She and Johnny faced her father, William Denham, in January. She was unaware that her father and his sweetheart, Marian, had been in the same situation in Glasgow years before—Marian was pregnant for several months before they married, and William’s stepmother took a harsh view of this, even after the young couple married and had six children, and that was one reason they brought their brood across the Atlantic, to escape her disapproving eyes and sharp tongue. The old man, unable to reveal his own story, sat before the young couple and wept. And they lied and told him they’d married secretly on August 8, 1936, but it was not so. They were not married until January 6, 1937, by a justice of the peace in Stillwater, and my brother Philip was born in May. Not out of wedlock but not nearly far enough in. The fiction of the August marriage was maintained to the end of their days. The marriage certificate was kept secret. In later years, when we children inquired about their wedding and who was in attendance and was it in a church or where?, we got vague answers, and if we persisted, Mother got testy. They never observed their wedding anniversary until 1986, supposedly their fiftieth, and over Mother’s opposition, we children insisted on giving them a quiet dinner in August in Anoka. Mother agreed to it on one condition: only immediate family, no guests who had been around in 1936 except the two lovers themselves, and no publicity. It was a small, quiet dinner at Mary Helen Cutter’s restaurant in the Jackson Hotel. A nice wine was served. Philip offered a toast. Mother was relieved when the whole thing was over and done with. Years later, when a granddaughter brought forth a baby out of wedlock, Mother wrote a tender letter to her, assuring her that the crisis would pass and she would be happy again and grateful for the child, and then Mother did not mail it, for fear it would expose her own secret. It was found in her papers after she died.
Grace, 18, and Elsie, 16.
The four crazed horses gallop toward home, the young man bracing himself, and the spreader crashes into the deep ditch and he’s thrown onto the wreckage and somehow doesn’t break his neck, but jumps up and runs after the team, and the crash lends urgency to his passion for Grace and he makes his claim and she accepts him in her arms. Their families weep over them, preach at them, but then accept them, and the secret is kept. Two large families and there must’ve been whispers but none of it ever reached us children. Philip, the scandalous child, was well-loved as were we all.
Thinking back, I remember Dad’s agony when he took his turn preaching the Sunday night gospel meeting and ascended the platform like a man going to the gallows—his sermons had no conviction or spirit and were extremely brief—and we felt great relief on the drive home and he stopped at the Dairy Queen on Lyndale for sundaes, a root beer float, whatever we wanted, hang the expense. I wonder now if, on those Sunday nights, his own adventure of 1936 was on his mind, the drive in the Model A, the walk into the cemetery, the spreading of the blanket, lying next to her, the breathing. It’s hard to preach when you are distracted by your own vivid memories. The Pioneers and Soldiers was only a few blocks north of the Gospel Hall.
The pain of the scandal made John and Grace merciful to a fault and forgiving, as we children discovered as we went off in our various directions: they could be disappointed but they never condemned, they never raised their voices, never spoke ill of anyone in my hearing. I was their rebellious child—somebody had to be—and I drew heavily on their forbearance. Both were brought up evangelical, under hellfire preaching, in a flock of contentious Christians, but scandal freed them to be loving and gentle all their lives. We lived next door to angry couples. I remember people yelling. A woman cried out, “When are we ever going to get out of this dump?” I babysat at neighbors’ who came home drunk and cursing each other. I only saw one serious argument: Dad left for work at the Railway Mail and Mother looked out the kitchen door and said to herself, “One of these days, that man and I are going to come to a parting of the ways.” I was fourteen. I was floored by that, I turned and went upstairs and threw myself on the bed and I wept, and Mother came up and apologized and said she didn’t mean it. I grew up in a house of love, my parents holding hands, whispering to each other, so I looked upon happiness and contentment as ordinary and natural, and I still do. It took me longer to find that happiness but when I did, I recognized where I was. Jenny walked into the room and sat on my lap and put her head on my shoulder and I felt a sweet abundance. I would do the same for her but I weigh 240 and she weighs 114.
