by Garrison Keillor "So I slow down and roll down my window and I says, 'Do you need a ride?' and he says, 'No, I'm running.' Well, I could see that. That's why I offered. So then I go on to Ralph's and head home and there he is again — running back the way he come. I know they do this but I can't see it: why would you run so hard to get to where you were in the first place?" "Beer an' a bump. And don't give me that Jim Beam. Last time I drank it, I got so damn sick I was afraid I'd die. And then I was afraid I wouldn't." "Wayne, you're so dumb, you deserve to be a Democrat." "Look at yourself, Oscar. You're drunk, you're personally repul- sive, and you believe in Reagan. What's left for you, Oscar? Next thing You'll be living in your car, eating bugs off the grille." "I don't have to take that from you, you —" "You! Wayne! Out!" "How come me? I didn't start it! Throw him out!" "He hasn't finished his beer." "Wally, those nuts are rotten. Lookit this!" "So get some other ones." "You eat a whole bag of nuts and you don't know they're rotten?" "Lookit this! Jeez!" "I read an article in the Minneapolis paper about rotten nuts. It affects your sex life. That's the truth." "There's a chestnut tree out there and he's getting them chestnuts and I know it and he knows I know it too. Damn Norskie's so damn stubborn: I followed him out there one day last fall and he drives around all damn afternoon rather than have me find out where the damn thing is. Cheap sonofabitch. I don;t know how some people can go to church on Sunday!" "I tell you, the price is so ridiculous — next year I'm putting in forty acres of zinnias. I'm sick of looking at corn. Long as I'm gonna go broke anyway, may as well have some fun doing it. Put in zinnias and sit out there in a lawn chair and read the paper." "Wally! This beer's flat, dammit. What you trying to do to me? I work all day and the old lady chews me out for coming down here and now you're trying to keep me sober?" A good night at the Sidetrack Tap: Mr. Berge has borrowed ten bucks from Senator K. and won two more at pinochle, and now he is up and dancing to Rusty Hintges's old song: "I can't wait to drive you home, Just call me Mr. Smith. Tonight it's time for love, And baby, you're the one I'm with." Rusty grew up near here and Mr. Berge once gave him bus fare to Nashville and years later got a box of 45s from him in payment, including this one, but it's not the memory of old Rusty that warms his heart, it's the fact that ten minutes ago two young women walked in and sat by him at the bar. Not so beautiful by day, perhaps, but in dim light they looked like movie stars. Mr. Berge, who doesn't draw much attention from women including his wife, is thrilled to pieces. One is Roxanne and the other Suzie. They're from St. Cloud. Just driving through. He insists on buying them beers, which guaran- tees him five minutes, and he starts out with a couple of Ole and Lena jokes, which they like okay, so he tells them a dirtier one, about Ole and Lena's wedding night. He gives the cigarettes. He offers to give them a ride home. "We got a car," says Suzie. "Well, I could give the other one a ride home then," he says. "You don't live together do you?" Actually, they do. "Well, maybe you could give me a ride, then, he says. Their attention is wandering. He offers to dance with one of them, but they don't want to dance. "I dance pretty good," he says, and gets up and dances. In his own mind, having had a few, he dances real good, but Merle laughs at him. "Hey, Berge, how's your wife and my kids?" The girls think this is pretty funny. He hitches up his pants and sits down. Merle has moved in at the other end, next to Suzie. "This is Merle," Mr. Berge announces, "Merle is my best buddy, ain't that right?" Merle snorts. "These ladies are from St. Cloud, now ain't that a deal, Merle? We don't get all that many of you up here. God, you're so pretty. Anybody tell you that before? You remind me of the Soderberg Sisters. Ever hear of them? God, they were pretty. Talented? Jeez, they had it all. Ja, they went right from here to the National Barn Dance. Did you know that? Huh?" The girls never heard of the National Barn Dance so they don't know what a great compliment it is to be compared to the Soderberg Sisters. "I used to know 'em both quite well," Mr. Berge plunges on, feeling his way. "I used to take 'em around to dances when I was a bartender at the Moonlite Bay supper club." Moonlite bay burned to the ground in 1954, but for Mr. Berge, it is still the ultimate in swank. Memories of the dance floor with spring suspension, Eddie Flores and His Saxophone Troubadors onstage behind little band desks, and forty booths with tablecloths and candles in glass bowls that reflected in the mirror on the back bar. O fabulous Moonlight Bay . . . but Merle leans forward and laughs at him. "You never bartended at Moonlight Bay!" he says. "I was in there a