The Keillor Reader

by Garrison Keillor

  4.

  JUNE

  What I know about doing a monologue is to forget about structure and what you learned reading the short stories of Flannery O’Connor and just go fast and keep changing the subject. And if you skid off course, don’t slow down: go in the direction of the skid. “June” is a pretty typical monologue that starts with a tender summer cabin scene, visits Pastor Liz and a worried father, throws in an adoption story, a high school reunion, tent caterpillars, high school graduation, and manages to quote Kierkegaard, all while the monologuist takes personal pleasure in naming a few real people he has known: the in-laws from his first marriage whose summer cabin he used to frequent and Lieutenant Henry Hill, a smart, disciplined, dearly loved graduate of Anoka High School, whose life was taken in Vietnam, a black kid in a white school who never acknowledged racism. Old Anokans wrote me to say that when they heard his name in the News from Lake Wobegon, they got choked up. There he was, along with my dead in-laws, on the porch at Cross Lake, and tent caterpillars, all impromptu in a pool of light on an outdoor stage in the Berkshires, where the young Bernstein conducted the Boston Symphony, families sprawled on blankets in the grass, and Richard Dworsky at the piano waited to play a Chopin étude after the line about the strong women, good-looking men, and smart children. Dear God, what a lovely way to earn a living.

  It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. Low 70s, dry, sun shining, nice breeze. Put people in a good mood. The peonies are in bloom, the lake water is warm enough to swim in, the water lilies are opening up. We went up to clean out the lake cabin and get it ready for summer. You drive up through the trees and stop and clear the fallen branches off the road and unlock the back door. You can smell the dead mice, so you open the windows and you throw the little bodies out in the brush. Thank goodness nobody broke in, no screens are torn. You crawl under the cabin and throw the switch on the fuse box and the pump works and the water comes out and you let it run until it doesn’t smell like rotten eggs. Then you clean out the fridge and plug it in and put the groceries in and you climb up and clean the leaves out of the gutters. You dust and vacuum with the old Electrolux and mop the kitchen and wash the windows, and get out the clean sheets and make the beds, and open the chimney flue and make sure there are no nests, and get some firewood in and you cook supper, sloppy joes, an old family tradition, and the smell of it in the old enamel pan on the fire brings tears to your eyes for the dead. Hilmer and Helen and Gene and Marge and Ed and Jen and Florence and LeRoy—this was their sacred haven, their resting place, where they sat on that front porch drinking their Manhattans and gin and tonics and brandy and sodas and laughing and laughing, playing gin rummy or 500, and this is how you want to remember them. They’d gone through the Depression and the Dirty Thirties and the dust storms and the war and after all of that, to sit on a screened porch and feel the breeze off the lake and eat sloppy joes and have a beer and be among familiar faces was pure pleasure.

  The summer cabin is like a family history center. The old wicker furniture from Grandpa’s house. The old dishes you grew up with as a child, now entombed here. Your childhood books. Uncle Gene’s outboard motor. Say what you will about his drinking, he maintained this motor very well and it comes to life every Memorial Day and the smell of exhaust brings back the memory of Gene. Why didn’t you bury him here instead of in the cemetery? The Larsons did—they cremated their parents and their ashes are in two urns on the porch.

  • • •

  Pastor Liz went down to the Minneapolis Synod conference on the eighteenth because she wanted to be there for the election of a woman bishop, Rev. Ann Svennungsen, the first in Minnesota. And then she came back and gave a sermon about how we should do our righteous deeds in secret and not be a show-off. And she does. She visits the old and infirm and if they want her to feed their cats or make them some chicken soup or find them a cleaning lady, she does that, calls up Clint Bunsen, a volunteer, who’s good at plumbing, and he comes out and replaces the float in the toilet tank. She gives hand massages, dries tears, takes temperatures, listens to people complain about their children, makes tea. All that training in theology but you don’t go visit Mrs. Oberg and talk about the problem of free will and could an omnipotent God create us with the freedom to reject Him, you open a can of peaches and you feed them to her, she who had a stroke a month ago and not of her own free will and not necessarily God’s either, it just happened. It is exhausting to go around and absorb the sorrows of the world and sometimes Pastor Liz comes home and weeps and if there’s a knock at the door, she can’t answer it, her eyes are all red and swollen. What helps is if she puts on a record and dances to it—“My Girl,” “You’re Gonna Lose That Girl.” She had the music turned up loud and she didn’t hear his footsteps. Clint Bunsen coming in to see if she needed her float replaced. “Hey, getting ready for the talent show, I see,” he said. She had started to change out of her clerical garb and she had taken off her skirt and hadn’t put her jeans on.

