Butch Thompson Trio, Bill Crofut, Garrison Keillor, Larry Larson, Minnesota Scandinavian Ensemble, Peter Ostroushko. Becky Reimer Thompson,
Bill Bailey please come home (Butch Thompson Trio ) Tuneless blues (Butch Thompson Trio ) Clarinet marmalade (Butch Thompson Trio ) Oh how I miss you tonight (Butch Thompson Trio ) Blue skies (Butch Thompson Trio ) In New Orleans (Butch Thompson Trio ) Low expectations ( Garrison Keillor ) That's all ( Becky Reimer Thompson , Peter Ostroushko ) I Can't Help it if I'm Still in Love With You ( Becky Reimer Thompson , Peter Ostroushko ) In The Gloaming ( Becky Reimer Thompson , Peter Ostroushko ) Long long ago ( Becky Reimer Thompson , Peter Ostroushko ) Don't Get Around Much Anymore ( Becky Reimer Thompson , Peter Ostroushko ) Creep mouse ( Bill Crofut ) Grandfather's clock ( Bill Crofut ) My youth is all spent ( Bill Crofut ) Banjo polka (Minnesota Scandinavian Ensemble ) Needelvin (Minnesota Scandinavian Ensemble ) Finnskogen (Minnesota Scandinavian Ensemble )
Bertha's Kitty Boutique Butch Thompson Music Corporation Fearmonger's Shop Lake Wobegon Chamber of Commerce Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility Pastor Ingqvist Powdermilk Biscuits Tolerude, Lyle Whippets
Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. Called up there last night- found out that Lyle Tolerud was run over here on Thursday. Run over by his tractor ran over his foot. I guess he thought he had taken it out of gear when he got off, but he hadn't and it started up and ran over his foot, which didn't really slow it down at all- kept on going- finally crashed into the chicken house. Which was kind of embarrassing for him, but an interesting sight. He said he had always thought the chickens could only fly very short distances, but some of those chickens went up like rockets. Flew so far it took them an hour to walk back. Embarrassing thing to have a tractor run over your foot and I feel for Lyle Tolerude 'cause it's impossible to keep something like that a secret in a town like Lake Wobegon, especially if you have children as he does. And you never live it down either in that town. I'm sure 20 years from now people will still associate him with that one dumb thing he did on Thursday afternoon. Somebody come up to him 20 years from now and say, “hey Lyle, your tractor’s running, better catch it.”
I'm still remembered for one dumb thing I did when I was 18 years old. The day I graduated from high school and I don't even want to get into it now, 'cause I heard enough about it back home. Most of you consider me to be, I think, a mature capable person but back home, especially to Jack down at Jack’s Auto Repair, which explains a lot, I am remembered as the person who drove into the auto repair on the day of graduation with water boiling out of my radiator and no oil at all in the engine. And he asked me if I hadn't realized that my oil gauge showed empty and I said “yes I did. But I thought that if I gunned it and went faster that the wind would cool it off.” He remembers that still to this day. Whenever I try and express an idea or an opinion to him, he'd look at me and listen to me and then he says “better check your oil kid.”
They never forget. It's one reason why the graduates kind of looking forward to leaving Lake Wobegon. They're all getting ready for graduation there tonight. Imagine they're all getting dressed. All those kids, senior class, almost 50 of them, gymnasium all decorated, the stage moved in and big banks of ferns in front of it and baskets of flowers and the bunting hanging from the ceiling. The band has been rehearsing Pomp and Circumstance all week echoing through the halls of Lake Wobegon High.
The hallowed halls, as it says in the school hymn. Though it's hard to think of halls as being holy where you spent three years leaning around and complaining about your parents and trying to get dates from girls. Still, they sing the school hymn
The years shall pass Lake Wobegon, and we shall pass from thee Yet to die walls and hallowed halls we ever true shall be.
