My true education was the deaths of four of my heroes, all four not much older than I, earthshaking deaths. My cousin Roger drowned at seventeen, a week before his high school graduation, diving into Lake Minnetonka to impress Susan whom he wanted to be his girlfriend, although surely he knew he couldn’t swim. I admired him, a sharp dresser, a cool guy, his slightly lopsided grin, his disregard for sports, his fondness for girls. Two years later, Buddy Holly crashed in a small plane in Iowa. I heard the news on the radio. It turned out that the young pilot was not qualified to fly by instrument at night, but, unable to say no to a rock ’n’ roll star, he took off into the dark and flew the plane into the ground and killed everyone in it. Two years later, Barry Halper, who hired me for my first radio job and became my good friend, who was smart, stylish, Jewish, had been to Las Vegas and met famous comedians, drove one afternoon east of St. Paul and crashed his convertible into the rear of a school bus and died at the age of twenty. And a year later, my classmate Leeds Cutter from Anoka, a year older than I, the smartest guy at our table in the lunchroom, who talked about why he loved Beethoven, how he’d go to law school but make a life as a farmer and raise a family, who was in love with my friend Corinne, who said, “I never do easy things right and I hardly ever do hard things wrong,” was killed by a drunk driver while riding home from the U. He was nineteen.
I felt the wrongness of their deaths, the goodness lost, the damage done to the world, and felt responsible to live my life on their behalf and embrace what they were denied, the chance to rise and shine and find a vocation. They didn’t know each other, but I see them as a foursome, Barry, Buddy, Leeds, and Roger. They were my elders and now they’re my grandsons. They each died in swift seconds of violence and the thought of them gives me peace. I promise to love this life I was given and do my best to deserve it. I carry you boys forever in my heart. You keep getting younger and I am still looking up to you. Life without end. Amen.
After college, I was hired by a rural radio station to do the 6 a.m. shift Monday to Friday, because nobody else wanted to get up so early. I worked alone in the dark and learned to be useful and clearly imagine the audience and do my best to amuse them. In my twenties I sent a story by US mail to a famous magazine in New York, as did every other writer in America, and mine was fished out of the soup by a kind soul named Mary D. Kierstead, who sent it up to the editors and they paid me $500 at a time when my rent was $80 a month and that was the clincher, that and the radio gig, my course in life was set, everything else is a footnote.
A few years later I went to see the famous Grand Ole Opry radio show in Nashville and decided to start something like it of my own. My boss, Bill Kling, against all common sense, approved of this. I had lost a short story about a town called Lake Wobegon in the men’s room of the Portland, Oregon, train station, and the loss of it made the story ever more beautiful in my mind, and, thinking I might recall it, I told stories about the town on the radio and also wrote books, including one, Pontoon, about which the New York Times said, “a tough-minded book . . . full of wistfulness and futility yet somehow spangled with hope,” which is no easy thing for an ex–Plymouth Brethrenist, to get the wistful futility and also spangle it, but evidently I did.
My great accomplishment was to gain competence at work for which I had no aptitude, a solitary guy with low affect who learned to stand in front of four million people and talk and enjoy it. I did this because the work I had aptitude for—lawn mowing, dishwashing, parking cars—I didn’t want to get old doing that. I preferred to tell stories. My first book, Happy to Be Here, published when I was forty, earned the money to buy a big green frame house on Goodrich Avenue in St. Paul. People noticed this. A renter for twenty years, I wrote a book and bought a house. In warm weather, I sat on the front porch and people walked by and looked. That era is over. Now you can get an unlimited Kindle subscription for pocket change and a successful book will buy you an umbrella tent. I am lucky I lived when I did.
I also became the founder and host and writer of a radio variety show of a sort that died when I was a child, for which I stood onstage every Saturday, no paper in hand, and talked about an imaginary town for twenty minutes. It was the easiest thing I ever did, easier than fatherhood, citizenship, home maintenance, vacationing in Florida, everything. I wrote five pages of story on Friday, looked it over on Saturday morning, went out onstage and remembered what was memorable and forgot the fancy stuff, the metaphors, the subjunctive, the irony, most of it at least.
