The Keillor Reader

by Garrison Keillor

  • • •

  For winter quarter, I got the 5:00 a.m. shift at a ten-acre gravel parking lot on the West Bank, overlooking the Mississippi. I was turning into a night owl, always up past midnight, and the alarm clock went off at 4:00 and I lay in the warm trench of my bed, reviewing my options, preferring sleep, longed for it, nodded off, which shocked me into wakefulness and I rolled out and drove to town through the snowy world and parked beside the parking lot shack and hiked to the far end of the lot, flashlight in hand, like a sheep shearer waiting for the herd to come piling through the gate. The lot sloped down to the edge of the bluff and I looked down on Bohemian Flats, a ragtag village on the riverbank. In their frame houses that got flooded out every spring, old Swedes and Bohunks lived a subsistence life in the middle of the Twin Cities. Smoke rose from their chimneys. One of the other parking attendants said there was a whorehouse down there. “Ten bucks a shot,” he said. “Indian women.” The cars came in a rush, starting at 6:30. Three ticket sellers stood in the street, and the flagman stood at the top of the lot and directed the flow to where I was conducting them into their spots, straight lines, double rows. No painted lines on the gravel, I did it all by eye.

  The Leonard Bernstein of the automobile, I directed each car with strong hand signals into its correct space and discouraged the tendency to freelance and veer off toward a more convenient place. Every morning there were three or four pioneers who wanted to start their own rows. You had to yell to the flagman to hold the traffic and then you ran over toward the miscreant’s car and yelled, “Your car will be towed in ten minutes.” The mention of towing got their attention, but you had to make it sound real. “That’s a twenty-five-dollar fine.” Usually that was enough to get them to move the car. If they hesitated, I said, “Plus twenty-five for the impound lot. It’s up to you.” I had no idea who to call to come tow a car or what they would say—I just did what other attendants said to do, and it worked. Creative parking couldn’t be allowed, chaos would result, cars skewed everywhere, blocking other cars, holding up traffic, people late, angry, honking—it was my responsibility to make the grid system work. For the common good. To be direct. Exercise authority. No, sir. Not there. Over here. Right here. Yes. Here. Your individualists and comedians would test the limits and if you gave them an inch, anarchy would ensue, cars going every which way like confused buffalo. Be firm. Make that bozo back up six inches. Straighten that line. Thank you. If you accept that variance, the line will buckle. If you do your job right, the lot fills to capacity in half an hour, you put up the full sign and huddle in the shack, the electric heater blazing away, and you take up with Natasha and Prince Andrei for Mr. Milgrom’s humanities class until 9:00 a.m., when the shift ends and you leg it over the Washington Avenue bridge to the East Bank. A cup of vending machine coffee and a cheese danish and off to class.

  In the winter, we packed into Williams Arena to cheer the hockey team against our deadly rival, the Fighting Sioux of North Dakota. Blood lust in the air. Our Gophers were all Minnesota boys and the Sioux were all Canucks, paid thugs, big bruisers, mercenaries, and when a Sioux got ridden into the boards, we cheered from the bottom of our hearts. I dated a quiet girl, a church organist, and at hockey games she screeched and booed like a true peasant. I wrote a poem about hockey and took it to a writers’ club meeting at Professor Hage’s house and the poet James Wright said something encouraging about it and my face burned with pleasure. I can still picture it in my mind, where I was sitting, where he sat, and I still feel my face getting warm.

  • • •

  That spring the Mississippi River rose and there were urgent flood warnings on the radio. One afternoon I put on warm clothes and took the bus to St. Paul and crossed the Wabasha Bridge to the West Side, where people were at work filling sandbags to bolster the dikes to save the low-lying houses. It was foggy, and then it began to rain. An army of hundreds of volunteers hard at work, men and women, drawn up in assembly lines, holding the sacks and filling them and passing them in a chain to the dike. It got dark. Nobody left. The Red Cross brought around sandwiches and coffee. We rested and went back to work. Trucks brought in more sand and bags. A couple of front loaders worked at anchoring the dikes with earthen banks. I worked until after midnight and lay down in the back of a truck under a tarp and slept until daybreak and got up stiff and cold and they brought us more sandwiches and coffee and I got back in the gang and worked until noon. I stayed because everyone else stayed. I sort of collapsed in the afternoon and was going to go home but slept a couple hours on a tarp in somebody’s front yard, and when I woke up, there was water in the street, people wading through it, some men with muddy overalls, pitched emotion in the air, though nobody said much. We had put so much into beating back the flood, and we kept working—shovel, fill, tie, and pass, shovel, fill, tie, and pass—and felt privileged to be there doing it. I could hear the river boiling by and slabs of ice heaved up on the dike and National Guardsmen patrolling, and when people couldn’t stand up any longer, they sat down and ate baloney sandwiches and drank coffee. And got back up.

