Now an older guy, I’ve gotten more moist and when the decorations go up over Main Street from Ralph’s north to the mercantile, I walk down alone to look at them, they are so beautiful—even old guys stand in wonder and are transported back to childhood, though of course these are the same decorations as when we were kids so it doesn’t take much imagination. The six-foot plywood star with one hundred Christmas bulbs, twenty on each point, was built by Mr. Scheffelmacher’s shop class in 1956; I flunked the quiz on electricity and didn’t get to work on it. I sanded the edges a little, though I had flunked wood too. Later, I flunked the ballpeen hammer and was kicked out of shop and into speech class—Mr. Scheffelmacher said, “All you do is talk, talk, talk, so you might as well learn how.” I begged him to let me stay in shop, which was getting into sheet metal and about to make flour scoops, but he said, “You couldn’t even pass wood. You couldn’t even make a decent birdhouse!” and he was right. My birdhouse leaked, and the birds were so mad about it, when I tried to caulk the roof, they attacked me, Mr. and Mrs. Bluebird. So I dragged myself into speech and had to make up the work I had missed: five speeches in one week: humorous, persuasive, extemporaneous, impromptu, and reflective, and suddenly, talking, which had been easy for me at the shop bench, became impossible. I dragged my feet to the front of the room, afraid my loafers would flap (they had been my brother’s), and stood there, a ridiculous person six-feet-three and a hundred fifty pounds, trying to keep my jaw slack as I had practiced in a mirror to make up for a small chin, and mumbled and got hot across the eyes and had to say, “Anyway, as I started to say….” which Miss Perkovich marked you down for three points for because “Anyway” showed disorganization, so I failed speech, too, but speech was the end of the line—if you couldn’t speak, where could you go? To reading? I sat in speech and drew stick men hanging on the gallows, listening to Chip Ingqvist’s reflective, entitled “A Christmas Memory,” which was about his dear old aunt whom he visited every Christmas, bringing sugar cookies, and was so good he did it twice in class and again for school assembly two weeks after Christmas and then in the district speech tournament, the regional, and the state, and finished first runner-up in the reflective division, and yet it always sounded so sincere as if he had just thought of it—for example, when he said, “And oh! the light in her eyes was worth far more to me than anything money could buy,” a tear came to his voice, his eyes lit up like vacuum tubes and his right hand made a nice clutching gesture over his heart on his terrific brown V-neck sweater, which I mention because I felt that good clothes gave him self-confidence, just as the clothing ads said and that I might be sincere like him if instead of an annual Christmas sweater I got a regular supply. Anyway, Christmas decorations sure bring back a lot of memories for me.
Depending on your angle, the stars seem to lead the traveler toward the Sidetrack Tap, where the old guys sit and lose some memory capacity with a glass of peppermint schnapps, which Wally knows how to keep adding to so they can tell the old lady they only had one. After one of those continuous drinks, they try not to look at the bubble lights on the little aluminum tree on the back bar. Bud is there, who gets a twinge in his thighs around Christmas, remembering the year the ladder went out from under him as he was hanging decorations, and he slid down the telephone pole, which was somewhat smoother after he slid down than before. In addition to the large star, you see smaller ones that look like starfish, and stubby candles, and three wise men who in their wonder and adoration appear a little stupid, all made by shop classes on a jigsaw, and angels that, if you look at them a certain way, look like clouds. The manger stands in front of Our Lady church, the figures (imported from Chicago) so lifelike, it gives you the chills to see them outdoors—it’s so cold, they should take their flight to Egypt! The municipal Christmas tree stands in front of the Statue of the Unknown Norwegian who seems to be reaching out to straighten it. It leans slightly toward the south, away from the wind.
One bitter cold night, a certain person stepped out of the Sidetrack Tap and crossed the street under the clear starry sky toward the gay lights of the municipal tree and noticed that he needed to take a leak. It was three blocks to home, and the cold had suddenly shrunk his bladder, so he danced over toward the Unknown and picked out a spot in the snow in the dark behind the tree where nobody would see him.