  He knows about the sorrows of the world, though. He’s a father. His daughter Tiffany is in Atlanta, unemployed, has a yearlong lease on a wreck of an apartment, thanks to a boyfriend with a temper. Walls with fist holes in them. Clint’s son, Chad, is getting rich in California designing video games in which demented people walk into fast-food restaurants and gun people down. And Kira, his youngest, is in Fargo running a French restaurant called Fargo Monet. It’s not doing well. She hasn’t been paid in three months. Twenty-two years old and she’s beautiful and broke. Her real joy is training dogs. Works late at the restaurant, gets up early and trains big Labs to walk like ballerinas. It’s for her that Clint carries a cell phone in his pocket, in case she needs him to tell her what to do. Which she hasn’t yet. Twenty times a day he’d like to press 1 on speed dial but he knows she’d be irked. “What?” she’d say. “I’m busy. What?”

  Liz went to put her jeans on and Clint replaced the float in the toilet and he opened the window and cardinals were singing in the maple trees. The phone rang and it went to the answering machine and he heard an old woman’s voice ask for the pastor to come, she needed to take Bernie to the hospital and could the pastor come and see to her cats. Clint opened her refrigerator door and there was a ham. It looked good. It was quiet back there in the bedroom where Pastor Liz was. She was waiting for him to leave. She was embarrassed. She didn’t want to see him. He wanted to ask her if he could have a slice of that ham. He called down the hallway, “Are you okay, Pastor?” “No,” she said. What to say? “Anything I can help with?” “No.” “Okay. Bye.” “Bye.” The ham looked so good, but he didn’t want to be a thief. Bad enough to be a voyeur. His cell phone vibrated in his pocket. It was Kira calling from Fargo. He dashed out of the parsonage and closed the door and opened the phone. “Yeah,” he said. “What you up to?” “Not much.” “You okay?” “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  • • •

  Father Wilmer was sitting in the Chatterbox Café, brooding over his chili and grilled cheese. He is a good man of charity and devoted to the gospel, kind, forbearing, gentle, and he has just discovered that he is Swedish. He was born in Chicago and adopted at birth by a family in Milwaukee named Mueller whose brother was a Franciscan priest, and Wilmer admired him and followed in his footsteps, and a month ago he got a letter from Child Services in Chicago that his birth mother would like to be in touch, and he went down to see her. Her name was Inga. She had been a waitress and she had taken up with a cook named John Johnson. One night of passion and then he left town and she had the baby put up for adoption and was ostracized by her family and she played piano in a saloon. One night she went to a Baptist revival meeting and was moved by the message and stood up and was possessed of the Spirit and told her story of sin and disgrace and told it so beautifully and so passionately that a rich woman took her in and Inga cared for her until the woman died and she had left everything to Inga, a big house and a car and a warehouse downtown and stocks and bonds and Inga started playing piano in
church. She played very lively and syncopated just like in the saloon except she played hymns about Jesus, but they made you want to dance, and people loved it. And now she was eighty-four and she wanted to find her lost boy. She said, “I prayed for you every day and I can see my prayers were answered.” He was not wearing his clerical collar when he met Inga. She said, “Are you a churchgoing man?” He said yes, he was. “I hope you ain’t Catholic,” she said. “It would kill me if you were.” “I’m a Christian,” he said. “Well, that’s a relief to hear.” She died in February and last week he got an envelope: a slip of paper said, Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind. . . . And a check for $18,000. There was only one stipulation, that he attend church regularly. Well, he does that, of course. He’s thinking he’ll take a vacation this summer and go to Ireland. Spend the money before anyone can ask him to donate it.

