Lake Wobegon Days

by Garrison Keillor

  The council’s annual debate on snowplowing and the use of street salt came in October. Item 3, Line 2, Additional Expenditures; Salt: $287.38. The War of the Roses. Ladies of the Garden Club were present as were some gentlemen who own ancient cars, to cry out against salting the streets to melt the ice. Salt eats car bodies, it kills grass and flowers. Salt the street, then it snows again, Bud plows, and the blade throws the salt on your lawn, and your roses gasp and shudder in their deep sleep and give up the ghost. Ladies speak against the salt holocaust, and then Florian stands up and says a few words about his ’66 Chevy. Forty-two thousand miles on her—he has two doormats glued to his garage floor where, when the car is parked, they’re in place to wipe your feet on before you climb in—she’s like new all over, not a spot of rust. Salt will destroy this car as surely as if you took a hammer to it. Ella Anderson speaks up for tulips. Then Mrs. Langen in behalf of the cemetery, where the dead rest in their pleasant garden, attended by lovely plants which speak to us of the promise of resurrection and eternal life. Salt will turn the cemetery into a dump. When this happens, she thinks she will move elsewhere. There is no need for salt, it is simply a lazy man’s scheme for getting out of snowplowing—and all eyes turn to Bud, the czar of salt, and once again Line 2 is defeated on a voice vote.

  This year, Bud didn’t go. Eloise wouldn’t let him. His blood pressure has been up, and the doctor took him off salt last spring, and she was afraid the annual salt talk would make blood come out his eyeballs. Bud has said his piece on salt many times and it’s like talking to a stone wall. Plowing cannot remove ice. Sand can’t do the job alone. You need salt. Otherwise, you come to January and old people are trapped at home as surely as if you nailed the doors shut, sidewalks are deadly, streets are sheer suicide, and he (Bud) just hopes that when someone goes sailing off an icy road into a tree, that it is someone from the Garden Club and that, in the last moment before her body is hurled through the broken windshield like meat into a grinder, she thinks about the importance of road maintenance.

  Mayor Clint Bunsen sat through an hour of argument, trying to keep it from veering off into greener pastures. “I’m opposed to salt, too,” said old Mr. Diener, “but I don’t think it’s the greatest danger we face here—which is (and I think everyone knows it): what is going on now in our schools. The other day—” and Clint no sooner put out that fire when Mrs. Langen got going on the need for a War Memorial. She knew for a fact that the Army was giving away old artillery pieces for use as monuments, and why the council couldn’t get one, she had no idea—Salt was too mundane for these philosophers, they wanted to get at the big issues. “Excuse me,” he kept saying, “but the motion on the floor right now is to spend money on salt.”

  He thought about the legislature in St. Paul. People have told him he should run. Senators sit in big armchairs at mahogany desks and bat around millions of dollars. The councilmen sit on folding chairs behind a folding table and listen to endless discussion of $287.38. Mr. Diener suggests that the salt money could be donated for cancer research instead; this terrible disease rages through the land, killing young and old alike including some dear friends of his whom he recalls with tears in his eyes, and though $287.38 may not seem like much, he quotes a poem (“For want of a nail, the shoe was lost”) to show that little things may be crucial.

  They voted 4-1 against salt, Clint being the one in favor. Councilman Diener, nephew of Mr. Diener, moved that in the interest of avoiding bitterness and rancor they make the vote unanimous. They voted 3-1 for unanimity, Councilman Bauser abstaining.*

  In Minneapolis, a fleet of orange snow plows and salt trucks moved out of the city truckyard at three A.M. Thanksgiving morning. The snow had stopped and the wind let up. State plows were out on the highways, a string of flashing blue lights moved along I-94 north from downtown along the river. The city crews started downtown, clearing the streets and salting them and loading snow into dump trucks. When Christine stirred at seven, Sixth Street was black and dry in front of the Dyckman Hotel, though she didn’t know it. On the bedside table was a card advertising the Thanksgiving buffet at the Dyckman’s Chateau de Paris restaurant. A happy family sat at a gleaming table admiring the huge turkey as a friendly waiter hovered overhead. The tablecloth was snowy white, no spills. The children were handsome and beautifully dressed. Candles glowed. All you could eat for $12.95. Wine from the Chateau cellar. Flaming desserts. Arturo and His Boulevard Violins. Keith and the children were asleep. Christine eased out of bed and into the bathroom and ran a hot bath. A telephone hung on the wall. She called home. “It doesn’t look like we’ll make it,” she said. “It looks like we’ll be up on Friday.”

  She called Chip in St. Paul and Corinne in Edina, and they both said, Fine, dinner at the hotel sounded good. Meet at ten for brunch, take a walk, go to a movie, eat dinner at five.

  That was the plan until the others drove downtown and noticed that the streets were really in pretty good shape. They had gone to bed hearing dire warnings on WCCO—“No travel advised”—and woke up to hear “No unnecessary travel advised,” but now WCCO, the Good Neighbor to the Great Northwest, was sounding less dogmatic about it, and Charlie Johnson was taking calls on “Party Line” from listeners who advanced their own views of weather conditions, more liberal than the official line. “How does it look out there?” he asked. “Not so bad, Charlie. Pretty good. Wind’s died down, and the plow went by about an hour ago.” He pointed out that the weather bureau still advised no unnecessary travel. “Well, she looks pretty good here,” they said. “I think we’re going to go.”

