We Are Still Married

by Garrison Keillor

  She found Val when the red boat towed him to shore and Dr. DeHaven (who had been in his basement, not at the cabin, which was now his son Jim’s anyway, whose dog it was, an old fishing dog named Bruno, now deaf) gave him a couple antihistamines on general principle and drove him home. Judy drove all around town looking for him and there he was sitting on his own back step, bewildered. He told her the truth about his poor cat Magic. She felt sorry for him, but not so sorry that she couldn’t pass on the Memorial Day chairmanship. “I hope that, in all this confusion, you haven’t forgotten that you’re the chairman of Memorial Day,” she said. “We’re all counting on you for something good.” He was too weak to resist, and he was so worn out that he went to bed and slept twelve hours and forgot all about Memorial Day until the morning of the 30th, when he saw flags all over town. He panicked. Then he saw me and thought, Speaker. I was heading into the Mercantile to buy a white shirt. I was in town visiting my Aunt Myrna and Uncle Earl, two of the greatest people in the world, so I was in an amiable mood. We’d just eaten chocolate cake and ice cream for breakfast. That’s how wonderful they are. Val took my elbow and told me how wonderful I was and then and there, on the sidewalk outside the Mercantile, under Lorraine’s seductive glance, he popped the question.

  Well, I’d once recited the Gettysburg Address at Memorial Day and heard Aunt Eleanor afterward declare it the finest performance of the spoken word she had ever heard, so I said okay, and two hours later I was in procession behind the Sons of Knute honor guard, heading up the hill to the cemetery, full of magnificent oratory about home and community and family and friends, about life and death and the price of coffee, a lovely extemporaneous speech that as I hiked up in the hot sun and stood in the hot sun in front of the GAR obelisk and listened to the Ladies’ Sextette sing “Abide With Me” and young Ben Tollerud recite “O Captain! my Captain!” seemed to expand larger and larger in my head until it came to include the entirety of all essential truth about our existence on earth. For a minute there, facing the crowd of familiar faces that looked like a Monet painting when I took my glasses off, I was in possession of a vast brilliant message, a gift of the Holy Spirit, and felt like Jeremiah must have felt when God said, “Here, say this.” And then somehow it came loose. Maybe it was the note the ladies hit on “foil the tempter’s power”—Arlene had quit the group a week before, saying she was too old and her voice was ruined and she couldn’t sing anymore: a blow to the other five because she was their best singer, and Florence was no prize as a replacement—or it might’ve been the Lord’s Prayer coming on the heels of the Address and making me think, “Our Father Who art in heaven, hallow this ground so that I shall not die in vain,” but die I did, in plain view of everyone in town, including the ten or twelve I’ve wanted all my life to impress. I gave a horseshit speech.

  What I wanted to talk about was whether the boys of the First Minnesota Brigade, including the one buried here, who made their heroic and brutal counterattack on July 2, 1863, at Gettysburg against Longstreet’s army that had found a great vacancy in the Union line and was swinging into position against its flank to roll up Meade and run him straight to Washington and win the war for the Confederacy—whether those boys thought of us in the future and what the country would come to, what they were fighting for and who would keep their memory—would they have liked us? or would our America horrify them? And how all two hundred of them jumped up off the grass and ran toward the smoke. They could’ve run for the river but they ran into the smoke, because that’s where everyone else was running and they were loyal to each other, loved each other, so in some way they loved the nation and us and our life that owes so much to them. Only forty of them came back out of the smoke; the rest were dead or wounded. Young men in the spring of life. A hot day, thick smoke, horses shrieking and men screaming horribly in that unbearable cannon fire around the peach orchard and meadow. But they all ran into the smoke, and how this somehow changes everything. The citizens of death. Our duty to honor them, a lovely duty. It’s a civic duty to look at death and thus see life clear, and how life—the furtherance of life—is the purpose of the state and community—parenthood—the value of storytelling—our connection to each other—It was a long horseshit speech, stumbling around in the thickness of my mind and trying to seem profound by saying dumb things and pausing after each one, and when I talked about loving each other, all of my neighbors looked down in the grass and waited for it to stop.

