The Lake Wobegon Virus by Garrison Keillor

Author:Garrison Keillor
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781951627690
Publisher: Arcade
Published: 2020-08-27T16:00:00+00:00

9

TRUE STORIES

Alice wanted to suppress the cheese and Lenny was curious about the science and Ashley wanted to practice her therapy skills and the cheeseheads wanted a chance to exercise righteous anger, and meanwhile the Herald Star ignored the whole thing, not wanting to offend or annoy, and I decided that what my town needed was a good book. There is something awe-inspiring in the loss of inhibition. I keep wanting to lose mine and then I look over the edge and it scares me. I want to write in honor of my dead, my old aunts, old teachers like Fern and Bertha and Helen, classmates who are gone, Corinne and Leeds and Roger. I love my town, my fellow Christians who hold hands and pray over the hotdish, the teenagers striving for cool, the old men who sit in the Sidetrack and hope to live to be 90 and enjoy their whiskey and have all their marbles to the very end and die in bed, perhaps shot cleanly by a jealous husband. When one of them dies, the others raise their glasses and say, “That’s one less here, and one more there, and now there’s more fish for the rest of us.” And now they’re all gone. All the old men who looked at me with grave suspicion are gone. Nobody is left to warn us not to think we’re so smart. The only old men left are my classmates, and we’re all in the same boat, and it’s sinking.

The Wobegon I knew slipped away like a ship in the night. I missed Darlene at the counter of the Chatterbox. If you should mention Father Emil in passing or the Thanatopsis Society or the Sons of Knute, she knew what you were talking about, and that gave the conversation some breadth and depth. Darlene’s daughter Cathy, who took over waitressing, has no interest in history, only in her personal story, the slights she’s suffered, the unfairness of life, her victimization at the hands of enemies. I’m afraid she gets up in the morning with no gladness, no thanksgiving. Lord, have mercy.

I am not ashamed of creating fiction. I once (true story) was asked to give the elegy at my classmate Bert’s memorial service in Minneapolis in 2012. I said yes, though I didn’t know Bert, but neither did anyone else. He and Elise split up after 10 years, and she remarried and moved to Chicago with the kids and Bert stayed in Minneapolis, a cashier at Walmart. He kept to himself, came to one reunion and I asked him what he was up to and he said he was collecting bus transfers. He had transfers from all 50 states, Canada and Mexico, Puerto Rico, and 60 other countries, more than 6,000 slips of paper in all. The next Bus Collectors convention would be in Montreal and he planned to go. He hoped to sell his collection and invest the money in expanding his collection of 741 alarm clocks to 1,440 so he could have a 24-hour ring-off, an alarm sounding every minute for 24 hours.

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