Took a KLM flight to Berlin, same drill, blanket, mask, beach, sleep. The beach that works for me is Stinson Beach north of San Francisco. Tall grass, big surf.
In Berlin, taxi to the hotel Adlon, built on the rubble of the old Adlon, a Nazi watering hole from the Twenties and Thirties, a stone’s throw from the Brandenburg Gate, not far from the Reichstag. Came here with my Danish stepkids in ’87 when it was still East Berlin and the Wall was up and you waited hours to cross. I remember my stepson Morten leaning across a konditorei table and saying, “These people are so much like us.” Which is true though Danes didn’t want to think so. The show is in Charlottenberg, in a theater just off the Kurfürstendamm. Breakfast arrived, scrambled eggs and coffee, and I ate it sitting at the laptop. pecking away at Guy Noir. Time to start writing that term paper.
Mar. 1. The American embassy gave a big party for us. Germans, Americans, Brits, Irish, Midwesterners in the Foreign Service, military attachés, spouses, their German tutors. A wonderful array of festive people. I was pushed onto a dais and told to speak and so I did. Introduced the crew and led the crowd in a few verses of “Home on the Range,” the one about the air is so pure, and how often at night, and the graceful white swan, then we mingled for a while. A German asked me if I was going to talk about the war on the show. I said no. He offered to show me where Hitler’s bunker had been. I declined. I didn’t come here to put on a show of righteousness.
Called home later. Mother said, “He’s losing ground.” She was managing the feeding tube with liquid nutrients. My older brother said he had a long conversation with Dad and asked if he had anything on his conscience that he needed to make peace with—Dad said he didn’t. Philip was the only one in the family who could’ve asked Dad that question. In 1947, Dad wrote dozens of letters to the Ames Brethren begging them not to split away from the Booths, so he didn’t have that on his conscience. He was a loving father even if he couldn’t express it. I had nothing to forgive him for, only regret that we were strangers.
At 11 p.m. Saturday, we did a live broadcast back to America from the Neues Berliner Kabarett-Theater in Charlottenberg, just off Bismarckstrasse. I sang the opening theme and said, “How good of the Germans to name a street after the capital of North Dakota.” I brought on a German crooner, Max Raabe, and the Comedian Harmonists and “The Lives of the Cowboys” with “I Ride an Old Paint” in English and German. A rhubarb pie commercial: Pflaumen Torte. A good show and the crowd was like a rural Minnesota crowd, rather quiet, then a standing O at the end. We took a group bow and the crowd started clapping in rhythm, and brought us back for an encore, and another and another. And afterward the German crew and musicians and I went across the street for beer. The Germans who yesterday had been stiff and correct now were downright affectionate, and it was very gemütlich, candlelit faces leaning forward over mugs of beer and in the spirit of the evening, I sang a verse of Hier in des Abends traulich ernster Stille, which I still remembered from high school choir, and then a song from an old Pete Seeger album:
Die Heimat ist Weit
Doch wir sind bereit.
Wir kämpfen und siegen für dich.
Freiheit!
And a verse about how we shall not be afraid of Franco’s fascists, even though the bullets fall like sleet. One of the women said, “We learned that as children in school. In East Berlin. It’s a communist song.” She was mildly amazed.
I called home. Mother sounded flat, running on empty. The hospice nurse was there, explaining what happens when a person dies. I am a coward. I was glad to be thousands of miles away.
I flew to Dublin, cold and rainy, and the seedy old Shelbourne Hotel, creaky floors, heavy drapes, musty carpets. My room faced an airshaft. I went for a walk down Nassau Street, old men walking by in worn tweed jackets and black sweaters and nicely shined shoes, men with craggy faces like Joe O’Connell’s and Jim Powers’s. I walked into Merrion Square, all lush and green, daffodils and daisies, with the statue of Oscar Wilde lounging on a rock, and off in a corner a couple engaged in heavy necking, his hand up under her shirt.
I called home. The hospice nurse had gotten them started giving him morphine to ease his breathing, and my niece Kristina had gotten Mother to lie down. Dad was sleeping all the time, the morphine making him less restless, and in brief wakeful moments he seemed unaware of his surroundings.