  I soon obliged them. There was applause. They all congratulated me afterward and said it was wonderful, except Clint, who put his hand on my shoulder and said, “One nice thing is that when it’s done, it’s all over,” and he was right. I am so sorry about all of them lying dead on the hill, the trooper from the First Minnesota and all the old women and the farmers, all the kids who died of diphtheria and influenza, and now my classmate Corinne, and I wish my speech had been great, just as I wish we could bring them all back to life, but it’s over and now summer can begin. School can let out. Baseball gets going and the sweet corn begins to get serious. Soon the very first ear will appear—on Aunt Myrna’s good china platter one Sunday after church, a faint yellow ear of corn, steaming hot, glistening with butter and crystals of salt—and then the life to come will start to begin.

  WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?

  Hey

  IT HAS BEEN a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown was such a sweet line all those years on the radio, the standard opening of each week’s story, a pleasant, modest, useful sentence, considering how many writers stew over their opening lines (e.g., “Ray opened the refrigerator door and bent down to look for the margarine”), and most stories stop there and wind up in the wastebasket, brilliant stories wasted because the first sentence wasn’t as brilliant as what would soon follow, so the writer quit and his masterpiece, his In Our Time, his Great Gatsby, his Collected Stories of John Cheever, never got written because the first sentence opened like a rusty gate, and is it so different for you and me? The marvelous work we could do if only we didn’t have to begin it but could start in at the middle. The things we could accomplish if only we didn’t know what we are doing until later.

  It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon gets you right in there, into the dim recesses of the Chatterbox Cafe, the air lit up with the smell of hot caramel rolls, where three heavy men in dark-green shirts hunker in the back booth under the Allis Chalmers calendar (“Krebsbach Farm Implement / New & Used Since 1912 / JUniper 5610”) and drink black coffee, refilled by Dorothy in her big pink uniform, who doesn’t ask if they’d like more (Do bears pee in the woods?), she just pours, as they commiserate on the lousy world situation and console each other with a few beloved old jokes about animals in barrooms. There was this man who trained his dog to go around the corner to Bud’s Lounge with a dollar bill under his collar and get a pack of cigarettes and bring them home, until one day the man only had a five, so he put it under the dog’s collar and sent him down, waited an hour, and no dog, so he got mad and went to Bud’s and there was the pooch sitting up on a stool drinking a vodka gimlet. He said, “You’ve never done this before!” The dog looked straight ahead and said, “I never had the money before.”

  One problem with It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon is that you couldn’t go straight from that into talking about dreams of boundless grandeur and the many-rivered generosity of life, but, then, it was that way when I lived there, too. Dreams we did not discuss, they were embarrassing in normal conversation, especially big ones. We sat at supper, Dad at one end, Mother at the other, children in the stanchions along the sides, and talked quietly about the day’s events. We might discuss the immediate future such as a history test the day after tomorrow or Bible camp next June, but the distant future, 1964, 1980, was inscrutable, due to the imminence of the Second Coming. And there was to be no grandeur. Once, just to see how it would sound coming out of my mouth, I said I was going to college someday. “College” rhymes with “knowledge.” I was ten years old and words were
as good as food in my mouth. I chewed my food fast so as to clear the way to be able to say more. “I’m going to go to college,” I stated. My sister laughed: Who d’ya think you are? She was right, I didn’t know.

