That Time of Year

by Garrison Keillor

  I was living on the West Bank near Seven Corners, in a neighborhood of hippies and dissidents and musicians, everyone living in shifting romantic arrangements, and I hung out at the Mixers bar with cranky old lefties and would-be writers, men bitching about academia, the government, the decline of journalism, ripping into the manager of the Twins, the abject emptiness of corporate life, the deficits of famous writers. It was the Critics Corner and I admired their ferocity. The military was idiocy in action, the English Department was dedicated to the hatred of literature, the Democratic Party was the dull leading the ignorant, the Holy Mother Church was full of pedophiles. It was classic saloon talk, nihilistic but all about personal style. I sat and listened, enjoyed the chatter. They had no money, no great prospects, but plenty of attitude.

  They would’ve regarded the Guntzels of Hopkins with a degree of contempt, so I kept the two worlds apart. I enjoyed Hopkins, mowing their lawn, mixing their drinks, staying for supper, even as I maintained a big beard, aimed to be a writer and escape the regimented life, enjoy the company of musicians, artists, iconoclasts of a similar stripe. But sometimes I experienced bolts of lucidity. A poem of mine was published in a literary quarterly, which was nice until I looked at it on the page across from a poem by a real poet, Donald Justice, and saw mine clearly for the fake that it was. I admired his poem: Lights are burning in quiet rooms where lives go on resembling ours. Mine was a rummage drawer of images, nothing more. It was edifying to see what a shitty poem I’d written, and so was the experience of studying in the periodicals room of Walter Library. Prestigious literary magazines were kept there on shelves, and I sat under fine old chandeliers and noticed that nobody ever walked in and picked up those magazines that I longed to be published in. I thought, If that’s prestige, then the ultimate honor is to be embalmed. But plenty of people picked up The New Yorker and looked at the cartoons. There was a lesson here: People will come for the dessert who may then stay and eat the spinach.

  I was leading two lives, the life of literary ambition and the life of family comfort, and then I was yanked away when Grandma Dora was felled by a stroke in July 1964. I was back at the U, in summer school, working at KUOM, and I went straight to the Catholic hospital in Onamia and sat at her deathbed for two days, stroking her arm, holding an ice pack to her brow. She had collapsed while vacuuming at Eleanor’s and never recovered consciousness. Her daughters tended to her, Eleanor taking charge. My uncles dropped in the next day and sat at the other end of the room, uneasy, uncertain what to do with themselves. They each came to the bedside, looked at her, then retreated to the other end of the room and sat in awkward silence, having no words, and talked about cars. I was disgusted that they weren’t paying homage to Grandma and reminiscing about her. It was all about cars. They couldn’t bring themselves to express grief. As Brethren, they believed that death transports us into God’s presence so we should rejoice in it, but they didn’t do that either. They talked about the superiority of Ford to General Motors, then they talked about their gardens and building projects. Eleanor told me I should go back to class, but I stayed, holding Grandma’s hand, stroking her hair, pressing a cold cloth to her forehead, moistening her lips with ice chips. Eleanor said, “You have a job. Mother would want you to go to work in the morning.” In this family, tending the dying was women’s work, and I respected that. They pulled the bedclothes off her and they lovingly bathed her, my naked grandmother, the gray clump of hair where each of them had once descended into the world, and I left then, but with a heavy heart, knowing that now the door was closed to the story of Grandpa Keillor and his sister Mary and Grandma’s job as a railroad telegrapher, why her dad John Wesley Powell had moved to Anoka from Iowa—a hundred questions in my mind—that door was now locked forever.

  A few days later, when her coffin was carried through the cemetery gate, I stood in the back of the crowd and sobbed and didn’t try to hide it. The men of the family believed in strict adherence to rules, but Grandma admired spunk and ambition. She liked having a writer in the family. She said so. She is ever in my heart. And I still have her farm firmly in my head and the Model T where my cousins and I sat singing mournful songs and at night, lying awake in a strange hotel somewhere, sometimes I imagine myself back to Grandma’s, washing my face in cold water from the hand pump on the back step and coming in for Post Toasties and a cup of Postum. Grandma and I will kneel on the parlor floor as Uncle Jim prays and I’ll go out and collect eggs in the machine shed where the hens have laid them. Uncle Jim hitches up Prince and Ned and lifts me aboard Prince, and I put my arms around his neck as the harness jingles and the wagon creaks, and I smell the new-mown hay and fall asleep on the way to the meadow.