hundred times and I never saw your ass in there." "I never saw your ass in there! And I bartended there for three years! I was there when Tommy bartended! Jerry Heinrich! Mike Gutknecht! Ask anybody!" "You're such a big liar," says Merle, "you gotta get your neighbor to call your dog!" The girls think this s funny. Merle says to Suzie, "Where'd you find him? Out in the ditch?" Mr. Berge plays it cool, he doesn't want to scare them. He tries to stared Merle down. "What you so quiet about?" says Merle. "I figure if you know so much,maybe I'll learn something from you. Tell me some more, Merle. What else are you an expert in?" This works pretty good. Roxanne pats his hand and tells him not to get upset. She says to have fun. He tries to hold her hand but she needs it to light another cigarette. "Who gives a shit if you bartended at the Moonlight Bay or not?" says Merle. "I know I don't. Do you?" he asks the girls. Roxanne turns to Mr. Berge. "Was that near here?" she says. He tells her a little about Moonlite Bay. The tables, the candles, the long bar, the band — "It was the most gorgeous place you ever seen," he says, but then he thinks that maybe, being from St. Cloud, she's seen a lot of clubs like that, so he mentions that John Dillinger once hung out there. A good story. It works! She says, "I saw a movie about Dillinger with Warren Oates, I think." (Who's Warren Oates? Is he her boyfriend?) Mr. Berge goes with Dillinger. "Ja," he says, keeping an eye on Merle who is trying to distract Suzie, "Dillinger and his gang come up from Chicago for a rest. They figured nobody up here knew him. But we knew. Ha! We spotted him the minute he walked in." "I was pretty young at the time. Just a kid." He mentions this so Dillinger won't date him. "He was a decent guy. He bought a beer and left a dollar tip. One of the other bartenders was going to call the sheriff but I says to him, I says, 'Hey, he didn't do anything to you. Leave him be.' That's my philosophy. Nobody gives me trouble, I don't give them trouble. I remember he sat at this table facing the door and he unbuttoned his jacket and I seen he had a bulge in his pants." Merle thinks that's the funniest thing he ever heard in his life. He repeats it three times. He laughs his head off; he pounds on the bar. "I meant his gun, dammit!" Roxanne pats his head again and tells him not to get angry. "Let's just have fun," she says. This time he holds her hand. She says he's sweet. He leans forward and kisses her on the cheek. She laughs and says his whiskers tickle. He kisses her again. She turns and says to Suzie, "Well? What do you say?" His heart is pounding, he is so much in love. His hands tremble. He excuses himself to go to the bathroom. There, he takes a leak and then, seeing his poor old self in the mirror, he washes his hands and his face. He spits out his tobacco and rinses his mouth. He doesn't have a comb on him, but he wets down his hair and does the best he can with his hands. When he comes out, they're gone. He runs outside. A car's taillights are way down Main Street, they flare up as it bakes and turns onto the country road. He looks that way a long time, thinking they might turn around and come back. Inside, Merle takes one look at him and says, "What happened to you? You fall in?" "Where did they go?" "Back to St. Cloud. They had to get to work in the morning." "Oh? Where do they work?" If he knew that, he could give them a call. "I didn't ask." Merle pays up with Wally, and while he's waiting for change, Mr. Berge wants to ask him more about the girls, like what kind of car was it? Did he get their last names? Where in St. Cloud do they live? What type of work do they do? But of course Merle wouldn't tell him even if he did know which he probably doesn't, and why give Merle one more laugh tonight. — Time to go home and see the Mrs. — But first, a whiskey for the road. Tasting the whiskey, he feels as bad as he's felt all day. They were so beautiful. Why wouldn't they dance? All he wanted was to have some fun. Couldn't he have some fun too? But then as he thinks about it, he starts to feel better. If they came in once, they'll come in again. Maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, but sometime. When they do, he'll be watching for them. He's going to wear a clean shirt tomorrow and get his hair cut. He's going to bring a gift he can give them if they come back. Too bad it's September and the roses are dead. But tomorrow afternoon, he'll cut two African violets from Mrs. Berge's plant and come down to the Sidetrack early. A big storm blew in on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, that nobody saw coming, not even Bud who knows weather like my father knows the Great Northern and calls the storms as they roll in from the Coast. This one caught Bud leaning toward autumn. Freezing rain fell in the morning, turning to heavy snow, and by suppertime we had thirteen inches