Lucy, she was very deep
Lucy, she was very deep
Lucy, she was very deep
It was Willie what got drownded in the deep Lucy.
Juvenile, yes, and them what got it, grinned, and the others went on, unmolested. Meanwhile, Dusty and Lefty rode the arid plains in search of a woman who wanted a pair of boots under her bed and Guy Noir searched for the answers to life’s persistent questions. Word had gotten around in the rodent population at the Acme that I was not a killer but a conscientious objector. The one time I set a mousetrap it caught a mouse by the ankle and he walked with a limp after that. I took care of him. Fed him. He became very fond of imported bleu cheese so I named him Mister Bleu. We became close. I made him a wheelchair out of a child’s roller skate. I found a vet willing to care for a rodent. He was on dialysis for a year. What can I say? I have his ashes in a little medicine bottle on my bookshelf. When the show was over, the crew loaded it into the semitrailer and Russ Ringsak headed for the next town.
Parody was a staple of the show, as it was back in my high school years, and now I used it to remind my generation that it was aging, using the Stones’ “Honky-Tonk Women”:
I found a long tall woman in New York City
She stood behind the chair that I sat on
I said I want my hair to come down on my shoulders
She looked at me and said, Those days are gone.
It’s the long tall hair salon woman
Gimme, gimme, gimme a very hard time
I took the delicate sensitive “Teach Your Children” of the law firm Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and made it more relevant:
You who recall this song
It’s been a long time since the Sixties
Your hair is thin up there
Your memory’s very dim and misty
Hear your children say,
It’s moving day, today we’re giving
Orders to you, today you move,
You’re going to assisted living.
You can argue, you can cry, but the Sixties have gone by,
It’s a sharp stick in your eye, but we love you.
We played to an audience of parents and we did our best to play on their anxieties.
I met you on the Internet
A chat room called EZ2Get
It was lowercase and phonetically spelled
We talked for hrs and we LOLed
You offered me a JPG
I said I don’t have one of me
You sent me yr entire file
Yr blu blu eyes, your HD smile
Someday when I’m out of jail
Done doing time for stealing mail
When I get out and back on the street
Maybe you and I can meet.
In my late fifties, I set out to write love sonnets, seventy-seven of them. Helen Story required me to memorize for English class Shakespeare’s “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” and the cadence sticks in the mind. My sonnets were pretty good but when I recited them to a crowd, the response was muted, but a poem that began and people fell apart. I submitted it to The New Yorker and the poetry editor, Alice Quinn, said, “Oh, Garrison, you know we can’t print that!” but so sweetly that a friendship bloomed. She suggested I do poetry on the radio, which led eventually to The Writer’s Almanac, a five-minute summary of This day in history followed by a poem and a blessing (“Be well, do good work, keep in touch”), which led to poets like Maxine Kumin, Ron Padgett, Billy Collins, Rita Dove, Robert Bly, Donald Hall performing on Prairie Home Companion. I was a good reader of poems thanks to my lack of theater training. I read them as one would read Scripture and every poem I read could be clearly understood even by listeners scrambling eggs for unruly children. I chose the poems for clarity. And if the poem is not clear, then it needs to be fascinating. I did the Almanac daily for almost twenty-five years on public radio, then continued it as a podcast. It was the best good deed I ever did, putting poets out in public view, and it was all about clarity, the idea of poetry as powerful speech. Read Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” or “A Summer Day” and you’ll see what I mean. She said, “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination.” She said, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” No poet ever asked me that before and meant it. I plan to create written work that gets wilder and that some people will value, perhaps one or two hundred.
O what a luxury it be,
What pleasure, O what perfect bliss,
How ordinary and yet chic,
To pee, to piss, to take a leak.