From the diary:
Went to dinner at 7 after a lousy day of writing, got back to the hotel room and found messages on my phone from home, my father is sinking fast. Called home and my sister answered, on the verge of tears, to say that his morphine dosage is up and the hospice nurse says he probably won’t make it beyond tomorrow. Spoke to my mother who is tired and distressed and who then had to go to his bedside. My sister came on the phone and said, “I think he’s going.”
And now I sit here weeping in Dublin, weeping for my daddy whom I will never know. I gained so much freedom when I was thirteen and more in college, then he moved to Florida, and we didn’t have the wherewithal to make each other’s acquaintance. Keillor men are somewhat fortresslike. They sat by their dying mother and discussed cars and it wasn’t from coldness of heart, quite the opposite: overflowing feeling and the fear that if it’s expressed, what comes out will be awkward and sound stupid. My dad was friendly with the Prairie Home staff and he’d introduce himself backstage (“I’m his father”) and there seemed to be pride in that, but of course he couldn’t express it to me for fear of what it’d sound like. I am sure he’s dead. And a little later comes a call that he died, about 4 p.m. Very peacefully, with children around, and people singing hymns, and my mother holding his hand, he floated away. Johnny, whom she met on July 4, 1931, at a picnic at the Keillor farm, in a crowd of young people, their eyes caught each other’s and held on and that was it, that’s where I come from.
He drove the car when I was a little kid in the back seat, he ran the power saw and built our house from the basement up, he planted the garden, he raised the car on jacks and put on snow tires, he said the same blessing over every meal. He was handsome and capable, and loved his nieces, and liked being silly with them. He favored girls over boys and should’ve had more daughters. He was so close to his kinfolk that as they got old, they could sit together silently and communicate by pure proximity. He loved long car trips and was an expert packer of luggage in the trunk.
His granddaughters knew him best. They knew him in his sixties and seventies, his prime. But I remember him as an elegant 34-year-old guy in a fedora and topcoat, walking with me along Bloomington Avenue in Minneapolis in 1947. I am riding a trike alongside and I am proud to be identified with him. And I feel the same today. It’s good to cry, but I want to do a funny show on Saturday, not a word about Dad, not a word. And now I really have to get to work.
I wrote in the diary, and then I sat in my hotel room and wrote Guy Noir:
It was March, and warm out, and I assumed that with no more heating costs, my cash flow would stabilize, but then I got hit with a bill from my long-distance provider for $3,358. I had been carrying my phone in my back pocket and every time I sat down it called a number in Dublin. The one in Ireland.
GUY: I don’t know anybody there. This is an outrage.
PHONE REP: Oh my. Let me write that down. “This is an outrage.” Oh, that is priceless.
GUY: I’ll fight you people to the death. I’ll write my congressman.
I’ll write letters to the editor. I’ll organize marches.
PHONE REP: Oh, you are the highlight of my day. A march! Make sure there are bagpipes!
I wrote a Mournful Oatmeal and Dusty and Lefty and decided to quote Yeats in the monologue, “Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths.” I took a cab to the Vicar Street club, a smallish venue, seating about 600. It dawned on me as I entered that a live 6 p.m. broadcast to the States starts at an hour when Dubliners are well into the whiskey and feeling free and easy. I sat on a stool to do the News from Lake Wobegon, it was like talking with friends after
dinner except these friends were well-soused and not afraid to interrupt and when the host clutched the microphone close and tried to ignore them, they spoke louder and used language we don’t accept in American broadcasting, but thank goodness they mispronounced the words, fook and fookin’, so I just plowed ahead and when the music resumed, the fookers shut the fook up. The singer Frank Harte sang a couple ballads and was tickled to be cast in “Guy Noir” as Father Paddy O’Furniture, and two sisters sang beautifully in Gaelic and we closed with “The Parting Glass”:
Oh and all the money that e’er I had,
I spent it in good company,
And all the harm that e’er I’ve done,
Alas it fell on none but me.
And all I’ve done for lack of wit,
To memory I can’t recall.
So fill to me the parting glass,
Good night and joy be with you all.
And that was the end of it. My dad died, and I did a show and it was good enough. Were I an Irishman, I would’ve talked about him on the show and the fookers would’ve been ashamed of themselves, or maybe not. Maybe they’d have wanted to talk about their own poor dead dads and the good deeds they did. But I was done with it: my first interactive show with drunks. I headed for the exit and walked fast back to the hotel and threw myself on the bed and lay there for a long time.
