So much yet to know, but nobody’s left. Her confidantes were all gone. An epoch, vanished. She was the last survivor on the island. Mother sits in the kitchen of the house Dad built and she murmurs to herself, audible but unintelligible, the cadence is that of conversation, and then she laughs. A very cheerful dementia. I guess she is reminiscing with her lost siblings, Elsie and Ina and George. A strategic dementia. Everyone’s gone, so Mother has taken leave of the rational world, the comings and goings of family, the daily business of life, shopping and cooking and laundry—and she has gone to live in her imagination.
There she sits, creating a novel before our eyes, which can’t be put in writing because that would destroy the perfection of it. Thus she escapes from a life in which she has nothing to do but sit and nobody to talk to who remembers the Fourth of July picnic in 1933 and the handsome farm boy and his crippled father whose arm Grace took, and she assisted him down the steps and into a chair on the lawn and held an umbrella over his head. She is very tender, living in her girlhood. One day she looks up and tells me to kiss her, which she never told me before. So I do. An old, old lady with snow-white hair brushed back, almost blind, her skin papery, reaching out to put her old hand on my hand—she sits, murmuring to herself, and her caregiver Ramona says, “She’s praying for you.”
And then alertness returns. She sits in the sunlight in the living room, a picture window with two full-length side windows forming a sunny alcove facing south. She tells us that Dad wanted to take a shortcut and omit the side windows, and Mother insisted he follow the plan. Now in her nineties, she sits in the alcove and feels the sun on her back, and she knows exactly where she is. She is at a historic site, where she won an important concession.
She listens to the show every week. Once I had the Lutherans of Lake Wobegon sing an old Brethren hymn, How good is the God we adore, our faithful unchangeable Friend, whose love is as great as His power, and knows neither measure nor end. ’Tis Jesus, the First and the Last, Whose Spirit shall guide us safe home. We’ll praise Him for all that is past and trust Him for all that’s to come.—and Ramona said Mother perked up and moved her lips to the words.
She lived her last days in the bedroom where Dad had died, my old bedroom, where I smoked Luckies and read Hemingway and imagined a literary career, where now I sit with my siblings, holding her hand, and we sing “Sweet hour of prayer” and “Blest be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love” as she lies unconscious, breathing her last. She is fifteen feet from the kitchen where we stewed tomatoes in the pressure cooker every summer, forty quarts in Ball jars with Kerr lids. I’m so glad the folks came home to spend their last days in familiar rooms rather than in an anonymous death motel in Florida. Down below is the laundry room smelling of Hi-lex bleach, where she scrubbed clothes on a washboard and rinsed them in tubs and wrung them out by hand and hung them outside on the line. Beyond the bedroom window is the driveway where Dad worked on his car and the garage where he cut my hair. Across the hall is the closet where the Hoover vacuum stood, its handle the microphone into which I told jokes on “The Gary Keillor Show.” We talked to her and held her hands, and then she was gone and I left the house and never went back. It remains in my mind exactly as it was in the mid-Fifties, a Sunday in summer, the comics pages spread on the living room floor, I’m in my Meeting clothes, pot roast in the oven, and Dad and the uncles sit and discuss cars as I read Skeezix and Dagwood and Little Iodine and Dick Tracy, and then Mother tells me to go out and pick a bagful of corn for dinner, the water is coming to a boil.
I broke away from John and Grace and caused them grief in the process but now we’re at peace. She is very much alive for me whenever I stand on a stage and speak and hear people laugh and I feel close to him when I’m on a train. He dreaded the thought of spending his life milking cows and when he got a job sorting mail on the train he knew he was free. I like to ride his old run, St. Paul to Jamestown, but even more I feel his company when the Lake Shore Limited pulls out of Penn Station and into the tunnel under Park Avenue to emerge eventually along the shore of the mighty Hudson. A train heading north along water bound for the sea and he’s there. When I’m in my eighties, I might start up a conversation with him.
