[undocumented]
It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. It’s been perfect summer weather, bright and warm but not too warm, room temperature, and green, and it’s good to have it because it’s a very big weekend. Memorial Day. A lot of gardens get planted this weekend. Open houses for the graduating seniors. And next Saturday is graduation. Monday is Memorial Day up at the cemetery, in the morning. The old vets will turn out, fewer of them every year, and these are all WW2 guys. When I was a kid there was Albert Woolson from Duluth, the last living Union soldier from the Civil War, a hundred years old, looking like an Egyptian mummy, sitting half-collapsed in the back seat of a convertible, trying to wave with his feeble hand with the papery skin, wearing a blue Union cap that looked silly on him and I’m sure it was someone else’s idea but when you’re a hundred, you can’t reach up and get a hat off your head that someone else put there. We all clapped. The old men march out and the young people march in. The Lake Wobegon Herald Star published the pictures of the honor graduates on the front page, ten of them, one boy and nine girls. Go figure that one out. In Lake Wobegon, we need affirmative action in the other direction. The yearbooks came out and it’s still a shock to see how graduation photography has changed from my day when boys wore suits and ties and not a hair out of place and the aim was to look like assistant office managers, intelligent, uptight, the person who knows what is in last month’s performance report, and now the seniors are photographed leaning against trees, wearing sweatshirts, a baseball cap turned backward, looking cool, self-assured, a person who has no idea what’s in last month’s performance report and is okay about not knowing. Graduation is Saturday and afterward the kids are locked overnight in the school with a couple dance bands and a big buffet and sleeping bags and a lot of chaperones, to keep the Class of 2000 from dying in ditches or making babies in motels. Last weekend and this are the graduation open houses, to which all of the relatives and neighbors and friends and parents of friends are invited for 12–2 or 1–3 or 3–5 or 5–7, a big ham and turkey buffet, potato salad and fruit salad and cole slaw, punch and coffee, and a sheet cake with CONGRATULATIONS JEFF written on it and a plastic mortarboard in the corner. You come in and you slip some money into an envelope in a basket in the living room. Ten bucks seems to be the average. You wish they’d give more because you only get to harvest your relatives now and at your wedding and maybe college graduation, but these folks are tight with money. The cost of a college education has gone through the roof, but to these people ten bucks still seems generous. Everyone loads up on food, getting at least ten dollars’ worth, and they go out and sit on chairs set up on the lawn, and admire the flower beds and how beautiful everything is, knowing the parents have been working like dogs to get it to look good, and Jeff comes through, working the crowd, and you say, “So, what are you going to do next year?” And he says, “Well, I’m going to take a year to sort of think about it, and I’ll stay here and work for my dad at the elevator,” and you think, “Oh dear.” It’s Jeff’s chance to escape, the big iron gate clanks open, and he decides to stay in his cell. You say, “But you haven’t ruled out going to college.” And he says, “Oh no, I might get some, I don’t know. It all depends. I’m going to wait and see. I think college is sort of overestimated anyway. It’s just not that important, the way I see it.” And you have a sudden chill vision of Jeff’s life. He’ll marry in a year or two, a girl who wasn’t an honor student, and they’ll live in a mobile home behind his folks’ house and he’ll gain about fifty pounds from beer and brats, and get two kids, and somewhere around the age of thirty or thirty-two he’ll go through a postponed adolescence, which can be explosive when it comes late.
WHY IS THERE NO LONGER A GRADUATION BANQUET AT THE LAKE WOBEGON LUTHERAN CHURCH?
Every May people under forty ask this question, more now than ever because they now have kids graduating, and people in their forties and fifties often say, “I don’t know,” so it’s up to us older ones to provide an answer. It’s not enough to say, “It’s a long story,” though of course it is. Explanations take longer than excuses.
The last annual banquet was held at the Lutheran Church in May 1980, which happened to be around the time A Prairie Home Companion started to gain an audience in Minneapolis and a good many Minneapolitans, who tend to avoid rural Minnesota except for the Boundary Waters and the North Shore, came through town looking for the Ingqvists and Bunsens and other characters they’d heard about on the radio. (I didn’t think of changing the name of the town because I never expected the show to last this long.) This influx of tourists irritated some people such as Mrs. Val Tollefson, the former Eunice Ingqvist, and she proposed changing the name of the town to Meadowbrook or Maplewood, but the motion failed in the town council, and Val, who was mayor then, said, “The answer is to not give the man material. He gets his stories right out of the Herald Star, so if Harold will simply print the good news and not humiliate us, we’ll be hunky-dory.”
Mrs. Tollefson was the chairwoman of the banquet, which doubles as a Mother’s Day banquet, so men do the cooking and mothers and their graduates are the guests. There were 48 mothers and 49 graduates (Mrs. Krebsbach’s twins, Connie and Ronnie), arranged at tables of eight, and the men brought out an appetizer course of Ritz crackers and Cheez Whiz and V8 juice, while Eunice stood up and gave her welcoming speech.