Lake Wobegon was all about the ordinary, about birds and dogs, the unexpected appearance of a porcupine or a bear, the crankiness of old men, the heartache of parenthood, communal events, big holidays, the café and the tavern, ritual and ceremony, the mystery of God’s perfection watching over so much human cluelessness. The tragedy of success: you raise your kids to be ambitious strivers and succeed and they wind up independent, far away, hardly recognizable, your grandkids are strangers with new fashionable names. The small town is strict, authoritarian, and your children prefer urban laxity and anonymity. There was no overarching story, few relationships to keep track of; it was mostly impressionistic. The ordinariness of a Minnesota small town gave me freedom from political correctness, no need to check the right boxes. In Lake Wobegon society, ethnicity was mostly for amusement, and Catholic v. Lutheran was the rivalry of neighbors.
I did Lake Wobegon pretty well, as I could tell from the number of people who asked me, “Was that true?” The Tomato Butt story was true and the homecoming talent show. The stories about winter were true. The story about being French was not true. Or the orphanage story. But I did have an Uncle Jim who farmed with horses and I rode on Prince’s back to go help him with the haying as Grandma baked bread in a wood-stove oven.
I never was a deckhand on an ore boat in a storm on the Great Lakes, the Old Man at the wheel, water crashing over the bow and smashing into the wheelhouse, running empty in thirty-foot seas, navigation equipment lost, and the Old Man said to me, “Get on the radio and stay on the radio so the Coast Guard can give us a location,” and I went on the radio and sang and told jokes for two hours and the ship made it safely to port, and that was how I got into radio. That was my invention, to demonstrate my facility. Hailstones the size of softballs smashed into my radio shack on the rear deck as I told Ole and Lena jokes. A story about a lonely guy in marital anguish wouldn’t have served the purpose.
One true story I never told was about Corinne Guntzel, whom I met when we were six years old and rode a toboggan down a steep hill and onto the frozen Mississippi River. It was thrilling. Later, she got the same excitement from beating up on me about politics. She was a college socialist and smarter and better-read and I argued innocently that art is what changes the world, which she scoffed at, of course. I loved her and thought about marrying her but feared rejection, so I married her cousin instead and then her best friend, after which Corinne killed herself. It’s not a story to be told at parties.
But the best story is about the day in New York I had lunch with a woman from my hometown of Anoka and had the good sense to fall in love with her. I was fifty, she was thirty-five. I am a Calvinist, she’s a violinist. We talked and talked, we laughed, we walked, we went to the opera, we married at St. Michael’s on 99th and Amsterdam, we begat a daughter. Now, twenty-five years later, she and I live in Minneapolis, near Loring Park, across from the old Eitel Hospital where my mother was a nurse, near the hotel where I worked as a dishwasher the summer after high school and learned to smoke Lucky Strikes, a block from Walker Art Center, where Suzanne Weil produced the first Prairie Home Companion shows. My old apartments are nearby and fancy neighborhoods I walked in back in my stringency days. I like having history around to help keep my head on straight and ward off delusion.
I had relatives who used outhouses and now I walk into a men’s room and pee in a urinal and step back and it automatically flushes. I walk around with a device in my pocket the size of a half-slice of bread and I can call my daught
er in London or read the Times or do a search for “Success is counted sweetest by those who ne’er succeed. To comprehend a nectar requires sorest need.” It’s a world of progress.
