A Trip Back Home to Get My Bearings

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I was in St. Paul last week, walking around, remembering my glory days there, the basement studio where I did a morning DJ show, my first house on Goodrich Avenue across the street from Scott Fitzgerald’s house where he lived with Zelda and wrote “Winter Dreams,” the Fitzgerald Theater downtown where I did a show for years. When I stuck my head in the door last Wednesday and walked down to the stage I remembered how incredibly lucky I had been in that town.

A few blocks away, is the train depot where my dad rode the westbound North Coast Limited twice a week, in the mail car, a .38 pistol on his hip. My mother, in her late teens, lived in St. Paul and earned pocket money going door to door selling peanut butter cookies in brown lunchbags. I grew up and had no interest in football so went in the opposite direction and tried to be a writer. I wanted to write like Kafka though I’d never been persecuted so it didn’t work but when my wife got pregnant I needed to earn a living and landed a job in radio by virtue of being the only applicant — it was the 6 a.m. shift — and obviously my audience wasn’t looking for existential dread, especially not in winter, they needed King Oliver and the Golden Gate Quartet and the Red Clay Ramblers. I come from serious people but I needed to learn to do comedy, so I did. A person can learn these things: brevity, word choice, timing, a wild streak. And cheerfulness is good.

It’s the Midwest, a culture that places a high value on modesty and self-deprecation, avoids irony, follows the rules and gives rule-breakers a sidelong look, keeps complaint to a minimum, prizes loyalty, and is well-practiced at ignoring flamboyance and foolishness and pretense. But sanctimonious bullies thrive here, too. At the Tchaikovsky ballet, a woman comes onstage to remind us to turn our phones off and she says, “We wish to acknowledge that the land we are on was taken from the Dakotah people,” and we all bow our heads at this cheap piety. There are people devoting their lives to education, health care, justice, among impoverished people, and this simpleton enjoys a little glow from reading a line off an index card. She might as well say, “We acknowledge that the nondegradable plastics that come with our concession products are causing damage to the planet that our children will inherit.”

I come from people who grew vegetable gardens, worked on their own cars, avoided ostentation. Women sewed, men did plumbing and carpentry. My generation broke with that and I could no more fix a leaky toilet than I could read Proust in French. My parents drank black coffee from a can you opened with a little key and brewed in a percolator. My generation is capable of asking for Sumatran dark, rainforest, not farm grown, cold-brewed in a French press and dripped through an unbleached paper filter. With oat milk. But wild oats, not domesticated. Or mushroom milk, if you have it. And if the cup of coffee costs $18, so be it. I’ve seen this in coffee shops. As a result, I only drink black coffee and I will not drink it from cups with humorous sayings on them. Thus I honor my people.

I left Minnesota and now I live in New York City. My wife lived my life for twenty years and now it’s her turn and she loves the big city where she lived before she met me. I’m okay with New York, I enjoy being a nobody — it’s the Midwesterner in me. Being in New York only makes me more Minnesotan than when I lived in St. Paul where I made a pretense of sophistication, but in a New York restaurant, eating with New Yorkers, I admire their finesse with profanity, their sense of the tragic, the operatic complaints about the insults of ordinary life, the gossip, the brilliant insults of famous people they’ve encountered: I have nothing to offer, I’m a child at the grown-up table.

I’m an old man and keenly aware of deterioration, my own and others’, but I’m still working, and I go back to St. Paul and sit in the café where I ate the year I dropped out of college to be a newspaper reporter. College was wasted on me; work was what I wanted. It’s still true today. My wife is a walker, I’m a worker. Thank you, St. Paul. See you again soon.

Garrison Keillor © 07.15.24