Lake Wobegon Days (43 page)
Authors: Garrison Keillor
The pantry off her kitchen holds the old switchboard, still in good condition, and also the steel cabinet with the switching equipment that took over from it when they went to dial telephones in 1960, but she keeps on top of things just the same. If someone doesn’t answer their phone by the fifth ring, she does, and usually she knows where they went and when they’re expected, so many customers don’t bother dialing in-town calls, they just dial o and she puts them through. If you do reach her instead of your party—say, your mother—she may clue you in on things your mom would never tell you, about your mom’s bad back, a little fall on the steps the week before, or the approach of Mother’s Day, or the fact that when you were born you were shown off like you were the Prince of Wales. A few customers accuse
Elizabeth of listening in and claim they know the click that means she’s there; but it isn’t a click, it’s an echoey sound, as if you and your party had moved into a bigger room. It’s a wonder that she keeps track of us so faithfully, what with her age and arthritis and her great weight. She suffers from a glandular condition and is pushing three hundred pounds. Nowadays, five rings is as quick as she can make it to the phone, even from her kitchen table.
When I talk to her, I don’t always hear an old fat lady; sometimes I hear the girl who walked the line with Grandpa in the spring of ’21. I am a person she bawls out on a regular basis, and when I call home and the phone rings and rings, I brace myself for her “Yes?” and “Oh, it’s you,” and “I don’t know if I care to talk to you or not,” and then the lecture. I have disappointed my friend so many times. I live far away but news of my sins travels fast, and she always finds out. She found out when I flunked out of college. And then when I got a
divorce—the worst, in her book—for almost a year afterward, she cried on the phone when I called. Many times she has told me, “I just thank God that your grandfather is dead and not around to see you now.” And yet, if I ask her about him, she is always ready to change the subject, a sort of forgiveness. I simply say, “Is it true that you used to go with him when he walked the phone line?” and she says, “You
know
I did. Heavens. I’ve told you that a hundred times,” but she’s willing to tell it once more, and then it’s spring, the sweet song of the rose-breasted grosbeak drifts from the wood tinged with green across the young alfalfa, the bumblebees buzz, the toads sing in the ditch, my tall handsome grandfather with the sharp blue eyes and brush mustache ambles along the bank above the road looking for the first rhubarb, the little girl scrambling to keep up.
“To me, there wasn’t a thing he didn’t know. Every flower, every tree. Every living thing, he just cared about it all and he expected you to care, and so of course you did. He talked to you like you were smart and would want to know these things, what bird that is and, here, this is a Jack-in-the-pulpit and—the
names
of things, that everything has a name. That isn’t a ‘bush’ over there, those are
choke-cherries
, birds eat them, we make jelly from them. I don’t think that man was ever bored in his life unless he was sick in bed. After my father died of diphtheria when I was five years old, I always looked on him as my father, and
I used to stay up to his house with your aunts and uncles when my mother would go to Iowa to see her relatives, and once I remember—it was January and
bitter
cold—he woke up all us children in the middle of the night and told us to get dressed. Well, we did. We didn’t ask any questions, we just got bundled up, and he led us out through the yard and up the path into the woods, eight children—your Aunt Flo was only four, I believe, and I helped carry her—
in the dark
, no lantern, mind you, just the moon, the coldest night of the year, and none of us was a bit afraid, because he was there. Not even when we came to the edge of the trees and looked up and there on the top of the hill was a wolf. He sat on the snowbank and looked at us. He was pure silver. He didn’t move a muscle. In the moonlight he looked like a ghost. Your grandpa knelt down and put his arms around us and said, ‘I want you to take a good look and remember this because you may never get to see it again.’ So we looked good. I can still remember it like I’m looking at it right now. I can see that wolf and I can feel his arm around me.”
When I talk to her, I often feel I’m talking to my grandfather who died before I was born, and I try not to hold back the truth, even when the news is so bad it almost breaks her heart. There is some dignity
to this, though the truth is not easy. When her nephew Wesley was replacing some shingles on her roof, he put his foot on the main phone trunk line to steady himself and snapped it off and then figured if he didn’t mention it, just tied the line to the gutter, maybe no one would notice, maybe it would get better on its own. So the phones were out for five hours, and when Bud found the break, Wesley said, “Oh, yeah, I saw that—I was sort of wondering what it was.”
When I look at the lines I’ve busted, I don’t sort of wonder about them, I know what I did; I know they didn’t fall off the side of the house because they were tired. Still, it’s hard to say what you’ve done and not write up a better version.