on the ground and more coming, falling sideways in front of a stiff west wind, and you couldn't see the house across the street. Wally closed the Sidetrack at five o'clock. It's illegal to sell alcohol in town when you can't see across the street, and when Clarence closed up Bunsen Motors across the street and turned off the blue Ford Motor sign, Wally couldn't see anything over there, so he called it a day even though Mr. Berge had Mr. Lundberg on the run at cribbage and was closing in for the kill and was furious, of course. He yanked his overcoat off the hook and jammed his arms into it and glared out the window at the snow, waiting for a good sharp remark to come to mind. "Well," he says, "I think I'll go home." Clarence walked five blocks home which he had been doing for a few weeks since he read an article about the heart, which his daughter Barbara Ann sent him along with a picture of a bicycle clipped from the Sears catalog. She and her husband were due for Thanksgiving dinner, and from the looks of things, they wouldn't make it. Nuts! Clarence liked it when she lectured him about his health, which she did now with every visit — "Daddy," she said in that sweet tone that led right into the legumes. Legumes, garlic, hard breathing, whole grain cereals, and no cigars and no red meat, plus whatever she had read about recently, maybe the benefit of eating raw cotton or the dangers of chewing on lead pencils. He argued with her only to stimulate further discussion. "Your grandfather lived to be eighty-four and he lived on cigar butts, fried chicken skin, and as much Rock 'n Rye whiskey as he could sneak downstairs for without arous- ing Grandma's suspicions. He kept the bottle in the cellar in his tool chest. The last three years, after he went blind, it was pretty hard for him to explain why he needed a hammer and nails." Daddy. He had been looking forward to her Thanksgiving health homily (maybe a tip on eating raw yams or some new data on cranberry sauce and how the pancreas feels about it). She made him feel like a well- loved man. That she would think a small-town Ford dealer could become Mahatma Gandhi. To most people, Clarence was Clarence, always would be. When he thought of her great faith that he might switch to grass and berries and grow young and run marathons, her fond hope of his longevity, he was moved to tears. As he was by her improbable gifts: walking shorts, kim chee, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. As he was by Arlene's choice of lilac wallpaper for their bed- room: amazing women. His daughter Donna sent him Whitman's Chocolate Cherries and thought lilac was ridiculous. Over his old brown overcoat, like a shawl, Clarence wore a red wool serape that had hung in his office closet since he wore it to work in a blizzard the March before. It was a gift from Don Eduardo, Eddie Bunsen, his cousin, a postal supervisor at the Minneapolis post office until he retired to a village in the mountains of Michoacan. Clarence sent him a Christmas card every year. Feliz Navidad. Don Eduardo and Donna Marie live in a two-room hut overgrown with flowering man- zanita, the Airstream they took to Mexico now serving as a chicken coop. He sent Clarence pictures of beautiful brown people, fabulous landscapes that breathed flowers and rain, and the red serape — when Clarence wore it, he felt like he was back in the Thespian Club as the generale in "A Message for Garcia." He thought of those brown faces with high cheekbones and grave handsome expressions, people at rest before the camera, with nothing to fear at all. That was their hand- someness — courage. Calm courage. Not having to impress anybody. Peace. Beating his way home, the serape to cover his face, he could smell the animal whose hair this was and his own stale cigar breath. He thought, I got to quit smoking, I'm losing my sense of smell, usually I only smell myself. The snow smelled clean, but like a hospital. For the third or fourth time that day, he thought, I am dying. The thought came to hm, struggling home: you don't have to be very smart to be an adult. Most people are working on half-throttle. Take this storm, for example. Depressing to see autumn snap shut — what a fine November, then suddenly the fuse blows and she's all over, no warning. But to see Wally in the front door saying, "I just wonder if and eat lunch the kids are going to make it up from the Cities tonight" — no, not if they have a brain in their head, they're not going to try to make it anywhere. a foot of snow with a good wind behind it can make you a person in a news story if you're not careful. Couldn't he see? This was a blizzard. And the phone lines to the Cities were busy all evening. He tried twice and Elizabeth at the exchange said, "I got you on the list, Clarence, I'll ring you. You're still tenth." "What's taking them so long?" "Oh, you know." People at this end were calling the people