Garrison Keillor,
Rocking alone in an old rocking chair ( Garrison Keillor )
[undocumented]
Well, it's been a quiet week in my hometown, Lake Wobegon. Listening to that song, I was thinking about my dad, how much he loved to get in a car and drive and still does. He should have been a musician and gone on tour just so he could have done it a few months out of the year.
He was always in the mood for that and still is. Get in the car and go for a ride. And you say, where are we going? And he says, I don't know. We'll find out when we get there. and take off with the windows down in the spring.
The romance of getting in the car and going for a spin has kind of worn off for me, but it never did, never has for him because he came along in the age of horses and carriages, barely. And so the automobile was a big deal.
I remember sitting in the seat next to him and driving out towards the country out to Uncle Jim's farm. And as kids always do, you put your right hand out the window to test the principles of aerodynamics. And you put your flaps up, and your hand goes up, and your flaps down, and your hand goes down.
And then you're out at Uncle Jim's, and then you find out you shouldn't have gone on the car trip with Dad, because there's a lot of work to do out there on the farm. And when your dad says, you need some help, yeah, we'll help, Uncle Jim doesn't turn down an offer. vIt can work you real hard out there on the farm, especially in the spring and in the fall. The weather has been so great this last week that they're planting, some of them almost done. Got small grains in and the corn in first because those withstand a late frost and some of them even putting in soybeans now, which are a little bit more sensitive to frost. And we do sometimes get a late frost in middle of May, late May, even in June. Not very often at all, but the very few times that it ever has happened, people certainly did remember it for a while afterward.
People who had put in their beans and who had put in their tomatoes, which are also very sensitive to any cold weather, any little frost.
You kind of want to get them in early, you know, so that you can get done and get on down to the Chatterbox Cafe when everyone is there for lunchtime and sit down and say, well, I got my beans in. How you doing?
On the other hand, you don't want to get them in so early and there be that real surprising late frost after they come up out of the ground that you have to walk back to the Chatterbox Cafe during lunchtime when everyone is there and somebody look up at you and say, yeah, it's too bad you put your beans in so early, Roger.
Put them in two weeks later, wouldn't have been any problem. So most of the people up there avoid soybeans, except for gamblers like Roger Hedlund. But tomatoes, there's no way to avoid. in a town like Lake Wobegon because they're all addicted to tomatoes. There is an addiction to that.
I've thought sometimes what would happen if tomatoes were illegal in this country and if federal agents in helicopters came around and sprayed the tomato fields. hunted down tomato growers. And I think that the Lutheran and the Catholic churches would be much different sorts of organizations if tomatoes were illegal. They'd go underground.
They'd be secret organizations, secret, illegal, radical organizations, tomato dealers. They might even merge. just to simplify things, if the tomato were put on a prescribed list. Well, Mr. Clarence Bunsen put his tomatoes in this last week and went out to help his nephew Roger Hedlund get the beans in. and went out to the farm.
Roger was out planting. Clarence walked around, waited for Roger to head back in towards the yard, and he saw something out behind the tool shed, just made him stop and stare at it. It was just an old cultivator sitting there in the weeds, all rusty, orange, sitting there and it brought back immediately an afternoon or morning of maybe 50 years ago and standing in a field in the spring that smelled about like this spring when he was a little boy and there were giants standing around him tall, incredibly tall men
In white shirts and bib overalls and beards, men with sunburnt faces, burnt brown and piercing clear blue eyes. His uncles. His uncles. All gone now. And he thought about them. and almost cried to think that these men, kings to him as a boy, all gone, all dead, all of it gone. Kings, their land and their horses.
Men who'd lift him up and put him on the cultivator. Nobody does that at Clarence anymore. Not sure if he'd care for somebody to. But then they used to hoist him up on their shoulders. All gone. Everything that was noble and beautiful and splendid, all gone. It will do that to you sometime spring.
Bring back painful memories of long ago. Sometimes I think it's the smell of lilacs that does that. They come along and they're kind of in the background for a while and you can sort of sniff something that faintly that probably is lilacs. And then all of a sudden they're on top of you.
They're not a subtle flower, lilacs. They're so romantic and they just come on you like a thousand and one strings, sometimes that lilac smell. Make a person cry when you get old enough to have the experience to remember it.
Even those elderly lilacs that we have to cut back a little bit this summer still put out a powerful lilac scent.
You'd be walking through town in the evening and walk past somebody's backyard and the wind be just right, and right there on the other side of the fence, a lilac draped over it, sighing to itself, humming to itself. It makes a person romantic, even an older person. Spring had that effect on you.
Up at Ella Anderson's house, spring had sort of an effect on her two elderly cats.
We're lying on her porch, wrestling with each other, two old tomcats who look as if their one lost record is kind of dropping below the 500 mark, but wrestling with each other like old cat pals there on the porch until they got exhausted, poor old things, and lay there in a cat embrace.
And every so often one of them lift up its head and sort of bite the other one. A little love bite. And the other one sighed to itself. They seemed to have been a little tired of being cats. the last few months and seemed to be more interested in trying out the lives of turtles for a while.
But now they're more like cats and one of them was even inspired by the spring weather to go hunting or to try it. Her old cat, which is half blind and almost deaf, though I don't know how you would test deafness in a cat.