I can see how I could write a bold account of myself as a passionate man who rose from humble beginnings to cut a wide swath in the world, whose crimes along the way might be written off to extravagance and love and art, and could even almost believe some of it myself on certain days after the sun went down if I’d had a snort or two and was in Los Angeles and it was February and I was twenty-four, but I find a truer account in the
Herald-Star
, where it says:
Mr. Gary Keillor visited at the home of Al and Florence Crandall on Monday and after lunch returned to St. Paul, where he is currently employed in the radio show business. Mr. Lew Powell also visited, who recently celebrated his ninety-third birthday and is enjoying excellent health. Almost twelve quarts of string beans were picked and some strawberries. Lunch was fried chicken with gravy and creamed peas.
The newspaper’s correspondent on the scene was Aunt Flo herself, and the careful reader can see that she still dotes on her wayward nephew, pointing out his gainful and glamorous employment and suggesting that he is no slouch on a bean row, either, giving a little plug for family longevity and complimenting the guests with a good lunch. Aunt Flo does not make her famous fried chicken for any old shirttail relative who comes in off the road.
It’s my first appearance in the paper in several years, and though it leaves out so much that one might like to add, about travels, awards, publications, it leaves out even more that one is glad not to see, about pride, gluttony, lust, and leaves me feeling better about home journalism. The story is accurate, as I read it, and everything is there: the sun beating down on us in the bean field, the elderly gent sampling the berry crop, the goodness of creamed peas and of poultry allowed a free and happy life and then rolled in flour and pan-fried, the goodness of Uncle Al, who said, “You remind me so much of your grandfather.” He was referring, not to my life or character, but to a similarity of mustache. A small compliment, and it pleased me for days afterward and I read as much into it as I possibly could.
*
T
erpsichore Terrace is the address of the former Wobegonian who wrote
95 Theses 95
, a neatly typed manifesto that he brought home in late October 1980, along with a fine woman from Boston whom his parents wanted to meet, since he had married her a few weeks before. His parents live in a little white house on the corner of Branch and Taft, where his old bedroom under the eaves has been lovingly preserved. He left his wife to look at it and snuck away to the Lutheran church, intending to nail the
95
to the door, a dramatic complaint against his upbringing, but then something in his upbringing made him afraid to pound holes in a good piece of wood, and he heard the Luther Leaguers inside at their Halloween pizza party and was afraid he would be seen—also, he was afraid the
95
would blow away since all he had were small carpet tacks. So he took it downtown and slipped it under Harold Starr’s door with a note that said, “Probably you won’t dare publish this.”
Harold considered publication twice—first, when his pipes froze and the office toilet burst, putting the Linotype out of commission and leaving him short of copy, and again when he had three wisdom teeth pulled and sprained his ankle, which he had hooked around the pedestal of the dentist’s chair, and had to use crutches for three days during which he heard the same joke about those teeth having long roots more than thirty times—but he held off, and the
95
remains on his desk, in a lower stratum of stuff under council minutes and soil conservation reports.
In the same stack are some letters from the anonymous author asking for his manuscript back. Like so many writers of manifestos, he forgot to keep a copy, and over the years his letters have descended to a pitiful pleading tone quite unlike his original style.
I simply can’t understand despite repeated requests…. This is very important to me…. The ms. is
mine
and I need it
now
for a longer work I’m writing…. I know you are busy and please forgive me if I seem impatient but I beg you to
please
attend to this small matter. I enclose a stamped self-addressed envelope.
Five such envelopes sit in the stack, with five addresses that show a trend toward the east and south, with one brief long jump to California. Three are plain manila envelopes, two are Federal Express. The manuscript of
95
has sustained some coffee damage but is in good shape, except for three pages that are missing. “They are around here somewhere, I remember seeing them,” says Harold, “and as soon as I get this desk straightened around and find the damn things, I’ll send it all back to him. I’m just one person, you know, I’m not the U.S. Post Office.”
Here, unabridged, is the document as Harold has it.
95 THESES 95
1. You have fed me wretched food, vegetables boiled to extinction, fistfuls of white sugar, slabs of fat, mucousy casseroles made with globs of cream of mushroom, until it’s amazing my heart still beats. Food was not fuel but ballast; we ate and then we sank like rocks. Every Sunday, everyone got stoned on dinner except the women who cooked it and thereby lost their appetites—the rest of us did our duty and ate ourselves into a gaseous stupor and sat around in a trance and mumbled like a bunch of beefheads.
2. Every Advent, we entered the purgatory of
lutefisk
, a repulsive gelatinous fishlike dish that tasted of soap and gave off an odor that would gag a goat. We did this in honor of Norwegian ancestors, much as if the survivors of a famine might celebrate their deliverance by feasting on elm bark. I always felt the cold creeps as Advent approached, knowing that this dread delicacy would be put before me and I’d be told, “Just have a little.” Eating “a little” was, like vomiting “a little,” as bad as “a lot.”
