That Time of Year

by Garrison Keillor

  One spring we were visited by Diana Cummings, the daughter of Paul Doty, indomitable at ninety, born the year our house was built, who grew up in it. Maia’s bedroom had been her room. She remembered every family who lived on our block in her childhood and remembered hearing people gossip about Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald when they returned to St. Paul for the birth of their daughter in 1921. Diana and my little girl sat together on the couch, holding hands, communing, and the lady said, simply, “I have only happy memories of this house.”

  Maia was a fish in water, strong arms, steady kick, little pink goggles rising and plunging. A dog jumped on her when she was three and terrified her, and thus we were spared the burdens of dog ownership. An aunt took her horseback riding, and I worried that the virus of horsewomanship might get in her blood, but no. We kept her away from sports and saved ourselves a lot of trouble. What she loved was to be in a roomful of people talking. She also loved musicals. She loved the Radio City Christmas show in which one Rockette kicked off a shoe and kept dancing though off-kilter; our girl was delighted. She grew up backstage at my show, called me “Show Boy,” adored the women singers, Heather, Aoife, Sara, Jearlyn and Jevetta, her sisters. She showed no interest in performing but was proud of her sisters. We bonded over jokes, musicals, trains, water fights. “Make me laugh,” she said, and I did my best. The best way is to reach for a glass of water and pretend to throw it at her, except if we are in the backyard, I actually do and she goes to pieces. She has a vigilant mother, so she didn’t watch television (except for approved videos) or eat fast food or drink soda pop or use foul language. She was taken to kiddie concerts of classical music and to children’s theater. At bedtime, with a little prompting, she bowed her head and prayed for people. But she loves to laugh, and I have a video of her on a raft ride at the State Fair, watching waves of water wash over the side and onto her father’s pants, and she is convulsed, howling, weeping, like me when I was twelve and read the limerick about the young man of Madras.

  One morning I heard a shriek from upstairs, a long primeval wail, and there was Jenny on the landing, holding the stiff body of our little girl. I dashed up and took Maia in my arms while Jenny called 911. The child was unconscious, her breathing shallow. She went into convulsions in my arms and her body stiffened, her mouth clamped shut. I thought she was dying. And in about three minutes the St. Paul fire department paramedics arrived at the door.

  In those three minutes, the heart of the father got scorched with dread. We were back in the Middle Ages, a peasant family, a dying child. The paramedics came in, four of them, and lifted her out of my arms. They laid her on the floor and tended to her, took her temperature (she was running a fever), put an oxygen mask on her face. One of them began explaining to me about febrile seizures, how common they are in small children, which Jenny knew about but I didn’t. We had bought a dozen books on child-rearing, and Jenny had read them and I hadn’t. And then one of the paramedics pointed out that I was still in my underwear. I pulled on a pair of trousers and we rode off to the hospital and hustled in the door and there was a pediatrician, a short man with a bow tie, like most pediatricians. I don’t remember what he did. We were there for less than an hour, and then we came home with a very tired little girl. For the first time in years, she took a nap and I sat by her bed and watched her breathe.

  GK and Maia, 7.

  And there was the day we found my heart pills scattered on the floor and didn’t know if she had ingested some, and if so, how many, so she had to have her stomach pumped, three nurses holding her tight while a fourth pumped charcoal down her throat, my daughter writhing in terror. Still vivid to me, years later. And her tonsillectomy. I was the one who wheeled her into the OR and held her head while the anesthetist put the mask on her. As she was wheeled out afterward, she saw me, the Judas, and stuck out her tongue.

  In a rash moment, against Jenny’s better judgment, I sold the Doty house and bought a house overlooking the Mississippi, with wild turkeys and raccoons and a red fox living in the woods behind. As the movers emptied the place, I took a last walk around, remembering my son Jason’s and Tiffany’s wedding on the staircase, January 1, 2000, and my little girl crawling under the dining table during dinner, and the garden with the board fence where I spent my luxurious recuperation after heart surgery, reclining on a chaise, coffee in hand, writing on a yellow legal pad:

  The secret of a long career is to keep going and not fade

  And not think about your reputation for one minute.

