Butch Thompson Trio, Garrison Keillor, Kate MacKenzie, Charlie Maguire, Claudia Schmidt. Stoney Lonesome,
Good chicken soup ( Garrison Keillor , Claudia Schmidt ) Sense God gave geese ( Garrison Keillor , Claudia Schmidt ) When you're smiling (Butch Thompson Trio ) I'm Coming Virginia (Butch Thompson Trio ) I'll never shed another tear (Stoney Lonesome ) Whose shoulder will you cry on (Stoney Lonesome ) Single gal ( Kate MacKenzie ) River of tears ( Claudia Schmidt ) Rock that sucker ( Claudia Schmidt ) Better get down home ( Claudia Schmidt ) All gone ( Charlie Maguire ) Home improvement ( Charlie Maguire )
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Well, let's come out and talk a little bit about my hometown of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota here. It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. It was kind of a crazy week where I was, but it was quiet up there. I assume that it was. It was a week when all of the Christmas decorations came down in town, including some of them of their own volition. They just got tired of holding on and fell off. Including the big municipal Christmas tree that the Sons of Knut put up every year. They're on the triangle where the statue of the unknown Norwegian is. Put it up right in front of him. All year round, an unknown stands up there on his pedestal in his pioneer farmer dress and his arms just slightly extended. He seems to be looking down Main Street and saying, "This way to the frontier, folks. This way to the rich virgin prairies and to the great wealth and to the rich black loam and to the fabulous new life of the new world." and then they put that tree up in front of him and he stands there with his arms outstretched and he seems to be saying it's a little crooked tina let me lean it a little bit to the left here well it came down on tuesday night ernie was over at the sidetrack tap spending a couple hours with george jones and lefty frizell and having himself about four or five beers until he lost count crossed the street over to the triangle, looked around and nobody was looking. So he stood there for a couple minutes and he must have reached up and grabbed onto the tree to steady him because that 15 foot spruce made a lunge at him. And he said, "Hey," he said, "get back there." But you know, a man in that situation that he was in at that moment is in no shape to run. And that tree got him down on the ground and he had to crawl out from under. And he went back to the sidetrack. And he said, Wally said, you know, a man can't walk in the streets here without taking his life in his hands. Give me another one. So now the tree is down and now the tree is restored. The statue is restored, I should say, to its nobility and its grandeur. Except when children come and stand in front of it. And the unknown stands up there with his arms outstretched and seems to be saying, I told you kids a hundred times. Now go do it before I snatch your balls. Go do it. Poor children. This was a week when they all went back to school. I know that the homes were empty and lonely without them. And we parents missed them. Something terrible. But it's good to go while you still can be missed, you know. Not to wait until people ask you for the opportunity. And the children wanted to go back because they're all smart children, not just the ones in Lake Wobegon, but yours and mine too. They're all above average. They're all smart kids. And smart kids can only spend just so much time lying around on their backs. They want to get down there to school. Because when you're smart, you want to have problems to solve and tests to take. Things that'll challenge you. Interesting problems. And we parents want that for them too. Want them to get back into the sort of atmosphere of pure logic and calm consideration that teachers can create. That we parents cannot. Not so well as Sister Arvon, for example, at Our Lady School walks up and down the aisles, twitching the ruler against her hand, inspiring all these children to sit up straight, to pay attention to that verb on the blackboard. Think about that verb and conjugate it. Oh, it's inspiring to watch them sit there under her direction. They're so alert and they're so bright. See, we parents can't do that. At least I can't. I'd like to. I'd like to be able to give some order and direction to my child's life, but I'm so confused myself sometimes. I wouldn't know how to do it. I think back when my boy was a little boy, And it was late afternoon. He'd been playing with his friends and then they had to go get their suppers. I was in the kitchen and he said, where's Nate? Where's Anna? I said, they went home. He said, I want to go home. I said, this is your home. He said, then where's Nate and Anna? I said, they went home. Well, I want to go home, he said. And I was going to try to explain to him, see, and educate him on this basic concept of home. But the washer was in the spin cycle. And there have always been a couple of short legs on that one, so it'll tend to walk on you when it's in the regular spin cycle, not in the permanent press. So you have to get up on it and you have to sit on it. So I had to sit on it. And then I had to jump down and turn the heat off under the soup. And in the meantime, there was a phone call from a friend who wanted to come over and tell me something that he couldn't tell me on the phone. And the cat came in and coughed up the remains of a bird. And I had to go back, sit on the washer, and then there was soup coming over the edge of the pot, and there was smoke coming up from where it hit the burner. And in the meantime, the kid was going out the door, and he seemed to have found a stick, and he was whacking rose bushes with it. And it was 6.30, and in the washer was a white shirt that I had to be wearing an hour later. At a speech to a Lutheran men's club on a topic that I don't remember now and couldn't think of then. And there was no time, see, to sit this boy down in a sort of a calm, rational way and explain what home is. 