  16

  Settling In

  I GAVE MARY A DIAMOND engagement ring in 1965, which made Marj happy, but no date was set since my prospects were vague. I graduated from the U in 1966 and sold my car to pay for a trip by Greyhound to New York to interview for a job at The New Yorker—Mr. Lindsay had written them a splendid letter of recommendation and they said, “Send him out” so I went—and if I were hired, I imagined maybe I could disappear into the city and let the wedding be canceled. Disappearing into New York seemed like an excellent way of simplifying my life. And Mary could find a better man than I—of that I was certain.

  A few nights before I left town, I went out to Metropolitan Stadium to watch the Twins play, maybe for the last time, with my friend Arnie Goldman, who was on his way to a teaching job in Australia. We bought steak sandwiches and a couple Grain Belts and sat in the second deck behind home, two birds on a wire. Out beyond right, Holsteins grazed in a pasture, and behind us in the press box sat Herb Carneal announcing play-by-play in his Virginia drawl to Minnesotans sitting on porches from here to Gull Lake as his cohort Halsey Hall puffed on a cigar and did commentary in a voice like gravel sliding down a washboard. Arnie was an Army vet, married with three kids, a cheerful guy, a good friend, and it was sad to think we’d drift apart. “I’m in the wrong line of work. I’m no scholar, I’m a bullshitter. Teaching is okay but I should’ve been a shoe salesman,” he said. “You’re different. You’ll do okay. You’re a loner. You come in a tight package.” We sat and smoked, and he said, “I’m a happy man in a sad life, and you’re a sad man in a happy life.”

  When the Met was torn down in 1982, I went out to look at the demolition. I walked around the mountains of wreckage where the grandstand had stood and slipped through the security fence and onto the field, which was in good shape except for bulldozer tracks in the infield. The left field stands and bullpen and scoreboard were intact and the flagpole. I walked across the outfield. There wasn’t another soul on the premises, just me and the grackles. I felt like an archaeologist at the ruins of an ancient temple. And his line came back to me, You’re a sad man in a happy life, and I’m still not sure what to make of it.

  I rode the bus to New York thirty hours in a stupor, rolling through the Lincoln Tunnel around midnight, and I walked out with my duffel bag into Times Square where Broadway slices across 44th and Seventh Avenue to make six different canyons hundreds of feet high, flashing signs, rivers of people, and I hiked south on Broadway and found a cheap hotel crowded with welfare families, their kids roaming the halls at 2 a.m. When I opened the door to my room, there was skritching and skittering and a crowd of cockroaches broke for the closet. I left the light on and lay on the bed, fully dressed, shoes on—it was a 10-watt bulb so it didn’t keep me awake—I was awakened by the sun shining through the dusty window. I washed my face and shouldered the duffel and headed for Chelsea and into a Hispanic neighborhood, looking for a boarding house I’d seen in the want ads and found it on West 19th next door to a convent, a four-story brownstone. I walked through the door and into a big dayroom and met the manager, a social worker named Libby Lyon. She said it was a salon for struggling artists and writers and rented me a little room slightly below sidewalk level, with toilet down the hall, for $55 a week including breakfast and dinner. Th
ere was one window in my room, through which I could see the shoes of people passing by on the sidewalk. Some residents sat in the sunny courtyard under an ailanthus tree, looking at a twelve-foot wall, painted pink. They may have been artists and writers, but clearly this was a halfway house for the mentally ill, newly released from hospitals; they were doped up on Thorazine, listening to nuns in the convent garden chanting in Spanish. An old man, hearing I was interviewing at The New Yorker, said he was an old friend of Dorothy Parker. “I used to see a lot of Dottie, I don’t anymore,” he said. He also told me that Marion Tanner, who cooked in the kitchen, was the aunt of Patrick Dennis and the model for his character Auntie Mame, which turned out to be true. She was not the comic grande dame of the novel, though: she had her hands full, cooking and keeping an eye on a foster daughter who kept trying to light fires. Life was a banquet for other people, but she was working to put lunch on the table and keep the house from burning down.

  The next morning, I walked uptown toward 25 West 43rd, an address I knew by heart, having sent a dozen stories there with stamped, self-addressed envelopes. I thought of the greats as I walked along 44th, the Algonquin where George S. Kaufman, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, and Marc Connelly gathered to mock the pieties of the day and resist sobriety, where Harold Ross conceived his humor magazine that against his better judgment became The New Yorker, which Frayne Anderson handed me a copy of when I was young and impressionable.