Dad mellowed with age. His children had all fled the Brethren, and he accepted that with equanimity. He loved his Catholic daughter-in-law and vice versa. I was grateful for him and for my siblings who gave him a good death. I wept for all of us. Rare for me. And I was glad for that visit to his bedside with my daughter grabbing at his foot under the blanket and laughing, the dying man with a grin on his face. She was my parting gift to him.
His life had integrity, built on the principle of Self-Reliance. He taught himself to play hymns on the piano by ear, chord by chord. I can see him, thirtyish, building our house, sawdust in his dark hair, running a two-by-four through a circular saw, trimming it, holding it up to the studs, pulling a nail out from between his front teeth, taking the hammer from the loop on his pants where it hung, and pounding in the nail, five whacks, and a tap for good luck. His hammering was as distinctive as John Hancock’s signature. Every few weeks, he cut his boys’ hair, sat us each in turn on a sawhorse in the garage, bedsheet around the customer, trimmed the top to a short clump with a shaved arc around the ears. The haircut was as intimate as he and I ever got, and I wished he’d talk to me and tell stories, and now I think, He’d put in a long day of work and now he had four heads to trim and you expect him to be Andy Griffith? Give the man a break.
There was a cadence to his life. He was a gentle man: anger is not useful when dealing with power tools. When he raised the axe and chopped off the chicken’s head, he did it cleanly. He was a sure-handed barber.
Once he carved a boomerang for me, and I threw it and it flew and rose in the air and curved back toward me. His prayer before a meal had a set rhythm—he bowed his head and said, “Our God and heavenly Father, we do come before Thee this day with grateful hearts to thank Thee for these temporal blessings. We think of our loved ones wherever they may be, that Thy good hand of mercy might be over them throughout the day. So we ask it all in our Savior’s precious and worthy name. Amen.” He was never bewildered until the very end and even then not so much, he had no time for skepticism, there was no bluster to him. He died at home, surrounded by family, as his father had and a long line of Keillors before him. He made my little girl giggle, he drove the nail into the pine, he killed the chicken, he said the prayer over the food, and he rode the train across North Dakota sorting mail in the mail car, a .38 pistol strapped to his waist.
Daddy was a carpenter,
He loved to cut and trim.
Whenever I hear a power saw
I always think of him,
Nails in his mouth, hammer in hand
Way up high on a ladder he’d stand.
I think of him in his coveralls
Packing up the tools as evening falls.
The living leave, they move away,
But the dead are with us every day.
My old dad.
My friends have drifted far apart
But the dead are living in our heart
My old dad.
Mother languished in the big empty house for a while, a lonely widow with her memories, but family gathered around her, Linda and Stan and grandkids and nieces, and she rallied. Family meant everything to her. I bring my little girl to visit and she puts her cheek up to Grandma’s ancient cheek, and the old lady murmurs with pleasure and the girl hugs Grandma, careful not to squeeze too tight, and the old lady says, Ohhhhhh, I love you, and I stand a distance away. My girl is a hugger and I am not. Because my mother was not one when I was little. But she is now. A few years ago, she and Dad went to hear a Christian psychologist speak and it struck her hard when he said, “Do you ever tell your children that you love them?” and Mother realized to her horror that she did not and never had. It didn’t bother us children—we could see perfectly well that she did—but it horrified her. I suppose her parents did not: with thirteen children, the expression of affection might be crowded out by sheer weariness. And besides, they were Scots, a tribe better known for murder ballads than for lullabies. But after the psychologist, whenever Mother talked to one of us, especially on the phone, she tossed in an “I love you, you know.” I never heard Dad say it but I’m sure she spoke for him in the matter.
I am a man of many regrets, a multitude, and visiting her, I remembered the show I did years before at the Edinburgh Festival when I had invited my parents and Uncle Don and Aunt Elsie to fly over to Scotland for a couple weeks. I flew them first class, got them hotel rooms, a rental car, and when they showed up at my hotel in Charlotte Square to come to the show, I could not bear the thought of having Dad sit and listen to me tell stories about Lake Wobegon. It was too intimate. I had developed a conversational style on stage that I could not perform for my father. It was irrational, but I panicked at the thought of him seeing the show, he’d be twenty feet tall in the audience. I told them, “It’s too cold and rainy. The show is under a tent. You’ll catch cold.” My mother said, “Do you not want us to come?” Finally, disappointed, confused, they went away. I saw them for breakfast in the morning: they were still confused and hurt. I still feel bad about it. They had forgiven me for leaving the Brethren and wanted to see the show, but I felt unable to perform in front of them—I was comfortable talking to strangers and not to family, particularly my father. Suddenly, in my mid-fifties, I was twelve years old.
