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  PENGUIN BOOKS

  LEAVING HOME

  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.

  LEAVING

  HOME

  GARRISON

  KEILLOR

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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

  First published in the United States of America by

  Viking Penguin Inc. 1987

  Published in NAL Penguin 1989

  Published in Penguin Books 1990

  This edition with a new preface published in Penguin Books 1997

  Copyright © Garrison Keillor, 1987, 1997

  All rights reserved

  “A Trip to Grand Rapids,” “The Killer,” and “Chicken”

  first appeared in The Atlantic.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Keillor, Garrison.

  Leaving home / Garrison Keillor.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-64470-6

  1. Lake Wobegon (Imaginary place)—Fiction. I. Title.

  [PS3561.E3755L43 1989]

  813’.54—dc19

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  To my mother and father,

  John and Grace

  One more spring in Minnesota,

  To come upon Lake Wobegon.

  Old town I smell your coffee.

  If I could see you one more time—

  I can’t stay, you know, I left so long ago,

  I’m just a stranger with memories of people I knew here.

  We stand around, looking at the ground.

  You’re the stories I’ve told for years and years.

  That yard, the tree—you climbed it once with me,

  And we talked of cities that we’d live in someday.

  I left, old friend, and now I’m back again,

  Please say you missed me since I went away.

  One more time that dance together,

  Just you and I now, don’t be shy.

  This time I know I’d hear the music

  If I could hold you one more time.

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  A Trip to Grand Rapids

  A Ten-Dollar Bill

  Easter

  Corinne

  A Glass of Wendy

  The Speeding Ticket

  Seeds

  Chicken

  How the Crab Apple Grew

  Truckstop

  Dale

  High Rise

  Collection

  Life Is Good

  Lyle’s Roof

  Pontoon Boat

  State Fair

  David and Agnes, a Romance

  The Killer

  Eloise

  The Royal Family

  Homecoming

  Brethren

  Thanksgiving

  Darlene Makes a Move

  Christmas Dinner

  Exiles

  New Year’s

  Where Did It Go Wrong?

  Post Office

  Out in the Cold

  Hawaii

  Hansel

  Du, Du Liegst Mir im Herzen

  Aprille

  Goodbye to the Lake

  PREFACE

  “Leaving home is a kind of forgiveness,” the author wrote in the introduction when this collection first came out in 1987, “and when you get among strangers, you’re amazed at how decent they seem. Nobody smirks at you or gossips about you, nobody resents your successes or relishes your defeats. You get to start over, a sort of redemption.”

  Starting over is the great American luxury: leaving your parents’ town for a greener one of your own, leaving the constricted life under the gaze of Mrs. Grundy for a freewheeling one that fits you more comfortably, leaving the sullen marriage, the dead-end job, the too-familiar house, the cold climate, the cool appraisals of your old relatives, whose take on you is so much less pleasant than your own. The author, back in 1987, was experiencing an odd sort of restlessness, that of the struggling middle-aged writer who is suddenly accosted by success, that beautiful, glittering young three-hundred-pound painted woman, who came screaming out of the woods and sat on him, smiling, for a year or so until gradually he began to long for other forms of entertainment.

  Emily Dickinson said, “Success is counted sweetest by those who ne’er succeed; to comprehend a nectar requires sorest need,” and the needy author found the success of “A Prairie Home Companion” and Lake Wobegon Days (1985) very sweet indeed, seeing as he had been such a social misfit in high school and college. Most of his high school classmates could not have picked him out of a police line-up. He was even more invisible in college. And Minnesota is such an invisible place in America that if a Minnesotan gets noticed by anybody at all, for anything not actually illegal, he feels a doglike gratitude. If there is money involved—which is sometimes true in publishing—then it’s all the sweeter, though you do, of course, feel guilty about your success, and worry about the state of your soul, and fully expect God to strike you down as He has struck down so many other large enchiladas (KEILLOR FOUND CONFUSED, WANDERING IN DOWNTOWN ST. PAUL, WAVING UNLOADED PISTOL, SHOUTING NON SEQUITURS) and you expect to wind up in the gallery of celebrity losers (KEILLOR: HOW I GAINED 200 LBS. FROM MY CODEINE COUGH SYRUP HABIT—AND LOST SOME OF IT!). Nonetheless, success struck the author as one of the nicer things that ever befell him. No kidding. To a social misfit, it’s a wonderful gift when, suddenly, people start to recognize you on the street and ask if you are the author of La
ke Wobegon Days and are happy to find out that you are.

