Bill Brown, Greg Brown, Butch Thompson Trio, Hall Brothers New Orleans Jazz Band, Johnson Sisters, Prudence Johnson, Garrison Keillor, Jason Keillor, Mary Kjos, Brian O'Connell. Peter Ostroushko, Tadas Ostroushko,
Too Tight Polka ( Peter Ostroushko , Prudence Johnson , Johnson Sisters ) I Can't Escape From You (Hall Brothers New Orleans Jazz Band ) The Family Radio ( Garrison Keillor , Peter Ostroushko , Butch Thompson Trio ) Mr. Sandman ( Prudence Johnson , Johnson Sisters ) My Tennessee Mountain Home ( Prudence Johnson , Johnson Sisters ) A Porter's Love Song to a Chambermaid (Butch Thompson Trio , Brian O'Connell ) Good morning blues ( Garrison Keillor , Jason Keillor ) The Dance Of The Prairie Home Graveyard ( Peter Ostroushko , Tadas Ostroushko ) You're Driving Me Crazy (Butch Thompson Trio , Brian O'Connell ) One Sweet Letter From You (Hall Brothers New Orleans Jazz Band , Butch Thompson Trio ) How Great Thou Art ( Greg Brown , Bill Brown ) Traditional Ukrainian Polka Medley ( Peter Ostroushko , Tadas Ostroushko ) Two Little Boys ( Greg Brown , Mary Kjos ) Mama Ain't I A Good Boy ( Greg Brown , Mary Kjos ) I Wish You A Happy New Year ( Garrison Keillor , Prudence Johnson , Hall Brothers New Orleans Jazz Band , Butch Thompson Trio , Greg Brown , Peter Ostroushko ) Auld Lang Syne ( Garrison Keillor , Prudence Johnson , Hall Brothers New Orleans Jazz Band , Butch Thompson Trio , Greg Brown , Peter Ostroushko ) Auld Lang Syne (Hall Brothers New Orleans Jazz Band )
Bertha's Kitty Boutique (Thanks for Kitty's presents) Butch Thompson Music Corporation (Fighting a corporate takeover and Bad Dad Guitar Course) Fruit Farm Micro Chips (Fashion Division: If your clothes don't compute, you're not wearing Fruit Farm.) Powdermilk Biscuits ( talks about an ATT operator thanking him for his call)
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It was a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown. I had decided to spend a quiet Christmas, so it was by choice for me. Went up there and spent Christmas among grown-up people. It was something I'd been saying I was going to do for a long time. And it was quiet. You could walk around town during the day or in the evening when I went out for a walk. And thanks to storm windows and pretty solidly built houses, You didn't hear a whole lot. It's like any other winter day on Tuesday. Kind of made you wonder what all those cars were doing parked along the streets and up in the driveways and some of them up into the backyards. Until as you walk along the streets in the dusk, someone opens up the door of a house and then you got an idea what they were trying to escape from. turbulent Christmases up there. Some of the people who were out taking very long walks were from houses that had large delegations of visiting small children who were out in force visiting the grandparents and whom Christmas is supposed to delight and their delight is supposed to delight us on Christmas. But sometimes, you know, when children sit down and there are a lot of new acquisitions and their assets are suddenly increased, there is uneasiness about the possibility of takeovers by other child corporate entities and forced mergers and liquidation of property. You sit down on Christmas morning and open up a package and suddenly your holdings are increased and you are now the owner of a ranch with a beautiful ranch house and barn and stable and about 40 or 50 head and about five little plastic employees. And you set up your ranching business and run your ranch and get it going according to your own methods and of ranching and then all of a sudden somebody who is in the dump truck business has one dump truck and a grader moves in on your territory and butts in and says no this is all freeway here in front of the couch and over under the coffee table and back that way this is all freeway And so your parent corporation comes in and forces a merger with the dump truck guy. And you've got to take him into the business, even though he doesn't know beans about ranching. And then another child comes along whose only assets are books and soft goods, you know, socks, shirt, sweater. and he got to be let in on this and then all of a sudden it goes to pieces and the kid who's got nothing but clothes and books has got four of your cowboys and they are going berserk and they're shooting people on your ranch. And the guy with the dump truck is bringing in heavy artillery and bombs and other people are coming in and you pick up your ranch and you relocate in the next room but this turns out to be railroad right of way. And about then is when a lot of corporations start slapping each other around. And when a lot of adults get up and put on their coats and go for long walks. I did not see any of that because it was a quiet Christmas where I was in the company of grown-up people. And it was extremely quiet. In fact, time passed very quickly. Weeks, I think, on Christmas Day. Though in some place in our hearts each of us is only seven years old and there's sensitivity to the implications of gifts as you sit in the company of other mature grown-up people and open your little packages. I've wondered year after year and wonder again this year why every year I get gifts that have to do with personal odor. Why soap year after year? Why? What are they trying to tell me? Stuff that is going to make you smell floral or coniferous. A little bar of spruce, Norwegian spruce soap. I wonder if you've been smelling deciduous all these