3. You have subjected me to endless boring talk about weather, regularity, back problems, and whether something happened in 1938 or 1939, insisting that I sit quietly and listen to every word. “How’s it going with you?” you said. “Oh, about the same,” you replied. “Cold enough for you?” It was always cold, always about the same.
4. You have taught me to worship a god who is like you, who shares your thinking exactly, who is going to slap me one if I don’t straighten out fast. I am very uneasy every Sunday, which is cloudy and deathly still and filled with silent accusing whispers.
5. You have taught me to feel shame and disgust about my own body, so that I am afraid to clear my throat or blow my nose. Even now I run water in the sink when I go to the bathroom. “Go to the bathroom” is a term you taught me to use.
6. You have taught me the fear of becoming lost, which has killed the pleasure of curiosity and discovery. In strange cities, I memorize streets and always know exactly where I am. Amid scenes of great splendor, I review the route back to the hotel.
7. You have taught me to fear strangers and their illicit designs, robbing me of easy companionship, making me a very suspicious friend. Even among those I know well, I continue to worry, what do they
really
mean by liking me?
8. You have taught me to value a good night’s sleep over all else including adventures of love and friendship, and even when the night is charged with magic, to be sure to get to bed. If God had not meant everyone to be in bed by ten-thirty, He would never have provided the ten o’clock newscast.
9. You taught me to be nice, so that now I am so full of niceness, I have no sense of right and wrong, no outrage, no passion. “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all,” you said, so I am very quiet, which most people think is politeness. I call it repression.
10. You taught me to worry about my face. The fear of acne, which will follow me to my grave, began when I was fourteen, a time of life when a person has no skin but is all raw flesh (skin-colored), and grew a crop of zits around my nose and learned various positions, sitting and standing, in which I could keep a hand to my face. They were triggered by fear. You said, “I’d like you to have a nice complexion for Dorothy and Bob’s wedding. They’ll be taking pictures.” So I wound up looking like a three-bean salad. I died inside to see myself in the mirror. Better that those blotches meant nose cancer; at least I could go to the hospital and get flowers. What I had, people don’t send flowers for. When I was sixteen, I bought the first ski mask in town. “Why don’t you smile more?” you said.
11. You taught me, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going,” teaching me to plod forward in the face of certain doom.
12. You taught me to be competitive even in matters of faith, to take pride in the great privilege of having been born Lutheran, even at moments of contrition. Religious intolerance was part of our faith. We believed that Catholics were illiterate peasants, foreign-born, who worshiped idols. In Sunday School, we looked up to see a gory picture of “Christian Infants Martyred at the Hands of Papist Clergy.” We believed there was a secret tunnel between rectory and nunnery. We believed they poisoned the pets of Protestants. Whatever they believed, it wasn’t right.
13. In place of true contrition, you taught me to be apologetic. I apologize continually. I apologize for my own existence, a fact that I cannot change. For years, you told me I’d be sorry someday. I am.
14. You taught me to trust my own incompetence and even now won’t let me mash potatoes without your direct supervision. “Don’t run the mixer so fast that you get them all over,” you say, as if in my home, the walls are covered with big white lumps. I can’t mow a lawn or hang tinsel on a Christmas tree or paint a flat surface in your presence without you watching, worried, pointing out the unevenness.
15. You taught me an indecent fear of sexuality. I’m not sure I have any left underneath this baked-on crust of shame and disgust. For years I worried because my penis hangs slightly to the left, and finally read in a book that this is within the realm of the normal, but then wondered, What sort of person would read books like that?
16. You have provided me with poor male role models, including the Sons of Knute, the Boosters Club and others whose petulance, inertia, and ineptitude are legendary. I was taught to respect them: men who clung to tiny grudges for decades and were devoted to vanity, horsefeathers, small potatoes—not travel but the rites of trunk-loading and map-reading and gas mileage; not faith but the Building Committee; not love but supper.
17. Listening to them, I was taught to keep quiet. Stupidity had the floor, always. Argument was impolite.
18. You instilled in me a paralyzing nostalgia for a time before I was born, a time when men were men and women were saintly, and children were obedient, industrious, asked no luxuries, entertained themselves, and knew right from wrong. I, on the other hand, was a symptom of everything going to hell in a handbasket. I was left to wonder why I bothered to be born.