Still this elderly guy cat going hunting or trying to make a good show of it in the backyard as squirrels up in the trees laughed their heads off and the birds that this old cat was drawing a bead on Birds walking around in the grass looking back over their shoulders saying, oh, please give me a break.
Not you. This old guy cat crawling along on his belly and cranking his tail to get his mainspring wound up a little tighter. and raising up a little bit and making his dash for them, but only dashing about 10 feet, about as far as an old guy cat can dash, and then stopping.
Putting on the brakes and stopping and turning away as the birds flew up in the tree and sang to them, alright, that'll show you right there. You get down on the grass again and I'll do that again. That'll show you. Dignified cats are, even when there's not much left reminded me of a guy I went to high school with. Harold Diener was kind of like that cat. Harold Diener was a little squirt who was able to say, you don't scare me even while walking rapidly backwards.
Harold Diener could be running full tilt and he'd still be able to yell back over his shoulder, you take one more step towards me and I'll show you. He was expressing a kind of inner dignity. Harold was.
He didn't have much outer dignity, but he was expressing his inner dignity, which if you run fast enough and they don't get hold of you and pound on you real hard is almost enough. The internal kind. He's not a little squirt anymore. He's a pretty hefty guy. But nobody's chasing him any longer. Harold.
He's hefty now so that he can barely catch his own children. When he wants to reach out and grab them, they get away from him. He says, come here. They say, Daddy, I didn't do it. I didn't do it. I can explain, Dad.
and they're able to run away from him long enough to explain it so that he doesn't grab onto them. His little boy Clinton Diener was standing out in the backyard on Tuesday, little Clinton. How old is he? He's about 12 years old.
He'd been sent out backyard to move the water sprinkler, which after running some other errands of his own for an hour, he finally did go back to move the water sprinkler and noticed that the coupling was loose on it.
and so picked it up to tighten it but he turned it the wrong way so that it came off so that water got all the front of him wet and so figured as long as he was wet already it wouldn't hurt much to put his thumb over the end of the hose and see how high in the air he could spray it straight up so it would come straight down on him.
And that felt interesting. He stood there, water going way up in the air, coming way down on his head until he was soaking wet. Little Clinton and his hair was stuck to his head. And he started to feel like he was in a movie. Like he was a hero in a movie. Like he was Clint Eastwood.
He often has thought about Clint Eastwood, because Clinton was named after an uncle who was dead a long time, who was kind of a fat man with a little mustache. Not a lot of dignity for that kid in being Clinton, but he thinks of himself sometimes as being Clint. Eastwood.
And there he was, Clint Eastwood, Mr. Make My Day, standing in a pouring rainstorm in the middle of a western street, squinting and looking cooler than cool and casual down towards the corner where a guy was going to walk out in just a moment and he was going to nail him with his long-barreled revolver, standing in the rain.
When all of a sudden, the ground underneath the poor kid's feet fell. And he looked down, he was on his hands and knees, he looked around and the grass, a circle about eight feet across, had dropped down about a foot and a half.
As if something underneath this lawn which had been soaked till it was a swamp, something underground had slipped or fallen and he could hear chunks of something falling down into water underneath him like it was some kind of a cesspool.
And he jumped out just as part of the turf went and was so scared he ran as fast as he could not looking where he was running and ran right into his dad who'd heard the and who was coming around the side of the garage. His dad said, what in the world happened? Are you all right?
Boy said, yeah, I'm all right. What happened? He said, well, I was watering the lawn and I was trying to soak it real well, like you told me to, and then it just fell. His dad said, well, thank goodness you're not hurt. Oh, driving in a car. That's what I started out talking about.
I was going to tell you about the time I drove in a car. I think about this every spring. It's been 30 springs since it happened, but I think about it when I think about people like Clarence who feel older in the spring. It was an old green, I believe, 1940 Ford four-door sedan.
It was our favorite car to go for rides in, my whole family. And one day my father noticed that the odometer was at 99,997.6 miles. and all of those miles were miles that he had put on that car. So it was a historic occasion for our whole family.
And he got us all together and we piled into the car to go for a drive so we could see the odometer turn over to a hundred thousand and watch all the zeros come down. There were neighbor kids in the back seat. A lot of people wanted to go.
We had the kind of pick and choose amongst our neighbors and friends. We packed in pretty tight and we set off, all of us looking over his shoulder watching the odometer turn to 99,998 and 99,999 and somewhere around 99,990.1 There was a bird that was flying along right in front of the car for a long ways.
And it was amazing. We'd never seen that before. A bird flying right along in front of the car. My dad followed this bird.
It seemed like we were following this bird, and the bird would go around corners, and we'd go take a left-hand curve, and the bird was right there, just about five feet out in front of the hood ornament. And it was like my dad was mesmerized by that bird. And we're driving along behind him,
What was going to happen when that bird suddenly swerved off into the woods and my dad turned the wheel and we went halfway down the ditch and then came back up on the road and looked at the odometer and it was zero zero zero zero one point six. My dad offered to
Put the rear end up on blocks and put it in reverse and run it back so we could try again. But I said, no, no, it was worth it. It was worth it anyway. Why did I think of that?
I don't know, but 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.
GK has stopped smoking. He's getting flak in the MN papers over his threat to move LW to another state.
Star Tribune May 5 1985 Star Tribune May 7 1985 St Cloud Times May 8 1985