Lake Wobegon Days (36 page)
Authors: Garrison Keillor
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F
ather Emil:
“He went to St. Clement’s and appeared to be okay but then he went to Minneapolis and fell in with a liberal crowd and got assigned to Holy Childhood in Golden Valley where they call God
Mother
and play guitars and he preaches about nutrition and stuff. I’m not sure but I
believe
that’s the parish where some people got up a petition demanding that Father Todd do his share of babysitting so now he puts in two Sundays a year in the crib room. I believe that he is a chaplain at the Excelsior Amusement Park, too.”
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“S
hort memory makes everything more entertaining, even weather. Four definite seasons every year, four big surprises. People talk about weather most of the time, usually like children. ’Smell that! It’s spring!’ Then, ’Jeez, it’s a hot one.’ Then, ’Looka those leaves, wouldja.’ Each change wipes the slate clean, so when it snows, they look out the window and say, ’Well, heaven’s sake. Look at that, willya.’ People are easily amused here.” (
Up from Minnesota
, Whyte; Spartan, 1964.)
*
A
memorable council meeting was that of 5/16/62 to discuss a motion to hold a special election to vote on a bond issue to repair sidewalks and install new streetlights. It was the late Leo Mueller who suggested that with a little more inner light (“Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet”), fewer people would need assistance walking home. He hinted that it was Lutherans who were walking into trees. It was the late Mr. Osterberg who said, “Men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil. John 3:19,” and “Let the lower lights be burning, cast a gleam across the wave,” and, in defense of sidewalk repair, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his path straight.” “Wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction,” said Leo’s friend, Mr. Luger, pointing out that our earthly pathway is not meant to be easy. Hjalmar Ingqvist, then the mayor, asked the speakers to please limit themselves to pertinent argument and be brief, and they all turned on him. Louie reminded him of Christ’s admonition in the Sermon on the Mount, “When they bring you unto magistrates and powers, take ye no thought how or what thing ye shall answer, or what ye shall say. For the Holy Ghost shall teach you in the same hour what ye ought to say.” What seemed “pertinent” to Hjalmar was not necessarily pertinent to the Holy Ghost who was leading them, and should one be brief where truth was at stake? The discussion began to range widely in the field of personal morals. At ten o’clock, Hjalmar banged his gavel, said he was tired, and moved for adjournment, but all he got was an uproar. How could he think of sleep at a time like this? Now was the time for wakefulness. People cited the watchman who slept, the sleeping apostles, the parable of the wheat and the tares, until Hjalmar said, “I’m going home to bed. Turn out the lights before you leave.” He didn’t run for reelection. “Politics brings you into contact with all the people you’d give anything to avoid,” he said. “I’m staying home.”
When I was fifteen, a girl I wrote three poems for invited me to Christmas Eve so her parents could see that I wasn’t as bad as many people said, and after a big meatball supper and a long thoughtful period between her dad and me as she and her mom cleared the dishes when he asked me what I intended to do with myself, we went to the ten o’clock candlelight service at Lake Wobegon Lutheran. My mind wasn’t on Christmas. I was thinking about her. She had never seen the poems because they were too personal, so she didn’t know how much I loved her.
The lights went out, and the children’s choir began its slow march up the aisle, holding candles and singing
“Hjemmet paa Prairien”
(“Home on the Prairie”)—“To our home on the prairie, sweet Jesus has come. Born in a stable, he blesses his own. Though humble our houses and fortunes may be, I love my dear Savior who smiles on me”—and in the dark, the thin sweet voices and illuminated faces passing by, people began to weep. The song, the smell of pine boughs, the darkness, released the tears they evidently had held back for a very long
time. Her mother wept, her father who had given me stony looks for hours bent down and put his face in his hands, her lovely self drew out a hanky and held it to her eyes, and I too tried to cry—I wanted to cry right along with her and maybe slip my arm around her shoulders—and I couldn’t. I took out my handkerchief, thinking it would get me started, and blew my nose, but there was nothing there.
I only cried later, after I walked her home. We stood on her steps, she opened the door, I leaned toward her for one kiss, and she turned and said, “I hate to say this but you are one of the coldest people I ever met.” I cried at home, in bed, in the dark. Turned my face to the wall and felt hot tears trickle down my face. Then woke up and it was Christmas morning.
