Chet Atkins, Greg Brown, Butch Thompson Trio, Johnny Gimble, Garrison Keillor, Peter Ostroushko.
Nobody's Darlin on Earth ( Chet Atkins , Garrison Keillor ) Cat, you better come home ( Garrison Keillor ) In The Good Old Summertime ( Chet Atkins ) Bye Bye Blues ( Chet Atkins ) Tiger Rag ( Chet Atkins ) Fiddlin' Around ( Chet Atkins , Johnny Gimble ) What a Friend We Have in Jesus ( Johnny Gimble ) BT Polka ( Peter Ostroushko ) Hymn to Lake Wobegon ( Garrison Keillor ) Brand New Angel with an Old Violin ( Greg Brown )
Bertha's Kitty Boutique (Il gato gelato)
Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown, way back there. I don't really keep track of them, but I do have a good memory, you know, so I can remember what transpires at this point in the month of July.
The gardens, you know, speaking of gardens, as we were, or singing, rather, a moment ago, are really booming along at this time of year. I imagine they are down... down here as well.
People back in the month of February placed large orders with their seed companies thinking they'd put in a little bit more than usual and also because looking out their windows in Minnesota in February, it seemed as if maybe the earth was not really hospitable to life and you ought to cast more seed on the ground because it's pretty rocky back there.
So they put in extra stuff and extra tomato plants, and now it is starting to move, that great glacier of food out behind the house in the garden. People walk downstairs in the morning and find a few tomatoes hanging around by the telephone like they're waiting for a call or something like that. go to put them in the fridge, but the fridge is full of tomatoes already. They are multiplying in there, doing something in the dark that you never knew tomatoes could do. A few zucchini hanging around there over on the kitchen counter and a whole bunches of carrots and sweet corn and all.
You put a whole bunch of cucumbers in a bag and try and give it away to people and find that they've got their own source. Put it aside. Take it to church on Sunday. Take it to... Give it away to Uncle Earl and Aunt Myrna. And you get to church a little bit late.
You go up the steps. You go into the cloakroom. And you see up on the shelf where they put the hats. There's a whole bunch of Christian cucumbers up there in... in bags and whole shopping bags full of Christian tomatoes lying around in the cloakroom. Everybody brought their stuff.
In the sanctuary they're singing, oh for a thousand tongues to sing my great Redeemer's praise. And here are thousands of tomatoes that are doing that just themselves sitting in a sack. God is good. God is generous and plentiful. And it's at this point in the summer, starting now, when we start to realize what heaven will be like.
It'll be too much. It'll be just plain too much. We won't worry about giving things to anybody because they'll already have too much of their own. and be trying to give it to us. It's going to be just surplus for as long as a person can imagine and then twice that and then farther beyond.
It's quite a thought. I do hope that there are vegetables in heaven. I believe that was my first taste of heaven was about this time in the summer when I was a boy, sitting and eating vegetables off my mother's table. You don't really know anything about food, I think, until you have fresh vegetables out of the garden.
Tomatoes, real tomatoes, not the kind that come from Texas in January. But real stuff, sweet, sweet tomatoes. Carrots. You don't know carrots if you buy them in a grocery store. Those are not carrots.
You've got to pick them right out of the ground and run cold water out of the holes on them and eat them right there with a little grit still on them in the wrinkles. That's carrot. Now you're talking carrot. Cucumbers the same way. You pick them right off a vine. You chill them a little bit on ice.
Slice them. Leave on the skins. And put them in vinegar with pepper and salt. That's cucumbers. Now we're in the cucumber ballpark. The stuff in stores, that's not cucumbers. It may be something else. It may be second grade zucchini, but those aren't cucumbers.
It always amazed me as a boy and yet didn't really amaze me when I sat in general science and learned that... I'm trying to think of how to say it. I guess there is no way to say it. Learned that sweet corn has sex, that out there in the field there is stuff going on with sweet corn.
There's a male part up at the top of the tassel with the seeds. And the female part is the ear with the silk. And the seed... Well, listen, I don't want to get graphic or anything here and embarrass a whole bunch of people. I didn't tell my parents about it.
