[undocumented]
Tallerud, Daryl
Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown. It's been a quiet week. We've got a lot of rain up there and gardens are coming in. School begins on Tuesday, right after the Labor Day weekend. The Tallerud family, Daryl and Marilyn, we haven't talked about them recently and a lot of people have written in to ask what happened to them after they adopted that family. Korean baby, Corinne, back in February this last year. I'll tell you, things have just gone wonderfully for them. It's been a wonderful year for them all the way since then.
Somehow doing that romantic, impractical thing of adopting a seventh child just turned things around for that family. They don't have any more money than they had before. In fact, maybe even a little less. But they feel wealthy and feel prosperous. They're in that little green house under the spruce trees out on the county road west of town up on the hill, the Talleruds. It's something living in a big family like that. And people do feel prosperous. Parents do, who have a lot of children. Sometimes they do. Especially after you get a whole troop of them under one roof. After you get over the hysteria of the first child and the nervousness about the second and the skittishness with the third. The ones after that are just pure entertainment. I know because I was a third child in a large family and I know that my parents liked the younger ones a lot more than they like those of us who are older. But it's always interesting, whatever else you may say about large families, they are dynamic and there's always a lot of stuff going on. They always keep the interest of other members of the family. They include, families always do, big families, include a number of oddballs. See, when you get up into the higher numbers of children, there's a higher likelihood of odd and unusual children. Say, in a family like the Talaruds of seven children, maybe six of them would be odd, which would mean that the seventh child, the normal child, would be sort of strange. They sit down to a meal, for example, the Tala roots, and the baby in the high chair, and the other six children around the big table in the kitchen. And each child has a different powerful dislike in food. So that if pizza, for example, is served, each child will pick out of the pizza different food that it cannot tolerate. And little Eric will be there and he'll be picking out all of the mushrooms very carefully and somebody else will be picking out all of the onions and somebody else taking out all of the little pieces of green pepper, which if she ate them she would die at the table. It's how children express their individuality within a family is by having their own personal powerful dislike in food.
Mine was cantaloupe or any kind of melon, water, musk, any kind of melon there was. I would not eat as a child because my father loved melons so much. Therefore, I could not eat them as a child. I despised them and had to keep on despising them until I was old enough to leave home.
And ever since then, I've been eating melons as much as I could get, of all kinds, every kind. They are my favorite fruit, if that's what melons are, fruit. Otherwise, they're my favorite vegetable, with the exception of sweet corn, of course. But there was a morning this last week when Daryl felt so happy sitting at the table, felt so wealthy and prosperous looking at these little children that he just could not stand it. He had to get up and walk outside and go out and stand in the rain out by the barn and be by himself. A moment when all of them were quiet for just a moment, a split second, when all of the seven little heads were bowed over the table and seven hands were putting food into seven mouths at the same time. He felt so lucky and so prosperous to have so much life under one roof that he went out so that they would not see him as tears ran down his cheeks.
He was so happy. An unusual thing for a man to feel so happy in Lake Wobegon, perhaps, where people are taciturn and reserved by nature. Where even if people experienced utter ecstasy, they'd probably say, well, that wasn't too bad. where people believe it's unlucky to express feelings of great pleasure.
When they get to heaven, they'll probably look around and say, I didn't realize it would be this big. Something like that. He felt so happy he had to walk away so that they couldn't see it. That was on Thursday of this week. And they all went off to the state fair on that day. All of them, including the oldest girl, Glenys, who just got back this week from Bible camp, Lutheran Bible camp. Being the oldest, she has to be the normal one of the children. There's a great weight on Glenys' shoulders. She has to be an example. And so she cannot pick little foreign material out of her food the way other children do.
And her big treat for the year at the age of 16 was getting to go off to Lutheran Bible camp at Spirit Lake where they spent a good deal of time in the Old Testament and where she came back rather subdued from it all.
She got back on Monday and she had no sooner gotten back but on Tuesday there were three love letters for her in the mailbox. all written by one boy. And on Wednesday there were five. Thursday, as it turned out, there were two. He slacked off a little bit. But on Friday there were six.
One boy sent her all these love letters which she read sitting out in the woods in a little place she keeps for herself out there. A boy named Earl, whom she could barely remember at Bible camp, writing her letters that said that his love for her was the high point of his life, that she had changed his life. She tried to remember him and could only remember A skinny boy with glasses who sat at her table at the refectory for meals and whom she could remember having passed a lot of mashed potatoes down in his direction.
And he had helped her on with her jacket one night after campfire, after vespers. She found his letters thrilling. He said that meeting her had opened up his heart to the beauty of the universe in a way that had changed his life. That he would never be the same.
That the love that he felt for her was something that could happen to a person only once in this life. And so he had gone through, since saying goodbye, had gone through the greatest joy and the most terrible suffering that it is possible for a human being to stand and still live.