years. This is the only way they have to tell you. People sit and watch you open these little gifts and you know they're watching and you prepare as you take the paper and ribbon off a little cry of pleasure when you'll see it and you will say, oh. Or you'll say, mmm. Or you'll say, oh, wow. They're studying you from over across the room as you peel the paper off and here is a keychain holder which is made of black plastic and which has my initials on one side and I turn it over the other side and it says the big enchilada. And somehow that little doesn't quite come out. Try to make it come out. This is the fourth keychain holder that I now have. One for the front door and one for the back door key and one for the car keys and one in reserve. And I sit and study it knowing that someone is watching me very closely. And I admire the wonderful way in which the plastic has been molded and feel it with my fingers, how the initial is laid in there and the big enchilada, it's all spelled right and see how the light strikes it. And then I opened this package and here was my burlap potato sack sport jacket. Potato tweed. What a treat. I got up and went for a walk. It was late afternoon. Time passes swiftly in a quiet place on a quiet Christmas. I, last year, lost my wristwatch. And it was three days before I noticed that it was gone in Lake Wobegon. Thank goodness I was still sitting in the same place where I'd been three days before and it was there on the end table where I had left it. I think it was three days. It might have been a week. I don't know. I didn't have a watch on me. I put on my jacket and I put on my coat and my scarf and I went for a walk. Sun had gone down, it was dark. Walked up past the school, up the hill, up the sliding hill behind the school. The kids had gone home already. Walked all the way up to the top of the hill where We used to play when we were kids. We'd set up logs on other logs and send incendiary bombs down onto the town for a few hours in the morning. And then we would go home and have lunch. Never thought much of it at the time. Other kids do this now, whom I sometimes see up there. And I sometimes forget and walk towards them as if they might ask me to come and be their captain or a lieutenant. And they look up and they say, Hi, Mr. Keeler. And then I realize that I can't do that anymore. There was nobody up there. It was dark. And it's wonderful to stand on Christmas evening and look down on this town and see all the lights, the streetlights, the lights in the dark houses behind shades and curtains, the lights of Christmas trees and the municipal Christmas tree, and the star, the lighted star on top of the tree. It's so peaceful to look at that town, especially at night. And you realize that it's a kind of a natural preserve like Wobegon. It's a kind of a Yosemite of the heart where people have maintained a great calm over the years. And though there is turbulence there, it's the same old turbulence of generations past. the turbulence of love and passion and shame and the ferocity of being a parent and the pride of getting something just as good for half as much, you know, the pride of a good deal. People feel strongly about those things. And yet so much has not changed. I'm always amazed. So much has not changed. The things that you read about in news magazines that the rest of the country is in an uproar about, such as the bonus plans that airlines offer their frequent flyers, has not made much of a dent up there. Lake Wobegon is a town where you can go hang around for a little while and someone will tell you, if you mention having taken a trip on a plane, will still say, you couldn't pay me to get up in one of those. You see, they wouldn't go up if the bonus trip was the first trip. As Al Anderson says, you couldn't pay me enough to go up in an airplane. There are fewer and fewer people like that, you know. each of them to be treasured. You couldn't pay. I don't know if airline representatives would ever send someone up there to negotiate with Ella Anderson trying to pay her enough to go up so that they could be her first carrier. But if an airline did send someone up to talk to her about it, I think they might have to go pretty high. maybe as high as the Cubs went with Rick Sutcliffe, I don't know. She's 76, about to take her ultimate flight, and the fascination of flying in a plane has been diminishing for her for a long time and was never that strong to begin with. You could pay me enough to go up in one of those things, she says. I have a lot of affection for people up there who are so much the same over the years. Old men who still now wear the same clothes that old men wore when I was a little kid and when these old guys were about the age that I am now. Same clothes, same baggy stuff. Guys who don't suck in their stomachs. Let it hang out. Guys who still clear their throats the same way that old guys have always cleared their throats up there, which I'm not going to demonstrate for you now. Old guys who stand around by the pickup trucks leaning against them the way old guys have always leaned, telling the same jokes about Norwegians. I have affection for those people as themselves and also affection because they bring back to me a time when I lived there and was a kid and when I ran a constant low fever and lay in bed at night and looked at the red light on top of the water tower and imagined the day coming soon when I would be able to get ahead, to move ahead, to move out, to get out of