It was an enormous relief at first, of course, like coming up for air after a long submersion, but it also made him leery to be so exposed right out on Main Street. So many dark windows where someone could be watching, and what if a car came along? They’d know what was up. Him, profaning a monument to the Norwegian people. “I should stop—right now!” he thought. His capacity, though: it was amazing! Like a horse. Gallons, already, and it didn’t feel like he could put the cork back in. Then he saw the headlights. Only for a moment, then the car turned the other way, but in that moment he hopped six feet to one side and stood in shock until the taillights disappeared, and only then did he hear the hiss of liquid on the hot bulb and look and see what he was doing. He was peeing on the tree! Pissing on Christmas! Then the bulb burst. Pop!
“Oh God, what a pig I am!” he thought. He expected the big spruce to fall on him and crush him. Pinned under the tree, found the next morning, frozen to death with his thing in his hand. The shame to his family. The degradation of it. Finally he was done (you pig!). There was a stain in the snow as big as a bathtub, and another one where he had stood before. He dumped handfuls of clean snow on them, but it turned yellow. Then he walked home, got a snow shovel, came back, and carried his mess, shovel by shovel, across the street to the side of the Sidetrack Tap, and brought back shovels of clean snow to fill in. He smoothed it over and went home to bed.
It was not such a happy holiday for him for the recollection of what he had done (pig), which if any of his children had done it he would have given them holy hell. He bought them wonderful presents that year and a gold watch for his wife, and burned when they said what a great guy he was, and it wasn’t until January after the tree came down that he started to feel like he could drop in at the Sidetrack and relax with a couple of beers.
We get a little snow, then a few inches, then another inch or two, and sometimes we get a ton. The official snow gauge is a Sherwin-Williams paint can stuck to the table behind the town garage, with the famous Sherwin-Williams globe and red paint spilling over the Arctic icecap. When snow is up to the top of the world, then there is a ton of snow. Bud doesn’t keep track of the amount beyond that point because once there is that much snow, more doesn’t matter a lot. After the ton falls, we build a sled run on Adams Hill, behind the school, with high snow embankments on the turns to keep our sleds on the track at the thrilling high speeds we reach once the track is sprayed with water and freezes. Everyone goes at least once, even Muriel. Up at the Pee Tree, you flop on your belly on the sled and push off, down an almost straight drop of twenty feet and fast into a right-hand turn, then hard left, then you see the tree. It is in the middle of the track and will bash your brains out unless you do something. Before you can, you’re in the third turn, centrifugal force having carried you safely around the tree, and then you come to the jump where some cookies are lost, and the long swooping curve under the swings, and you coast to a stop. You stand up and look down and see that you’ve almost worn the toes off your boots. You had the brakes on and you didn’t notice.
At the swimming beach, the volunteer firemen have flooded the ice to make a glass sheet and hung colored lights in a V from the warming house to the pole on the diving dock. The warming house is open, the ancient former chickenhouse towed across the ice in 1937 from Jensens’ when he gave up poultry after some exploded from a rich diet that made their eggs too big. When Bud fires up the cast-iron Providence wood stove, a faint recollection of chickens emanates from the floor. The stove stands in the middle, the floor chopped up around it where decades of skaters stepped up and down to get feeling back in their feet, and the benches run around the walls, which are inscribed
with old thoughts of romance, some of them shocking to a child: news that Mother or Dad, instead of getting down to business and having you, was skylarking around, planting big wet smackers (XXXXX) on a stranger who if he or she had hooked up with her or him you would not be yourself but some other kid. This dismal prospect from the past makes a child stop and think, but then—what can you do?—you lace up and teeter down the plywood ramp and take your first glide of the season. It’s a clear night, the sky is full of stars and the brilliant V points you out toward the dark, the very place your parents went, eventually, holding hands, arms crossed, skating to the Latin rhythms of Cully Culbertson and His Happy Wurlitzer from the Rexall Fun Time album played through a mighty Zenith console put out on the ice, where some of the oldsters still cut a nice figure. Clarence and Arlene Bunsen, for two: to see him on the street, you’d know he has a sore back, but on the ice, some of his old form returns and when they take a turn around the rink in tandem, you might see why she was attracted to him, the old smoothie. Once two people have mastered skating the samba together, it isn’t that much harder to just get married, says Clarence. She has bought a new pair of glasses, bifocals, that, when she looks at him, bring his ankles into sharp focus, slightly magnified.