  It’s like becoming Tallest Boy In The Sixth Grade,

  Stick around and you’re bound to win it.

  So do your work, keep going straight ahead,

  And you can be a genius someday after you are dead.

  The new house was built in 1919 for a family who had a cook and a housemaid who lived on the third floor, short women from undernourished countries, so the back stairway had low clearances and I banged my head often. Maia took an upstairs bedroom and sat at an old desk where, twenty years before, I banged out Lake Wobegon Days, which changed my life though not to the extent that she has. We put her in preschool, then into a church school, because the thing we feared most was bullying, and a teacher told us, “Sitting in a class of twenty kids, she isn’t going to learn anything. She needs individual attention.” We searched for the right school desperately as our girl sank into the academic slough and found one that came as a miracle, a school designed for kids with learning challenges, where everyone is an oddball in some way or other and a spirit of acceptance prevails, no bullying. She was not going to become an English major and write term papers about Joyce, but she was joyful and jokey and affectionate. For her, the right place turned out to be a boarding school in New York state, a thousand miles away, and Jenny and I did the painful necessary thing and packed her suitcase and one September day took our girl to her new school and left her, weeping, in the arms of a kind teacher, and walked to the car and drove away in silence, brokenhearted, a day burned into my memory, the day we abandoned our own. She was fourteen. A long quiet ride into the city. She didn’t change her clothes for days because those were the clothes she was wearing when Jenny hugged her goodbye. We had given her a wonderful month of August, and it only made saying goodbye harder.

  The next day the school emailed us pictures of Maia, bravely trying to smile. We’d done the right thing, which became clearer and clearer as time went by, but there was little pleasure in it. We missed our girl. Every time I walked past her bedroom door and looked in and saw her stuffed animals, I felt hollow inside. Her sociability got her through the hard times, and she made friends with KK and Nora and Marisa and charmed her teachers and she came to love schedules and look forward to weekend outings, and Jenny and I woke up every morning and saw that door to the empty room. I missed her. The school became her family and we became distant relatives. Sometimes I thought about the brilliant neurotic daughter I’d been expecting, the one who’d stay up late at night writing angry poems. And then I missed the heroic humorous girl away at school, the girl who loved to come up and hug me and who said, “Make me laugh,” and I did.

  I went to a dance at her school a year ago, the gym crowded with boys in suits and ties, girls in prom dresses, some with an odd gait, some quirk or twitchiness, a speech abnormality. My heart clutches, remembering what outcasts they would’ve been in the gym of my youth, how cruelly we treated the disabled and gimpy, and now the band strikes up “My baby’s so doggone fine, she sends chills up and down my spine”—the band is five old guys my age, the lead guitarist is going bald with a white ponytail down to his butt, playing “Brown-Eyed Girl”—and I see my daughter’s friend who was injured as an infant and now, at sixteen, is blind in one eye and walks with a lurch, one arm semi-paralyzed, and she is dancing to Van Morrison, utterly transported, dancing like mad, laughing and a-running, skipping and a-jumping, and singing “sha la la la la la la la la de dah,” not the least bit self-conscious. And then a slow waltz and I sing the word
s to my daughter, “I hear babies cry, I watch them grow; they’ll learn much more than I’ll ever know. And I think to myself, What a Wonderful World.” And it’s true. The world has come a long way in my time, and it looks wonderful to me with her in it.

