Lake Wobegon Days

by Garrison Keillor

  * When Bertha Ingqvist, David’s mother, said one April, “I don’t believe I’ll put in a garden this year,” they knew she didn’t have long. When you no longer care about fresh tomatoes and sweet corn, then death is near, and so she died the first week of June and now she is enriching the soil up there on the hill.

  * One slow week years later, the Herald-Star carried a photo of the Lugers looking at their garden under the headline GARDENS DOING WELL, RESIDENTS SAY—SWEET CORN, TOMATOES, ON TARGET, ACCORDING TO REPORTS. I thought my targeted tomato would have made a great photo, and also the cheeseburger I bought at the Chatterbox when I was four with a dollar I stole off the kitchen counter. My father arrived just as Dorothy put the beautiful cheeseburger in front of me; he said, “You come with me,” and I said, “I’ll be there in a minute.” He dragged me away without a bite. No burger since has looked so good to me. I still miss it. Wake up nights hungry and see it.

  In Gene Autry and the Mystery of Big Mesa, a gang of desperados rode into town when Gene was away, and one named Big Pete rode his horse into Mrs. Adams’s Dry Goods Store, grabbed one end of a bolt of calico and rode away with it up the street, trailing a long flag of bright blue cloth that got longer and longer. A bad man, and yet I couldn’t get that picture out of my head, and though I knew it was wrong to tie all those sheets together the day after washday and run out the front door and tow them around the house, whooping at my horse Bob, forty feet of white sheets is quite a sight. Throwing the tomato was a great moment. It was a fabulous cheeseburger.

  “Don’t you know it’s wrong to steal?” he said. Of course, I knew. In the Bible, people who innovated tended to get smote, and that at a time when God smote hard: when He smited you stayed smitten, smiting was no slap on the wrist. Mrs. Tollerud illustrated this in Sunday School with a flannelgraph: a cloth-covered board on which she placed cloth figures and moved them around. The liberals got kicked out of Paradise, they got flooded upon, and Pharaoh, though decent in some ways, when he didn’t obey God, God made a mess of Egypt, dumping locusts, frogs, blood, lice, hail, and flies on them and then turning day to night. She took down the figure of Pharaoh the ruler and put up the figure of Pharaoh with his hands over his face. It made us think twice about striking out in new directions. But knowing right from wrong is the easy part. Knowing is not the problem.

  * In his desk, they say, was thousands in gold dust brought back from Colorado, the family fortune—all lost in the blaze, thus changing our history these past hundred years. All of us think of it often. The new house became a chicken coop later, and I wonder if the gold didn’t sit in the dirt and generations of chickens crawl under the boards and eat it. In that case, the golden yolks of our boiled eggs were truly golden and so are we now. I loved eggs. I may be worth hundreds of dollars.

  * The Red Cross gave Ralph a pin for giving the most blood during the drive that ended Memorial Day. The pin arrived from Minneapolis the first of August, and Ralph and Margaret Krebsbach went to the Herald-Star for the presentation, where Harold has the Speed-Graphic mounted for portraiture—most official presentations take place there, in front of Harold’s display of fine printing: NO TRESPASSING, HUNTERS WILL BE PROSECUTED, KEEP OUT, BEWARE OF DOG, PRIVATE. Margaret accidentally stuck Ralph when she pinned it to his shirt, and he didn’t bleed a drop. “It was only a scratch,” he said, but he didn’t feel well at all.

  SCHOOL

  School started the day after Labor Day, Tuesday, the Tuesday when my grandfather went, and in 1918 my father, and in 1948 me. It was the same day, in the same brick schoolhouse, the former New Albion Academy, now named Nelson School. The same misty painting of George Washington looked down on us all from above the blackboard, next to his closest friend, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was kind and patient and we looked to him for sympathy. Washington looked as if he had a headache. His mouth was set in a prim, pained expression of disapproval. Maybe people made fun of him for his long, frizzy hair, which resembled our teacher’s, Mrs. Meiers’, and that had soured his disposition. She said he had bad teeth—a good lesson for us to remember: to brush after every meal, up and down, thirty times. The great men held the room in their gaze, even the back corner by the windows. I bent over my desk, trying to make fat vowels sit on the line like fruit, the tails of consonants hang below, and colored the maps of English and French empires, and memorized arithmetic tables and state capitals and major exports of many lands, and when I was stumped, looked up to see George Washington’s sour look and Lincoln’s of pity and friendship, an old married couple on the wall. School, their old home, smelled of powerful floor wax and disinfectant, the smell of patriotism.