In some homes, decorations don’t appear until Christmas Eve afternoon, except for the Advent wreath on the supper table, its candles lit every night during supper. Catholics believe in abstaining before a feast—it sharpens the appetite—so Father Emil gives up his 9 P.M. finger of brandy for weeks so that his Christmas Eve brandy will taste more wonderful, even when Clarence brought him a bottle of Napoleon brandy far more wonderful than the Dominican DeLuxe Father buys for himself. “None for me,” he said. “Oh, come on,” Clarence said, “you only live once.” Clarence is Lutheran but he sometimes drops in at the rectory for a second opinion. It is Father’s opinion, however, that a person does not only live once, so he put the Napoleon on his bookshelf behind War and Peace where he would remember it. Even on Christmas Eve, one finger is the correct portion, by him, and it’s a miserable mistake to think that two would be twice as good, and three even better, or putting both hands around the bottle and climbing into it. That’s no Christmas. The true Christmas bathes every little thing in light and makes one cookie a token, one candle, one simple pageant more wonderful than anything seen on stage or screen.
The Kruegers ask him over to watch the Perry Como Christmas special and out of respect for their tremendous contributions over the years, he goes, and sits in glum silence watching tanned, relaxed people sing “O Little Town of Bethlehem” on a small-town street like none he’s ever seen. A man appears on the screen to talk about Triumph television sets as the perfect Christmas gift, as behind him a viewing couple turn and beam at each other as if TV had saved their marriage. The Kruegers enjoy martinis, a vicious drink that makes them sad and exhausted, and the Mister gets up during commercials to adjust the picture, making it more lurid—greenish faces like corpses of the drowned, then orange, the victims of fire—and then the Krueger boy says, “Oh, Dad,” and fixes it to normal, but even that looks lurid, like a cheap postcard. They sit, enraptured by it, but what dull rapture: not fifteen words spoken between them in the whole hour until, in the middle of “Chestnuts,” the phone rings—it’s Milly’s sister in Dallas—and though it’s only a commercial, Milly doesn’t take her eyes off the screen, doesn’t make a complete sentence, just says “uh-huh” and “oh” and “all right, I guess” as if the lady demonstrating the dish soap is her sister and her sister is a telephone salesman. A dismal scene compared to church, people leaning forward to catch the words coming from their children’s mouths, their own flesh and blood, once babes in arms, now speaking the Gospel. What would the Kruegers do if during Perry’s solo the doorbell rang and they heard children singing a carol on the porch?—would they curse them?
The German club from high school goes caroling, most of them Catholic kids but it’s Luther they sing: Vom Himmel hoch da komm ich her, Ich bring euch gute neue mar. Luther League goes out, Catholic youth, Lutheran choir, Miss Falconer’s high school choir, the Thanatopsians troop around and warble in their courageous ruined voices, Spanish Club, G.A.A., 4-H, even Boy Scouts sidle up to a few doors and whisper a carol or two. O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree/How brightly shine thy candles. The Scouts carry candles, which drip onto their jackets. Jimmy Buehler, Second Class, whose mother confiscated his phonograph because AC/DC’s song “Highway to Hell” made her nervous, is their best singer; his sweet tenor leads the others. And from each bough, a tiny light/Adds to the splendor of the sight.
The carols that Miss Falconer’s choir sings along Elm Street are a relief from the Hodie they practiced so hard for the Christmas assembly. Day after day, they sat and looked at the floor, which reeked of disinfectant, and breathed quietly through their mouths as she stood over them, still as a statue, and said, “Well, maybe we should cancel the whole concert. I’m not getting one bit of cooperation from you.” She sighs at the shame of it and folds her arms. In a school this small, you don’t get to specialize: one day Coach Magendanz is trying to bring out the animal in you, and then you are Ernest in The Importance of Being, and then you are defending the negative in the question of capital punishment, and the next day you’re attempting sixteenth-century polyphony. “Tenors, open your mouth, you can’t sing with your mouths shut. Basses, read the notes. They’re right in front of you.”