Now an older guy, I’ve gotten more moist and when the decorations go up over Main Street from Ralph’s north to the mercantile, I walk down alone to look at them, they are so beautiful—even old guys stand in wonder and are transported back to childhood, though of course these are the same decorations as when we were kids so it doesn’t take much imagination. The six-foot plywood star with one hundred Christmas bulbs, twenty on each point, was built by Mr. Scheffelmacher’s shop class in 1956; I flunked the quiz on electricity and didn’t get to work on it. I sanded the edges a little, though I had flunked wood too. Later, I flunked the ballpeen hammer and was kicked out of shop and into speech class—Mr. Scheffelmacher said, “All you do is talk, talk, talk, so you might as well learn how.” I begged him to let me stay in shop, which was getting into sheet metal and about to make flour scoops, but he said, “You couldn’t even pass wood. You couldn’t even make a decent birdhouse!” and he was right. My birdhouse leaked, and the birds were so mad about it, when I tried to caulk the roof, they attacked me, Mr. and Mrs. Bluebird. So I dragged myself into speech and had to make up the work I had missed: five speeches in one week: humorous, persuasive, extemporaneous, impromptu, and reflective, and suddenly, talking, which had been easy for me at the shop bench, became impossible. I dragged my feet to the front of the room, afraid my loafers would flap (they had been my brother’s), and stood there, a ridiculous person six-feet-three and a hundred fifty pounds, trying to keep my jaw slack as I had practiced in a mirror to make up for a small chin, and mumbled and got hot
across the eyes and had to say, “Anyway, as I started to say….” which Miss Perkovich marked you down for three points for because “Anyway” showed disorganization, so I failed speech, too, but speech was the end of the line—if you couldn’t speak, where could you go? To reading? I sat in speech and drew stick men hanging on the gallows, listening to Chip Ingqvist’s reflective, entitled “A Christmas Memory,” which was about his dear old aunt whom he visited every Christmas, bringing sugar cookies, and was so good he did it twice in class and again for school assembly two weeks after Christmas and then in the district speech tournament, the regional, and the state, and finished first runner-up in the reflective division, and yet it always sounded so sincere as if he had just thought of it—for example, when he said, “And oh! the light in her eyes was worth far more to me than anything money could buy,” a tear came to his voice, his eyes lit up like vacuum tubes and his right hand made a nice clutching gesture over his heart on his terrific brown V-neck sweater, which I mention because I felt that good clothes gave him self-confidence, just as the clothing ads said and that I might be sincere like him if instead of an annual Christmas sweater I got a regular supply. Anyway, Christmas decorations sure bring back a lot of memories for me.
Depending on your angle, the stars seem to lead the traveler toward the Sidetrack Tap, where the old guys sit and lose some memory capacity with a glass of peppermint schnapps, which Wally knows how to keep adding to so they can tell the old lady they only had one. After one of those continuous drinks, they try not to look at the bubble lights on the little aluminum tree on the back bar. Bud is there, who gets a twinge in his thighs around Christmas, remembering the year the ladder went out from under him as he was hanging decorations, and he slid down the telephone pole, which was somewhat smoother after he slid down than before. In addition to the large star, you see smaller ones that look like starfish, and stubby candles, and three wise men who in their wonder and adoration appear a little stupid, all made by shop classes on a jigsaw, and angels that, if you look at them a certain way, look like clouds. The manger stands in front of Our Lady church, the figures (imported from Chicago) so lifelike, it gives you the chills to see them outdoors—it’s so cold, they should take their flight to Egypt! The municipal Christmas tree stands in front of the Statue
of the Unknown Norwegian who seems to be reaching out to straighten it. It leans slightly toward the south, away from the wind.
One bitter cold night, a certain person stepped out of the Sidetrack Tap and crossed the street under the clear starry sky toward the gay lights of the municipal tree and noticed that he needed to take a leak. It was three blocks to home, and the cold had suddenly shrunk his bladder, so he danced over toward the Unknown and picked out a spot in the snow in the dark behind the tree where nobody would see him.