When I go live in the Home for the Confused, I’ll sit in a sunny corner and tell stories to myself. When my time is up, they’ll wrap me in a sheet and truck me back to Anoka and the Keillor cemetery fifteen minutes north of where I was born and plant me with my aunts and uncles on whom the stories of Lake Wobegon were based. I got a lot of pleasure out of writing them up, and so it’s right I should lie down there in a cemetery where Aunt Jo used to send me over to mow the grass and trim around the gravestones. Dad’s cousin Joe Loucks is here, who drowned in the Rum River in 1927: a dozen boys formed a human chain into the river to rescue him and he slipped from their grasp. Now they are here too. Old farmers are here, also an astrophysicist, a banker, a few salesmen, a cousin who died of a botched abortion by a doctor in town. Some had more than their share of suffering. My cousins Shannon, Philip, William, and Alec are here, all younger than I. When I was young, I was eager to escape the family, but death is inescapable and I’ll be collected into their midst at last. A brief ceremony, no eulogy, no need to mourn a man who had an easy life. Lower him down and everybody grab a shovel. Either there will be a hereafter or I will be unaware that there is not. I believe there will be. I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, nor our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen and amen.
2
My People
James Keillor, 40, a skilled carpenter turned farmer, 1900.
MY LIFE WAS HALF LAID out before I existed. My great-grandfather William Evans Keillor was walking home in Anoka one night in 1910 and heard an invisible crowd of people around him in the dark, walking with him, talking in low unintelligible voices, who, as he neared his house on the hill, faded into the night. A Brethren preacher had recently come through Anoka and Great-Grandpa assumed the voices were Plymouth Brethren, and so he led his family down the narrow rocky road of Brethrenly separation. Episcopalians can be unintelligible, so can Methodists or Mennonites, but he chose Brethren and our family history hangs on this ghost story. Grandpa James married Dora Powell, who was a progressive Methodist at the time, a proponent of women’s education and racial equality, and she became a loyal
farm wife and Brethreness, though she made her sympathies known to her grandchildren. She advocated for scholarship and science. She said, “Don’t be a five-dollar haircut on a twenty-nine-cent head.” A $5 haircut was fairly extravagant back then.
Denhams were city people. Grandpa Denham was the son of a Glasgow street sweeper and grew up in a tenement, no toilet, no bathtub. His poor overworked mother died young and his father married her nurse, Martha Whiteside, a censorious woman. Grandpa never attended a movie or read a novel. He was not a storyteller. He sailed back to Scotland in 1920, to visit his dying father and kept a meticulous diary of his trip, what he ate for breakfast, what he saw aboard ship, right up to when the ship docks in Glasgow and then the diary ends, not a word about his father, Martha, none of it. I suppose it was too painful and confusing for him to leave a record. I wanted to be a Powell, or a Keillor, but I have Denham in me too, and I have painful chapters too but shall tell my story as honestly as I can without causing too much pain to those I love. The Denhams appeared in the Lake Wobegon saga, their name changed to Cotton, and they were renowned for caution and a tendency to apologize. Their letters often begin, “I am so sorry it has taken me all this time to sit down and write to you. I’ve thought of it daily but then get busy with one thing or another. Please forgive me. I shall endeavor to do better in the future.”
Brethren instilled perfectionism. A band of dissenters, led by the Irish curate John Nelson Darby, who around 1831 left the pomp and hierarchy of the Establishment Church to create an assembly of saints gathered in simplicity, as instructed in Scripture. God is perfect and everything we do or say must meet His standard, which is impossible, as we Brethren could see, looking around the room at the few survivors. I still live with perpetual failure. I attend an Episcopal church now and that is a magnificent pageant, but no show is ever good enough, no piece of writing is ever finished. When I lie in hospice care, on oxygen, catheterized, I will whisper to the nurse: Bring me that book, the chapter about the luncheonette, I forgot to put in the salt and pepper shakers and the napkin rack.
I chose my parents well. John Keillor and Grace Denham, a farm boy and a city girl, loved each other dearly and I grew up in the warm light of that love. She missed him when he was on the road, sorting mail on the North Coast Limited. He liked it when she came over and sat on his lap. She baked pies for him and beautiful pot roasts. She had little bouts of jealousy; he felt completely out of place among the Denhams. He and she disagreed about Christmas; he was laconic and she was excitable. Whenever Mother left the house, she imagined she’d left the iron on and the house would go up in flames and we’d come home to a basement full of ashes. She never left it on, but she kept thinking she had. When a big storm moved in, she went to the basement and begged him to come but he liked to stand in the front yard and watch it.