Family Tree
3
All You Need to Know
I’M OLD ENOUGH NOW TO see that my life was woven of the benevolence of aunts and a series of crucial failures before the age of twenty.
A botched robbery
Cowardice in the face of Darwinism and learning the art of invisibility
Green teeth
A fall from a haymow headfirst onto concrete and into the bull’s pen
Demonstrated incompetence at the power saw
A flunked physical at age thirteen, due to mitral valve prolapse
A schism in the Plymouth Brethren that rendered our Minneapolis Assembly weak and listless and left a blockhead in power, thus making it easy for me to jump ship and wend my way back to the Anglicans whom the PBs had revolted against.
Seven failures that closed off certain avenues and opened others, all when I was too young to have a will of my own, and thus I went bopping along a circuitous path to wind up traveling around doing A Prairie Home Companion, telling stories that made intimate friends of complete strangers. I owe a great debt to failure, though I do feel I’ve gained enough benefit from it and would like to coast for a while.
The green teeth episode sticks with me. I was ten and a boy named Bob told me they were green and rotten and said it with authority, looking closely into my mouth. We were standing by the swings on the playground of Benson School. The school was torn down long ago, but I remember the exact spot where he said it. I looked in a mirror in the lavatory and saw no greenness but believed him because he sounded so certain. I didn’t mention it to my mother or anyone else. It was my terrible secret. I was horrified. Pictures of me from that time afterward show a solemn, tight-lipped boy. The muscles around my mouth forgot how to smile. Even today, people look at me and ask, “Are you okay?” Yes, I’m fine; when your teeth are green, you don’t smile, that’s all. Thanks to this somber face, I never went into retail sales or politics, but it was no handicap for a writer or a radio guy, so that’s what I did instead. My tormentor who said my teeth were green once took hold of my wrist and said, “Your wrists are so thin, like a girl’s. It’s good you didn’t go out for football, you would’ve gotten killed.” Which drove me to wear long-sleeved shirts, to hide this deformity. He was a big confident guy, an excellent student, was elected president of our senior class, and he bestowed his contempt whenever he laid eyes on me. I was an indifferent student but was admitted to the University of Minnesota and worked in a scullery and in parking lots to pay my way. My tormentor saw me there and said, “I never thought you’d make it to college, you’re such a freak.” He saw my poems in the Ivory Tower magazine and told me how worthless they were, and probably he was right.
I took a hodgepodge of English lit courses and stayed in college as long as I could, and in 1969 I went to work in radio, twelve-hour days, writing at night at home; meanwhile my tormentor graduated from medical school and did his residency and ran into me at a reunion and asked, “So what are you up to now?” like a dog sniffing my résumé. I muttered something. He was married and had a family and was on an upward trajectory when one day, repairing a water pump at his home, he stuck a screwdriver into the works, thinking the circuit was broken and it was not and he was electrocuted. He was entering the best years of his life, and a flash of powerful voltage passed through him and he fell into a coma and died three days later. It happened as I was finding my vocation and embarking on a happy career. Since then, I’ve forgiven him over and over, and also I’ve avoided trying to repair any electrical appliance, I don’t even replace burnt-
out lightbulbs. I am fearful of this story winding up in symmetry.
Despite my best efforts, I was spared alcoholism, lung cancer, carpal tunnel syndrome, high blood pressure, and death by stupidity. I once got my car up to 100 mph on a straight stretch of northbound Highway 47 just to see if it could and a pickup truck pulled out of a driveway ahead of me and I steered around behind it as it pulled into the southbound lane, thus avoiding death at 22. My brother Philip and I went canoeing around the Apostle Islands on Lake Superior and paddled into a deep cave under one of the islands, and explored it for a while, ducking our heads under the low rocky ceiling, and then paddled out to open water a minute or two before the wake of a distant ore boat came crashing into the cave, four-foot waves that would’ve splattered us on the cave ceiling, no need for EMTs, the turtles would’ve feasted that night. We sat in the canoe and watched, no need to say a word: death was in the cave and we had eluded it. Once a mattress that I was hauling home fell off the roof of my car and landed in the center lane of the freeway fifty yards back and I ran to drag it to safety as my wife screamed and a semi whooshed past, horn blasting, and I got to experience the Doppler effect up close. I horsed the mattress back up on the car and we drove slowly home. She thought about saying something and then did not. I’ve often stepped off a curb in New York thinking my thoughts and heard shouted Chinese, and a deliveryman on a bicycle raced by so close I could smell the garlic sauce. I once ran on a slippery dock at Cross Lake and slipped and instead of landing on the dock and breaking my neck and starting a new life as a paraplegic, I landed in the water (which covers three-quarters of the world, so statistically your chances are good) and was spared an endless amount of self-pity.