So great is the town’s demand for Christmas music, some of them are going straight from this practice to Mrs. Hoglund’s at the Lutheran church or to Our Lady choir practice and a different Hodie under Sister Edicta, a rehearsal in parkas in the cold choir loft, Father Emil having blanched at the latest fuel bill and turned the thermostat down to fifty-five. A cold Advent for Catholics, thanks to Emile Bebeau, the itinerant architect who designed this pile in 1878, no doubt intending the soaring vaulted ceiling to draw the hearts of the faithful upward; it also draws heat upward, and the parish is in hock to a Lutheran fuel-oil supplier. Father is dreaming of a letter from Publishers’ Sweepstakes: “Dear Mr. Emil: It’s our great pleasure to inform you—” or an emergency check from Bishop Kluecker, though Our Lady is not a diocesan parish but a mission of the Benedictines and Father reports to an abbot in Pennsylvania who observes the rule of silence, at least in financial matters.
The Sons of Knute don’t carol in person, God having given them voices less suitable for carols than for wallies and elmers, but they do sponsor a choir of fourth-graders who learn two Norwegian carols well enough to sing them in dim light and make the rounds in the snow after supper, alternating carols house to house. One is usually enough to make any Knute wipe his eyes and blow his nose—Jeg er så glad hver julekveld, Da synger vi hans pris; Da åpner han for alle små, Sitt søte paradis. (“I am so glad on Christmas Eve, His praises then I sing; He opens then for every child The palace of the King”)—and two might finish him off for good. Even Hjalmar, who sat like a fencepost through little Tommy’s rare blood disease on “The Parkers” while Virginia put her head down and bawled, even Hjalmar hears Jeg er så glad hver julekveld; his pale eyes glisten, and he turns away, hearing his mother’s voice and smelling her julekake, the Christmas pudding, Mother sitting in a chair and working on her broderi, a pillowcase with two engler hovering over the krybbe where Jesus lies, the bright stjerne in the sky. “Glade Jul!” the fourth-graders cry, and back come Hjalmar’s own boyhood chums in fragrant memory to greet him. “Hjally! Hjally!” they call, standing in the frame of bright windowlight on the brilliant snow of 1934.
Custom dictates that carolers be asked in and offered a cookie, a piece of cake, something to nibble, and so must every person who comes to your door, otherwise the spirit of Christmas will leave your house, and even if you be rich as Midas, your holiday will be sad and mean. That is half of the custom; the other half is that you must yourself go visiting. Everyone must get at least one unexpected visitor, otherwise they’ll have no chance to invite one in and C
hristmas will be poorer for them. So, even if when they open the door, their thin smile tells you that you have arrived at the height of an argument, and even if, as you sit and visit, sulfurous looks are exchanged and innuendos drop like size-12 shoes, you are still performing a service, allowing them to try to be pleasant, even if they don’t do it well.
Baking begins in earnest weeks ahead. Waves of cookies, enough to feed an army, enough to render an army defenseless, including powerful rumballs and fruitcakes soaked with spirits (if the alcohol burns off in the baking, as they say, then why does Arlene hide them from her mother?). And tubs of lutefisk appear at Ralph’s meat counter, the dried cod soaked in lye solution for weeks to make a pale gelatinous substance beloved by all Norwegians, who nonetheless eat it only once a year. The soaking is done in a shed behind the store, and Ralph has a separate set of lutefisk clothes he keeps in the trunk of his Ford Galaxie. No dogs chase his car, and if he forgets to change his lutefisk socks, his wife barks at him. Ralph feels that the dish is a great delicacy and he doesn’t find lutefisk jokes funny. “Don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it,” he says. Nevertheless, he doesn’t offer it to carolers who come by his house because he knows it could kill them. You have to be ready for lutefisk.
Father Emil doesn’t knock lutefisk; he thinks it may be the Lutherans’ penance, a form of self-denial. His homily the Sunday before: we believe that we really don’t know what’s best for us, so we give up some things we like in the faith that something better might come, a good we were not aware of, a part of ourselves we didn’t know was there. We really don’t know ourselves, our own life is hidden from us. God knows us. We obey His teaching, even though painful, entrusting our life to Him who knows best.
The faithful squirm when he says it. What comes next? they wonder. No Christmas this year? Just soup and crackers? Catholic children see Lutheran children eating candy that the nuns tell them they should give up until Christmas and think, “Ha! Easy for nuns to talk about giving up things. That’s what nuns do for a living. But I’m twelve—things are just starting to go right for me!”
Lake Wobegon Days Page 27