We Are Still Married

by Garrison Keillor

  “What is it like?” I asked over and over. I myself have never been outside the United States, except twice when I was in Canada. When I was eighteen, a friend and I made a list of experiences we intended to have before we reached twenty-one, which included hopping a freight to the West Coast, learning to play the guitar, and going to Europe. I’ve done none of them. When my son called, I sat down at the kitchen table and leaned forward and hung on every word. His voice came through clearly, though two of the calls were like ship-to-shore radio communication in which you have to switch from Receive to Send, and when I interrupted him with a “Great!” or a “Really?” I knocked a little hole in his transmission. So I just sat and listened. I have never listened to a telephone so intently and with so much pleasure as I did those three times. It was wonderful and moving to hear news from him that was so new to me. In my book, he was the first man to land on the moon, and I knew that I had no advice to give him and that what I had already given was probably not much help.

  The unused checks that he’s left on the hall table—almost half the wad I sent him off with—is certainly evidence of that. Youth travels light. No suitcase, no sports coat, not much language, and a slim expense account, and yet he went to the scene, got the story, and came back home safely. I sit here amazed. The night when your child returns with dust on his shoes from a country you’ve never seen is a night you would gladly prolong into a week.

  SNEEZES

  MY MOTHER WHEN SHE SNEEZES SAYS “The bishop!” and has for as long as I’ve known her. She stifles a sneeze as much as she can, but it has a pleasant, musical tone, like the call of a bird. My father’s sneeze is impossible to represent phonetically. He delivers his with an open embouchure, head thrown back, and the tone, while not musical, is bold and triumphant. I once heard a similar sound on a National Geographic special but was out of the room, and when I got a look at the television screen that particular animal was gone and the show had moved on to another part of the jungle. When my father clears his throat, he produces a loud, sharp growl that, if you have your back to him, may make you jump and drop your knitting. When my mother clears her throat, a little balloon appears over her head containing the word “ahem.”

  A person might think that these differences are based on sex—one masculine, one ladylike—but all of my mother’s family sneezes like her, including her brothers, and my father’s family sneezes like him. One of his sisters sneezes in a way that is thrilling to hear. She is a soft-spoken woman, but when she feels one coming she grabs on to a chair or a wall and makes a series of rhythmic cries, louder and louder, rising in pitch, culminating in the ecstatic crescendo, a ringing “Massachusetts!” delivered from the chest, full voice, bel sniso. Dogs jump to their feet, cats dash to safety. “Oh my, that felt good,” she says. On my mother’s side of the family, I think, they would prefer to do this in the bathroom behind a closed door, though their sneezes are pretty well repressed to begin with. They sneeze “Permission!” or “Sister!” but it’s hard to make out the word, because they are covering up and trying to be unintelligible.

  I refer here not to the sneezing that comes with a bad cold or hay fever but to the occasional sneeze, the recreational sneeze that the body works up simply to loosen the flesh, adjust the spinal column, jolt the brain, send a message to the extremities. My father sneezes every morning when he wakes up, and again when he walks into bright sunlight. When he has a cold, he is as miserable as anyone else.

  Over the years, my own sneezes have loosened up somewhat. In company, I try to rein them in, because I know that people’s attitudes vary—some enjoy a sneeze, and others immediately see the old hygiene-textbook picture of a man releasing a cloud of pestilence into the air—but when I’m alone I cut loose. I crouch, I spring up and make a move like an umpire calling a strike. I give voice to the sneeze. I make it as big as possible.

  Not long ago, I walked out the door of my house on a clear, cold morning and was thinking pure business when, halfway across the porch, I felt that familiar pleasant wave in the chest—the magnetic field of the sneeze—and the long intake of breath and the pulsation in the head. I wound up, reared back, and delivered a sneeze worthy of Pavarotti—a six-syllable sneeze that sounded like “onomatopoeia!” On the accented syllable, I stamped my foot (wham!) on the wooden floor, and then the majestic cry (and wham!) came bouncing back to me off the house across the street. I thought, God bless you ! I said good morning to the bunch of children who wait for their schoolbus on my corner. They appeared to be awestruck. I climbed into my car and drove off, and at the corner the stoplight turned a luminous green.