  I went home in the morning. I sat on the bed and cried. For the relief of getting out of those mud-crusted clothes and standing under a hot shower, but also for what I’d seen, the spirit of all those workers caught up in the job of saving their neighbors’ houses. Forget all the jabber and gossip, all the theoretical balderdash and horsefeathers, here is reality: the river rises up in its power and majesty, and the people rise up in theirs, and while one can do only so much, you must do that much, and we did. We saved several blocks of homes. Nobody thanked us. It didn’t matter. It was an experience.

  • • •

  I stuck around at WMMR and did the noon newscast for six months, five days a week, and then in May was told that the station had been off the air for at least that long. Doggone it. Our engineer, a brilliant young man, had been busy building a state-of-the-art control room and hadn’t had time to do maintenance on the transmitter and it had burned out. I was in some anguish over having spent six months editing a newscast so I could sit in a room and read it to myself, but as Barry Halper said, “It was good experience.” Had I ever, in those six months, thought about the listeners and wondered why the cards and letters weren’t pouring in, or trickling in, or even dripping in? No. I was having too much fun. “You sound terrific,” said Barry. “You could get a job on any station in town.” He was a pal and a real positive guy. He was twenty, he drove a big white convertible, he was Jewish and smart, he’d been to L.A. and Las Vegas and met Jack Benny and Shelley Berman. If he’d asked me to, I would’ve shined his shoes.

  I was a serious young man and did not go to parties at the U except one in the spring of my sophomore year at somebody’s parents’ house in Kenwood, a tony neighborhood in Minneapolis, where a mob of students was drinking something called Purple Death out of a washtub in the kitchen. Fortified with this, people started spouting off their big opinions about Kennedy and Hemingway and Ornette Coleman and some of us got into a contest to see who knew more dirty limericks. The base of Purple Death was grape Kool-Aid, plus whatever the guests had brought. It was a potluck cocktail: Old Buzzard Breath bourbon, crème de banana, licorice schnapps, vodka, anything would do, and after drinking for a while and telling dirty jokes, some of us headed over to Cedar Lake to go skinny-dipping, and we stripped off our clothes, but it wasn’t the erotic thrill it should’ve been, not for me anyway: I could feel the hangover mounting up behind my forehead, a truly monumental one, with shades of surrealism—I remember naked women and I also remember throwing up—and in the morning I awoke with a taste of what mental illness might be like, a sort of vacancy with dark shadows. I was glad to be alone.

  As U of M students we walked around with a fine chip on our shoulder toward eastern finishing schools like Yale and Harvard where children of privilege slept until noon after a night of inebriation, were brought cucumber sandwiches by a porter, sashayed off to their 3:00 p.m.
music appreciation class, and then played squash until dinner. Oxford and Cambridge were held in even greater contempt: dandruffy men quivering with borrowed sensibility drinking sherry and propounding fabulous foolishness with great certainty. You walk around with a brown bag lunch and a few bucks in your pocket, trying to scrape together next quarter’s tuition, and a little class resentment is good for you, a balm and a prod both. I envied cool people, good tennis players, opera singers, sandy-haired rich guys who looked princely even in ratty old clothes, all Frenchmen, men with lovely girlfriends, guitarists, but the U was the antidote to envy. So many cool people seem on closer examination to be trapped in a set of mannerisms that are not so interesting and lead nowhere, whereas the U appealed to your curiosity and drew you into scholarship, which took you through doors you hadn’t known existed. In one smoky classroom after another, sitting elbow to elbow at little arm desks, you felt illuminated; there was a quickening almost like drunkenness, a feeling that you and the professor were conspiring in a noble enterprise that would last you to the end of your days. I learned how to plant myself in a library chair and open the books and take notes on a yellow legal pad. Having a good ear for multiple-choice tests had gotten me through high school (the correct answer, two-thirds of the time, was C) but now I needed to actually do the work. I soldiered through and learned how to write profoundly at great speed late at night about books I barely understood.