Glenys has always thought of herself as being a little ordinary. She's always thought that her legs were a little bit too thick, that maybe she should take off some weight. But she did take off some weight about a year ago, and her legs were still thick. And with the weight off from the rest of her, it made her look even funnier. She'd like to be able to get contacts, but she can't until she's 18 years old, in two more years. She read these letters and they made her feel excited to think that someone felt this way about her.
But it also terrified her that he might find out who she really is. As if she had gotten a prize for something she had not really done. She sat in the woods and read his letters and every day at 12.30 watched for Mel in the postal service truck to come down the road so that she could go out and get more of them. The first love letters she'd ever gotten. She thought about him all the time down at the state fair, walking around. She had to take a couple of the little children with her where she went because she's the oldest.
She noticed all of the fine, handsome couples walking around the state fair, going on rides together. Boys throwing softballs at targets to win large stuffed animals for their girlfriends. Nobody was winning one for her. She walked around the state fair and thought about him. And when she got home to Lake Wobegon, she sat down to write him a letter. She went out to the woods in a little place that only she knows about. A magical place that she has known about since she was a little girl. And she sat there on a large rock under four box elder trees.
Four box elder trees where once, years ago, she saw early one morning what looked like diamonds in the air. They were webs that had been woven by spiders from one tree to the other. But as the light hit them, they looked like diamonds. Glenys always has thought of that spot as the place where she is not ordinary, where she is not the oldest daughter, but where all things are possible. Having received 15 letters from him, she thought perhaps she should write one back and took some of her best stationery out to the rock and sat and tried to think of what to write.
The state fair, her family, all the stuff that had happened to her since Bible camp. She thought about writing him about her family, all those little kids, but it seemed so ordinary. The state fair, he'd probably been there dozens of times. School, she couldn't think of what to write. The cows getting out?
Not really, though that had been exciting. When Darrell had stood out by the barn in the mist on Thursday morning before going down to the State Fair with the kids, when he stood out there with the tears running down his cheeks in gratitude for all these wonderful children, he had not noticed that one of the fence poles the cows had been leaning against had rotted and snapped off at the base. And so a few hours after all the Tallerudes were in the car and on their way to the state fair, 42 Holsteins had trooped over the fence and down the ditch and had marched single file through the Gustafsons' field corn, about three rows abreast from the looks of it. had knocked over a mailbox and at last had been seen by Delmer over in Mrs. Christensen's garden where they had pretty well started out at the asparagus and gone through the green tomatoes and were winding up with zucchini for dessert. It was an event. It was an event, especially when the men who rounded them up that evening, the Tala Roods still away at the State Fair, had rounded up 42 cows, thinking that was all there were. But there were 44, and the other two had not been found until late that night. when Leroy, who was on duty, had gotten calls from people who heard footsteps out in the yard. He went over in the cruiser. Gary was having a night off, and it was over at the Tollefson's, and then it was up at the Inkvist's house. People heard men moving around in the bushes, probably with shotguns, they thought.
Leroy had just gotten a plaster of Paris footprint identification kit from law enforcement products in Painesville. But there were about 12 people up there watching, and so he didn't want to try it out and have to stand there in front of them and read directions. He said, it looks like cows to me.
And as it turned out, he was right. But he still had to patrol every half hour all night. They insisted on it. The two cows were returned then on Friday morning. She thought about writing about the cows to Earl, but she decided it was just too ordinary and that he wouldn't be interested.
And so she sat down and started to write about the trip to St. Paul. He lived in Duluth, Earl did, so she thought he might be impressed that she'd been to the city. She said, I attended the Minnesota State Fair in St. Paul yesterday and wished I might see you there.
But of course there were so many people that even had you been there, I probably would have missed you My favorite part was looking at the art exhibit at the Fine Arts building. And among my favorites, and then she thought, she couldn't remember. what she had seen in the fine arts building.
There had been paintings and prints, photographs and sculpture, but she couldn't remember anything. She'd had the little kids with her and somehow she remembered the little kids very vividly, but the art on the wall she had missed. She wanted to write to him about art so that He would think that she was somebody and would keep on writing her letters. She thought she would make up a painting. Among my favorites was an oil painting of a rock in a field. under four box elder trees with diamonds in the air over the head of a beautiful girl with long slender legs who sits on the rock and looks into the distance There was such sensitivity and feeling in her face that I could not take my eyes away from it. And just then, she heard a stick crack behind her, Glenys did, and turned, and there was a cow about ten feet away, tiptoeing towards her. as if it wanted to read the letter over her shoulder. She thought about putting the cow in the painting, but then thought, no. There was a horse in the painting behind the girl, a beautiful Arabian horse. She thought about putting a man on the horse, a beautiful man on the Arabian horse, possibly a beautiful Arabian man on the horse. But then she thought, nah, the girl in the painting will get on the horse and will ride away by herself. That's the news from Lake Wobegon. where all the women are strong and all the men are good looking and all the children are above average.