  Mine was a vintage desk with iron scrollwork on the sides, an empty inkwell on top, a shelf below, lumps of petrified gum on the underside of it and some ancient inscriptions, one from ’94 (“Lew P.”) that made me think how old I’d be in ’94 (fifty-two) and wonder who would have my place. I thought of leaving that child a message. A slip of paper stuck in a crack: “Hello. September 9, 1952. I’m in the 5th grade. It’s sunny today. We had wieners for lunch and we played pom-pom-pullaway at recess. We are studying England. I hope you are well and enjoy school. If you find this, let me know. I’m 52 years old.”

  But Bill the janitor would find it and throw it away, so I only scratched my name and the date next to Sylvester Krueger’s (’31), a distinguished person whose name also appeared on a brass plaque by the library, “In Memoriam. Greater love hath no man than that he lay down his life for his friends.”

  It was an honor to have Sylvester’s desk, a boy who probably sat and whiled away the hours with similar thoughts about Washington and Lincoln, cars, peckers, foreign lands, lunch. School was eternity, a quiet pool of imagination where we sat together and dreamed, interrupted by teaching, and thought of the boy Lindbergh (from Little Falls, a little east of us), the boy Lincoln, Wilbur and Orville, Lou Gehrig, all heroes, and most of all, I imagined Sylvester who left the room and died in France where his body was buried. Strange to think of him there, French guys mowing the grass over him and speaking French; easy to think of him here, working fractions under George Washington’s gaze.

  His mother came to school one day. Maybe it was Arbor Day, I remember we planted a tree in the memory of those who died for freedom, and I wasn’t one of the children chosen to shovel the dirt in. Bill the janitor dug the hole, and the filling honors went to the six children who were tops in school citizenship, which didn’t include me. They were lunchroom and hall monitors, flag-raisers, school patrol, and I was a skinny kid with wire-rim glasses who had to do what they said. Mrs. Krueger was a plump lady in a blue dress who put on her specs to read a few remarks off a card. I studied her carefully on account of my special relationship with her son, Sylvester. She was nervous. She licked her lips and read fast. It was hot. Some kids were fooling around and had to be shushed. “I know Sylvester would be very proud of you and glad that you remember him,” she said. The little sliver of tree was so frail; it didn’t last the spring. Bill had dug the hole in left field and the tree got stomped in a kittenball game at the All-School Picnic. Mrs. Krueger looked like a person who was lost. Mrs. Meiers walked her to the corner, where she would take McKinley Street home. I tagged along behind, studying. Mrs. Krueger seemed to have very sore feet. At the corner, she thanked Mrs. Meiers for the very nice ceremony. She said, “A person never forgets it when they lose a son, you know. To me, it’s like it was yesterday.”*

  The same day we planted the tree, our all-school picture was taken by a man with a sliver of a mustache who crouched behind his tripod and put a cloth over his head. Jim told me we could be in the picture twice—at both ends of the group—by running around back while he shot it, but I left the right end too soon and got to the left end too late, and so appeared as two slight blurs. I looked at the print and thought of Sylvester and me.