I decided to atone for that and I offered her a trip to Scotland, which she declined (“I’m too old. It’s too expensive.”), a ritual decline, a habit in our family—we say “No, thank you” to all generous offers at least twice, sometimes three times, and thus we miss out on some wonderful things in this world that are only offered once—but I pushed the matter and told her she could take six people with her, and that caught her interest. That gave her a stronger motive than the chance to see Scotland: the chance to be generous to family. And she agreed to go, in the company of my sister and her husband and a niece and her husband, and another niece, five of Mother’s favorite people whom she felt easy and comfortable with. I told Camille, the travel agent, to make it deluxe and I, of course, stayed home. (To have the donor along would’ve meant a daily litany of gratitude and guilt.) My goal was to give a beautiful trip to a woman who’d been a lifelong scrimper, to enjoy in the company of her near and dear without worrying about extravagance. We wheeled her to the airport gate and she boarded in a festive mood, and was pleased to be in first class and didn’t ask how much it cost, and according to my sister, she flew across the Atlantic in style, ate a hearty meal, and drank a glass of red wine. This was my small payment for two divorces, some unsavory jokes on the radio, and general neglect. The six of them stayed at the Ritz in London and rode the Scotsman to Edinburgh and then traveled arou
nd the Highlands in comfy bedrooms on a private train. I told Camille not to tell me how much it cost, and a week later she asked, “Are you sure?” and I said I was sure. Mother & Company visited the old family home in Redding and ate hearty breakfasts and enjoyed the Scottish tongue, the voice of her childhood, and the streets of Glasgow. She ate haggis. She made more trips in her nineties. Boarding a plane lifted her spirits: she, the old worrier who insisted we go to the southwest corner of the basement at the least tornado alert—she got happier as the plane rolled down the runway and rose into the air. She sometimes demurred (“It’s too expensive”) but only briefly and then she went off, wide-eyed as a teenager: Alaska, Florida, Paris, New York, Nova Scotia. And so the prodigal son tried to serve up fatted calf to his faithful mother and alleviate his regret. I gained independence early and as an adult never got to know John and Grace, and I regret that I didn’t reach across the gap, though perhaps it was beyond my reach. But at least I could give her trips that made her eyes light up.
When Mother was 96, she told me in a lucid moment, “There’s so much I’d still like to know, but there’s nobody left to ask.” A poignant line. She missed Elsie and Jean and other contemporaries whom she could talk to and stimulate her memory of Longfellow Avenue, weekends at the Hummel farm, the trolley to Anoka, the Keillor farm. To amuse her, I told a story on the radio about her career in the Denham Brothers, Canner & Campbell Circus, a tightrope walker and sharpshooter, Grace the Great, and Dad was a clown, standing blindfolded on the trunk of an elephant, a lit cigarette in his mouth, which Mother shoots with a pistol aimed over her left shoulder using a hand mirror. The hot coal explodes in a cloud of sparks, the elephant tosses Dad into a double backflip, landing on the elephant’s back as his pants fall off, and the elephant steps forward on a switch that fires a midget out of a cannon who lands on Dad’s shoulders, and the crowd goes crazy. I told this story and the next week she said, “That was nice what you said about me on the radio, but it’s not true, you know.” And she smiled. And then, for Mother’s Day, I made her a star of Senior Women’s Hockey known for playing rough. As she says, “Old age is not for the timid. I didn’t get to be ninety-six by baking sugar cookies.” I created my bad brother, Larry, who is awaiting trial for mail fraud. He sells Powerball Bibles with winning lottery numbers hidden in the first chapter of Leviticus and brokers enormous loans to evangelicals persuaded that the Lord will return before the due date. She said, “I am not going to let your brother rot in jail,” and one day she got the drop on three US marshals and freed Larry at gunpoint and drove him to a grass landing strip south of Minneapolis and they took off in a small jet and made it to Venezuela, and there they are today, my little mom and her son the felon. She enjoyed hearing this; she told her caregiver, “He likes to make things up.”
That Time of Year Page 28