  What I didn’t dare mention was my other dream of going into the show business, a faint dream because we were Christian people and wouldn’t dream of doing immoral things, though I hoped to find a way around this. I mentioned S.B. to Mrs. Hoglund, the piano teacher, and she told me the story of the famous Swenson Sisters, who hailed from nearby Kimball, a girls’ quartet who sang at summer resorts including Moonlite Bay and who, one cold winter day in 1954, won the St. Paul Winter Carnival Outdoor Talent Contest, and the next week boarded the morning Zephyr to Chicago and then the Super Chief to Hollywood. They signed a contract with Fairmont Pictures to make a movie called Minnesota Moon but then the producer, Leo Lawrence, took a deep drag on his stogie and growled, “Kids, I love this script, it’s beautiful, I loved every bit of it except the cows and the lakes and the farmers—we’re going to change them to camels and desert oases and thousands of Bedouins galloping hard over the desolate sands,” so the movie became Moon over Morocco and the Swenson Sisters became the Casablanca Quartet, dressed in vast black robes, their faces veiled, and their career went down like a concrete block and by 1955 they were back at Gull Lake, singing at Hilmer’s Supper Club (Beer & Setups, Fish Fry—All U Can Eat Friday Nites), and their dream was just an old black shell of a burned-down house. What’s more, they, who had gone away innocent and filled with shining hope, returned home four hardened women with dark-crimson lipstick who smoked Luckys and drank vodka gimlets and when they laughed, they laughed a deep laugh, like men, laced with pain, and so of course men would have nothing to do with them, and they fell into unnatural forms of love. There ended the story; she would say no more. They tried to go too far, and it should be a lesson to the rest of us: not to imagine we are somebody but to be content being who we are, Minnesotans.

  I’m very proud to be a Minnesotan and have been proud since I was a kid and first traveled to see our beautiful State Capitol building in St. Paul. Our fourth-grade class got up at six o’clock and rode a schoolbus down to meet the governor. We had studied state government for a month, the duties of governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, and other state officers, and the legislature and the state commissions and boards, which didn’t prepare us for the grandeur and sheer magnificence of the great white temple spread on the crest of a gentle hill, the bank of steps rising to the pillars, the golden horses and golden chariot high above, and the dome, the largest anywhere in the Christian world, so it appeared. We camped in the bus, eating liverwurst sandwiches and drinking green Kool Aid, waiting for our 11:00 A.M. appointment. Mrs. Erickson said that she was trusting us to be on our best behavior indoors, but she didn’t have to worry, we were stunned, we shuffled along with the dumb dignity of the barely conscious. Indoors was even more magnificent, such opulence as a child might imagine from fairy tales but never associate with our modest prairie state, long vast echoey marble halls, marble statues, oil paintings, and a room with a gold ceiling and a rug three inches thick, and there was the governor of Minnesota, the leader of our people, physically present in the room with us.

  We formed a straight line and gravely filed one by one past Mrs. Erickson, who whispered our name to a grim-faced man, who then whispered it to the governor, who shook our hands and said, “Hello, Stanley, it’s good to meet you.” This was thrilling, until suddenly, when Mrs. Erickson whispered Shirley, Shirley clapped her hand over her mouth and rushed away to the toilet, but her name had gone into the pipeline and when the governor shook Billy’s hand he said, “Hello, Shirley, it’s good to meet you.” He smiled the same warm smile and went right on calling all the rest of the class by the wrong name, including Elaine, who was called Robert. I was called John. He was the governor but he wasn’t what you’d call bright.

  It was so amazing how many kids (mostly girls) later defended him, saying he was a busy man, had a lot on his mind, had to run the state, etc. We boys said, No, he’s dumb. How can you look at a boy and say, Hello, Shirley. The girls said, How do you know Shirley isn’t a boy’s name, too? Show us where it says Shirley can’t be a boy’s name. How do you know? Who do you think you are? You’re not so smart.

  Who do you think you are? You’re from Lake Wobegon. You shouldn’t think you’re somebody.

  You’re no better than the rest of us.

  Some of our teachers, however, such as Miss Heinemann, believed that we were good enough and could be improved with proper instruction, and so she set Shakespeare’s sonnets in front of us, Macbeth, Wordsworth, Chaucer, and expected us to read them and to discuss what was on the page, and if any of us had been so bold as to aspire to a life in literature, she’d have been pleased as punch. The higher the better.