  American universities have seen plenty of radicals and revolutionaries come and go over the years, and all of them put together were not nearly so revolutionary as a land-grant university itself on an ordinary weekday. To give people with little money a chance to get the best education there is—that is true revolution. When I graduated from Anoka High School, I believed that my chances would be as good as anybody else’s, and the good people of Minnesota did not let me down. I got my chance and right there is where a Democrat is made—a kid from Anoka sits in a parking lot shack on Fourth Street SE where, earning $1.48 an hour, he translates Horace for Mrs. Forbes—whose standards are high—as birds sit scritching on the telephone wire and a fly buzzes at the window. A bright fall day and he has no money to speak of and no clear plan for the future but he has teachers who engage him with gravity and fervor and that’s enough. That was the true spirit of the University, the spirit of professors who loved their work. That was the heart and soul of the place, not the athletic teams, not the architecture. The University was Mary Malcolm, a native of Worthington, who studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and came back to teach music theory for forty-three years. She had perfect pitch and could write down on paper anything you could hum or plunk on the piano. It was Izaak M. Kolthoff, a Dutch chemist who guided Jewish scientists out of Germany in the thirties and worked on the crucial war project of creating synthetic rubber and became a peacenik in the fifties. It was Marcia Edwards, a chain-smoking authority on adolescent psychology and a fanatical Gopher sports fan who went to angelic lengths to help her students, even lending them money, and who turned down the offer to become dean of the College of Education because she didn’t want the hassle, especially the foofaraw of being the first woman dean. It was Bill Marchand, who taught Shakespeare to kids majoring in animal husbandry and horticulture. It was Nils Hasselmo, who came from Sweden to study the Swedish emigrants and got his doctorate and became chair of the Scandinavian Languages Department and eventually president of the U. And it was Margaret Forbes, who could make you feel that a few lines of Horace held the key to everything noble. If you start to feel ennobled, you lose interest in how you are perceived by other people. You walk into the library and that Niagara of scholarship holds you in its sway, the deluge and glory of learning, and you begin to see where work and play become one. And imagine working at something you love. That was how the University of Minnesota gave me my life.

  10.

  MY STROKE (I’M OVER IT)

  My neurologist showed me a map of my brain last year, taken by magnetic resonance imaging, and pointed to a dark spot: “That’s where your stroke hit.” And pointed a couple millimeters away: “And if it had hit there, you would’ve had significant motor and speech losses.” A matter of fact. The blood clot that got fired from the atrium could have landed here or it could’ve landed there. It landed there, and so you can walk and talk. You may believe it was the Lord’s Will, or blind fortune, or the result of regular strenuous exercise, but Dr. Science only says what he knows: had it landed in this busy neural metropolis here, you would be in a wheelchair, a gimp, a feeb, a crip, a wacko with big Xs for eyeballs trying to say She sells seashells by the seashore slowly and distinctly but it comes out q&w$e#r%t!y$u&i*o%p, but instead it landed in a “silent area,” as he put it, sort of the Wyoming of the brain, where not all that much is going on so if a meteorite drops from the sky, no big deal, life goes on as before, except with a little wisdom that you got practically for free.

  It happened on Labor Day, in Minneapolis at a spa with Peruvian flute music playing, aromatic candles, jasmine in the air. A powerful Jamaican masseuse named Angelica was working on my neck and shoulders and telling me how good her life had been since she turned it over to the Lord Jesus Christ and let Him make all the decisions. “Including what to eat for lunch?” I said. Yes, she said. I started to say something witty about honey and locusts and in that instant my brain fogged up, my mouth felt numb, I slurred the word locusts. I heisted up on my elbows. I took a deep breath. She said, “Are you okay?” and I said, of course, “I am just fine. But I have to leave now. I forgot something.” I managed to pull my jeans on and T-shirt. I paid her. I stepped into my shoes. My head felt as if a balloon were expanding inside it. A mystical experience, one a person would rather not have. I careened out the door, listing slightly to the left. I climbed into my old Volvo. Call me a fool but I don’t believe in calling 911 anytime you feel woozy. So I drove twelve miles very carefully to United Hospital in St. Paul and on my way from the parking ramp to Emergency bumped into a man I hadn’t seen in years and couldn’t remember his name.