And I wrote to Jenny:
My dearest Jenny—I’m not myself without you, and it isn’t my life I’m living when you’re not here, it’s a refugee life. We belong together. Otherwise my feelings don’t work right unless we’re together. You and I have a conversation that goes on and on. Will you marry me? We could marry in September in New York. I’m in love with you. You are extraordinary and beautiful and I feel sad without you, even when I’m having a good time. We have come through all of our awkward times without any ill feeling whatsoever and we have come to love each other more and more. I am crazy about you. You need to play music, and I need to sit in a quiet room and write but I can’t endure that quiet unless you’re near. Well, sweetheart, that is all for tonight. I will see you tomorrow after your show. I am so much in love with you.
In the spring of 1995, I wrote a letter to my mother, telling her I would marry Jenny in the fall. In my family, third marriages are unknown, and it helped matters that Jenny was from Anoka and her sister knew mine. Her people were within our constellation though not in the same orbit. Some of my teachers went to their church. One of Jenny’s childhood friends had been a Brethren girl whose aunt was married to my Uncle Jim. Jenny’s mother was behind the Great Books program in Anoka and knew Catherine Jacobson, mother of my classmate Christine. We had connections. We had been brought into the world by the same Dr. Mork. Marrying her was to marry Anoka to Manhattan, to belong on 90th Street and still hold Minnesota in my heart. And when I took her to meet John and Grace in Minnesota, Jenny threw out her arms and held the old lady close and then the old man, and that was that, no more needed to be said. They had not been huggers, except with grandkids, but they were delighted to feel her affection. Jenny stayed a Nilsson, didn’t take my name, but she was accepted as a Keillor from the moment she met them.
We merged into marriage on November 21, 1995, in a side chapel at St. Michael’s, Amsterdam at 99th, the bride elegant and jittery, kneeling under pre-Raphaelite apostles on the Tiffany windows, and we were blessed by a West Indian priest and heard Jenny’s sister Elsa play Elgar’s Salut d’amour on violin and Jenny’s mother read, from Colossians, “You are the people of God; He loved you and chose you for His own. Therefore, you must put on compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience.” We said our vows and Philip Brunelle played a rousing Bach postlude that incorporated the Anoka High School fight song, and we hiked down Broadway, Jenny in her lacy ivory dress carrying a bouquet of freesia, and passersby smiled and we got good wishes from numerous panhandlers. The wedding lunch was at La Mirabelle on 86th, about forty of us, grilled sole, with wine, and Roy Blount made a speech in which he told the joke about the man who described to his wife her two main faults and she said, “Those are why I couldn’t get a better husband.” Roland Flint recited the poem about love as “an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken; it is the star to every wand’ring bark, whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.” And the waitress, Danielle, serenaded us with “La vie en rose,” with rich Piafian vibrato. We ate the cake and hung around for coffee and lingered and talked and walked home.
We spent a week in Rome on our honeymoon, and the grandeur of it, the narrow twisty streets and the magnificence rising on both sides, was perfect: when you’re in love, why would you want to be anywhere else? Thanks to our friend John Thavis, we met Father Regin
ald, the Pope’s Latinist, who gave us a little Vatican tour, including the world’s only ATM in Latin. We came home to do an open-air Prairie Home at Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, Jenny’s old school where she was inspired to make music her life and where bats nesting in the trees got excited by the music and flew in big dramatic loops over the stage. I looked at the audience during the monologue, and they were looking up with sheer dread, thinking of vampires. We flew home in a small jet through a storm front, lightning to the north and south, around high cumulus clouds, a full moon above, and into Minneapolis between two layers of cirrus clouds, sunset to the west. We started writing a novel together about a small-town girl, Rachel Green, who loves to play violin. We hired Norzin, an undocumented immigrant from Tibet, and suddenly our apartment had flowers, and her cooking was like my mother’s, noodles and meat. We paid her well and she saved her money and she and her husband brought their children over, hired a lawyer, they all became legal, and they moved to California. When she left, she took our hands in hers and cried louder than anybody I had ever said goodbye to. She left a long white silk scarf tied to the door handle, a Buddhist prayer scarf, and ever since then, I’ve had good fortune.