  School gave us marks every nine weeks, three marks for each subject: work, effort, and conduct. Effort was the important one, according to my m
other, because that mark showed if you had gumption and stick-to-itiveness, and effort was my poorest showing. I was high in conduct except when dared to do wrong by other boys, and then I was glad to show what I could do. Pee on the school during recess? You don’t think I would? Open the library door, yell “Boogers!” and run? Well, I showed them. I was not the one who put a big gob on the classroom doorknob during lunch though, the one that Darla Ingqvist discovered by putting her hand on it. Of all the people you’d want to see touch a giant gob, Darla was No. 1. She yanked her hand back just as Brian said, “Snot on you!” but she already knew. She couldn’t wipe it off on her dress because she wore such nice dresses so she burst into tears and tore off to the girls’ lavatory. Mrs. Meiers blamed me because I laughed. Brian, who did it, said, “That was a mean thing to do, shame on you” and I sat down on the hall floor and laughed myself silly. It was so right for Darla to be the one who got a gob in her hand. She was a jumpy, chatty little girl who liked to bring money to school and show it to everyone. Once a five-dollar bill—we never had a five-dollar bill, so all the kids crowded around to see it. That was what she wanted. She made us stand in line. It was dumb. All those dumb girls took turns holding it and saying what they would do if they had one, and then Darla said she had $400 in her savings account. “Liar, liar, pants on fire,” Brian said, but we all knew she probably did have $400. Later Brian said, “I wish I had her five dollars and she had a feather in her butt, and we’d both be tickled,” which made me feel a little better, but putting the gob on the knob, knowing that Darla was monitor and had the privilege of opening the door, that was a stroke of genius. I almost didn’t mind Mrs. Meiers making me sit in the cloakroom for an hour. I put white paste on slips of paper and put them in the pockets of Darla’s coat, hoping she’d think it was more of the same.

  It was Booger Day. When Mrs. Meiers turned her back to write her loopy letters on the board, John Potvin whispered, “Bunny boogers. Turkey tits. Panda poop,” to Paul who was unprepared for it and laughed out loud. Mrs. Meiers snatched him out of his seat and made him stand in front, facing the class, a terrible humiliation. Everyone except Darla felt embarrassment for poor Paul; only Darla looked at him and gloated; so when Paul pretended to pull a long one out of his nose, only Darla laughed, and then she stood up in front and he sat down. Nobody looked at her, because she was crying.

  On the way home, we sang with special enthusiasm,

  On top of old Smoky, two thousand feet tall,

  I shot my old teacher with a big booger ball.

  I shot her with glory, I shot her with pride.

  How could I miss her? She’s thirty feet wide.

  I liked Mrs. Meiers a lot, though, She was a plump lady with bags of fat on her arms that danced when she wrote on the board: we named them Hoppy and Bob. That gave her a good mark for friendliness in my book, whereas Miss Conway of fourth grade struck me as suspiciously thin. What was her problem? Nerves, I suppose. She bit her lips and squinted and snaked her skinny hand into her dress to shore up a strap, and she was easily startled by loud noises. Two or three times a day, Paul or Jim or Lance would let go with a book, dropping it flat for maximum whack, and yell, “Sorry, Miss Conway!” as the poor woman jerked like a fish on the line. It could be done by slamming a door or dropping the window, too, or even scraping a chair, and once a loud slam made her drop a stack of books, which gave us a double jerk. It worked better if we were very quiet before the noise. Often, the class would be so quiet, our little heads bent over our work, that she would look up and congratulate us on our excellent behavior, and when she looked back down at her book, wham! and she did the best jerk we had ever seen. There were five classes of spasms: The Jerk, The Jump, The High Jump, The Pants Jump, and The Loopdeloop, and we knew when she was prime for a big one. It was after we had put her through a hard morning workout, including several good jumps, and a noisy lunch period, and she had lectured us in her thin weepy voice, then we knew she was all wound up for the Loopdeloop. All it required was an extra effort: throwing a dictionary flat at the floor or dropping the globe, which sounded like a car crash.

  We thought about possibly driving Miss Conway to a nervous breakdown, an event we were curious about because our mothers spoke of it often. “You’re driving me to a nervous breakdown!” they’d yell, but then, to prevent one, they’d grab us and shake us silly. Miss Conway seemed a better candidate. We speculated about what a breakdown might include—some good jumps for sure, maybe a couple hundred, and talking gibberish with spit running down her chin.

  Miss Conway’s nervous breakdown was prevented by Mrs. Meiers, who got wind of it from one of the girls—Darla, I think. Mrs. Meiers sat us boys down after lunch period and said that if she heard any more loud noises from Room 4, she would keep us after school for a half hour. “Why not the girls?” Lance asked. “Because I know that you boys can accept responsibility,” Mrs. Meiers said. And that was the end of the jumps, except for one accidental jump when a leg gave way under the table that held Mr. Bugs the rabbit in his big cage. Miss Conway screamed and left the room, Mrs. Meiers stalked in, and we boys sat in Room 3 from 3:00 to 3:45 with our hands folded on our desks, and remembered that last Loopdeloop, how satisfying it was, and also how sad it was, being the last. Miss Conway had made some great jumps.

