[undocumented]
It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, though the Mist County Fair has been going on is going on this weekend at the Wally Old Hard Hands Bunsen Memorial Park. It is a quieter fair than most really more of a livestock exhibition. People do more wandering around, looking at the livestock and the food exhibits. There's less of being hurled around by big diesel engines, though they do have the Ferris wheel of course and the merry go round, and they do have the The Leap for Life from the roof of the grandstand into the haystack down below. Which is the big thrill of the fair, I’ll tell you.
A quarter a jump. Worth every penny of it. So when you make the climb up the ladder and stand on the roof and look way down at the haystack below you, you do have doubts. People have tried to do away with it at the fair saying that, it's dangerous and you could kill yourself. And it's true that you could kill yourself, but then that's generally true in life. I think it's a lot less dangerous than those situations in which you think that somebody else is looking after your safety, but they aren't, that's dangerous.
But when you finally, move up to the edge of the roof. After you have said “Oh no, you go ahead, I'll go after you. I just came up for the view.” When you finally stand there, you realize it's not the view you came up for, it's that moment of delicious terror as you stand on the edge and lean forward and a very brief moment of flying. And then that wonderful moment when you pick yourself up out of the hay. And it seems as if your whole life has started again. And everything looks new and wonderful. On account of your having survived it and walked away.
And it's a good thing in a town like Lake Wobegon to have things look new and wonderful. It's a town where it's a lot easier to see things as being all faded and worn out and not wonderful at all. I remember growing up there as a boy. Especially in the month of August. Summer is starting to get a little thin. Young boy oppressed by his family. I was the middle child. So I was picked on by the older ones and I was told on by the younger ones and had no place to go.
Oppressed by hard work, especially in August as the garden was starting to burst at the seams with truckloads of vegetables, most of which I didn't particularly care for anyway, and would have happily given up eating. Pressed by rules like the rule that work comes first and then play. Which means that by the time you get to play, it's the hottest part of the day when you don't feel like it. Not that there's any fun anyway for somebody that age. Too old to make little cities in the sand pile and too young to get into ball games.
I tell you, I spend a lot of time on a front porch reading the National Geographic in those days. What a wonderful magazine. Especially those articles about exotic faraway places like jungles, where they don't have room for large vegetable gardens. And where people sit around without any clothes on and eat food that grows on trees. And you just shake the tree and it just falls right in your lap. You sit there in the shade of the jungle and you eat it. Every place in the National Geographic looked much more scenic than Lake Wobegon. The pictures are all so lush, so green and verdant and kind of moist. In a dewey sort of way. Like it rains during the night and the sun shines all day and I just wished I could live there forever in the National Geographic.
But something happened that kind of frightened me. And it was a casual sort of a thing. My father just mentioned to my mother once- a house that they had been thinking of buying in the city a long time before instead of the house that they did buy the house in which I spent all of my childhood. And it came as a shock to me to realize that I might have lived in a different place. And been a different person -except who? I had no idea.
We were taking up the doctrine of predestination at that time in Sunday school. And I was trying to believe in it at the same time as I was trying to figure it out. And so far as I could see, it meant that God had known everything that was going to happen in all of time before he ever created the world, no matter how insignificant it was, he knew it back when the world was chaos and just mists he knew about you and he knew about me, and he knew that I was going to be 12 years old that year, and I would ride a red Schwinn bicycle. And I would like beet greens and not like zucchini. He knew that. Everything about me and it was all part of his plan.
I mean, either God is God and knows that stuff, or else he's just kind of an old guy like your uncle or your grandpa. And friends of mine didn't believe in predestination. They believed that our souls were like little gumballs in a chute. And that when our parents decided to have us, they put a dime in the gumball machine and whichever soul was next rolled out. And that was who you were. And if your parents had just been about 10 seconds late and some other parents had come in there first and put their dime in the machine first, you could have been somebody else entirely other than who you were.
It’s a terrifying thought at that age. To think that eEverything about me who I was and my friends and my school and my bike and my dog and my room- everything that I knew at one time had been up for grabs. In the case of this decision about buying a house and that my father could easily have made him as terrible mistake. And instead of buying my home in my hometown where I belonged, would have bought this other house in the city where I would have grown up a complete stranger with no friends 'cause all my friends would have been in Lake Wobegon. Nobody would have known me or cared about me down there.
And I felt grateful for that, and I promised I would never complain ever again. I promise that I didn’t keep, but I still felt grateful for my family, including my brothers and sisters, even the older ones. And the house, including the vegetable garden. And just the relief of knowing that through luck or somehow, or the intervention of God himself that I lived in a big White House that was my home. Not some strange house 100 miles away. Big White House with a big garden. Where I sat on the porch on summer afternoons and the hot smell of asphalt on hot afternoons sitting there, drinking chocolate milk and reading the National Geographic with my dog panting in my ear. With the Bunsen's on the one side and the Deeners only other and that every day at exactly 5:00 o'clock and not a minute later Mrs Deener would come out the back door and call her children- James and John and Rebecca and Esther and Sarah and Joseph and Melanie, exactly in that order. And that everything was exactly as it was intended to be.
In Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, where all the women are strong and all the men are good looking and all the children are above average.
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