'Cause home is just chaotic sometimes. I tell you that sometimes if you're a parent, there are some times when you just feel you're not cut out for it. You're trying to be something that you aren't. It's like, having a child is like having a live radio show. You know, your mind, when you start it, when you start into it, you're not really thinking about everything it's going to involve you in. You just do it sort of in a spirit of hope, you know, in a sort of a moment of carefree abandon. Sort of ecstasy. And then later on you realize this is not a natural talent. There's nothing that anybody would be good at. Nobody's born able to do this. We're not born being parents. It's something more or less forced on us. That can drive you crazy. Trying to be something that you're not. Like Wobbegon Whippets would be a good case in point. It's not the season now, but they're out there trying every summer, Sunday after Sunday, trying to be a winning ball club, which they're not. And on the one hand, you've got your coaches trying saying, "You gotta get in there and try harder. You gotta work harder. It's not the size of the dog in the fight and when the going gets tough and you can't quit. You gotta do harder, do more." And on the other hand, your loved ones are saying, "It's only a game. If it's not fun, don't do it." Well, who do you believe? On the one hand, it's no fun to lose. But on the other hand, into each life a little rain must fall, you know? In the case of the Whippets, there have been many games they wished a lot of rain would fall. Hopefully before the fifth inning. I think of people who spent their lives being exactly what they were. I think about Mr. Winkler. Old Mr. Winkler is long gone these many years. Leon Winkler. Who lived with his brother Roman up at the old Winkler Place, down at the old Winkler Place, south of town. Two old bachelor brothers, different as day and night, lived under that same roof all those years. And Roman was the big one. He wasn't fat exactly, but he was a very substantial man. And he was always in motion. And he was the worker of the two. He was a hard worker. He worked day and night. Always had back problems from bending over and working at things. And Leon was his younger brother, and he was of a slight build, kind of reedy. And he always had kind of a far away look in his eyes so that if he were standing talking to you, eventually you'd look back over your shoulder, see what he's looking at back there. Usually just the horizon. He was a man who had a great ability to be able to look at work for a long period of time. And to watch other people work and not to feel that he necessarily ought to go pitch in. He, well, there was many a day when he never got out of bed. He didn't see any reason to. Bed was where he was when he woke up and it was fine there and his bookshelf was right by the bed and He loved to read. He'd pull a book off the shelf and sort of dive into it, pull the cover over him. And when it got too dark to read, he'd go back to sleep. So there they were out there all those years. The one brother who believed that man was meant to work. And the other brother who believed that maybe so, but not necessarily everybody. And not necessarily him. And I imagine they had a lot of arguments when they were younger. But by the time I knew them when they were old men, they had sort of condensed their differences into just a few words. And Roman would say, oh, Leon. And Leon would say, ah, Roman. And that's all they said. Well, now, in fairness to Leon, I'd have to say that Roman was trying to make more out of that farm than God had intended. Because when their grandfather came over from the old country, he passed up a lot of good land in the bottom lands. To find this piece of land which was kind of hilly and sandy and had a lot of scrub oak trees and gave up a good crop of rocks every spring, you know, because it reminded him more of the old country, don't you see? So we picked that, not remembering the poverty that led him to leave the old country and... Come to the New World. Whatever God intended that land to be, He certainly never intended it to be a show place for raising hybrid seed corn, which is what Roman tried to do, working day after day after day, as if just by sheer effort, he could pull corn up out of the ground and make it grow tall. And Leon lay up in bed and read books. Well, Leon moved out. When he was 68 years old, he said he was going to move out because he couldn't sleep nights because Roman made so much noise in his sleep. Roman had dreams almost every night in which he was plowing with a team of horses. And he'd thrash in bed and he'd yell at the horses and they'd be yelling at him all night long until he woke up in the morning and poor Leon had to lie there and listen to it and couldn't sleep until it was day and that was the time when he wanted to read. So he went over the hill, Leon did, off towards the back woodlot, and he dug himself a sod house there, back by the trees. He dug down about six feet, and he used that sod to build up the walls and the roof of this house, and he moved his bed and his books in and his wood stove, and he lived in there. Which Roman thought was crazy. My brother in the dirt, he'd say. My brother in the dirt. Living in the dirt. But he missed him. Roman did. And he'd go out there every night and bring him his hot supper. On an aluminum pie plate. And Leon would eat it and they'd sit there and smoke. And they'd talk a little bit. Oh, Leon. Ah, Roman. Leon had a lot of visitors out in this little sod house there because, you see, he'd planted flowers on the roof and they grew so beautifully. And they flowered, they bloomed beautifully in the summer and also in the winter because, of course, the heat from the wood stove kept that dirt up there warm. People would drive out to County Road just to look up there and see it. Bright swash of color of orange and yellow and blues and greens up there in the middle of all that snow. And they'd go up, climb up the hill and visit this old man there. And he'd reach up and he'd snip off some of the roots that grew down through the ceiling. And he'd put them in a pot of boiling water and make tea. Laughter and sit there and visit with him. He'd tell him about the books that he was reading. And he lived there until he died. And when he died, Roman buried him in it, just as Leon wished. Laid him right in his bed, just pulled the covers up over him. And then he pulled out the timbers so the thing would just come down. And there he was buried. In his little prairie home there. He was buried. And after a few years, you know, the rains and all, he was just as flat as everything around it. You'd never tell to look at it that anybody had ever lived in this spot in the field. And one spring, Roman forgot, and he plowed it along with everything else. And you know, don't you know, that in that one spot, Roman finally got the seed corn he'd been looking for all these years. All around it, the corn was kind of stunted a little bit. But here in this one square, the corn grew six, seven, eight feet tall, stood out there like soldiers. Roman was so proud of it, he'd have people come out and look at it. He'd say, oh, that's the best corn I ever had. He said, yeah, he says, I just wish my brother Leon were here to see it. The Winklers. 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 are above average.
Failure is endemic in writing. Lady's Home Journal: Carol starts a private journal until Don starts his journal. Last of the lutefisk is on sale. CS poem about Christmas presents. HM talks about the blizzard.
1988-01-09 1989-01-07
1983.01.08 Berkshire Eagle
Archival contributors: Frank Berto