She is, it must be said, not a pleasant person, not somebody you’d care to go on a long car trip with, and people have wondered why her term as chairwoman never ends, and the answer is that Lutherans are polite and avoid giving offense or the appearance of offense, and this makes it possible for an unpopular person to maintain a leadership role, and there she was, at the podium, with a corsage the size of a toaster, in her green pantsuit and giant glasses that made her look like an angry grasshopper, reciting in detail each graduate’s accomplishments, except for the unaccomplished about whom she said they are helpful and loyal and well-liked by all who know them” or words to that effect. In a town of fairly humorless Scandinavians, Eunice would win the prize. She read her speech off 49 large index cards, reading carefully, word by word, and it felt endless, and after graduate No. 10, she said, “To save time, let’s hold our applause for the end,” but then they clapped for No. 11 anyway, so then they had to clap for all of them, because Lutherans are nothing if not evenhanded. The appetizer course was long gone, and around No. 18, there was a tremendous crash from the kitchen, as if maybe the refrigerator had fallen over. Eunice paused and looked up but didn’t comment. The crash was not on the program and she believes that once you get off the program, you may never make it back. So she plunged ahead, talking about No. 18 and meanwhile back in the kitchen, the men stood aghast looking at the hundreds of baked chicken breasts strewn on the floor.
Clint Bunsen was the head chef, and he’d just set a tray of chicken breasts down on the table with all the other chicken breasts on it, and he asked Daryl Tollerud, “When in God’s name is the old biddy going to wind it up?” and Daryl thought she was just getting warmed up, so the men discussed whether to put all the chicken breasts back in the warming oven, or just cover them with tinfoil, and maybe they should skip the salad course, which was orange Jell-O with grated carrot, and serve it after the main course, and in the midst of this intense discussion, Clint said, “To hell with it, I say let’s take the main course out right now and let Eunice deal with it,” and he swung a fist to emphasize the point and slipped on a grease spill, and he kicked the leg of the table, hard, and it came off, the entire table capsized, and an avalanche of chicken breasts landed at his feet and also the bowl of cranberry sauce that was supposed to go with them.
The women at the banquet had a good idea of what happened. They’ve experience major food spillages in the past and they had been leery of that table leg, so much so that they got the custodian, Mr. Hoglund, to fix it but he was in one of his royal bad moods and he simply screwed the old screws into the old holes, which were too big to start with, and they said, “Don’t you think you should fill those holes with wood plaster?” And he held out the screwdriver and said, “You know a better way, be my guest,” and being Lutherans they didn’t say, “Thank you, we will,” they said, “No, no, we didn’t mean to criticize, probably this is fine, just fine.” Two women started to stand up to go to the kitchen to help and then they decided not to get involved. You go in there now, you humiliate the men, you’ll never get them to volunteer again.
In the kitchen, the men looked at the carcasses all around. A Gettysburg of fallen chickens. And Clint said, “Hurry before someone comes. Wash ’em off, wipe ’em off, and put ’em on plates, and somebody help me with this stupid table.” He could hear Eunice plowing ahead on the program and meanwhile someone found some chips of glass in the mashed potatoes, so the spuds had to be dumped, and they cooked up a big pot of instant rice, and put the chicken breasts back in the oven to stay warm but it was too hot and the breasts turned into bricks, and the rice was mush, and they put the entrées down before the graduates and their mothers and in the bright light of the dining room, it was clear (as it had not been in the dim kitchen) that some bits of crud were stuck on the chicken, some hair and dust balls, which the Lutheran ladies said nothing about, but cut their chicken into pieces and pushed the pieces around on the plate and ate little slivers of it.
Eunice was done with the 49 graduates but still had to award the door prizes, which were fifteen red geranium plants. And the first plant would go to the person who had come the farthest? And someone’s grandma had come from Florida, and Eunice said, “Why don’t you stand up and tell us a little about yourself?” And she did. People were dying. People were looking for a route of escape. Marilyn Tollerud stood up, took her purse, and pretended to go to the ladies’ room, and a moment later they heard her car start up.
The next red geraniums would go to whoever could recite the longest poem, so Myrtle Swenson did “The Raven” and the long string of “Nevermores” and three hours had passed and there was despair in the air and it was a godsend five minutes later when the table leg gave way again and a hundred plates of Jell-O hit the deck. The banquet was over. The woman jumped up en masse and went to work cleaning up the kitchen and the men slunk away one by one and that was the end of it.
The women created an emeritus chair for Eunice and she accepted it and so Marjie Krebsbach became the chair — there being no reason everyone should march to the drum of the slowest and dullest and most humorless person. Eunice became an inspiration to all the graduates at the banquet who went away determined to not be like her. They left, in rebellion against this little paradise of backyards, with the lawn chairs, the birdbath, the sprinkler, the marigolds and irises and asters and petunias, the bird feeders, the old clothespoles where the wrens and finches perch, the old neighbors on their porch clinking the iced tea, talking, concerned about money, never redecorating on account of the expense, hanging onto the big clunky antiques, the flowery sofa, the Oriental rug, the gewgaws and bric-a-brac. The new generation chose modern monochromatic furniture and gray rugs and halogen lamps on pencil-thin arms and Abstract Expressionist posters on the walls instead of the Praying Hands in the dining room and the Harvesters by Jean Millet, and the picture of a maiden on the ocean shore under a weeping willow looking off toward the horizon.
And the awards banquet died. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been another one. The idea of recognizing accomplishment and setting some people above the others goes against our Lutheran sense of equality, so it’s never been a problem. I myself have never attended an awards banquet nor have I stood up to accept an award, not even a door prize, and I don’t intend to break my record. People have threatened to give me one prize or another, but I have said no. The only prize that matters is to have a reader, and for that, I thank you very much.
Archival contributors: Official website