  • • •

  Class of 1962 held their fiftieth reunion and stood under a big tent out in the park by the lake and reflected on how much they liked each other, people who had once been beset with angst and envy and wild irrational ambitions and now here they were, older and sort of satisfied. They stood in honor of their classmate Henry Hill, who died in Vietnam, a first lieutenant. Janet Oberg, who was in the class play with him—she played Juliet; Henry, Romeo—stood and recited:

  Give me my Romeo; and, when I shall die,

  Take him and cut him out in little stars,

  And he will make the face of heaven so fine

  That all the world will be in love with night

  And pay no worship to the garish sun.

  That’s what high school does for you: gives you some art and music and history so that even if you spend your life raising kids and writing computer programs, still there was a time when you argued about the First Amendment and talked about the Civil War and read Romeo and Juliet.

  The high school choir came to the reunion. Arrived at 10 p.m. in their black gowns and stood outside the tent and hummed the Alma Mater and looked at all these old people in their sixties standing weeping. Unbelievable.

  Hail to thee, our Alma Mater,

  Would that we might dwell

  Longer in thy hallowed hallways,

  But we bid farewell.

  Through life’s dangerous lonely passages

  Long the coasts of grief and fear,

  In our hearts we’ll e’er remember

  How you loved and taught us here.

  Corinne Tollerud is back from St. Olaf after her freshman year and she is all torn up over Kierkegaard—a seeker after truth, living without income, piles of dirty clothes on the bedroom floor. Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. Kierkegaard said that. So she told her mother, “What is the point, really, of vacuuming? There has always been dirt, always will be. Dirt is organic. There is nothing new under the sun. People say to me, ‘A young woman like yourself should be out seeing the world, not living at home,’ but what do those words mean, young and woman? Those don’t define me. They limit me. Life is a race with no finish line and no prize. You could skip the race and stay home and just let God pick the winners. It’s all the same. Yes, it would cause anxiety but anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. Why do we live the way we do?”

  • • •

  Meanwhile the smell of burning charcoal is in the air, and hamburgers, and though we longtime residents may think about the meaning of life, we also think about the tent caterpillars who are out in great numbers, droves of them, eating the leaves of trees, so you don’t feel bad as you walk along crushing them underfoot, but nobody is going barefoot, and at night you lie in bed and you can hear them pooping on your roof. You come down to breakfast and a tent caterpillar crawls out of the butter dish. You look down at your chair and there are two of them there. Your wife sits down. A tent caterpillar is crawling up her nightgown toward her bare shoulder as she drinks her tea and reads about Afghanistan. The caterpillar is heading for an Afghanistan of its own—it ventures out onto bare skin and she whoops and her tea goes up in the air and she smacks it hard and runs into the toilet to wipe it off her and comes back and looks you in the eye and she knows, she knows—women know—that you saw it and said nothing. You wanted to see it.

  There are pesticides, of course, but the one that deals with the tent caterpillar is alleged to have side effects for humans—it causes sleepiness. And that’s something we don’t need. The presence of caterpillars stimulates alertness. A skunk paraded through town on Tuesday, walked up from the lakeshore past Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery and the Mercantile and across the street past Skoglund’s Five & Dime and the Sidetrack Tap and the Feed & Seed and everyone in town watched him walk across the ballfield and into the cornfield and Mr. Berge turned from the window in the Chatterbox Café and took a forkful of his salad and got a fuzzy feeling in his mouth and he coughed it up and spat and spat and everyone in the café was laughing so hard they were weeping. Darlene had twisted some pieces of yarn together and that’s what he felt on his palate—she did it to pay him back for the time he put the mouse in her apron pocket and got her excited and she went to the ladies’ room and while she was there he switched her hot fudge sundae and substituted a liquid laxative for the hot fudge.

  The caterpillars are out for survival. Survival is victory. We have it easy. We lie in our beds at night and hear what sounds like rain on the roof and it’s caterpillar poop falling through the trees. A thin layer of it on the ground. Pastor Liz serves communion and something in the dish of wafers is moving. She flicks it away and her acolyte Brian says, “Hang on,” which he’s never said during communion, and he removes a caterpillar from her chasuble. “Thank you,” she says. “And also yourself.”

