A Letter From Copenhagen, Part 1

Garrison Keillor is an institution here in my home state of Minnesota. He is, of course, the host of the live weekly music, comedy, and variety radio show A Prairie Home Companion, which has been running in various incarnations now for 35 years on public radio here in the United States. His voice is as famous as he himself is, a breathy baritone that Keillor himself once described as being like "soggy milk-toast" and which can put one to sleep, though certainly not through boredom at what is being said. He also does The Writer's Almanac. He is a respected novelist and humorist, known for his creation of the fictional small prairie town of Lake Wobegon. Though he has written many novels, his acclaimed masterpiece remains the partially autobiographical Lake Wobegon Days, first published in 1985. Keillor is something akin to a Minnesotan version of Mark Twain or Will Rogers. He is at once both "homespun" and sophisticated (as is his beloved state :) Much of his work tries to lovingly poke fun at, while painting an accurate portrait of, quintessentially small town Minnesotan life. In my view he succeeds at this masterfully.

In 1987, Keillor published a "sequel" of sorts to Lake Wobegon Days, called Leaving Home. It is actually more like a loose collection of Lake Wobegon stories than an actual novel. My "Bleak House" poem of yesterday reminded me of one of my favorite pieces of Keillor's writing, a piece titled "A Letter From Copenhagen" which served as an author's introduction to the first edition of Leaving Home. A few weeks ago I was in a bookstore and picked up a new copy of Leaving Home and saw that "A Letter From Copenhagen" has been removed. It is no longer in the latest editions of the book. This is too bad, in my view, for I think it was Keillor at his best, and I can't imagine why the piece would have been removed....

I'm going to share one of my favorite passages from "A Letter From Copenhagen." Because it is long for the blog medium, I'll post it in two parts, with the second part tomorrow. The second part is actually a poem with which Keillor finishes off the piece. So now that you've read my introduction, settle in and feel this:

"When I was little I didn't think of grownups as having bare skin; grownups were made of wool clothing, only kids were bare naked; now I'm older than they were when I was little and I lie naked under a quilt made of their clothes when they were children. I don't know what makes me think I'm smarter than them.

Every time I read a book about how to be smarter, how not to be sad, how to raise children and be happy and grow old gracefully, I think "Well, I won't make those mistakes, I won't have to go through that," but we all have to go through that. Everything they went through, we'll go through. Life isn't a vicarious experience. You get it figured out and then one day life happens to you. You prepare yourself for grief and loss, arrange your ballast and then the wave swamps the boat.

Everything they went through: the loneliness, the sadness, the grief, and the tears--it will all come to us, just as it came to them when we were little and had to reach up to get hold of their hand, when we knew them by the shape of their legs. Aunt Marie had fat little legs, I held her hand one cold day after a blizzard, we climbed snowdrifts to get to the store and buy licorice whips. She said, "Come on, we can make it, don't slip," and soon she was far behind, a fat lady in a heavy coat with a fur collar, leaning into the wind, wheezing from emphysema, and sometime later she died. She knew that death was only a door to the kingdom where Jesus would welcome her, there would be no crying there, no suffering, but meanwhile she was fat, her heart hurt, and she lived alone with her ill-tempered little dogs, tottering around her dark little house full of Chinese figurines and old Sunday Tribunes. She complained about nobody loving her or wanting her or inviting her to their house for dinner anymore. She sat eating pork roast, mashed potato, creamed asparagus, one Sunday at our house when she said it. We were talking about a trip to the North Shore and suddenly she broke into tears and cried, "You don't care about me. You say you do but you don't. If I died tomorrow, I don't know as you'd even go to my funeral." I was six. I said, cheerfully, "I'd come to your funeral," looking at my fat aunt, her blue dress, her string of pearls, her red rouge, the powder on her nose, her mouth full of pork roast, her eyes full of tears.

Every tear she wept, that foolish woman, I will weep every one before I am done and so will you. We're not so smart we can figure out how to avoid pain, and we cannot walk away from the death we owe."