I didn't know they'd be able to handle it when I was a boy. But it made me think a lot about sweet corn and really appreciate it all the more.
My father, on Sunday after we got home from church, after the table was set and the pot roast was done to where you could eat it with a spoon, it would pry apart in delicious shreds.
After the potatoes were boiled and they had been mashed and after everything was ready and a large pot of water was boiling, then and only then would he take off for the sweet corn field out behind the house with a gunny sack and pick as fast as he could 30 ears of sweet corn.
He was the only one trusted to pick sweet corn in our family. He brought them in and we kids shucked them at an average rate of, I'd say, about six and a half seconds per ear.
That was removing every strand of silk from them and threw them in the boiling water where they cooked for a very few short minutes and were put on the table. There was a quick prayer and then the corn was passed around only ten minutes from the stalk or less.
Butter and salt and friends, that is as good as it gets. That is as good as life gets. People have looked for something better than that. They haven't found it. There's nothing better than that. Sex is not better than that. People have tried, they have tried, and they've tried, but sex is not better than sweet corn.
Now I'm talking about fresh sweet corn, of course, right out of the garden. Stuff in stores, yes, sex is a lot better than that. Late at night, couples lying in bed. saying that was pretty good. Yeah, that was pretty good. How was that for you? That was good for me too.
Wasn't like sweet corn, but it was good. It was one of the great graces of life, a garden, a garden with a great surplus of food out back. It was one of the graces that I remember from that little town, little town with the big lots so that people in town could have gardens.
Houses that on the front of them, the side facing away from the garden so that you wouldn't have to sit and look at it, was a screened porch. Another graceful thing that I see less of. And I don't know why, really, because it's such a sweet thing.
Screened porch with great high screens we had that we'd wrestle them off every October and we'd wrestle them back up every spring, May, late May or June. We'd put up the screens on the porch that were put up according to a numbering system that my grandpa had worked out I think back in the Coolidge administration somewhere with numbered tacks in the bottoms of the screens that were, or rather on the floor of the porch that were supposed to match up with Roman numerals that were scratched into the sides of the screens.
Except that the porch had warped a little bit over the years and the house had settled a bit so that The numbering system had to be changed, and it worked according to a pretty complicated code. It went, I believe, 1, 2, 3, 7, 6, 5, 11, 10, 8, 9. No, 10 was in there between 8 and 7.
They had to be moved around so they could be squeezed in. And for some reason, we never wrote down this sequence of numbers all the years I lived in that house.
I don't know, maybe we thought that Nazi spies would try and get it out of us or something and torture us until we revealed our porch numbering system. I don't know why. So every year it was a great struggle to get those screens up and remember where they were supposed to go.
But still it was worth it because it was a sweet place to sit and receive all of the news of the world, you see. To be able to watch as people went about their business and walked by. To call to them if you wish or not as you wish because you are behind screens. You cannot be seen.
Sit and watch people go about their lives. Watch cars go by. sit and receive the odors of the world as they drift in and smell the smell of cooking from the neighbors and the smell of new mown grass and the little car exhaust mixed in with it. Lovely smells drifting. The smell of rain.
You can smell rain as it comes in. You can smell water as it approaches.
I smelled bacon on a porch I remember when I was a boy it amazed me to sit outside and smell it because for some reason you weren't supposed to eat breakfast on a porch I don't know why it's just that we never did and if I had gone out there and my parents were at home they would have said what are you doing out there on the porch you don't eat breakfast in the kitchen one morning I went out early, just so I could eat my breakfast on the porch. Sit and eat the Ralston and smell bacon fry halfway across town in the early morning. Smell dew and smell peonies and smell bacon, all three of them together. Unusual. I don't think bacon is good for you, eating fried pig fat, I don't think.
But even if we gave it all up tomorrow, you've got to have somebody just walk down the streets with a frying pan every morning, just drive through in a pickup truck with bacon frying in the back. We'd smell water. You can smell water, you know. Smell water, bacon, peonies, grass.
Sometimes we'd put up a water sprinkler upwind of the porch. That was air conditioning for us because we didn't have it in our home. We had the porch for that. Even on the stillest day, there was always a breeze on that porch.