  POOL TABLE

  OUR DECISION TO BUY A POOL TABLE and put it in the dining room and haul the dining-room table upstairs and use it to pile stuff on was the sort of swift, intuitive decision that top family management makes when it is clicking on all eight cylinders.

  “Let’s go look at pool tables,” my wife said one drizzly morning last month after we had canceled a vacation trip because we had too much work to do.

  “Where would we put one?” I said.

  She said, “In the dining room.”

  And we went out and bought it—bam!—just like that. I was amazed, and so was the third member of the family, the fourteen-year-old youth. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he said.

  In fact, I had been kidding a few months before when I said, sitting at the dining-room table, “This’d make a good poolroom.” She and he both laughed. Obviously, the room was a dining room, being near the kitchen and having a chandelier. In the creative end of family management, though, many great proposals are first made in the form of jokes, which serve to deflect initial resistance (“Only kidding, dear”) and allow the proposal to percolate for a period of time, until another member introduces it as a serious idea, and the next day two guys carry in a pool table. “Where do you want it?” they say. In there. “In the dining room? You sure?” Positive.

  The canceled vacation was one factor in the decision—we felt we had some extravagance coming to us—and another was dissatisfaction with the basic dining-room concept. Of the rooms in our house, the DR lagged far behind the BR, LR, and Kit. in pleasure production. Its long table was where we sat with a stack of bills and wrote checks. We did income-tax returns there. We laid towels on it and spread out wet woolens to dry. And occasionally we sat there with company and put away big dinners, which were not bad—pretty good—and yet, considering the levels of fun experienced in nearby living areas, did not meet the performance standards we had in mind. Frankly, in our experience, when our pals sit down at a dining-room table set with matching china and matching silverware on a white tablecloth, they come under the shadow of a penal dining code learned in childhood. In the kitchen or out on the porch, they can be about fifty-percent funnier than at the table, where they sit up straighter and their conversation takes a turn toward higher ground—into the realm of issues and problems, needs and priorities. Frankly, the dining-room table was too much like other long tables I’ve spent time at, attending meetings. Frankly, in my own home my priority is to whoop it up a little. In those meetings, a major proposal such as dining-room conversion would be discussed at great length and considerably amended, the pool-table component would be set aside pending further study, and we would wind up with a long-term program of dinner enrichment, with new guidelines for guest selection.

  This is the advantage of the family unit: founded on sexual attraction, which is unexplainable, the family maintains the capacity for swift, intuitive action, such as we’re certainly seeing a lot of now around our new pool table. The other night, I banked the eight ball off two cushions and between two balls slightly more than one ball’s-width apart to park it in the corner pocket where I had called the shot—a little exercise in intuitive geometry that made my partner gasp in admiration even as it cost her the game. A person doesn’t have a hot stick like that every night, and, of course, you don’t need to. Occasional amazement is more than enough to keep a family clicki
ng along.

  COLD

  IT TURNED COLD THIS WEEK, down to twenty below Monday night, and my Blazer started right up, and on the way to the office I saw the neighbor lady needed a start. I stopped and got the jumper cables out and hooked them up to her battery, glad to show her what it means to own an American car. Hers is a Mazda. Her throttle was frozen and it was a major operation all the way around, and then I looked up and saw neighbors watching from their windows, curtains drawn back. Suddenly it’s clear just how easy it is to break into show business and bring joy into people’s lives. They can see how cold it is from the way you’re bent over, hands in your pockets, shivering, and they pad back to their breakfast table feeling like the King of England. Her car started and died a couple times. “Yeah, these little Japanese cars, I tell you,” I said. “This Blazer of mine, gosh, I just put in the key, press the pedal down a half-inch, and she goes right away. I don’t even bother putting her in the garage.” Cold weather is hard on cars but good for people. We finally get her started and then go into her kitchen for a cup of coffee—we say, “Hooooo, it’s a cold one out there. You hear the weather this morning? Cold out there. Terrible.” Except it’s not terrible at all. You’re a man who is phenomenally alive, your whole body, the nervous system and along the cortex and in the marrow of the bones, every part of the body has got the message: “Heat. Let’s go. Come on, team. Little more H, now. Let’s have some H.” There is no depression at twenty below. Human depression occurs frequently in the low fifties, and when it gets into the nineties there’s plenty of latitude for self-pity and grief at your sad wasted life and the people who let you down and exploited your vulnerability, but at twenty below the body turns passionate. You venture out and every internal organ is up on its feet doing the schottische, your skin is singing the “Habanera.” At twenty below, nature sends us a message: Die. And the body says, “Hell no, we won’t go!”