I want to go back to the fall night in 1936 when John drove the Model A from Anoka down to Minneapolis to pick up Grace and take her away to lie on a blanket in the grass in a cemetery, their arms around each other, fumbling with each other’s clothing. I want to stand at the gate and protect them from interruption. Two good Brethren young people, brought up with impossible standards, shamed for even slight dereliction of duty, ever aware of God’s unwavering gaze, had spent five years thinking about each other over family opposition and the realities of the Great Depression and now they made love under the starry sky and conceived a child. After five years of uncertainty, this carnal sin finally joined them together. They faced the music and embarked on a life together, and what they didn’t realize was that the sin freed them from the legalism of the Brethren, the judgmentalism, the arrogance, and made them loving and forgiving Christians. I guard the gate so nobody can call the cops. My life depends on those two lying in the grass behind the stone monuments. Thank you, Lord, and thank you, Uncle Bob, for lending John the car.
27
Mitral Valve
THAT SPRING OF 2001 I was inducted into the Academy of Arts and Letters up on 155th Street, nominated by John Updike and Edward Hoagland, a fine honor for Anoka High School and my teachers and a shock to me. Standing in front of the Artists and Lettrists was nice, but the people who should’ve been there, Mr. Buehler, Warren Feist, LaVona, didn’t get invited. They would’ve been astounded. As for me, a humorist needs to avoid distinguishment because comedy is not about triumph, it’s about shame and defeat. A humorist has a moment of passion in a VW with a tall dark beauty and to avoid the stick shift they get into the back seat, which is too tight for him to remove her pantyhose, and he bangs his head on the ceiling and she has a laughing fit and Erectile Disillusion occurs and of course he is disappointed but he also thinks, “This is good, I can write about this,” which I just now did.
The Academy had always been hospitable to humorists: Mark Twain was a charter member, George Ade got in, Finley Peter Dunne, the great Don Marquis, Art Buchwald, Peter DeVries, Calvin Trillin, Ian Frazier, and David Sedaris, so it was not like entering the Academy of Irish Setters or Veterinary Aromatherapists. The ceremony did not make me dizzy, I know who I am, a hardworking writer, one of thousands, a deadline man, a monologist who occasionally wanders onto the high plateau of novelisticism and the greenhouse of sonnetry. It was a shock to go in and stand between Philip Roth and Harold Bloom at the urinal. Of course, it would’ve been even more shocking to stand between Ann Beattie and Joan Didion.
Being admitted into an august Academy is exciting for one in the amusement business as I am. The citation about me used the word “hilarity,” which was kind of them and made me think of the young woman I saw in a vaudeville show in London, who played a very sexy “America” on the kazoo, fluttering and fiddling with her décolletage, and then very demurely dropped her drawers, pulled a second kazoo out of her bosom and stuck it up under her long skirt into a private place and proceeded to give us (we imagined, we dared to hope) a two-part rendition of “America,” the alto part from her nether region, a very accomplished orifice duet, all with the innocence of a 4-H’er performing at the county fair. It was musically flawless, it bent the borders of decency, and it made some of us laugh our heads off.
A lady performed on kazoo,
And then she played music on two,
One in her kisser
And one in her pisser,
My country, America, ’tis of you.
I envied the elegance of her joke, the kazoo up the wazoo, and didn’t want the induction into the Academy to tempt me to be distinguished and a couple weeks later, I did a beautiful vulgar parody of Paul Simon’s “Sounds of Silence” with gagging and retching and fartin
g that moved millions of listeners with visceral intestinal distress. (Fred Newman did the sounds, I was only the writer and singer.)
Hello darkness, my old friend
I have gone to bed again
Because a virus came in to me
And I’m feeling tired and gloomy
And my head hurts and I’m achy and I’m hot
And full of snot
I hear the sound of sickness.
A modest start but it went on to thrill every thirteen-year-old boy in the audience:
I came home and went to bed
And felt a throbbing in my head
And I’m getting the idea
I will soon have diarrhea.
What Fred did at this point can’t be represented in print, but it was vivid and meaningful and made the room spin.
Why am I the one who’s fated
To be so awfully nauseated
And something like silent raindrops fell
And what a smell
I hear the sounds of sickness
It was the only time public radio presented a man at the brink of regurgitation. “Sounds of Sickness” as done by Mr. Newman was absolutely in the “America” kazoo duet class.
