We Are Still Married Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Part 1 - PIECES

  END OF THE TRAIL

  THREE NEW TWINS JOIN CLUB IN SPRING

  YOUR BOOK SAVED MY LIFE, MISTER

  WHO WE WERE AND WHAT WE MEANT BY IT

  THE CURRENT CRISIS IN REMORSE

  THE PEOPLE VS. JIM

  THE YOUNG LUTHERAN’S GUIDE TO THE ORCHESTRA

  MAYBE YOU CAN, TOO

  A LITTLE HELP

  A LIBERAL REACHES FOR HER WHIP

  HOLLYWOOD IN THE FIFTIES

  LIFESTYLE

  HE DIDN’T GO TO CANADA

  HOW THE SAVINGS AND LOANS WERE SAVED

  Part 2 - THE LAKE

  LETTERS FROM JACK

  THREE MARRIAGES

  THE BABE

  HOW I CAME TO GIVE THE MEMORIAL DAY ADDRESS AT THE LAKE WOBEGON CEMETERY THIS YEAR

  WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?

  Part 3 - LETTERS

  HOW TO WRITE A LETTER

  ESTATE

  O THE PORCH

  TRAVELER

  SNEEZES

  POOL TABLE

  COLD

  PUCK DROP

  LUTHERAN PIE

  SEXY

  COUNTRY GOLF

  REGRETS

  THE PENNSYLVANIA DEPT. OF AGR.

  FAMILY HONEYMOON

  HOME TEAM

  BASKETBALL

  WOODLAWN

  EPISCOPAL

  NU ER DER JUL IGEN

  GLAD BAGS

  HOPPERS

  MILLS

  ATLANTA AIRPORT

  THE TALK OF THE TOWN SQUAD

  SUBWAY

  AUTOGRAPH

  GETTYSBURG

  POSTCARDS

  NINETEEN

  PATMOS

  REAGAN

  VIRAL

  SNOWSTORM

  LAYING ON OUR BACKS LOOKING UP AT THE STARS

  LONDON

  STINSON BEACH

  Part 4 - HOUSE POEMS

  O What a Luxury

  Lamour

  In Memory of Our Cat, Ralph

  The Solo Sock

  Mrs. Sullivan

  Guilt & Shame

  Obedience

  Upon Becoming a Doctor

  Mother’s Poem

  The Finn Who Would Not Take a Sauna

  Part 5 - STORIES

  MEETING FAMOUS PEOPLE

  THE LOVER OF INVENTION

  LONELY BOY

  WHAT DID WE DO WRONG?

  YON

  THE ART OF SELF-DEFENSE

  END OF AN ERA

  GLASNOST

  AFTER A FALL

  MY LIFE IN PRISON

  WE ARE STILL MARRIED

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  WE ARE STILL MARRIED

  Garrison Keillor was born in Anoka, Minnesota, and is the host and writer of A Prairie Home Companion. He is the author of ten books (all available from Penguin) including Lake Wobegon Days and Lake Wobegon Summer 1956. A teacher at the University of Minnesota and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he lives in St. Paul with his wife and daughter.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

  Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,

  Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads,

  Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,

  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published in the United States of America by

  Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc., 1989

  This expanded edition published in Penguin Books 1990

  Copyright © Garrison Keillor, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990 All rights reserved

  Page 377 constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Keillor, Garrison.

  We are still married: stories & letters / Garrison Keillor.

  p. cm.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-57269-6

  I. Title.

  PS3561.E3755W4 1990

  813’.54-dc20 89-28606

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To the memory

  of my classmate

  Corinne Guntzel

  (1942-1986)

  The Lake Wobegon novels

  WOBEGON BOY

  ISBN 0-14-027478-2

  “[It] had me spraying Diet Coke from my nostrils and scattering popcorn across the carpet in great gusts of mirth.... As sharp and funny a comic novel as any I’ve read in the ’90s.”