town and to become somebody and to see the world. I couldn't wait. When we were kids we looked forward to New Year's Eve in a big way watching that year click over because we kept very close track of years. When you're in the second grade, you've got four years. Then you'll be in the sixth grade. You won't be a little kid anymore. A couple more years, you'll be in the ninth grade. A few more years, then you'll be a senior. And then you'll have one year. One year. And then you'll be able to get out. And then I got out and then I re-enlisted for some reason. I don't remember why. Four more years. Four years of college and you count off those years. One, two, three, and then four. And then you start to lose track of time after that. You get married. How long is that supposed to last? How long does that take? Get a job. How long do you do that Ten years for this. It's only part-time. Ten years. You have a kid. How long does that take? How many years do you spend being a parent? When are you done doing that? You enter into kind of a plain, kind of a prairie of middle age. It's like driving across North Dakota. There aren't a lot of... landmarks. You study the biographies of great men and women, you know, to figure out what were they doing when they were your age, to keep track of where you are in your life and how you're doing, you see? Mozart is always discouraging. You don't want to look at him. But if you're a writer, as I was, and you're in college, you think, well, F. Scott Fitzgerald published his first novel when he was 24. And then you're 24. And then you think Ernest Hemingway published his first big novel when he was 27. You got three more years on that. And then that comes and goes. And then you can think, well, Robert Frost didn't publish a book of poems until he was 39. And then when you pass that landmark, there aren't a lot left. And it doesn't come as great encouragement to know that Grandma Moses didn't start painting till she was in her 70s. It never has been a real inspiration to me. Want to do something long before then. You think about this fever that you have about your own age, and you think back to when you were a kid and how people praised everything you did. And if you wrote stories, as I wrote stories, people loved every single one of them. And they'd pick them up and they'd say, oh, this is wonderful. For a 12-year-old boy, this is really good. Nobody says, this is really good for a 42-year-old person. They say, this is really good for a 42-year-old kid. Look at it. Their penmanship is so nice, and the right margin is straight, and every word is spelled just perfect. That's wonderful. I'm a better speller now than I was when I was 12, but people don't notice it as much and you don't get the credit for it. So it's kind of peaceful to stand up on a hill in Lake Wobegon on Christmas night and look down and think about all these people to whom the passage of time does not mean quite so much, and who are not in a constant fever wondering how they're doing, how they're getting ahead, if they're keeping up with other people. And especially when you wear my old potato sack jacket, Because when I stand up on that hill, all I need to do is just turn to my left and look up to the north. And there's Mr. Peterson's farm where I used to pick potatoes in September. I'd go out. Kids following behind the potato digger, behind the tractor as it went along. You'd haul one of these potato sacks along with you and you'd fill it up. It got heavier and heavier and heavier. It got heavy pretty fast. Earning 25 cents a bushel. Picking potatoes up off the ground, hauling this bag along. It was always a dry, dusty day. The tractor went back and forth, digging potatoes. The dust blew across the field. You breathed in the dust. You had dirt in your mouth. You'd forgotten to bring your lunch. Your lunch was going to be one of these. We're going to eat raw potato for lunch. Looking ahead towards the end of the row wondering when you'd get up to the end of the row and maybe stand up because you've got to walk along this long row hundreds of yards bent over and your body hurts real bad. But you know that if you stood up it would hurt even worse. You go along and you go along and this sport jacket made of burlap brings all of that back to me. All I need to do is just smell the lapel. Smell a burlap and I can almost smell a little potato in it and a little dust in it too. Digging potatoes, it's what we all do for a living, even when we think we're done with it. It's still our living. Even if you work in an office, you got a little gunny sack down there by your feet. Don't ask how you're doing. Just keep going ahead. You're not done yet. Don't stay up too late on New Year's Eve. Get yourself a good night's sleep because the next morning you've got to be back at the row. And when you get done with this row, you move over four rows and you come back this way. And we do it until it's done and it isn't done yet. And if you're wondering how you're doing, look behind you Look at those little dark lumps in the dirt there. Those ain't rocks. Them's potatoes. Do good. That's the news from Lake Wobegon where all the women are strong and all the men are good looking and all the children are above average. Every single one.
GK - Discussion of having various relatives on the show tonight. GK discusses the new Potato Sack jacket he received as a gift and puts it on
"The Relatives Show" - never broadcast?
Archival contributors: Ken Kuhl/ Michael Owen