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It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. No airplanes flying overhead. Tomato harvest has been picking up even over the week before. Seems to be a bumper crop according to all reports. Father Emil put a notice in the bulletin this week saying the parishioners who bring tomatoes to mass hoping to give them away to other people are responsible for disposing of them properly. There was about a half bushel left in the vestibule on Sunday with a note saying “free take as many as you want” and they were still there on Thursday. Don't need to bring him by the rectory or the convent either- Father and the sisters have all the tomatoes that they can handle for the time being.
Sister Christine left Lake Wobegon on Monday- come down to attend a course at the University of Minnesota- the first sister from Lake Wobegon to attend the non-Catholic School- which caused a lot of grave doubts about letting her go. The Catholic schools don't offer courses in Rose Growing so down she came on Monday to attend the Ag campus of the University of Minnesota- trying to figure out why they lost half the roses from the Convent Garden over the winter. Sister Mary Joseph gave her a talk about staying close to her room and avoiding temptation and then realized Sister Mary Joseph said that she didn't know much about what sort of temptations were available down here in St Paul. So sent a question to the reference room of the Saint Paul Public Library which sent back a map of the city with parts of a shaded in, representing where temptations were to be found. Nobody knew exactly what they were because Sister Mary Joseph confiscated the list that came along with it. She figured it was enough to know where they were without going into a whole lot of detail about them. So Sister Christine is down here this week.
That garden behind the convent is about the most gorgeous place in Lake Wobegon least it used to be. Life can be kind of thin- kind of hard I think for a nun in a town like Lake Wobegon- with a priest like Father Emil. Life can get kind of cramped sometimes. But for three four months of the year that garden out behind the convent is just a riot of colors- big fat flowers, gorgeous smells, lush green foliage. Now Sister Christine is down here on a mission to gather information. I think any temptation she's apt to find in Saint Paul are likely to seem pretty bleak compared to that Garden out back of that convent.
Her departure wasn't reported in the Lake Wobegon Herald-Star because the paper was three days late coming out this week. Lotta people assumed that the editor Harold Star fell off the wagon again. The truth was that his antique linotype for which he's been offered a couple thousand dollars by museums out east went on the fritz here on Monday, the hottest day of the summer, and Harold spent Monday Tuesday and Wednesday sitting back there in the back room with that one window that's been jammed shut since about VE Day fooling around with the thing which has thousands of moving parts and which deals in molten lead so it puts out some heat itself. And when it came down to Friday I'll tell you he didn't fall off the wagon he jumped. He's down to the Sidetrack Tap going at it with both feet talking about how he's going to go on strike if conditions didn't improve down to the paper until somebody reminded him that he was the owner. It’s easy to forget you know for some people. They associate ownership with profit, you know, so when you endure a lot of misery for not much money it's easy to forget that you're the proprietor. Sit down and negotiate with yourself until you're blue in the face never get anywhere.
Problem is that the X and the Z went out on the linotype. He did the best he could but wouldn't you know it was the week when The Wizard of Oz was showing at the theater. It was the week before Crazy Days- that had to be postponed. It was the week when the Zimmerman girl got married- daughter of Earl and Maxine- to the Erickson boy, now at home in Austin Texas or they will be soon as he gets it in the paper.
The extension agent’s column was all about box elders and azaleas, which Harold changed to peonies and maples figuring it be about the same one way or the other. Had to leave out the vanilla extract and pecan zebra cookies. Had to drop the story from the post office about the importance of using ZIP codes in box numbers and that was his page one story. I was supposed to go up there in the upper right-hand corner.
So the town council meeting that was scheduled for this next Tuesday has been postponed because there was no proper public notice of it which the Town Council was going to discuss taxes and expenditures. School board’s already raised taxes in Lake Wobegon they they got their first. Now the council's kind of out on the limb. They can't cut the budget or if they don't find buried treasure up in a cemetery they're going to have to raise taxes which isn’t the easiest thing to do in a town where the tax collector, you know, hangs around with the taxpayer pretty much on a daily basis. Has to face them in church and down at the Chatterbox Café.
They asked Bud, the village maintenance man if he wanted to take a one quarter cut in salary but said “sure,” but if he did then he’d decide which three months of the year he'd take off and they’d be January February and March. No more snow plowing. So the Town Council is looking at the fire and safety departments. I don't want to say anything against the volunteer fire department of Lake Wobegon other than what people already know, that they used to do the fireworks at 4th of July in till two years ago- they set a bunch of swamp grass on fire with some Roman candles and it took them 45 minutes to respond to the call because the fire chief had parked his pickup and locked it right in front of the fire barn and was sitting out in the middle of the lake in a boat where he could enjoy the fireworks.
Gary and Leroy the town constables- not much better. On the one hand there's not much crime and Lake Wobegon so Gary and Leroy say they must be doing something right. But on the other hand that leaves them with a lot of time on their hands and they tend to get into trouble because when some little thing does happen the go all out on it you know. No burglaries this last year but when the one burglar alarm went off at the Inkqvest State Bank they had the street blocked off and half a block evacuated and had set up a control center before they finally figured out it was a short in the wiring caused by the rain that day. Went around trying to make work for themselves examining smoke detectors here a few weeks ago- both of them pretty good smokers you know- Gary and Leroy- just have to go into a kitchen and breathe pretty much sets the thing off. Went to the Krebsbach house how they set it off they couldn't get it to stop. Volunteer fire department showed up, had their hoses unrolled, disappointed it was a false alarm. Couple of them decided they'd put some water on the Krebsbach’s garden- it looked dry. They did that, Leroy heard it, to him it sounded like suspicious movements of a person out in the sweet corn. He came out the back, shot a warning shot into the porch ceiling. That brought Gary out with a shotgun. It was close there for a moment. If it hadn't been for the fact that Leroy has an unmistakable outline… constabulary might have been wiped out right there and then.
So the council will have to decide on it as soon as Harold gets the X and the Z's fixed on the linotype which he'll do soon. He ordered the parts from Boston and Gary and Leroy came down to pick them up at the airport today. Not at the main terminal- the passenger terminal- but at the freight terminal out there at the airport which is a little bit to the West and the north- I guess you’d take the Post Road exit off of 494 there. The road takes a little jog to the left then to the right- you follow it up their past some, I think it’s some charter outfits there and then you come to a stop sign. I think it’s a stop… well it may not be a stop sign there actually but it's the main road that goes right by the North End of the cemetery there you take a right and you got to make a real quick left in there behind a chain-link fence and it's right there. Or if it's not there it's close to there. If you ask somebody why you can't miss it.
That’s the news from Lake Wobegon- all I can think of- where the women are strong and where all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average. Good luck to them.
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