  It was high drama, walking the street A. J. Liebling had walked to the Paramount Theater to interview Pola Negri, lying in a white peignoir on a white chaise longue like a crumpled gardenia petal, and to the Hotel Dixie, home of Colonel John R. Stingo, the horse racing columnist for the National Enquirer, who said, “I sit up there in my room at the Dixie, and I feel the city calling to me. It winks at me with its myriad eyes, and I go out and get stiff as a board. I seek out companionship, and if I do not find friends, I make them. A wonderful, grand old Babylon.” I doubt that Colonel Stingo ever said exactly that, but I forgive Liebling everything. Walking around his city, I regret that he died before I got to meet him. He was the rare writer to confess to enjoying writing, unlike E. B. White and others who considered it a sort of internal hemorrhaging. Liebling simply said he wrote better than anyone who wrote faster and wrote faster than those who wrote better. He said of Marcel Proust, “The man ate a cookie, the taste evoked memories, he wrote a book about them. Imagine if he had had a real appetite, he might have written a masterpiece.”

  I crossed Sixth Avenue with its cold gray office buildings like thirty-story filing cabinets. A man wrapped in a blanket lay in the doorway, his possessions in a shopping bag. Around the corner, Times Square, Neon National Park. I looked up at the Royalton Hotel where Robert Benchley had sobered up when he needed to and I crossed the street to No. 25 over the door—NATIONAL ASSOCIATION BUILDING. I walked into the long narrow thru-lobby and stopped for ten minutes at the deli for a large coffee and a kaiser, buttered, working up the nerve to ascend to the sacred offices, and finally made myself board the elevator.

  My interview was with Patricia Nosher, who suggested I write some tryout pieces for “The Talk of the Town,” and so I set out to do that. A Black evangelist in a cheap blue nylon suit pacing the corner of 43rd and Eighth Avenue, a big Bible in one hand, thundering at the river of passersby, who shrank from him. “Do you know where you will spend Eternity?” he cries. He is of a vanishing tribe of the Lord’s foot soldiers— maybe he had a story to tell me, but I didn’t ask. Women in tiny skirts and low-cut blouses tried to converse with me: I ignored them. A string quartet in a doorway, playing Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.”

  I walked around all afternoon, taking notes. An exciting city where something was always happening, most of which you wouldn’t want to be involved with personally. No alleys in Manhattan, so it’s all happening out on the street. A man peeing against a storefront. Hustlers grabbing at you. Down the block, flashing lights, a water main broken, water bubbling up from the pavement. Men sitting on front steps, talking machine-gun Spanish, listening to Latin dance music. A man dancing on the sidewalk. Cars with the windows busted out, smoke in the air, a building on fire and people throwing stuff out the windows onto the street. Late at night, people walking down the street in their pajamas and then I realized it was people getting out of bed to move their cars to a new parking space. No Parking signs were complicated, like eye charts, and 4 a.m. seemed to be a deadline in that part of town.

  Meanwhile I ignored the story that was right under my nose, Auntie Mame working in the kitchen and trying to discipline an unruly daughter. She was busy and I didn’t want to bother her. I tried to write a story about a guy named Irwin Klein, who drove a taxi by night and walked the streets by day, shooting portraits of the lonely and destitute, photographs in the style of Robert Frank, black-and-white, on the fly, nothing posed. This became my tryout piece for The New Yorker. He lived in a tiny apartment with his wife and two little girls, a maelstrom of clothing and debris, his wife seemed distraught. I think he let me follow him around, supposing that if I sold the story to the magazine he’d get some good publicity, but in the week we spent together, I could see how bad off he was, broke, desperate, doing a lot of LSD. I didn’t know how to write the story. A few years later, he jumped from a rooftop and died.

  I got on an overnight bus to Boston and washed my face and changed my shirt at the Boston bus station and went over to The Atlantic in an old red-brick mansion near the Public Garden, and had a polite interview with an editor who said they didn’t have an opening for me at the present time but to keep them in mind in the future. I thought of staying in Boston, finding work as a dishwasher, changing my name, writing a novel, writing a letter to Mary—I don’t think we are right for each other. It’s my fault. You should find someone who is steady and can give you the life you deserve.—and yet, marriage seemed plausible, we were both lonely, we both liked classical music. And hockey. Mary got very excited at Gopher hockey games, lost her self-consciousness, stood, whooped and yelled. And the thought of disappointing Marj was too painful, so the next day I boarded the bus back to Minnesota.