Our marriage was happy. Jenny was never at a loss for words; everything I said got a quick comeback. She made me laugh. I missed her when she went out for a long run, training for a marathon. I edited James Thurber’s collected works for the Library of America and talked them out of doing it unabridged. Everyone, even Thurber, needs abridgment. We, however, set out to expand and become parents. There were lab tests of my sperm’s motility. A man assumes his sperm are good swimmers, but I’m not and neither were they. To compensate for my defective sperm, I had to inject progesterone in her thigh, I sang, Close your eyes, pretend I’m a Beatle as I stick you with this needle so that our seed’ll create something fetal. And finally, a lab guy named Ron injected my sperm into her egg under a powerful microscope. And in due course science worked.
I was driving home from a speech in St. Cloud when the car phone rang and Jenny told me she was indeed pregnant and the baby would be born in December. I was delighted, also shaken, as a man should be, and turned off the highway in a daze, and spent a while being lost on county roads, rolling this mystery around in my mind, fatherhood at 55, a stunning fact, a clutch in the heart. Friends of mine were parents and they’d set out to be beloved and wound up as parole officers, listening to angry offspring listening to a band called Degenerate Thrombosis. Others produced daughters devoted to mathematics and practicing Chopin. Hard to know where the apple would drop. I got home and we sat on the side of the bed, arms around each other, not saying a word. I knew she wanted this child, and I knew I wanted to bring the child up in Minnesota among relatives.
We were in New York in December 1997, as her due date approached. The baby was moving around, and I put my hand on the bulge and made contact. A nurse told us the fetus looked like a girl, nice and compact, no dangly parts, which was fine by me. We didn’t need any Christmas gifts except the Infanta herself. We lit a few candles and sat in the dusk and looked at each other, two characters in an ancient drama. Christmas dinner was a light lunch, the little tree sat on the coffee table. She arrived on the 29th at 9:06 p.m. at New York–Presbyterian Hospital on 68th and York. The obstetrician examined the mother and gave her a pep talk and the nurses did the delivery, comforting the mother, easing the child’s descent, and she emerged, took a breath, turned pink, aced the Apgar test, was loosely swaddled in a receiving blanket, and at 9:11 was handed to me, her arms and legs swimming, her dark eyes shining, her mouth prim, her long slender fingers grasping my finger, a kind of luminosity about her. Her heartbeat appeared as spikes on a graph on a TV monitor. It was a religious moment. I have hiked the Grand Canyon, seen Pavarotti in “Pagliacci,” dined with S. J. Perelman, sung with Emmylou Harris, and once, on national television, I tossed a basketball over my left shoulder without looking and hit a swisher at twenty feet, but none of those compared to holding a five-minute-old daughter in my hands. I was struck by dumb wonder, the thought that this is how everybody comes into the world, just this way, and turned to my wife, who did not have the same sense of wonder I had. She looked like the victim of an assault.
We named her Maia, after Jenny’s Swedish grandmother, and Grace, after my mother. I walked out of the hospital, thinking dumb profound thoughts, and walked a couple miles in a daze before I saw I was going the wrong way and I jumped into a cab at 14th and rode home. Carlos the elevator man said, “How’s it going?” I said, “It’s a beautiful little girl.” I reached to shake his hand and then he hugged me. Carlos is Mexican; he knows that you shake hands on a real estate transaction, a new father needs an embrace.
She was a remarkable little girl, not a hobby baby you could shoehorn into your busy schedule. She lived on Australian Standard Time, ate like a wolverine, stored up pockets of gas not easily jiggled out of her. Sometimes she pooped while feeding, the entire digestive tract engaged at once. She fought off sleep, not wanting to miss out on anything. When her tiny head touched the pillow, her eyes flew open, she keened and wailed. She had no midrange; she was louder than anyone else in the family. When it was my turn, I slung the spit rag over my shoulder and walked the floor with her, a foot soldier in the old campaign, an exhausted, poorly informed man nobody would ever hire to look after a child.