  The Ingqvist children met in the hotel lobby at ten and decided they would feel bad spending Thanksgiving there with the roads looking good. Corinne said, “The folks listen to ’CCO. They’d never say so but they’d feel terrible if they knew that we could’ve come and just didn’t. You know Mom. She’s crazy about holidays. I’ll bet she’s got the turkey in the oven already and she’s already got her pies out of the freezer.”

  “Think we should call?” Keith asked.

  “Naw,” said Chip. “Let’s surprise them.”

  As it turned out, Virginia did have her pies out of the freezer, but they were Swanson’s frozen chicken pot pies. At one o’clock, she was sliding them into a 450-degree oven when Hjalmar yelled, “Guess what?”

  She had no idea. Something on television?

  “They’re here.”

  “Who? Is this a joke?” Then she heard them coming through the door. It was them all right. The grandchildren tore in, and there were coats to be taken off and boots, and hugs and kisses all around, and in all the pandemonium, it took the children awhile to notice that something was different. The house smelled different. It didn’t smell like Thanksgiving; it smelled like room freshener.

  Christine went back to the kitchen to help her mother make coffee. She said, “Were you thinking we wouldn’t make it?” Her mother ran water in the teakettle and got the coffee down from the cupboard. “You know,” she said, “there’s a recipe for macaroni and cheese I’ve always been meaning to try. It’s the one where you boil up about three pounds of macaroni, and then you grate cheese on it. It only takes about ten minutes.”

  Barbara Ann Bunsen and her husband Bill pulled into the Bunsen driveway about one-thirty. “We made love,” she explained to her mother. “Otherwise we would’ve been here earlier.”

  “Well, it certainly is good for your complexion,” said her mother.

  Bill had a new mustache that did not quite fill his upper lip. He held a casserole of refried beans that smelled of garlic. He took his time wiping his feet, not sure where he should go from the doormat (“Welcome”)—to the kitchen?—An easy chair? Stand and talk for a while, then sit down? “Come on in, make yourself at home,” said Clarence. “Duane!”

  Arlene snapped on the oven light where the bird sat, dark golden in its pan, glittering, and snapped it off.

  “That,” she said, “is my twenty-eighth Thanksgiving turkey.”

/>   “It’s perfect.”

  “It’s a turkey anyway. I kind of lost interest after the tenth.”

  “I like your glasses.”

  “Thank you.”

  They looked at each other. Barbara Ann wore blue jeans and an embroidered blue shirt. She was letting her dark brown hair grow long again. Arlene’s had dramatic gray streaks and she didn’t know what to do with it, or with her new glasses, only two weeks old: she took them off. Clear plastic frames, the only pair on the rack that didn’t look ludicrous on her, meanwhile Clifford handed her one after another, each worse than the others. “These are quite attractive,” he said. “These are real popular this year.” Cat’s-eyes with rhinestones, goggles, granny specs. Why be picky at your age? he seemed to be saying.

  “Hi, Mama.”

  They hugged each other.

  “I love you,” they said. “I love you.”

  “So,” said Clarence, sinking into the couch. Bill had sat in Clarence’s chair. “How’s that chair? Comfortable for you? What you been doing with yourself?” Then he remembered: drinks. Of course. “A drink!” he said. “You care for a drink?”

  “Sure. What do you have?”

  Clarence wasn’t sure. Some bottles down the basement in an old library bookcase. Did it matter? “How about brandy?” he said. He thought he could make up one of those. “Fine.”

  Bill crossed his legs and tried to look comfortable. It was one-thirty. Four, five hours to go. Duane stuck his head in and saw him. “Oh, hi,” he said and disappeared.

  At the in-laws’, Bill felt as if he had walked into the wrong class, medieval history instead of civics which he had studied for, and everyone but him knew the right answers. Names, dates, stories of which they only used the punch line (“I didn’t know that was your horse!” “Svensk”), obscure references. If his wife had been offered a brandy, she’d say, “Just up to the first bird,” referring to a childhood tumbler with four painted chickens down the side. The whole town is like this, he thought. A cult.

  Duane didn’t understand why he couldn’t invite a friend of his to Thanksgiving, someone he could talk to. The answer was, “Because they have their own families.”

  “They see their families all the time. Maybe they’d like to get away once in a while.”

  “Some other time.”

  “But—”

  “No.”