  Mary still wanted to marry me, so I married her. She wore her pale blue wedding dress at the Methodist church with her bridesmaids in their pastel gowns, including Corinne. Mary had been the Talented Girl in her high school class, who played the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto with a youth orchestra, was made much of, and arrived at the University to find out there were others more gifted, and that’s when she and I met, she feeling defeated, I feeling full of myself, striding across campus, backpack in hand. Every time she sat at a keyboard, she felt more inadequate, meanwhile I was editing the Ivory Tower and sending stories to New York. Now, in a tuxedo, feeling far from confident, I promised to love her for the rest of my life.

  We moved into two rented rooms in an old mansion on Lowry Hill. I wrote stories and she and I fell into silence. We believed that marriage would make us friends, but we had little to say to each other. We languished for three years, separated, and a month later she told me she was pregnant. So we moved back together. On May 1, 1969, the boy was born after twenty hours of labor, delivered by a young resident whom I saw in the hall poring over an obstetrics textbook. I told him that Mary was frightened, that her aunt had lost a baby in childbirth, and it was 2 a.m. and we should get started. Three hours later, my son emerged, handsome, bright-eyed, a little bruised from the forceps, a Dixie cup taped to the top of his head to protect the IV needle inserted into his soft skull tissue. He was born at University Hospital, a stone’s throw from where I’d done my first newscast at WMMR, and in the early dawn light I walked up the Mall toward Northrop and over to Al’s Breakfast in Dinkytown and ordered steak and eggs. I told Al that my wife had just given birth to a son and he wished me well in Swedish.

  Walking through campus, I realized that that chapter of my life was now over. No more messing around. I looked on them as wasted years— and I still do—the courses in How t
o Write Brilliant Obtusity about Moldy Work by Dead Men Who Deserved It—and then I think of the friends I met who changed my life, Jon and Marcia, my closest writer pal Patricia Hampl, Bob Lindsay, Barry Halper, Roland Flint, Arnie Goldman, Maury Bernstein the folklorist and curmudgeon. Maury was a compulsive lecturer who’d grab your elbow and expound upon Sephardic music and cowboy ballads and the Hardanger fiddle, and days would pass as you stood on the corner of 15th and Fourth Street listening to him. In a just world, he’d’ve had an endowed chair at the U and authored definitive books, but a lack of social grace doomed him to obscurity. He knew everything, and he knew it and he didn’t tolerate interruption. He never got a driver’s license, was allergic to everything, lived in tiny rented rooms, picking up a few bucks playing accordion at birthday parties and bar mitzvahs, organizing an annual Scandinavian music festival. I once saw him and a friend, both down on their luck, pull an old Laurel & Hardy gag at Gray’s lunch counter. Maury sat down and ordered the giant breakfast platter and when it arrived the pal sat down next to him and they got into a pretend argument, yelling at each other, and the pal grabbed the platter and tore out the door, Maury chasing him, and they ran around the corner and sat down and shared the free meal. It was a comedy routine that traveled from one lunch counter to another.

  Maury introduced me to Koerner, Ray and Glover, the Sorry Muthas with Bill Hinkley and Judy Larson, Little Stevie Beck the Queen of the Autoharp, Peter Ostroushko and Dakota Dave Hull, Sean Blackburn, the Middle Spunk Creek Boys, musicians who all knew each other and constituted a small town in the midst of the big city, and that small town was where A Prairie Home Companion began. Maury never forgave me for the success of the show, and whenever I ran into him on Cedar Avenue or the Riverside Café, he told me what a dreadfully ignorant show it was and I thanked him for listening. That success rightfully belonged to him, he knew, and the injustice was clear to him and clearly anti-Semitism was behind it. As the show grew and thrived, he enjoyed loathing it. I was his enemy, a nobody, he was a wunderkind from the age of ten on, playing his accordion for Lubavitcher weddings and I was a schnook from a small town who knew from nothing. I felt bad for him. He deserved better. He thought so and so did I. I still do. He died of Parkinson’s, still lecturing whoever’d listen. I think of him as an old friend, even though I never got a word in edgewise.