  PUCK DROP

  IN THE FALL OF 1986 the Minnesota North Stars invited me to drop the first puck and open their hockey season, a ceremony I had never heard of, so I bought a puck after lunch one day and practiced dropping it on my office floor. It takes approximately one second for a dropped puck to hit the deck and it drops straight down, so there’s not much a dropper can do to make the drop graceful—or much that can go wrong either, if you look at it that way. So I called the North Stars back and said yes and thought no more of it until I got to the arena a couple weeks later. Baseball’s ceremonial Opening Day toss is a mass of complications compared with the puck drop, and over the years there must’ve been dozens of tossers—governors, mayors, owners, old-timers—who turned in their sleep, reliving the moment when, in jam-packed Weems Stadium on a fine April afternoon, all eyes turned on His Grace as he accepted the ceremonial ball, rubbed it up in a clownish way, trying to project to the vast throng an air of nonchalance, even slight self-mockery, and, grinning at other dignitaries and the photographers, made a ridiculous stiff windup and pitched the ball feebly into the dirt—a dinky throw that made forty thousand people simultaneously think, “Wimp”—and then tried to appear amused at his disgrace and waved to the masses and sat down on a cup of beer. A ceremonial toss could end up tossing a wrench into a man’s life and years later be thrown back at him by strangers at parties, no matter how distinguished his later career (“Saw you at the ballpark. About ten years ago, wasn’t it? That time you tossed the ball out. Heh-heh”), but a puck drop is simpler, or so I thought until I got to the arena and remembered: Ice. You have to walk on ice. Falling was on my mind as I walked across the dark parking lot and down into the bright fluorescent bowels of the arena, where a friendly young guy from the front office led me down concrete halls past crates of souvenirs through mists of sausage steam from the kitchens, past a waiting ambulance, to the passageway outside the North Stars’ dressing room that led to the ice, where, at the moment, the Boston Bruins were zooming around and where in a few minutes, said my guide, after the introduction of the players and brief remarks by the team owners, George and Gordon Gund, and prior to the National Anthem, I would proceed to the face-off circle at center ice, where the puck would be dropped. “By the way, there’s a microphone, if you want to say a few words, but-you don’t have to,” he said.

  To the danger of ice now was added the greater danger of speech, a slippery step for a ceremonial person: consider how many men, invited ex officio to snip a ribbon or toss a shovelful of dirt, have stepped to a microphone and given more of themselves than the occasion called for—I remember a Methodist minister who stood to give the invocation at my son’s soccer-awards banquet and couldn’t resist the chance to tell a joke about a man found hiding in the closet when the woman’s husband came home early from work. We laughed (nervously) at the punch line (“Everybody’s got to be somewhere”) and then he tried to top that joke for about ten minutes before he finally turned to God in prayer. I wondered if the microphone would be right in my path across the ice so I’d have to step around it and my silence would look sneaky or arrogant (“Big Shot Snubs Crowd, Has No Comment as Thousands Sit in Stunned Disappointment—‘We drove all day and all night to see him,’ said unemployed father of eleven, comforting his weeping wife, eight months pregnant, ‘and he didn’t say a word, this is the low point of our lives, I don’t see how we can go on’ ”) and I tried to think of ten or fifteen terrific words I could say about Winter Our Favorite Season, or Hockey in a Democratic Society, but that seemed to lead toward a major speech (Crowd Attacks Man Who Delays Hockey Game in Mid-Ice Filibuster—“ Someone lower down in the organization invited him to drop the puck,” said tight-lipped North Stars execs, “and we expect to know their identity within the next thirty-six hours”).

  I asked John Mariucci, a Stars exec and an old friend, why I was chosen, and he thought for a long time. Mr. Mariucci is almost seventy, a former defenseman, a man sometimes called the Father of Minnesota Hockey but more often called John, and he put his hand on the back of my neck and squeezed it. “We’ve had our eye on you,” he said in his sweet high voice. “We’ve seen you drop quite a few things over the years and we like your style. You have a good release.”