We'd sit, after working hard in our garden, sit damp and happy on the porch and feel a slight breeze. You can feel a breeze better, you know, if you are damp, if you are sweating, which people who live in air conditioning constantly and who go from one air conditioned place to another don't experience.
They miss out on so much. Smells, wonderful smells, wonderful smells. We didn't have air conditioning in our house. My parents were God-fearing, Bible-believing people. And they believed, although they couldn't find the verse, they believed that there was one back there somewhere that forbade air conditioning, I think. Back in Leviticus or somewhere, you know.
God said thou shalt not, but especially thou shouldest not do that. Have air conditioning. Because it didn't seem right to them. Probably was something in the Bible that covered that. They weren't looking too hard to find it. They knew that it was back there. Back where God was smoting, smiting a lot of people.
And no slap on the wrist either. But I mean, he'd smite them so they stayed smitten. And there was a lot of smoting going on. going on back there in Scripture. You know, they believed it was a luxury and was unnecessary, and also my father had, I believe, was aware, at least in his subconscious, 24 hours a day, that in our garage was a glass bowl that was stuck, nailed, screwed to the side of the garage, and inside was a silver metallic disc that turned slowly, our electric meter. He was aware that this thing was turning.
I think even in his sleep, his sleep was restless. knowing that this was always turning, sometimes rather rapidly so that it alarmed him. But what really alarmed him was the fact that once he tried to make it stop and turned off everything in the house, even everything, clocks we unplugged.
We turned off everything trying to get the wheel to stop. And he was in the garage and we were running around the house trying to find that one last thing because it was still turning. And he said, look upstairs. Somebody's got a radio on or something.
And we ran upstairs and we looked all over and checked everything and we got it to going very slowly. But it wouldn't stop. Now you see, back in his day, back in the day of kerosene lamps and wood stoves, There were periods in the life of a family when cash outflow was down to zero.
See, like at least at night when you were asleep, no money was going out, right? That's bothered him. That no matter what you did, a little bit of expense was leaking out of the house. No matter what. So, he wasn't about to get something that would make that thing spin in the garage.
Get an air conditioner and go out there and hear that thing see steam come up from it. No, sir. No, he wasn't going to do that. Parches, lovely, lovely things. Air conditioning. Thankful for it right now at this moment in this auditorium with all of you here, but I don't know.
There's a fungus that people get who go directly from air conditioned cars into air conditioned houses and into air conditioned buildings as fast as they can and don't spend any time outdoors. There's a fungus that they get. They breathe it, it goes up their noses and it goes into their brains and it makes them stupid.
And it's a disease that is progressive, fungal stupidity. And of course people don't realize that they're becoming more stupid because they gradually lose the power to understand those things. So they become dumb. And what saves you, you see, is sweat. You sweat until your brain starts to sweat. And then you sneeze.
And then it comes out the same way it went in. Hay fever is good for you, see. It's a good thing for you. Porches, why don't they put them on houses anymore? Gardens, I miss them. I miss that sweet corn.
Oh, Lord, to talk about all these good things, good things that there isn't as much of as there once was. And I miss them all. And I feel bad that a lot of good stuff is gone, farther away from us. But you know we can bring it back. It is all recoverable.
Everything that was ever good and that was ever valued in the past, we can bring it back. Everything. I'm positive of that. You don't have to go live in a small town like Lake Wobegon to have those good things that you want. We just decide that we want them and we work for them.
And we all do this. Whether it is for peace in the world or whether it's for church or whether it's just for good food or whatever is good that we value, good old music, radio, old radio, it is work and you bring it back. That's why I do this show. And it's a great privilege.
It's a great privilege to do it for people like yourselves. That's what I really came here to say, was to thank you. That's the news from Lake Wobegon. Where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.
Austin American Statesman Jul 18 1985 Star Tribune Jul 22 1985 Courier Journal Jul 20 1985 Lexington Herald Leader Jul 23 1985 Tennessean Jul 21 1985
1985.07.14 Lexington Herald: broadcast show / 1985.07.19 Lexington Herald. Rebroadcast on February 15, 1986