  QUESTIONS FOR CLASS DISCUSSION

  1. Can you name other American Presidents whose pictures make you feel uneasy?

  2. If you wrote a message to the child who will have your desk in thirty years, what would you write?

  3. Do you think the author should have worked harder in school?

  Yes, I should have, and also in Scouts. Einar Tingvold, our Scoutmaster, quit Scouting the year after I joined and I knew it was frustration with me that drove him out.

  Three decades later, I keep running into my failure in Scouting. I cannot identify trees, flowers, fish, or animal tracks. I know only four knots: the square, the half-hitch, the one I tie my shoelaces with, and the bowline hitch, which is useful if you’re in a pit and rescuers throw down a line, which has never happened to me.

  Every Tuesday night in the basement of the Lutheran church (the Catholics had their own troop, run by Florian Krebsbach, that met at Our Lady), Einar tried to coach us in semaphore signals, animal tracks, knots, and the Code of the Trail. He was a skinny old guy with a white crewcut and black horn-rimmed glasses; his Adam’s apple bobbed like a cork as he sat on a bench murmuring woods lore to the good Scouts who sat cross-legged around him, taking it all in. I was curious about the Adam’s apple.

  What does it look like? Like a piece of apple, some kid said; the chunk of apple that Adam ate and got original sin. I doubted that God would put a piece of apple in our throats, but the sight of Einar’s, rattling and jumping around as he talked, made me think that, apple or not, it was definitely loose in there. A person could choke on it. Einar’s even slipped to the side, did somersaults, came almost up into his mouth when he swallowed.

  Einar also had ropy spit, a fact I discovered when he got angry at us for flipping cards into a hat when we should have been practicing our semaphore signals. “You guys don’t care, do you! You really think you can sit on your duffs and let other guys do the work! Well, I don’t need you here! You can go sit someplace else as far as I’m concerned.” Some secret ingredient of his saliva made it stick to his teeth and tongue as his mouth moved, producing ropes of spit in there, long liquid stalagmites that made different formations for each word. It was very interesting. I tried to do it in front of a mirror and couldn’t, not even with a mouthful of spit.

  Why did we need to know semaphore code? Einar said it was handy for sending messages in the outdoors at a distance of up to a half-mile. “Imagine you’re camping on a hill and another troop is on another hill a half-mile away. Suddenly you need medical help. You flash a mirror at the other camp to get their attention. They train their binoculars on your camp, and meanwhile you take two shirts and tie them to sticks. Now you’re ready to send a
message, using semaphore code. This is why we need to learn this. Imagine if someone were sending you an urgent message and you couldn’t read it. Help could be delayed for hours. Someone might die as a result.”

  Einar’s answer only raised a lot of questions in my mind. (1) What hills? You’d need to have pretty high hills to be able to see a fellow Scout waving his flags a half-mile away, even with binoculars. We don’t have hills like that around here. Usually, we camp in a ravine, down near the creek so we don’t have to haul the water so far. Flags in a ravine aren’t going to do anyone any good. (2) What binoculars? None of us Scouts had a pair. Einar had one, but what good would that do if he was with us, the troop that needed urgent medical help? All he could do with his binoculars then would be to see that the other troop couldn’t see us. (3) What other troop? No other Scout troop camped around where we camped out in Tolleruds’ pasture (with its one extremely low hill). The only people to see our semaphore signals would be the Tolleruds, and probably they’d think it was just some kid waving a couple of shirts. (4) If we needed urgent help, why not get in Einar’s car and drive to the doctor’s? Einar always had his car when we went camping. That’s how we got there. Why stand around waving at a nonexistent troop on a hill that wasn’t high enough and probably misspelling words in the process (“UNGENT/SEND HEAP/I’M BADLY CURT”) when we could hop into Einar’s Studebaker?