  —Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times

  LAKE WOBEGON DAYS

  ISBN 0-14-013161-2

  “A comic anatomy of what is small and ordinary and therefore potentially profound and universal in American life.”

  -Chicago Tribune

  LEAVING HOME

  ISBN 0-14-013160-4

  “These monologues hold up as a string of lovely vignettes and memorable portraits... and slowly climb to peaks of quiet hilarity.”

  ——The Cleveland Plain Dealer

  Also by Garrison Keillor

  ☐ THE BOOK OF GUYS

  ISBN 0-14-023372-5

  “Marvelous stuff from the funniest American writer still open for business.”

  —Time

  ☐ HAPPY TO BE HERE

  ISBN 0-14-013182-5

  “Cerebral and complex, a blend of romance and nostalgia; it sparklingly parodies the American (and human) condition.... His stories and satires glow with a sense of time and place.”

  —The Washington Post

  ☐ WE ARE STILL MARRIED

  ISBN 0-14-013156-6

  “The shock, for a radio fan leafing through this collection, is to discover, perhaps not for the first or fifth time, that his hero is even more gifted as writer than as entertainer.”

  —Time

  ☐ WLT: A RADIO ROMANCE

  ISBN 0-14-010380-5

  “A praise-song to old-time radio.... It’s the wicked brother of A Prairie Home Companion. A real lollapalooza.”

  —Studs Terkel, Chicago Sun-Times

  My parents think I’m crazy,

  My kids think I’m bourgeois—

  My true love thinks I’m wonderful,

  The handsomest she ever saw,

  And who am I to disagree

  With one so sensible as she?

  INTRODUCTION

  There’s a lot to be said for lack of communication and so many problems we can’t talk about simply go away after a while, such as the problem of mortality, for example, but a writer’s duty is to keep trying, to wake up every afternoon and saddle up the mare and bear the sacred plume de literature over the next ridge, and here, to show I’ve been on the job and not just sunning myself in Denmark, is a book, collecting in one neat pile some stories, poems, and letters mostly written at the time of Ronald Reagan, the Presid
ent who never told bad news to the American people.

  I’ve written for The New Yorker since I was in high school, though they weren’t aware of it at the time, and many of these stories first appeared there; most of the letters in Section 3 appeared there, unsigned, in “The Talk of the Town.” When I first met up with the magazine, I was thirteen, sitting in the periodicals room at the Minneapolis Public Library, surrounded by ruined old men collapsed in the big oak chairs, who I took to be retired teachers. I read Talk as the voice of inexhaustible youth, charged with curiosity and skepticism, dashing around the big city at a slow crawl, and tried to imitate its casual worldly tone, which, for a boy growing up in the potato fields of Brooklyn Park township, was a hard row to hoe, but I tried. The magazine was studded with distinguished men of initials, including E.B., A.J., S.J., E.J., J.F., and J.D., so I signed myself G. E. Keillor for a while, hoping lightning would strike. The summer after college I hitched a ride to New York and got a room in a boardinghouse on West 20th next door to a convent and walked up to The New Yorker on West 43rd to apply for a job as a Talk reporter. I was twenty-three, had a faceful of beard and long hair, and was dazed with ambition. There were plenty of exclusive clubs on 43rd and 44th, including the Harvard, Princeton, New York Yacht, and Century, but only one worth trying for, in my eyes, and I took the elevator up and tried. A woman named Patricia Mosher talked with me for an hour. She was friendly and encouraging, and sent me home to write more, which I’ve been doing ever since. Three years later, I got a letter from Roger Angell at The New Yorker buying a story of mine and sat down on the front steps of my house and enjoyed his three or four lovely paragraphs two or three dozen times. I felt grateful that my life would not be completely wasted. Over the years, Roger turned out to be a tireless editor, and a great coach, telling me how much the magazine needed me, hoping I’d become one of his starters, a cleanup humorist, and only gradually did he come to accept me for who I am, a tall serious man with a knack for the long pause, slow to write and easily distracted, whose association with the magazine has been modest, if undistinguished. In 1971 I became the first writer in its history to have his name misspelled on a byline (Kiellor), and a few years later I wrote the story “Don: The True Story of a Younger Person,” which contains a quintuple interior quote, a quote of a quote of a quote of a quote of a quote, the deepest interior quote ever published there, I guess. You could look it up. In 1974, having written a piece about the Grand Ole Opry, I became one of the few writers in New Yorker annals to try to live the life I had written about, when I started “A Prairie Home Companion.” Mark Singer did not open a bank after writing Funny Money, nor did Calvin Trillin buy a rib joint with the proceeds of Alice, Let’s Eat. Yes, I am aware of Roger Angell’s pinch-hit appearance (7/12/49) at the Polo Grounds, a long poke off the bat handle that scooted into the left-field corner under the Macy’s clock and caromed off the groundskeeper’s roller for a skinny triple, driving in one run, and that’s why I said I was one of the “few”—Pauline Kael, who directed Joanne Woodward and John Wayne in Canaan, is another, but you look at that picture, you can’t help but feel the sparks flying between the stars and you see how precise and single-minded and knowing the camera is, and you wonder, “Why couldn’t she just let those two loose?” And Roger’s hit, in any other ballpark, would’ve been a double, except in Fenway, where it would’ve been foul.

