The Book of Guys by Garrison Keillor

Author:Garrison Keillor [Keillor, Garrison]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781101644713
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 1994-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

GARY KEILLOR

hen I was sixteen years old, I stood six feet two inches tall and weighed a hundred and forty pounds. I was intense and had the metabolism of a wolverine. I ate two or three lunches a day and three full dinners at night, as my family sat around the kitchen table and observed, and I cleaned off their plates too when they had poor appetites or were finicky. There was no food I disliked except muskmelon, which smelled rotten and loathsome. Everything else I ate. (It was Minnesota so we didn’t have seafood, except fish sticks, of course.) I was a remarkable person. I was a junior in high school, Class of 1960. I was smart, so smart that poor grades didn’t bother me in the slightest; I considered them no reflection on my intelligence. I read four books a week, and I sometimes walked home from school, all twelve miles, so I could relive favorite chapters out loud, stride along the shoulder of the highway past the potato farms, and say brilliant and outrageous things, and sing in a big throbbing voice great songs like “Til There Was You” and “Love Me Tender.”

I had no wish to sing in front of an audience, songs were a private thing with me. I was an intense person, filled with powerful feelings, and I assumed that I would live alone for the rest of my life, perhaps in a monastery, silent, swishing around in a cassock, my heart broken by a tragic love affair with someone like Natalie Wood, my life dedicated to God.

I was a lucky boy. I had learned this two years before on a car trip to Colorado. My Uncle Earl and Aunt Myrna drove there that summer—he had been stationed in Colorado Springs during the war—along with my cousins Gordon and Mel, and I got to go too. I won that trip by dropping over to their house and being extremely nice. I’d say, “Here, let me wash those dishes.” I’d say, “Boy, I’m sure in a mood to mow a lawn.” And then she’d offer me a glass of nectar and a piece of angel food cake and I’d eat it and say, “Boy, I was looking at National Geographic the other night and they had a big article on Colorado. It was so interesting. Just the different rock formations and things. I don’t see how people can look at those mountains and not know there’s a God.” And she’d smile at me, a good boy who mowed lawns and whose faith was pure, and I got to go. Of course my brothers and sisters were fit to be tied. “How come he gets to go? We never get to go. Oh no, we have to stay here all summer and work in the garden while he goes riding out to Colorado.” They just didn’t get it. Trips to Colorado don’t fall in your lap. You’ve got to go out and earn Colorado.

We took off on the trip, and I was a very good passenger.

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