We brought the little girl home to Minnesota to meet her ancestors. A flock of them came one afternoon to view her, and the sleeping child was passed from one elder to another, Ina and Louie, Joan, Elsie and Don, Jean, each holding her in their arms, the Last Niece. All the other nieces were having children of their own. It was a poignant visit, old aunts and uncles, knowing they would not see this tiny girl reach maturity, which made her all the more precious to them. They held her tenderly, murmuring primeval comforting sounds though she was sound asleep. They also spoke some to me and Jenny, though Maia was the beautiful mystery. Me they could read about in the newspaper. A few months later, Father Bill Teska came to the house in a magnificent black robe and baptized her with great ceremony and snatches of Latin, my old Brethren parents watching in silence as he anointed the infant with oil and water and salt and made her Roman Anglican, her aunt Linda and cousin Dan and friend Gretchen, godparents.
We lived in a cabin in the Wisconsin woods for less than a year. Seclusion was not what we needed; the new mother craved company and support, especially with the father often on the road. One day, heading out the long treacherous driveway, she collided with an incoming garbage truck and broke a finger. Another day, on her way home, a suicidal deer leaped into her car on the county road and cracked the windshield. Obviously for our own safety we needed to move to town so we bought the Doty house on Portland Avenue next door to the Hooleys and their four small children. The New York Times was thrown onto our front steps by 6 a.m. every day, and friends were apt to drop in. The house was designed by the French architect who did the St. Paul Cathedral down the street and looks very French, with a winding staircase and a slate roof. Years before, the house had been owned by the head of Northwest Orient Airline, a Mr. Hunter, and one winter, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, stranded during a big blizzard, had spent two nights in his guest bedroom, a small room with bathroom across the hall. Surely the First Lady could’ve commandeered something grander downtown, but it was wartime and she was a Democrat and duty-bound to set a good example. We spent ten years in that house, had a hundred houseguests, and every one was told about their predecessor, Eleanor. When my mother was fifteen, she lived a few blocks away with Aunt Jean and Uncle Les, and after school she went door to door selling homemade peanut butter cookies to help pay her way in the world, and she remembered going to this big house. “Were they nice?” I asked. “It was the Depression,” she said. “Everyone was nice. Everybody helped each other. People getting off a streetcar would take a transfer and if they didn’t need it, they’d stick it into a crack in a building by the streetcar stop for someone else to use. Littl
e slips of paper stuck in a wall. Free rides.”
My workroom was next door to my little girl’s bedroom. She grieved to be put to bed at night and always woke up early feeling exuberant, and toddled in to where I sat at a computer, a grin on her face. We padded downstairs for breakfast, and she savored each berry and chunk of melon and spoonful of cereal. We shared a love of peanut butter, Dairy Queen cones, cheese curds, and popcorn. We sat in the dining room, by the grandfather clock like the one my dad sang about, that went tick-tock tick-tock until it stopped short, never to go again, when the old man died. I read the prayer painted above the fireplace, O Lord we thank Thee for the food, for every blessing, every good, for earthly sustenance and love bestowed on us from heaven above. All was well for a time, and then we started to worry about our girl not hitting her developmental deadlines, the first utterance of Mama, standing up, walking, the first use of the past participle, etc. There were meetings with the pediatrician when I held my breath, I was listening so hard. And the slow suspicion that maybe we had not gotten the precocious neurotic child we were expecting. We had a sweet girl who adored her nannies Suzanne, Katja, Kaja, and Emily: they were the Sun and the Stars. She lived in the moment, every one. She could amuse herself with a bowl of water on the sidewalk. She got laughing fits easily—at loud belches and pretend stumbles and cries of alarm. She was not a finicky eater: she licked her chops the moment the bib was tied. She laughed as we put her tiny feet into wet concrete when we laid a new driveway. When she was two, I took her around the State Fair, and she touched a newly shorn sheep and looked into the faces of hogs and goats. We slid down the Giant Slide together on a burlap bag, and she laughed the whole way down. She ate part of a corn dog that I pre-chewed for her, and we rode through the Tunnel of Love and she was delighted by her own echo.
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