I survived these close calls and the Saturday night show, A Prairie Home Companion, launched in 1974 and, with a break in 1987, ran until 2016, and through no fault of my own became a box-office success in the public radio sphere, a porpoise among the hippopotami, and I was launched onto a writer’s dream—I wrote and hosted the show while smarter people, Margaret, Christine, Kate, and Sam, ran the business. I played the detective Guy Noir (It was November. Gray day. My landlord, Doris, had just turned on the radiators, which are on the National Registry of Historic Heating Systems and I looked out the window and saw a gray cloud that looked like someone I knew and then realized it was my face.) who waits for a big case involving Louie B. Louie or some other slimeball with a bulge under his jacket and instead in comes an old man who’s lost his glasses and needs a detective to retrace his footsteps. I played the cowboy Lefty in search of his Evelyn and I played a dullard named Duane, and now and then I got to stand next to a woman and sing a love song with her, and this was considered work. I have a picture of Grandpa Keillor in his farmyard on a bitterly cold winter day, earflaps down, denim jacket buttoned up, a sweater over his coveralls, pitchfork in hand, tending his animals, and he looks truly happy, as was I doing the show or sitting down to write with a fine black pen on the white cardboard the dry cleaners put into my shirts. It is too small for a story and the right size for a sonnet.
Frankie and Johnny were lovers and swore to be true
To each other and it didn’t take him all that long
Before he went to the hotel with You Know Who
And got busy doing Miss Frankie wrong.
He was her man, a good lover, handsome
In his bowler and spats, but not so astute,
Which led to her looking over the hotel transom
And pulling out the .44, which went rooty-toot-toot.
And the rubber-tired hearses came and poor Frankie
Was locked up in a dungeon cell. They threw
Away the key. She lay and wept in her hanky
But mostly she felt like a fool. Wouldn’t you?
People had warned her, again and again and again.
And she knew it too. There is no good in men.
We sang “Frankie and Johnny” in Mrs. Moehlenbrock’s fourth-grade classroom out of our blue American Harmony songbooks and we loved the lines the first time she shot him he staggered. The second time she shot him he fell. The third time there was a southwest wind from the northeast corner of hell. We sang it loud. And we sang about the E-ri-e was a-rising and the gin was a-getting low and I scarcely think we’ll get a drink till we come to Buffalo. It was joyful to sing about gin, a Brethren boy who had sat under Brother Tomkinson’s preaching as he shouted, “There are people here who are going to hell and they don’t know it!”—it made for a vivid and varied life. Bullies stalked the schoolyard, and I slipped away from them. Brethren preached separation from worldly pleasures, but my mother laughed at comedians, particularly Gracie Allen, who said, “My mind is so fast, sometimes I say something before I even think it.” To Mother, this was hilarious. And also, “If it wasn’t for Thomas Edison, we’d be listening to radio by candlelight.” Other Brethren frowned on jokes. Dad was indifferent to them and I never heard him tell one. Mother claimed she couldn’t remember jokes, but when I told one, she just laughed and laughed. And so, from the time I could read, I looked for jokes to tell my mother and it made me happy to hear her laugh. It’s just that simple.