  “Are you okay?” he said.

  “I’m about to find out.”

  “You look okay.”

  “Good to know.”

  Not many people in the waiting room. I took a number and when I was called to the desk, I said in a clear voice, “I believe I am having a stroke.” An orderly brought a wheelchair and took me down a series of halls to a curtained alcove and I stripped down to my shorts and put on a hospital gown and lay on the examining table. It was a flowery gown and I lay with hands clasped over my abdomen, and imagined my funeral, my family walking past the coffin, dabbing at their eyes, as a soupy organ plays “Beautiful Isle of Somewhere,” looking down at my inert form, saying, “What is he doing in that little gown?” and someone says, “Because he’s going to be cremated and they didn’t want to waste a good suit.”

  The nurse announced my numbers—Blood pressure: 139/72. Pulse: 59. Not bad for a stricken man.

  • • •

  The young Chinese lady neurologist told me, as she tapped me with her little silver hammer and scratched the sole of my foot and moved her index finger back and forth and up and down for me to follow with my eyes, that she used to listen to my show when she was in medical school. The words used to gonged in my head. How had I disappointed her? It made me sad, lying on the gurney in my burial gown. I watched her write on a form in her clipboard, “Very pleasant 67 y.o. male, tall, well-developed, well-nourished, flat affect, awake, alert and appropriate.” I’ve had a flat affect since I was a kid, I’m from Minnesota, I thought it was the appropriate way to be. I make it a point to be appropriate. I am perfectly comfortable with appropriateness.

  She shipped me off to the MRI Space-Time Cyclotron, where they laid me on a narrow platform and ran it up a rail and into the maw of the beast for fifty minutes of banging and whanging, buzzing and dinging, and I lay with my eyes shut, to avoid claustrophobia, and imagined myself on the beach in Denmark, the day I
swam in the cold cold sea with my friend Euan, who said, “You don’t have to do this, you know,” which truly obligated me to do it, so I stripped and ran into the water through a wall of pain and dove for total immersion and trotted back on shore. Euan suffered a major stroke in Paris a year before mine and was still in rehab, a healthier man than I, a Scot for heaven’s sake. Lying there, I recited to myself, “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state” and “You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain, too much love drives a man insane” and “Minnesota, hats off to thee, to our colors true we shall ever be. Firm and strong, united are we,” all the words present and accounted for.

  I got transferred to Mayo and St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester because that’s where I go for stuff. They know me there. I was wheeled into Intensive Care and a set of electrodes was taped to my chest to broadcast my vital signs to a monitor at the nursing desk. A plastic sack of blood thinner dripped into me through an IV. I fell asleep in the faint glow and hum and then a nurse asked me to say my name and birth date and was I experiencing any pain or dizziness. A few hours later, my internist Dr. Rodysill came in and asked for the story, so I told him, as I’d told the Chinese neurologist, a cardiologist, and a nurse the night before. A technician came in to make sure I could swallow and another arrived with an ultrasound wand to check out the veins in my neck. A neurologist arrived—an important one, judging by the retinue of disciples in his wake—who had me stand on one foot, arms extended, in my little gown. He and his entourage gathered at the bedside, eight men and women in long white coats, folks who’d aced the math and science courses I’d skipped in favor of Chaucer and Shakespeare and the Transcendentalists, and a couple of the disciples tapped me and peered into my eyes, and the troupe exited. Enter a speech pathologist and a physical therapist, and I told my story again. I wished I could add a speeding car to it, a shady man with a bulge under his tux jacket, a Great Dane who leaped out from the bushes. I felt inappropriate lying there, a man with excellent blood pressure, but at the same time comforted, to be in the care of extremely capable people. My dad distrusted doctors, having a dim view of higher education in general. I, who loved college dearly, am fond of smart people who put their smarts at the service of another, who study the data and explain it so an English major can understand. You suffered a cerebral event that could’ve been catastrophic. We don’t yet know why. We shall endeavor to find out. Meanwhile, we will do what we can to protect you against a recurrence.