  It was a long reach for a writer, to do a radio show all those years, like a dairy farmer sailing the Atlantic, but that sort of thing happens all the time. The open sea casts a powerful lure and dairy farmers are particularly susceptible. The monotony of twice-daily lactation and the steady throbbing of the milking machines make them feel like the engine-room crew of a ferryboat that’s going nowhere, and they dream of taking the helm and getting salt spray in their faces. Wiping the immense udders, they imagine a billowing spinnaker—a manure-crusted tail switches across their face and they see the mainsheet taut as the Francesca rounds Bermuda—and next thing they’re at the Clay County library to check out How to Build a Boat from a Sixty-Foot Pole Barn. One year and eighteen months later their pole barn is gone, the Francesca is finished and loaded on a flatbed truck and all the comedians of Chatterton, South Dakota, who have watched Ray build the boat, stand around and hoot and howl as he chugs out of the driveway. He’s glad to pull out of the dusty little town and past the soybean fields and see the water tower disappear in the rearview mirror, but six months later, after weeks of thirty-and forty-foot swells and close calls with icebergs and flying sharks and the morning when the tanker loomed out of the fog and the misery of wet socks and damp underwear and rope burns on his hands that never heal and the sullenness among his crew since the whiskey ran out, Ray thinks back on Chatterton as a jewel of civility and he is glad to return and see his cows and get back on the tractor and hold seeds in his hand, and so was I glad to rejoin The New Yorker— its faded yellow walls and scraps of furniture, its burrows stuffed with books and manuscripts, the glass bookcases and the long table piled with newspapers, the archives full of black scrapbooks and the little library crammed with reference books where Eve and Dusty and Hal and all the checkers slave away—and to be back among paper.

  My cash crop is humor, a bastard genre of literature that includes Mark Twain and the gentlemen of the old firm of Benchley, Thurber, Perelman & White and also includes How to Talk Suth’n, Buddy’s Big Book of Booger Jokes and Funny Fotos of Cats in Hats, a mixed field.