  25

  Friendship and Fame

  THE DOTY HOUSE ON PORTLAND and the big white manse on Summit, the houses Maia grew up in, were a couple blocks from my pal Patricia Hampl, a St. Paulite born and bred, raised by the nuns, and she’d written genius memoirs about the neighborhood, A Romantic Education and The Florist’s Daughter, and owned it literarily. I was Protestant, a visitor. Back in college days I used to walk the streets that Fitzgerald had walked and look at the old Commodore Hotel where he had a few drinks and his parents’ row house where he finished writing This Side of Paradise and where he ran out into Summit Avenue and stopped cars to tell people that Scribner had accepted it for publication. Down the street was the Empire Builder James J. Hill’s enormous stone castle, looking like a Victorian train station or an insane asylum, take your pick. Mr. Hill built a railroad and is also known for having died from an infected hemorrhoid. Across the street, Archbishop Ireland’s cathedral designed by the French architect Masqueray, whom the archbishop worked to death building majestic edifices, fifteen of them. He died of a stroke at age 56 while riding a streetcar down Selby Avenue and was carried off and laid on the grass and died looking up at the cathedral dome. Downtown is Wabasha Street, named for the Mdewakanton Dakota chief who ceded all this land to white men in 1837, adopted Western dress, became Episcopalian, supported the government during the Dakota Uprising of 1862, did his best to knuckle under, and for his loyalty the government shipped him in iron shackles to Nebraska along with his people, where he died and was buried in a little grove of trees on the open prairie. Down the hill is Kellogg Boulevard, named for Frank B. Kellogg, a St. Paul lawyer and Calvin Coolidge’s Secretary of State, who negotiated a treaty, signed in Paris by all the major powers, men in morning coats and top hats, renouncing warfare as a means of settling disputes, which won him the Nobel Peace Prize, after which Kellogg retired to a big house on the hill and watched the world fall apart: Japan invaded Manchuria, Italy invaded Ethiopia, Russia invaded Finland, and Hitler invaded Poland. Kellogg would’ve contributed more to the world had he invented Grape-Nuts. He intended to be a savior and instead he became a boulevard.

  Frank Kellogg drew up a pact

  Outlawing war—that’s a fact.

  It was quickly signed

  By the deaf and the blind,

  And the powerful promptly attacked.

  And then there was Fitzgerald, who said, “Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.” He was thinking of himself, as he generally did. He didn’t like St. Paul, so he left in his twenties and never returned. He was a literary sensation at the age of 24, the Handsome Schoolboy of the Jazz Age, and wound up burned out at 44, an invalid in Hollywood, worrying about his daughter at Vassar, in debt to his agent, watching his old pal Hemingway coming out with For Whom the Bell Tolls as Fitzgerald wrote stories about a hack writer, based on himself, and a few days before Christmas, he jumped up from his chair and fell down dead from a coronary.

  It’s a neighborhood of cautionary tales about the perils of prominence, nonetheless I persevered, since I was enjoying myself. Fame is a role and some people play it very well, such as George Plimpton, who crashed a party at my apartment in New York one night. I hadn’t invited him because I didn’t know him, he was too famous for me to know, but he wanted to be friends so he came around midnight and sat at the dining room table, jiggling a glass of Scotch and holding court, talking about Hemingway at the Café de Tournon and the bar at the Ritz and E. M. Forster whom he interviewed for the Paris Review and Ezra Pound. George invited me to lunch at the New York Racquet Club and showed me the tennis court modeled after the one Henry the Eighth played on, an actual courtyard with walls and a roof to play the ball off. He explained the arcane rules of court tennis and took me down to the library where we sat in leather chairs and he told about the book he’d found in which an Old Member had hidden his correspondence with his mistress, describing her breasts as “gleaming rosy-tipped orbs.” My Midwestern bias against clubbiness runs deep, but George was a real writer, his Paper Lion and Out of My League part of the literature of sports. And his great adventure was founding the Paris Review in Paris when he was 26 years old, living in a toolshed, sleeping on an army cot, dropping in at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée to write letters on hotel stationery to his parents assuring them that he was having a fine time and wasn’t ready to get a job on Wall Street yet. He remained 26 on into his seventies. He was a tireless encourager, and generosity, not cleanliness, is what is next to godliness. That night at my apartment, he left around 4 a.m. “I miss staying up all night,” he said. “That gray light in the morning. You think your time is up and then you get a second wind.” We stood out on Columbus Avenue, cabs passing by. He said, “I envy you getting to talk to all those people on the radio. People hear my voice and they get their backs up, they hear Harvard snob. I tell you, friendship is what it’s all about. It’s all it’s ever been about. All my deepest regrets are about people I missed my chance to get to know, and it’s always for the dumbest reasons.” And then a cab stopped and he got in, waved, and was gone.