It was quite a year, 2001. My father died, I got Academicized, I entertained thousands of thirteen-year-old boys with a song about vomiting, I began to notice my own dizziness and shortness of breath onstage, and then I flew down to Nashville to speak at Chet Atkins’s funeral at the Ryman Auditorium, his designated eulogist. He died at 77, after a brain tumor and a stroke. He wrote me after the tumor that he was having to relearn the guitar and he sort of did—he played on the show after the stroke, though he could barely make chords. “I’m getting better,” he said, “but I’m no Chet Atkins.” We wheeled him out onstage, guitar in hand, to a big ovation, and we turned off his mike as Pat Donohue sat directly behind him and played Chet’s part so well that nobody noticed. I visited him in Nashville after that and reminisced about our touring days—the flight on the charter plane that ran into heavy weather over the Rockies, and Paul Yandell said, “I can see the headline, Chet Atkins and Garrison Keillor and Five Others Disappear in Storm, and I’ll be one of the Others”—Chet sat slumped down and never looked at me and didn’t say much. I’m sure he felt wretched and he didn’t want to be seen like that, old and sad, wrapped in an overcoat, holding a guitar on his lap, unable to play it. He wanted to be alone with Leona and his daughter, Merle. So I slipped quietly away. There was no consolation, only family. In the eulogy, I quoted from his letters. He was a natural writer. He wrote: “I am old and still don’t know anything about life or what will come after I am gone. I figure there will be eternity and nothing much else and I will probably wind up in Minnesota and it’ll be January. What I do know is that Leona has stayed with me through four percolators. We counted it up yesterday. She is mine and she is a winner.” I said, “Let us commend his spirit to the Everlasting, and may the angels bear him up, and eternal light shine upon him, and if he should wind up in Minnesota, we will do our best to take care of him until the rest of you come along.”
The season continued, shows in Norfolk, Seattle, Memphis, Tangle-wood, and Wolf Trap, I kept writing. Once again we take you to the hushed reading room of the Herndon County Library for the adventures of Ruth Harrison, Reference Librarian. A woman who loves classical literature but longs for illicit love. And then Roy Bradley, Boy Broadcaster. “Even hard words like sagacious and hermaphrymnotic flowed from his tongue like cream from a pitcher, thanks to his having grown up in the town of Piscacadawadaquoddymoggin.” I felt wheezy on stage and to avoid panting on the air, I parked myself onstage behind the piano next to the drummer. Jenny mentioned the wheeziness to our cousin, Dr. Dan Johnson, who directed me to the Mayo Clinic where Dr. Rodysill listened to my heart for a minute or so and gave me the lowdown: mitral valve prolapse, the very defect that kept me off the Anoka football team and turned me toward newspapering. The defect that killed off several Keillors, including two uncles my age. A surgeon was summoned, Dr. Thomas Orszulak, who looked like the tenor Jussi Björling, was from Pittsburgh, the son of immigrants, the first in his family to go to college, a Harley enthusiast and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies. It was Monday. He had an opening on Wednesday morning. I’d planned to fly to Europe, and instead I went up to the cardiac unit. It all felt very straightforward, tremendously competent people around me. “Open-heart surgery,” which was front-page news in my childhood, now a well-traveled road. I signed up for an early morning slot, July 25, 2001.
Tuesday afternoon, I drank a gallon of liquid laxative to empty my bowels, and a burly man came in to shave my groin. Father Nick came in and prayed with Jenny and me, and we took Communion. I slept well and took a shower at 5 a.m. and was anointed with antiseptic and given muscle relaxants and wheeled out on a gurney with my wife beside me, her hand on my shoulder, she kissed me twice and then into the chilly OR I went and was slid onto the glass operating table. A moment of pleasant chitchat with the anesthesiologist and then I was in a small boat in a deep fog, bumping up onto a sandy shore in the dark, surrounded by angelic beings with Minnesota accents, Erin and Erin and Cliff, who removed the tube from my mouth, a simple breathing tube but it felt like the tailpipe of my old Mercury, and they assured me that I was alive, and I’ve been grateful for that ever since. I was in the ICU and it was five hours later, and then Jenny was there to say hi and they wheeled me back to my room.
The first big test was urination: could I do it? The catheter was removed and—he shoots, he scores! I took a shower. I took a walk down the hall, holding a nurse’s arm. The surgeon’s assistant inspected the scar, the cardiologist took my blood pressure (Excellent! ), Dr. Rodysill came by to explain the sewing of the mitral valve, the angelic beings dropped in, Jenny returned and sat on the bed, holding my hand.