  Humor is a knife and what it cuts off doesn’t grow back right away, just look at journalists. They are gentle and thoughtful people given to good work in a dark world, but they have been withered by thousands of journalist jokes, portraying members of the Fourth Estate as peabrains. Humor has dropped a rock on them, just as it has withered Iowans, Clevelanders, Jerseyites, Dan Quayle, proctologists, and people named Elmer, and yet no victims dare complain lest they be accused of having no sense of humor, the worst charge that can be leveled against an American citizen. Even someone who was convicted of selling the nation’s last three nuclear secrets to the Russians—if, before sentencing, the judge were to lean across the bench and say, “You know, you have a very poor sense of humor,” the defense would leap to its feet and object. Humor, a good sense of it, is to Americans what manhood is to Spaniards and we will go to great lengths to prove it. Experiments with laboratory rats have shown that, if one psychologist in the room laughs at something a rat does, all of the other psychologists in the room will laugh equally. Nobody wants to be left holding the joke. The funniest line in English is “Get it?” When you say that, everyone chortles.

  For a long time, most Americans have considered humor to be much funnier than it really is. Sometimes I wish I could quit writing humor and just write irritation for a while. I grow old and irritable. I once was a tall dark heartbreaker who, when I slouched into a room, women jumped up and asked if they could get me something, and now they only smile and say, “My mother is a big fan of yours. You sure are a day-brightener for her. You sure make her chuckle.” I grow old. Boys and girls in their thirties who compose essays on the majestic sorrows of aging—give me a break. I’m forty-seven. Wait until you’re forty-seven and then tell me about it. I’ll be sixty then.

  I grew up in a gentler, slower time. When Ike was President, Christmases were years apart, and now it’s about five months from one to the next, and in a decade it’ll be the end of the century, the year 2000, a fiction. I grow old and irritable and forgetful and often forget what irritated me in the first place, though the misery is still there. It’s enough to make a person psychopathic if you had the energy for it but irritation is all I can manage. It irritates me when news people explain things that everyone knows, such as who Rocky Marciano was or Edward R. Murrow or John Foster Dulles, names that don’t pop up often, but when they do, the teenage anchorman says, “Dulles, the bass player of the Crickets, gave up his seat on the plane to Richie Valens,” as if you didn’t know this. Of course you do. Last November, on the
anniversary of the assassination, the tube was jammed with bozos explaining about the Kennedy years, implying that it was long ago, but twenty-five years isn’t that long. You learn this as you grow up.

  Like everybody, I mark time by who’s in the White House, starting with Truman, who presided over my childhood, a man in a bow tie who resembled my uncle Bill Anderson who hiked around Minnesota as a young man and swam across rivers stripped naked, his clothes wrapped in a bundle and fastened on his head with his belt looped under his chin. He shot pool, a daring thing in a Christian family, and knew all the counties of Minnesota by heart. About Truman, however, dark things were intimated in our house. He used the Lord’s name in vain and was weak on Communism. In the playground at Benson School, we played war during recess and killed North Koreans by the zillions. Our teacher Floyd Lewis brought a television set to sixth grade so we could watch Eisenhower’s inauguration. He looked like Uncle Merrill who traveled the Midwest aboard the North Coast Limited and Hiawatha and other crack trains, extending the domain of Northrup, King seed corn. Ike’s benign rule saw me through high school and I started at the University of Minnesota the fall Kennedy was elected. Being eighteen, free, and reasonably intelligent, I decided I was a Democrat, of course, and admired him feverishly and was—except for an afternoon during the Cuban blockade when I was afraid the world was about to end—as patriotic as a person could possibly be, right up to November 22, 1963, that deep cold cave, the day of our national murder, when Lyndon Johnson was ushered in. He was the first President I voted for and the first who threatened my life. My son was born at the beginning of Nixon, 1969, who resigned in 1974, missing my thirty-second birthday by a day, ending the epic Watergate story, since when newspaper reading hasn’t been one fourth as much fun. Ford didn’t register on me. Carter only showed that I didn’t know beans about politics: I thought he was a decent hardworking God-fearing President and never understood how Republicans could get elected simply by saying his name out loud. Everybody understood this joke except me, so I took an eight-year vacation under Reagan and didn’t have a political thought, except to admire the old masseur as he applied his craft. Then came Gentleman George Bush, the man who gave Dan Quayle to the nation, and there we are now.