  When success lingers too long, however, it is time to push the fat lady off you and go do something else. After all, you don’t become a writer so that you can go on television and talk about your work to a man with hair; you are a writer because you write, and public attention is not so conducive to that. Writers are meant not to bask but to work, to observe, not to be the observee. So off he went, closing down “A Prairie Home Companion” with a farewell broadcast in the spring of 1987, taking a bow, slipping out the back door of the World Theater in St. Paul, selling his dearly beloved house in St. Paul, and heading for Copenhagen and, ultimately, New York. He wrote “Talk of the Town” pieces for The New Yorker. He traveled around. He did a show at Radio City Music Hall. He looked for a farm to buy. He started, and stopped, writing a memoir. He wrote a novel. It was a tumultuous few years, characterized by a kind of impetuous restlessness that the author had managed to postpone from his teenage years. He had been a hard worker through his youth, a cautious little striver, a Scout, and then, in his late forties, he went through adolescence. He woke up almost every morning seized with a beautiful notion of what, finally, to do with his life, and every morning it was a new notion, and it seldom lasted into the afternoon of the next day. And finally, when he recovered, he went back to the Midwest and back to doing “A Prairie Home Companion” and felt grateful to have the second chance.

  It is hard work to invent ourselves. Movie stars do it pretty well, and politicians, and writers of memoirs, but at the author’s age—the extremely late forties—it is good to go back home and be among people who know you. Some of those are the people in this book, a collection of monologues from the radio show between 1984 and 1987. The author has written his share of lyrical prose about the Midwest and spoken his share of curses on it, and at the moment he has made his peace with it, which is a kind of redemption too. Midwesterners have an urge to roam—exasperation with home impels us out on the road—and thanks to a good upbringing, being patient and polite, we make good travelers and take vast pleasure from un-Midwestern places, such as Italy or India or North Africa. And then, coming home, seeing the towboat plow up the Mississippi around the bend below St. Paul, seeing the dome of the cathedral on the hill, the giant “1” on the First National Bank building, the tower of the old courthouse, the snow drifting down in Rice Park, snow on the head of the statue of F. Scott Fitzgerald, standing as if waiting for a friend, we feel our hearts break with the pleasure of the familiar.

  A TRIP TO GRAND RAPIDS

  It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. It was chilly on Tuesday and Wednesday, as a cold front moved through, and the tomato growers stayed up late debating whether to cover plants for frost or not. “Naw,” they decided about ten o’clock, and hit the hay and lay thinking about it: the humiliation of getting froze out, the shame of eating store-bought tomatoes, or, worse, going on tomato relief. “Here, Clarence, have a couple bushels of these—we got plenty. No, really. Bud covered ours that night in June, of course, when it froze—you remember—it was that night, you could tell by the birch leaves it was going to get below freezing…you didn’t know that?”

  It rained Wednesday night. Roger Hedlund lay worrying about his unplanted corn and thinking about his daughter Martha’s new black kitten. Roger had laid down the law that a cat stays outdoors, even when it’s cold: That’s what it has fur for, put it outside, it’ll take care of itself. She looked up at him, pleading. He said, “Now. Just do it.” She put the kitten out. On her way upstairs she whispered, “Murderer.” He heard her. When he went up to bed, he heard the kitten crying on the back step. Well, he thought, it’ll go away. It cried pitifully and then it did go away, and after a while he went out to look for it. “Kittykittykittykitty.” He walked naked except for his long T-shirt, barefoot across the cold wet grass, his big dog, Oscar, with him. He pulled the T-shirt down to make himself decent, and thought he heard the kitten under the house. Bent over to look, and Oscar sniffed him. Roger jumped straight into the side of his house, hitting the faucet with his thigh. He groaned and sat down in the grass. “Ohhhhhhh.” And saw the flashlight. “Dad?” she said. “Dad? Is that you?”

  “Go back to bed,” he said, “everything is all right.” But his voice sounded funny, like a man who’d run into a faucet. “What’s wrong, Dad? Are you all right?”

  No, he wasn’t. Much later he was not so bad, after the pain subsided and he had a shot of bourbon, but he wasn’t all right. He lay awake listening for the kitten. He fell asleep, and in his dreams something chased him to hell and back—it might have been a cat. In the morning the kitten came back. Martha said, “Don’t you think it’d be less trouble if we kept him in the house? Then you wouldn’t have to get up in the middle of the night and go find him, Dad. You see, if you keep something—” “All right,” he said. “—if you keep something indoors, then you know where it is.” “All right,” he said, “we’ll try it and see how it works.”