I was glad to be surrounded by brisk Minnesota women in blue uniforms who sized up the situation when they walked into the room and went right to work. “So how are we doing then?” they said. They made small talk to put the patient at ease. They cared and their caring was not generic, they’d been brought up to care. And when I was released and went home, every sense was heightened, every day beautiful, to rise early and smell coffee and pick up the Times and be alive. I lay on the chaise in the backyard feeling the luxury of ordinary life and did the crossword and watched my daughter as she wrote Daddy in green chalk on the driveway. One afternoon, I saw her swinging high into the air on the Hooleys’ rope swing, laughing on the backswing up into the branches of the apple tree and a gasp of delight in the moment of weightlessness, and then she put her feet down and skidded to a stop and toppled over in the grass, laughing. My girl.
She was delighted with her speech therapist, Amy, and her physical therapist, Kim, and her nanny, Katja, all of them working on her speech and agility deficits. She’d been diagnosed with verbal apraxia, which turned out to be only one aspect of the problem, and clearly, she wanted to be with people, she loved company, and wanted to take part in things. She sat with her Czech nanny Katja, and later Kaja, arms entwined, imitating how they crossed their legs and brushed back their hair, kissing their hands, praying to be in their club. Sometimes I’d say, “It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, baby,” and she recognized the line and laughed. Eventually she was diagnosed as having Angelman syndrome, a genetic slipup that can be catastrophic, but in her case, thanks to her mother’s determination and the help of dedicated therapists and the grace of God, she grew up articulate and humorous and good-hearted, and whatever her deficits may be, she makes up for with a sense of comedy.
Maia and GK, 2001.
Once we visited Prague with Kaja and sat near the Vltava, below the Castle, a stone’s throw from the tourist mob on the Charles Bridge, near the Church of St. Nicholas, a big whoop of High Baroque with cherubs like glazed doughnuts and a marble bishop throttling Satan, near Franz Kafka’s house on Celetná Street. He dreaded noise, footsteps, the gramophones of neighbo
rs, his sisters’ canaries, the bonging of church bells, the jangling town hall clock—he felt like he was living in a bowling alley. Now the town square is packed with tourists videotaping the clock, which has apostles instead of cuckoos, and drinking beer and listening to jazz bands. Kafka’s problem was the lack of a daughter. He should’ve gotten his fiancée Felice pregnant and today the word Kafkaesque wouldn’t mean “nightmarish” or “weird,” it’d mean funny. “What do you name a guy with no feet? Neil.” “Very Kafkaesque.”
A month later, I was on the move. Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 came out, and I did the usual book tour, two cities a day, two readings in two theaters. The book did well enough, and Viking signed me to write three more. The tour took me to New York for a reading September 10 at a bookstore in Union Square. A good crowd for a Monday evening. I talked about parts I had omitted from the book I was promoting, then stood around and signed copies. It was almost midnight when the last dog was hung. Holly and Dina from Viking were still there and Anne (Dusty) Mortimer-Maddox, a friend from New Yorker days, and we four crossed the square to a seafood restaurant on the south side of 14th. The place was packed and the maître d’ led us to a table on a narrow balcony, and we camped there for two hours over martinis, oysters, scallops and linguini, some not-bad wine, and talked. Dusty and I gossiped about the old crowd at the magazine. She talked about the filthy barroom language that Pauline Kael liked to put in her movie reviews to get Shawn’s goat. Kael once referred to an actress as “a walking advertisement for cunnilingus” and Mr. Shawn wrote in the margin: Why does she do this? Why? It was a splendid fall night, festivity in the air and New York magnificence. We could see the lights of the World Trade towers downtown. Holly said that 1 a.m. in Manhattan made her feel as if she were twenty-four again and just arriving in the city. Dusty announced that she was seventy but felt thirty-seven. “Aging is the opportunity of a lifetime,” I said. We were all feeling oddly ecstatic, sitting up there above the canyons of lights, working people who’ve allowed themselves to stay up late on a warm September night, and seven hours later, two airliners crashed into the towers and fire and smoke billowed up and office workers leaped to their deaths and valiant firefighters hauled hose up the stairways and an hour later the buildings collapsed.
That Time of Year Page 29