I kind of like the thought behind that as I get older. The thought that all of this that seems so common and ordinary to us today we will, sometimes someday, years from now, look back on with great reverence. The school that we went to and family around the supper table and the supper itself in some cases. Kids we went out and did stuff with after supper and the things that we did in the stuff that we said in songs that we sang will someday be very sweet to us. And you can write it off as sentimentality or nostalgia but I feel as I get older that nostalgia for things in the past is simply giving to them the reverence that they deserved at the time. You ever think of that? That nostalgia is a way of looking at things with the reverence that you should have had at the time, for all of these things, that seemed so common and ordinary.
Well, I know the graduates don't feel that way as they get dressed. They're wondering why all this fuss. I'm getting graduated big deal. Why don't they just give me the diploma while all these speeches and the band playing and all these adults standing around with tears in their eyes. Big Deal. And a few years from now when they get married, they may feel the same way. Why all the fuss? Ushers and bridesmaids, costumes and rehearsals and the organist and the little sandwiches with the crusts cut off... Why don't I just go down to judge during your lunch hour and say your I do's and that be it?
Well, It's ceremony, kiddos. And ceremony is for the purpose of sort of bringing nostalgia from the future into the present, you see. Ceremony is for the purpose of taking a common ordinary thing, like graduating from high school or getting married and raising it to the level of something sacred is why we do it. We need a lot more ceremony. We have so few of them and we miss one of the best ceremonies of our lives and that's our funerals, we miss it. All those people saying wonderful things about us and people weeping over us. And the worst part is that we miss it by only a few days. So close we're just almost there then we miss out on.
At Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility, they have more. They have eighth grade graduation at Our Lady School because that's where the school leaves off. They have first communion, of course, the baptism and all the others, but we need more. We need more of them.
I remember my Uncle Jim had a ceremony. Before every meal, and he always said a prayer, he always said grace there in the kitchen on the farm. But it was never an ordinary grace that he said. Grandma’d put the dinner on the table and then Uncle Jim would say sort of a freeform grace, you know, whatever he felt at the time. Sometimes the dinner course she'd put it on hot and as it would cool off Uncle Jim would get warmed up to his prayer. And he'd lay before the Lord everything that had happened that day. And if he had a lot of things to ask the Lord for, then he would try and balance it off by thanking the Lord for a lot of things. And sometimes he would thank God for each of us by name. Which was a thrilling thing to me as a child to sit there with my eyes shut or half shut, and to hear him say my name.
I'd often heard people use God's name to me, but I never heard people use my name to God before. And to say “and God, we thank you for sending this boy,” he'd say. Well, to think that you were sent, you know, I just always felt like I'd been dropped or something like that- like I was sort of an accident that had happened. But the idea that you were sent, that you were consecrated in some way. Lord, he’d pray and pray and pray, and then we'd open our eyes and everything that we looked at- kitchen, the cupboards, the supper, the dishes, each other- everything seemed to have an aura about it and just seemed to shine. He was some pray-er, just a common dirt farmer, but he sure could pray. 'Cause to a farmer, you know even the dirt is sacred, especially the dirt. And then everything from the dirt on up.
So Pastor Ingvist get up there and say the invocation tonight in the high school, and I hope in some place in their hearts these children know that that prayer, whatever he says, is a kind of a vessel. It contains all the love that all of us have for these kids no matter what dumb things they've done in their lives. It's just a vessel for a love that is so great and so all encompassing there are no words to express it anywhere.
And the ceremony will drone on from there and everybody will speak. But the purpose of it, dear children, is to make you shine in our eyes now, as you will shine someday in the future. So stick through it.
That's the news from Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, where all the women are strong and all the men are good looking and all the children, every single one, are above average.
GK comments on reader's letters. The Whippets opener is next Wednesday.
1982.05.22 Berskshire Eagle / This is a Sliker tape from KOAC - Corvallis, OR. Audio - Fair. The introduction is missing. / Audio of the News available on CD.
Archival contributors: Frank Berto, Ken Kuhl