  Thursday night he was glad the kitten was in. It rained buckets, one of those summer thunderstorms when the sky turns black and clouds boil up and the wind blows the grass flat. Trees bend in half and sheets of rain fall like in the Old Testament, and then it’s over.

  The wind took hold of the Quaker State oil sign at Krebsbach Chev, the one that hung on the Pure Oil sign, and ripped it from the bracket and whipped it down Main Street like a guillotine. It sliced into the ground in front of the Unknown Norwegian and buried itself halfway in. When it came whistling down the street, Mr. Lundberg had just emerged from the Sidetrack Tap to make sure his windows were rolled up. The wind almost bowled him over, and then he heard a hum like a UFO and ran inside. It was the sign whizzing past so fast he only saw a blur, it could’ve cut someone in two. Such as him, for example. He is a hefty man and half of him would be almost as much as all of just about anyone else you could think of, but that sign would’ve done the job. It had not been a good week for him anyway, and then to get sliced in two on top of it—not a week you’d care to live through again.

  Tuesday night a chunk of plaster fell from the bedroom ceiling, crashing on the bureau dresser and waking him and Betty out of a sound sleep. It was a chunk they have noticed for two years—first its outline, shaped like the state of Illinois, then the shadows where it pulled away from the lath. The force of gravity being what it is, it was clear what would come next, and they both looked up and said, “Looks to me like that plaster’s coming off.” So when it finally fell on the bureau, there were recriminations on her part, after they got over the scare. They lay in the dark, little bits of plaster falling, and she said, “If you’da just done it when you said you were going to.” He knew better than to reply. She said, “I kept telling you to.”

  He lay, smelling the perfume on the bureau that got busted by the chunk. A dozen different perfumes, sickening, and when he opened the window, the wind blew all the perfumes directly at him. She said, “But oh no, you wouldn’t listen to me, would you. Oh no. You wouldn’t listen to me for one minute.”

  He lay and listened to her, remembering me awful nights out when she wore the perfume he bought her, such as the Sons of Knute Syttende Mai Ball, which he spent in a suit at least three sizes too small for him. He was too proud to have it let out, although it meant he couldn’t dance, couldn’t sit, had to stand, and when he dropped his wallet he had to kick it into a closet and close the door and ease himself down so he could pick it up, but when he eased back up, his pants split anyway, and then he could only stand in certain areas.

  She said, “Well, maybe you’ll listen to me the next time. I’m not wrong about everything, you know.”

  The perfumes were gifts from him, bought at K Mart in Saint Cloud for anniversaries and birthdays, in a panic at the last minute, him sneaking over to Notions while she was in Women’s Wear and asking the clerk to give him something nice. He should have known, looking at the clerk, that her taste wasn’t right on the mark. She looked like someone he played footb
all with, except she piled her hair up high on her head and sprayed it to stay, so when she gave him a bottle of Nuits de Oui, he might’ve guessed it wasn’t what Betty would wear. Smelling the perfumes made him think what a dope he was, and he couldn’t even fix a ceiling before it fell either.

  He lay in the dark thinking it over. Her last words were “And you can clean it up too.” At six-thirty he got up and made toast and coffee and brought it up to her in bed. To confuse her. Then he got the vacuum out. He picked up the big pieces and the broken bottles, vacuumed the plaster bits and dust on the floor and under the radiator and on the bureau, as she sat and drank her coffee, speechless. He swooshed around with the vacuum, a new Japanese-made model more powerful than what he was used to, and it sucked up some money off the bureau, including a few quarters that banged around in its bowels, and it almost swallowed a picture of Donny Lundberg. As he rescued Donny from the vacuum’s maw, it ate a tiny plastic bottle of superglue that clattered around inside it and then made a popping sound. He felt something wet on his bare foot. He wiped it off with his hand. Then it dawned on him that it was superglue. He said, “Oh for dumb,” and clapped his hand to his forehead.

  He was in that pose when Betty drove him to the hospital: The Thinker, hand to his forehead. He remained in serious thought until the nurse found the correct solvent and sat with a Q-tip and slowly pried his hand loose from his forehead and the bedspread from his foot. He had gotten so mad about putting his hand to his forehead, he kicked the bed with his sticky foot, and the spread came along attached to his ankle.

  The hand-forehead separation, the bedspreadectomy, were carried out with professional gravity befitting an open-heart operation. Betty drove him home without a word about anything except the rainy weather and things other than getting stuck to yourself, but still he had to go to work at the Co-op elevator with an angry red mark on his forehead and another on the heel of his palm. They said, “What happened to you?”