19. You brought me up to respect fastidiousness as incarnate virtue, Christianity made evident. As a tiny child, I lined up my string beans in a row on the plate, taking exactly three per bite. I hesitated to eat the mashed potatoes, lest the little gravy lake spill. I kept useless collections of stamps, seashells, postcards, rocks, delighting in their deadly neatness. In our home, all surfaces were meant to be bare; emptiness was the ideal. The fear of dust (amathophobia) was endemic. One little book lying on the floor: “The house is a mess. Why can’t you ever put things back when you’re done with them?” We were passionate about snow-shoveling and made nice even banks. In summer, I edged the lawn, trimmed around trees, attacked dandelions. When Grandpa died, we tended his grave zealously, kneeling at the stone to landscape his resting place. “He was a good man,” someone said once in the cemetery. “
Ja
,” you said. “I’ve been thinking of applying a little Turf-Builder. And maybe a fungicide.”
20. In our theology, hard work was its own justification, a guard against corruption. Thus, we never bought an automatic dishwasher or a self-cleaning oven or a self-propelled mower with bag attachment, believing they would lead to degeneracy. We raked the grass clippings into a pile and later burned it. We did not use it for garden mulch because mulching kept weeds down and it was important that children weed the garden, slaving through the long hot afternoons. It was good for them. It kept them from moral turpitude.
21. Suffering was its own reward, to be preferred to pleasure. As Lutherans, we viewed pleasure with suspicion. Birth control was never an issue with us. Nor was renunciation of pleasures of the flesh. We never enjoyed them in the first place.
We were born to suffer. Pain was pooh-poohed. If you broke your leg, walk home and apply ice. Don’t complain. Don’t baby yourself. Our mothers ironed sheets, underwear, even in July. Our fathers wore out their backs at heavy, senseless labor, pulled their own teeth, lived with massive hemorrhoids. When Grandpa had his heart attack, he took one aspirin and went to bed early. We children suffered through dull repetitive schoolwork, under the lash of sadistic teachers. Punishment was good for you, deserved or not; if you hadn’t done wrong, well, then it was for last time.
22. A year ago, a friend offered to give me a backrub. I declined vociferously. You did this to me.
23. Two years ago I carried a box-spring mattress up four flights of stairs, declining offers of help, and did something to my back which still hurts. I didn’t see a doctor but did buy a different mattress (orthopedic). Someone helped me carry it up and I felt guilty and kept saying, “No. Really. I got it now,” all the way up as my back killed me and my eyes filled with tears.
24. Recently, I dropped my air conditioner on my foot. I think this is related.
25. Despite the bum foot, I kept running four miles per day. I love the misery of running. I love the misery of feeling I should run more, hundreds of miles, and do it on my knees.
26. You taught me to believe in quietness as a sign of good character, that a child who sat silently with hands folded was a child who had overcome temptation. In fact, I was only scared, but being a nice quiet boy, I was offered as an example to other children, many of whom despise me to this day. I did not have to be shushed on Sunday afternoon but went about my glum business of cutting out pictures from the rotogravure and pasting them into a scrapbook, being careful not to snip too loud. I learned that quietness could be used to personify not only goodness, but also intelligence and sensitivity, and so I silently earned a small reputation as a boy of superior intellect, a little scholar, a little sunbeam in this dark world, while in fact I was smug and lethargic and dull as a mud turtle.
27. Even now, I go to someone’s house and think I am being a good guest if I am very quiet, don’t ask for anything, and refuse anything that’s offered. This behavior makes other people think of me as a nincompoop.
28. I find it very hard to whoop it up, hail a pal, split a gut, cut a rug, have a ball, or make a joyful noise. I’m your boy, all right.
29. You taught me not to go overboard, lose my head, or make a big deal out of it, but to keep a happy medium, that the truth is in the middle. No extremes. Don’t exaggerate. Hold your horses. Keep a lid on it. Save it for later. Be careful. Weigh the alternatives. Wear navy blue. Years later, I am constantly adjusting my feelings downward to achieve that fine balance of caution and melancholy.
30. You taught me not to be “unusual” for fear of what the neighbors would say. They were omniscient, able to see through walls. We knew they’d talk, because we always talked about them. We thought they were nuts, but still we shouldn’t offend them.
31. Your theology wasn’t happy about the idea of mercy and forgiveness, which only gave comfort to enemies, and so, although you recited the Lord’s Prayer every Sunday, you remembered your debtors and managed to not speak to certain people—a major feat when you live in a town so small and attend the same church as they, an act of true dedication. In your behalf, I still dislike Bunsens. I have no idea why.
32. Your own mistakes you managed to explain to your own satisfaction. When you hurt people, you explained that you didn’t mean to. When you gossiped malicious gossip, you explained that “everyone knows this and besides it’s true.” You had a good reason for every dumb thing you did which you said I would understand someday. I don’t. I don’t understand it at all.