  The graduating seniors pay no attention to caterpillars. They are thinking about summer and the great beyond—their favorite part of town is the road out. Mr. Halvorson is hoping to repress any and all attempts to disrupt the commencement with some prank or other. Last year twelve of the seniors, eight boys and two girls, dropped their robes in the procession going out and walked along naked, a memorable moment. Flashes of cameras. People screaming. Students clapping. The seniors will undoubtedly be planning this at their big bonfire tonight out at the Hansens’ farm. The Hansens will be home, but they don’t plan to stay up all night, nor do the constables Gary and LeRoy. In the hours between 2 and 6 a.m. there is great freedom in Lake Wobegon. You could, if you wanted, go in the back doors and sit in the living rooms and go through books, look in closets, check out the fridge. There are sound sleepers in this town—you could go up the stairs and stare at them in their sleep, and if you did you might see a tent caterpillar walking up a neck and through hair and up a cheek and around to the open mouth, snorting and groaning, and up to the left nostril, and he puts his head in and feels around with his antennae and the sleeper crinkles up his nose and the caterpillar humps off to the side just as the sneeze comes out. An explosion.

  • • •

  On Wednesday the high school kids gathered out on the parking lot and watched Venus cross over the sun. They wore paper eye protectors, and as usual when grown-ups are involved, the thrill of the moment was oversold. Kids were expecting some sort of galactic explosion and instead there was a tiny speck of shadow that some of them saw and others thought they saw and others weren’t sure. It made you wonder what else has been oversold. The joy of seeing Paris, France. The joy of seeing someone’s underpants. Maybe marriage is like this. You stand around with paper over your eyes and then it’s over and she says, Did you see it? And you say, I think so, I don’t know.

  Corinne saw Pastor Liz on the street and she ran over and she said, “I never understood the Christian faith until last month. Kierkegaard said that people pretend not to understand the faith because they know if they did understand it, it would obligate them to follow it and they don’t want to do that. It means: Have nothing. Want nothi
ng. Give everything away. Live without effort. Love people you don’t like. It’s not complicated.” I was right there, I saw a caterpillar crawling up her shoulder. I didn’t take it off her. I didn’t feel I had the right.

  5.

  GOSPEL BIRDS

  On a Saturday morning before a show, I sit down and write out the News from Lake Wobegon monologue, about three pages single-spaced. A sensible person would do it on Monday, but old habits die hard and I seem to require a high level of adrenaline to get the job done. On Monday the show appears very far away, on Saturday morning I am looking over the precipice. Sometimes I print out the three pages, sometimes not. If I print them out, I will glance at them before going out on stage. You don’t want the monologue to sound like you’re reading it, so you don’t read it—you want it to sound like a man thinking aloud, so you stand in the spotlight and try to think of what you wrote down, unconsciously editing the three pages approximately in half, rearranging things, and, if your mind goes blank, you grab the first thought you can think of and hang on. It’s exciting.

  Ernie and Irma Lundeen and their Performing Gospel Birds came to LW Lutheran last week. Attendance had been poor at Wednesday night prayer meeting and Bible reading, so the elders had gone to a Christian talent agency which also offered them Brother Flem Hospers, the world’s tallest evangelist, and the Singing Whipples, who play among the six of them thirty-seven musical instruments, and Rev. Duke Peterson, former runner-up for Mr. Minnesota and champion weight lifter whose use of bodybuilding drugs reduced him to the level of a wild animal and almost led to his death—he was dead for six and a half minutes and saw visions of the other side, but then he was revived and entered the ministry. On Wednesday night, it was Ernie and Irma and the Performing Gospel Birds who walked into the sanctuary, a full house, each of them covered with birds—doves, canaries, parakeets, a couple of parrots, a crow—there must’ve been forty birds perched on them, and all the birds were singing at the tops of their voices. It was awesome. So beautiful. Then Ernie bowed his head to pray and the birds were quiet. Not a peep. And it was a long prayer. He prayed that those who had come to mock and scoff would have their hearts opened to the message. That shut them up in back, in the scoffers’ seats.