  And then suddenly it was my cue. The young guy put a puck in my hand, a muffled voice boomed my name in the darkened arena, there was light applause like water going over a small dam, the spotlight swung toward me, and I smiled affably and stepped down the runway through the door in the boards onto the ice. A tall woman in a brief spangly suit skated over and took my left arm—on skates, she towered over me—“just so you don’t go down,” she said, as I padded out onto the ice, “be careful, it’s slippery”—and she propelled me across the white ice. I looked down. I barely noticed the microphone in passing, or the hockey players standing at attention along the blue lines. Two players waited at center ice. They smiled two big toothless smiles, I shook their hands (both dry) and wished them each a good season, and they then faced each other, bent over, sticks ready, and I bent and then—with what some North Stars officials told me later was a graceful but economical motion—I dropped the black rubber disc on the white ice, the players feinted a swipe at it, one of them picked it up and gave it to me, the spangled lady took my elbow, and I padded back past the microphone to the runway to a second, fainter wave of applause, stood at attention as a tenor sang the Anthem, nailing the high note (“land of the free”) in a thrilling voice, and the moment was over. Nobody that evening confessed to the slightest disappointment that I had not spoken. I sat and watched the game, which the Bruins won, 5—3, and drove home and was in bed before midnight.

  LUTHERAN PIE

  ONE FALL DAY I went to the kitchen and got out a bag of flour and made the first apple pie I made in my life. Made it from scratch, including mixing butter with flour to make a great crust, and loaded it with sour apples and brown sugar and nutmeg, baked it to a T, and of course it was delicious. My guests for dinner were a couple who seemed to be coasting from a bad fight. We ate the pie and sat in a daze of pleasure afterward,
during which the wife said that it reminded her of pies she ate when she was a little Norwegian Lutheran girl in Normania Township on the western Minnesota prairie. “We had love, good health, and faith in God, all things that money can’t buy,” she said, glancing at her husband, apropos of something. “This time of year, we were always broke, but somehow we made it. We’d fix equipment, feed the animals, and sleep. My mother made apple pie. One year she made thirty in one day. My dad was sick and thirty of our neighbors come in with fourteen combines and harvested his three hundred acres of soybeans. It took them half a day to do it, at a time when they were racing to get their own soybeans in, but out there, if your car broke down in the country, the next car by would stop. My mother baked thirty pies and gave one to everybody who helped us.” Naturally I was pleased, until later, when it occurred to me that I would never bake another one as surprisingly good, having hit a home run on my first try. (They are still married, by the way.)

  SEXY

  A MAN WHO IS NAMED one of the ten sexiest men in America by Playgirl magazine has a responsibility to his fellow men to say a few words about it, especially if he is forty-four at the time, a Midwesterner who majored in English at a Big Ten school, and wears glasses and grew up fundamentalist—not to gloat over what is, after all, a God-given asset (how many men does God put in the top ten, anyway?)—but to offer help and counsel. Unfortunately, it’s 10:30 on a Saturday night and I’m about ready to head upstairs, so this will be a shorter lecture than what you hoped to hear, perhaps. (1) If you have a choice between poetry and football, choose poetry. Football wrecks your legs and you can’t use it for anything. Other guys put their arms around you in football. You write a poem for a woman, you give it to her, she is speechless. What can a jock give her, his socks? So I chose to write poems about her delicate body being like a shy deer nibbling the blossoms of an apple tree. It’s not an original image but it was an easy choice. A quarter-century later, my wife remembers it. (2) The human elbow, particularly the tip of the elbow. I don’t want to say more. (3) Foreign women release something in men, and perhaps vice versa, so don’t shy away from your foreign side. I’m Scottish with some Canadian. (4) Fundamentalists have more fun. You can’t enjoy sex to the fullest unless you’ve spent some time in the wilderness, being repressed. (5) Sex is better in marriage than anywhere else you can imagine, like the song says: It’s all right to get your appetite walking round town just as long as you eat supper at home. (6) Eating in bed afterward is perfectly natural. (7) It gets better.