Years later, working on a screenplay for Disney, a very funny movie that never got made, sitting through production meetings attended by fourteen men in short-sleeved white shirts who talked about the Narrative Arc and the Hero’s Quest and what is the Gift that he brings back from his Journey, I went for a walk one foggy afternoon and passed a Hertz office, and got an urge to rent a car. They offered me a convertible; I took it. I cruised along Sunset Boulevard, the top down, traffic juking and bopping around me, through a canyon of flashing lights and people wearing sunglasses and billboards with faces of famous celebrities I never heard of, and then lost my bearings and circled for a while in strange neighborhoods. Whenever I drive around for fun, I think of my dad who loved driving around. There was some teenage boy left in my dad, though he worked so hard, doing carpentry work, sorting mail in the swaying mail car hurtling through the night, his .38 snub-nose revolver at his side. My dad came home weary from his shift with the Railway Mail Service and after supper he fell asleep in his chair reading the Star, and Mother had to wake him up to go up to bed. I didn’t want to ever work that hard. So I aspired to be a freelance writer and achieved that, thanks to the virtues I rebelled against that my dad had tried to instill in me: to buckle down and tend to business and to thrive on work, the old middle-class virtues of persistence and attention to detail. Jokes made my mother happy so I went into radio to do a show that had died long before but in my Brethrenly isolation I didn’t notice and if I live to be 100 I’ll ride in a parade in a convertible with a big sign, America’s Last Living Live Radio Show Host. The idea of radio will be as foreign to them as the telegram or mimeograph, but there will still be good manners and people will applaud as I go by.
4
Luncheonette
I WAS CONCEIVED IN LATE fall, their third child, in their rented house on Jefferson Street in Anoka. They had been forgiven for the scandal of 1936 thanks to their having produced two obedient, truthful, well-behaved children in Philip and Judy, and now here came a third. I’d like to say I was conceived in patriotic fervor on December 7, 1941, the night of Pearl Harbor, but actually it was November 7, and I appeared August 7, 1942, at 6:40 a.m., Gary Edward Keillor, eight pounds, seven ounces, in Dr. Mork’s maternity hospital at 1841 Ferry Street, near where the Rum flows into the Mississippi. The long wall across the street by the Caswell house was built by my great-uncle Allie around 1911, of rock from the Rum, he who in his eighties went with his wife, Millie, to buy a new mattress at Thurston’s in Anoka and told the clerk, “I don’t like the firm mattress—I can’t get a good purchase with my knees,” and Millie blushed. My great-uncle Lew’s Pure Oil station was around the corner, and John worked there, pumping gas in his smart Pure Oil uniform with an officer’s cap, waiting to hear about his application at the post office. He had no fondness for farming, but thanks to his up
bringing he knew about carpentry and auto repair, and was patient and soft-spoken by nature, having herded cows. He was hired by the post office and then drafted into the Army. America was at war. Anoka was a town of 7,000 with a classic Main Street, two banks, two newspapers, a county courthouse with a high steeple in a grassy square, a Carnegie library with dome and pillars, the county fairgrounds with dirt racetrack and the State Hospital for the Insane on the north side of town. The big news of the day was the landing of the 1st Marine Division on the beach and rainforest of Guadalcanal in the Pacific, the first land offensive against Japan after Pearl Harbor.
We moved around during the war, living with Grandma and then Aunt Jean, and when I was four and Daddy came home from the war, we lived in a duplex apartment at 39th Street and Bloomington Avenue in south Minneapolis for a couple years while he saved up to build us a house in the country north of the city. America had won the war and saved the world. Boys on the Bancroft School playground sang: Hitler had just one ball. Goebbels had two but they were small. Himmler had something similar, and Goering had no balls at all. My first dirty songs. I didn’t completely understand the words but I knew to sing it only to myself, not at home. Dad bought a movie camera and shot a scene of his children emerging from the front door on Bloomington one by one—“Don’t look at the camera and smile,” he said—so we looked down at the sidewalk and frowned, Philip, nine, with curly hair, and Judy, eight, straight and tall, and me, Gary, four years old, almost five, in a blue peacoat, and as I walk out the door, a streetcar passes, and I look up and smile.
That Time of Year Page 3