It was an enormous relief at first, of course, like coming up for air after a long submersion, but it also made him leery to be so exposed right out on Main Street. So many dark windows where someone could be watching, and what if a car came along? They’d know what was up. Him, profaning a monument to the Norwegian people. “I should stop—right now!” he thought. His capacity, though: it was amazing! Like a horse. Gallons, already, and it didn’t feel like he could put the cork back in. Then he saw the headlights. Only for a moment, then the car turned the other way, but in that moment he hopped six feet to one side and stood in shock until the taillights disappeared, and only then did he hear the hiss of liquid on the hot bulb and look and see what he was doing. He was peeing on the tree! Pissing on Christmas! Then the bulb burst. Pop!
“Oh God, what a pig I am!” he thought. He expected the big spruce to fall on him and crush him. Pinned under the tree, found the next morning, frozen to death with his thing in his hand. The shame to his family. The degradation of it. Finally he was done
(you pig!)
. There was a stain in the snow as big as a bathtub, and another one where he had stood before. He dumped handfuls of clean snow on them, but it turned yellow. Then he walked home, got a snow shovel, came back, and carried his mess, shovel by shovel, across the street to the side of the Sidetrack Tap, and brought back shovels of clean snow to fill in. He smoothed it over and went home to bed.
It was not such a happy holiday for him for the recollection of what he had done
(pig)
, which if any of his children had done it he would have given them holy hell. He bought them wonderful presents that year and a gold watch for his wife, and burned when they said what a great guy he was, and it wasn’t until January after the tree came
down that he started to feel like he could drop in at the Sidetrack and relax with a couple of beers.
We get a little snow, then a few inches, then another inch or two, and sometimes we get a ton. The official snow gauge is a Sherwin-Williams paint can stuck to the table behind the town garage, with the famous Sherwin-Williams globe and red paint spilling over the Arctic icecap. When snow is up to the top of the world, then there is a ton of snow. Bud doesn’t keep track of the amount beyond that point because once there is that much snow, more doesn’t matter a lot. After the ton falls, we build a sled run on Adams Hill, behind the school, with high snow embankments on the turns to keep our sleds on the track at the thrilling high speeds we reach once the track is sprayed with water and freezes. Everyone goes at least once, even Muriel. Up at the Pee Tree, you flop on your belly on the sled and push off, down an almost straight drop of twenty feet and
fast
into a right-hand turn, then hard left, then you see the tree. It is in the middle of the track and will bash your brains out unless you do something. Before you can, you’re in the third turn, centrifugal force having carried you safely around the tree, and then you come to the jump where some cookies are lost, and the long swooping curve under the swings, and you coast to a stop. You stand up and look down and see that you’ve almost worn the toes off your boots. You had the brakes on and you didn’t notice.
At the swimming beach, the volunteer firemen have flooded the ice to make a glass sheet and hung colored lights in a V from the warming house to the pole on the diving dock. The warming house is open, the ancient former chickenhouse towed across the ice in 1937 from Jensens’ when he gave up poultry after some exploded from a rich diet that made their eggs too big. When Bud fires up the cast-iron Providence wood stove, a faint recollection of chickens emanates from the floor. The stove stands in the middle, the floor chopped up around it where decades of skaters stepped up and down to get feeling back in their feet, and the benches run around the walls, which are inscribed with old thoughts of romance, some of them shocking to a child: news that Mother or Dad, instead of getting down to business and having you,
was skylarking around, planting big wet smackers
(XXXXX)
on a stranger who if he or she had hooked up with her or him you would not be yourself but some other kid. This dismal prospect from the past makes a child stop and think, but then—what can you do?—you lace up and teeter down the plywood ramp and take your first glide of the season. It’s a clear night, the sky is full of stars and the brilliant V points you out toward the dark, the very place your parents went, eventually, holding hands, arms crossed, skating to the Latin rhythms of Cully Culbertson and His Happy Wurlitzer from the
Rexall Fun Time
album played through a mighty Zenith console put out on the ice, where some of the oldsters still cut a nice figure. Clarence and Arlene Bunsen, for two: to see him on the street, you’d know he has a sore back, but on the ice, some of his old form returns and when they take a turn around the rink in tandem, you might see why she was attracted to him, the old smoothie. Once two people have mastered skating the samba together, it isn’t that much harder to just get married, says Clarence. She has bought a new pair of glasses, bifocals, that, when she looks at him, bring his ankles into sharp focus, slightly magnified.