  Everything in the kitchen was the same except the mixer was moved to the counter by the stove. Barbara Ann found, to her not very great surprise, that she knew it by heart; she got the colander out and rinsed strawberries; the meat platter was on top of the fridge, the gravy boat down behind the cereal, the sieve was nesting in the mixing bowls. She got out the big bowl, moved the mixer back to its old home by the toaster, and was about to mash the potatoes when, on an impulse, she opened the small cupboard high over the sink. There were the little china Pilgrims, their log cabin, two pine trees, and one surviving Indian who looked like Uncle Stan. The smoke was broken off the cabin chimney where she had dropped it while setting the table eighteen years ago. Four people at that dinner were now dead: Grandpa B., Ryman and Monie, Aunt Faith. Grandpa sat on the couch and took her for a ride on a horse on his knee: “Up the hill—clop, clop, clop—and down the hill—clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop—and across the pasture, jiggety-jiggety-jig.” When she broke off the smoke, the Pilgrims had no fire, they sat around eating sandwiches and devilled eggs. Her father’s table grace was unchanged in her lifetime; it was: “Dear Heavenly Father, bless this food to our bodies and watch over all Thy children as we gather once again to give thanks for Thy love and Thy many gifts. Amen.” Still, she thought she would try to steer him away from bacon and toward yogurt.

  * Father Emil: “He went to St. Clement’s and appeared to be okay but then he went to Minneapolis and fell in with a liberal crowd and got assigned to Holy Childhood in Golden Valley where they call God Mother and play guitars and he preaches about nutrition and stuff. I’m not sure but I believe that’s the parish where some people got up a petition demanding that Father Todd do his share of babysitting so now he puts in two Sundays a year in the crib room. I believe that he is a chaplain at the Excelsior Amusement Park, too.”

  * “Short memory makes everything more entertaining, even weather. Four definite seasons every year, four big surprises. People talk about weather most of the time, usually like children. ’Smell that! It’s spring!’ Then, ’Jeez, it’s a hot one.’ Then, ’Looka those leaves, wouldja.’ Each change wipes the slate clean, so when it snows, they look out the window and say, ’Well, heaven’s sake. Look at that, willya.’ People are easily amused here.” (Up from Minnesota, Whyte; Spartan, 1964.)

  * Amemorable council meeting was that of 5/16/62 to discuss a motion to hold a special election to vote on a bond issue to repair sidewalks and install new streetlights. It was the late Leo Mueller who suggested that with a little more inner light (“Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet”), fewer people would need assistance walking home. He hinted that it was Lutherans who were walking into trees. It was the late Mr. Osterberg who said, “Men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil. John 3:19,” and “Let the lower lights be burning, cast a gleam across the wave,” and, in defense of sidewalk repair, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his path straight.” “Wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction,” said Leo’s friend, Mr. Luger, pointing out that our earthly pathway is not meant to be easy. Hjalmar Ingqvist, then the mayor, asked the speakers to please limit themselves to pertinent argument and be brief, and they all turned on him. Louie reminded him of Christ’s admonition in the Sermon on the Mount, “When they bring you unto magistrates and powers, take ye no thought how or what thing ye shall answer, or what ye shall say. For the Holy Ghost shall teach you in the same hour what ye ought to say.” What seemed “pertinent” to Hjalmar was not necessarily pertinent to the Holy Ghost who was leading them, and should one be brief where truth was at stake? The discussion began to range widely in the field of personal morals. At ten o’clock, Hjalmar banged his gavel, said he was tired, and moved for adjournment, but all he got was an uproar. How could he think of sleep at a time like this? Now was the time for wakefulness. People cited the watchman who slept, the sleeping apostles, the parable of the wheat and the tares, until Hjalmar said, “I’m going home to bed. Turn out the lights before you leave.” He didn’t run for reelection. “Politics brings you into contact with all the people you’d give anything to avoid,” he said. “I’m staying home.”

  WINTER

  When I was fifteen, a girl I wrote three poems for invited me to Christmas Eve so her parents could see that I wasn’t as bad as many people said, and after a big meatball supper and a long thoughtful period between her dad and me as she and her mom cleared the dishes when he asked me what I intended to do with myself, we went to the ten o’clock candlelight service at Lake Wobegon Lutheran. My mind wasn’t on Christmas. I was thinking about her. She had never seen the poems because they were too personal, so she didn’t know how much I loved her.

  The lights went out, and the children’s choir began its slow march up the aisle, holding candles and singing “Hjemmet paa Prairien” (“Home on the Prairie”)—“To our home on the prairie, sweet Jesus has come. Born in a stable, he blesses his own. Though humble our houses and fortunes may be, I love my dear Savior who smiles on me”—and in the dark, the thin sweet voices and illuminated faces passing by, people began to weep. The song, the smell of pine boughs, the darkness, released the tears they evidently had held back for a very long time. Her mother wept, her father who had given me stony looks for hours bent down and put his face in his hands, her lovely self drew out a hanky and held it to her eyes, and I too tried to cry—I wanted to cry right along with her and maybe slip my arm around her shoulders—and I couldn’t. I took out my handkerchief, thinking it would get me started, and blew my nose, but there was nothing there.

  I only cried later, after I walked her home. We
stood on her steps, she opened the door, I leaned toward her for one kiss, and she turned and said, “I hate to say this but you are one of the coldest people I ever met.” I cried at home, in bed, in the dark. Turned my face to the wall and felt hot tears trickle down my face. Then woke up and it was Christmas morning.