.” It seemed excessive.
To find out how many bonus miles I had won, I simply rubbed the gold film off the Instant Bonus Miles Certificate inside the Glad-Lock box. It was a big relief to see that my bonus was a mere twenty free TWA miles, for a total of twenty-five for the box. Unlimited free air travel for one year is the sort of prize to turn you and your family into surly beasts and disgust your friends and ruin your children and bring your marriage crashing into a low line of tr
ees—a year that would teach you never to purchase another freezer bag in your life. You couldn’t pay me enough to accept a prize like that; I’d gladly lock myself into this office rather than face a year aboard an airline.
Whoever thought up this frequent-freezer program for Glad-Lock overlooked a better idea, and that’s a few free miles aboard a train heading for those garden spots where in a few months they’ll be hauling in bushel baskets of gorgeous stuff that would make my pasta something glorious, the Appalachian Spring of spaghettis. Twenty-five miles aboard Amtrak would take you within range of gardens where you could put Glad-Lock to good use, collecting zucchini, snap beans and limas, small red potatoes, fresh leaf lettuce, beet greens, and green tomatoes, which taste so good fried in cornmeal. Five free miles on the Lexington Avenue subway would take you to Union Square and its lavish weekend green market. Trains, not planes, are the way to travel for purposes of foraging. The train rolls along past the back yards and gardens of towns, such as the garden of our youth along the Mississippi, where in April a neighbor named Fred Peterson plowed my folks’ half-acre patch with his tractor, and we raked it and planted it in one Saturday. The dirt smelled fresh then, and after every rain and when the sun shone, too. Dirt is what I miss in the city, and one of these days I may take my Glad-Lock bags and ride up along the Hudson, stopping between here and Albany to collect soil samples. These bags, which are reclosable, would keep quarts of dirt fresh for weeks, and day after day I could take some out, spread it on white paper on my desk, and feel in touch with life. In spring, an eighteenth-floor office in Manhattan is so isolated from the main action I might as well be flying. Some clean dirt would be good to have. One could plant a desktop tomato and maintain contact with what’s happening out there.
We Are Still Married Page 21