  She strolls the aisles between our desks, swishing past in her dull-brown dress, talking about metaphor, the use of language to mean more than what we know it to mean, whereby common things, such as a rose, a birch tree, the dark sky, rain falling, come to mean something else for which there isn’t an exact word. She talks about literature as being urgent, impulsively bold, unavoidable, like stopping your car on the highway at night and stepping out and walking alone into dark damp woods because it’s unbearable to only know what’s in your headlights. Art calls us out of the regulated life into a life that is dangerous, free. I remembered that when I was chosen class poet, to participate in the winter homecoming program and, after the procession of Queen Aileen to the throne and the singing of her favorite song, to stand and recite her favorite poem. Her favorite song was “Vaya Con Dios” but she didn’t have a favorite poem, she said, so I said, “That’s okay, Aileen, I’ll choose a real good one for you.” I had in mind a few lines from Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” beginning:I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!)

  My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods,

  No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair,

  I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,

  I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange,

  But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,

  My left hand hooking you round the waist,

  My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road.

  Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,

  You must travel it for yourself.

  But first I had to show it to Miss Heinemann for her approval. She was incredulous. “Aileen Heidenschink chose this? This is her favorite poem? Aileen?” No, not exactly, Miss H., it’s one that I thought might be one that—“I think that on Aileen’s big day you might come up with something more appropriate than this. Really. I have no church, no philosophy? Aileen is Catholic. Her family will be sitting there. Think.”

  I was thinking, that the Queen’s Favorite Poem was a rare occasion when Art had a chance to lift its hairy head and call my classmates toward a higher spiritual life, but Miss Heinemann didn’t see it that way; she said, “Don’t be mean to Aileen. Find something she’ll enjoy, like ‘Invictus.’ Or else don’t do it,” which disgusted me, idealist that I was, and also was a huge relief, because the thought of reciting Walt Whitman to a gym full of Lake Wobegon made me sick with fear. So I bowed out as Homecoming Poet on the issue of artistic freedom, keeping my principles intact and taking a big load off my mind at the same time.

  Hey

  Thirty years later I lived in St. Paul, in a big brick house on Crocus Hill, a nice neighborhood where if you needed to buy a volume of Whitman or a dozen white Japanese candles or a Mozart piano concerto you could find it in a shop close by, but if you wanted caulking compound you’d have to get in the car and drive a mile to Seven Corners Hardware, where graceful old houses were restored to a condition of elegance such as the builders could scarcely have imagined and were lived in by people with plenty of books and lots of money.

&nbs
p; When I sat in Miss Heinemann’s class, I was reading Main Street and Babbitt, imagining myself as a rebel against the materialism and provincialism of the Midwest as Sinclair Lewis described it, the culture of the Shriners and boosters and plumbers and shopkeepers and dull solid unimaginative people who seemed to dominate the landscape and hold us mysterious and artistic people back from our destiny. But now, a quarter-century later in my neighborhood, all the shops sold beauty and music and art and cuisine and nobody could tell me where to find a little replacement part for the burners in my furnace. This burned me up, because I am a writer and have stories to create and couldn’t afford to spend a whole Monday morning running around St. Paul looking for a tiny grommet or nipple or whatever it’s called that the gas flows through when it burns. I drove to a plumbing-and-heating shop and got the impression that furnaces were only a sideline for them, that they were really performance artists waiting for word on their new video and then they’d be off to New York.

  “I never saw one of those,” a man there said, “where’d you get it?”

  “I got it off my furnace, of course.”

  “How do you know it doesn’t work?”

  “The house is cold.”

  I drove home. The Blazer had a funny clicking sound in the axle. I’d had it in to the garage three times but they were artists, too, not dull technicians who do menial jobs like figuring out why my car clicks. I paid them money and the car still went k-chick, k-chick, and when I called to complain they said, “We didn’t hear anything.” They were avant-garde automotive artists of anti-mechanical repair, their purpose to confront me, their audience, with my car’s problems. For this I paid $112.32, money I earned by sitting in a little room by myself and writing in such a way that a reader runs the risk of laughter, a pleasurable sensation of trembling along the spine.