John and Grace, 1936.
Dad came from a family of eight, she from thirteen. Her mother died of a blood infection when Grace was seven, and she was brought up by sisters. She and John laid eyes on each other at a Fourth of July picnic on the Keillor farm in Anoka in 1931, a month after he graduated from Anoka High. She was a slim lovely girl of sixteen, born on May 7, 1915, the day the Lusitania sank, and he was eighteen, born on Columbus Day, the handsomest boy in the Brethren. His father James’s birthday was July 4 and he was on crutches, suffering from a mysterious wasting disease, and Grace was solicitous and took his arm, and John noticed. She sent John a birthday card in October. They met again in a carload of Brethren young people going to the Minneapolis airport for a plane ride. She was frightened and he put an arm around her in her white summer dress. Both families were opposed to the romance, on the grounds the two were too young and had no money and he was needed on the farm— his father died in 1933. Grace went into nurse’s training and got a job as a caregiver. He visited her often and sang hymns to her with the word “grace” in them. On Sunday, May 10, 1936, he wrote her a long letter:
Friday morning after breakfast, I was instructed to haul manure over to a field north of Aunt Becky’s place. We put all four horses on as it was a long hard pull. After duly getting ready, I mounted the driver’s seat and left for the field. Everything went fine until the homeward trip for the second load. At the top of Aunt Becky’s hill, the horses started acting up, kicking and jumping around, as the spreader had run against their heels. I eased them almost to the bottom of the hill when they became unmanageable, and broke into a terrifying gallop. As they did, I dropped one rein, but bent forward and picked it up. I then crawled back in the main part of the spreader so I could stand up and brace myself. I thought of jumping out but decided to stick by it and try to stop the mad rush of horseflesh.
In no time at all they had covered the distance from Aunt Becky’s to our place with my efforts to stop them of no avail. As they neared our driveway, they tried to turn in, but could not make the turn. They ran across the ditch between the paper box and a telephone pole and on into the yard. As they crossed the ditch, the tongue on the spreader broke and plowed about four feet into the ground, breaking in three pieces. As it did so, it threw the machine to one side and I pitched out the other onto the broken pile of tongue.
My mother being a witness to the scene ran over and asked if I was hurt. I said no and ran after the team, which had become tangled down the road in the ditch. It was then I started to feel faint and hurt, but nothing serious as it could have easily been, for which I am truly thankful. It is no fun to be hauled behind four wild horses at breakneck speed to be thrown lord knows wher
e.
Jo brought her bedroom suite home yesterday and is it ever swell. I feel sort of jealous of her because I wish I or you and I could get things like that, don’t you, Honey? Perhaps our time will come when we can have the fun of picking out our furniture and things for our home. I have been thinking of you and realize more and more that you are more to me than any earthly or natural ties and yet I cannot as yet claim you for my own. I can only say I hope in the near future to make such a claim.
Until then, I am lovingly
Johnny
P.S. May I come down sometime? Love, Johnny
That was his way of proposing marriage, a reminder of his mortality followed by intimations of intimacy. I wish that I—or you and I—could get a bedroom set, don’t you, Honey? They feared losing each other in those unsettled times, and a few months later, he borrowed his brother Bob’s Model A and he and Grace drove to a secluded spot—let’s say the Pioneers and Soldiers Cemetery at Lake and Cedar in Minneapolis—and lay a blanket in the grass and held each other close and made love. In November, in fear and trembling, Grace rode the streetcar to the Medical Arts Building downtown, accompanied by sister Elsie, and the doctor said that yes, it was so, as Grace suspected. She was starting to show.
That Time of Year Page 2