  Friendship is what it’s all about, all it’s ever been about. I think of my disapproving father whom I never knew and how happy he was with his sister Eleanor. He never was at ease with Mother’s family; with Eleanor, he was completely happy. I sat in the next room and listened to them, talking and laughing, he was someone I didn’t recognize at all. I was in the business of impersonating friendship on the radio, and one day I got a friendly letter from Maggie Forbes, my Latin teacher at the U, for whom I wrote clumsy translations of Horace, who wrote from Texas to say she loved the show, and I stared at her letter in happy disbelief. The woman had seen a dense dull side of me and now we were friends. My doorbell on Portland Avenue dinged one morning and there was Charles Faust, my old history teacher and now he wanted to be friends. Helen Story came to a party at my house and said she admired Pontoon and admired Love Me even more. She was on her way to the Stratford Festival, flying to New York and London, planning a trip to Machu Picchu, not a word about her years of servitude at Anoka High, only about her love of theater. LaVona Person asked me to speak at her retirement dinner; she was proud of having been my teacher—this thrilled me more than any prize could, that I’d won the regard of the woman who showed me that if I took off my glasses, the audience became a Renoir hillside.

  I acquired a friendship with the writer Carol Bly, who wrote me weekly about her anger at oppressive Lutheranism and the need for boldness and honesty in all things artistic and the need for comedy that doesn’t jeer at people but facilitates self-confidence and psychological growth, and why, instead of teaching critical reading in English classes, they should require kids to memorize stories from age seven on up through college, so you can tell Moby-Dick to someone or Lord Jim or David Copperfield—she kept trying to enlist me in good causes to open all systems wide and let the sun shine in. When she read that I was going to speak at the dinner of the White House Correspondents Association and the Clintons would be there, Carol badgered me to not tell jokes but call the administration to battle.

  I wrote a funny speech and went to the dinner and sat next to Mrs. Clinton, who was good to talk with. I’d just attended a Supreme Court session, and I talked about how inspiring it was to see them at work and suggested she visit sometime. She laughed and said, “I don’t think it’d be a good idea for me to show up in a courtroom where a member of my family might be a defendant.” It was the year before the impeachment of her husband. And then she turned and bestowed her attention on the old Republican bull sitting on the other side of her, Speaker Dennis Hastert, whom nobody was talking to. It was her duty to be civil to him, not to amuse me, and she focused on him and even made him chuckle a few times, no easy task. />
  Out of nowhere came a friendship with the jurist Harry Blackmun. It was his idea, not mine. I don’t aspire to be on a first-name basis with the US Supreme Court, but Harry grew up on Dayton’s Bluff in St. Paul, a blue-collar Republican, and he listened to the show regularly, or so he said. We wrote back and forth. I met him years later at the Court and we took a walk around the block, he in a blue cardigan frayed at the sleeves, an old blue raincoat, and, coming back, he stopped to listen to the picketers on the Court plaza, protesting the decision he wrote in Roe v. Wade that struck down state restrictions of abortion. They paid no attention to me or the slight bespectacled gray-haired man next to me. He said, “Maybe they take you for my security,” but it was his own humility that shielded him. “They still write me a lot of letters,” he said, “and I try to read them.” Then he walked up the steps under the Equal Justice Under Law inscription and went in to his office where he kept, in a frame, a chunk of his apartment wall with a bullet hole in it where some anonymous sniper had fired at him and missed. He was still miffed at the insurance company that did not fully compensate him for the upholstered chair that the bullet had passed through.