at that end, and the other end didn't know any more than they did — he tried a third time, and their was Art Diener on the party line with his son-in-aw in St. Paul, saying, "How does it look down there?" "Looks pretty bad." "So what do you think?" "Hard to say." "I guess we'll have to wait and see." "I think that's all we can do." "Well, let us know." "Okay." It's in critical situations such as this that the telephone is supposed to be such an advance in communications, but what's there to say? "What's it doing down there?" "Snowing." "Yeah, same here." "You'd think these people weren't from here!" Clarence said to Arlene. "You'd think they never saw winter before!" Hjalmar and Virginia Ingqvist's oldest, Mrs. Keith (Christine) St. Clair, called them from Los Angeles at noon (ten a.m., P.S.T.) to say, "I can't believe it! I'm so excited! We'll be there in just a few hours! I can't wait! No, there's nothing wrong. Why? No, I just called to say hi. God-bye," and then she and her orthodontist husband and the three children flew to Minnesota in three hours. Amazing. You leave California, have two glasses of champagne and eat lunch, and the next thing you know you're back in the old North Star State. Except they weren't. They were in Sioux Falls, S.D. Traffic at Minneapolis-St. Paul was backed up with only one runway open. A few hours later, they were still in Sioux Falls, on their sixth cup of vending-machine coffee apiece, and the children were sick of Space Invaders and were draped on their parents and aiming sharp kicks at each other. A few hours after that, they were in Minnesota (though, from the look of the airline terminal, it could've been anywhere in America), and a few hours after that they left the airport on a bus heading for downtown Minneapolis. An hour later, they were almost downtown. Up in the air it was the twentieth century but in the blizzard on the ground it was the Middle Ages. Peasants trudged along the road, their heads down, or struggling to free their oxcarts from the mire, lacking only oxen to do it. Their sheer bulk in the heavy clothing made the people look like beasts. A bearded man got on the bus. He was immense. His feet were like clubfeet in two moon boots, and his giant leather paws hung at his sides. In the dimness, his fur cap appeared to be his own matted hair, on a head shaped like a gorilla's. His breath and spit were frozen on his hairy face. He smelled of wet fur. Christine turned away. He looked as if he had emerged from a cave where he had spent the Ages since bronze eating half-cooked mastodon and grunting to his women. Christine was cold. She wore a thin London Fog raincoat over her pink shirt and blue jeans. Her feet were wet, in brown loafers. "Put your arm around me," she told Keith. He grunted and put his arm around her. "If I had known it was going to be like this —" she said. In 1887, her great-grandfather Sveeggen, a boy of twelve, was lost in a blizzard between the barn and the house where he;'d gone to do chores. His family had gone to town; he was the oldest of six children. He looked out the barn door into the wind and was sure he saw a ghostly mass of house and black roof ahead so he plunged into the blizzard and was blinded by white light and everything disappeared, house and barn behind him — he counted twenty, thirty, forty, fifty steps, trying to walk straight into the wind, then turned left, took thirty steps. Then right. And turned back, and knew he was lost and would die — and then the house caught fire. He saw the dull orange glow and walked toward it and stood by the back steps as flames shot out the roof and it all collapsed — he was cold on one side, burning hot on the other — and got his bearings straight and ran into the blizzard and ran smack into the side of the barn, where he spent the night, lying next to the cow, Tina, holding his broken nose. It was the great experience of his life, which he never forgot. "Hvor er Gud Fader mild, vi alle var fordervet i synd." ("How kind is God the Father, we were all lost in sin." Having lost his life, he entered the new one with a sweet disposition. He planted trees, raised cattle, married, and had seven children, and seldom spoke a harsh word. His nose was never set. He pitched ten tons of hay the day he was married; in their wedding picture, he sits, smiling, his eyes bright beside his ruined beak, a man who took a hard wallop and now everything is easy for him. To Dede, washing pots and pans in the back of the Chatterbox, the snow came as quite a thrill. It had been so long since she had sen snow, she had almost forgotten about it. Tiny white crystalline flakes falling through the air, billions of them, which when you take some in your hand and study them, no two are the same. You can't study them long because they melt in your hand, but no two are the same, that's what they say. But who said this? Who would do a study of billions of snowflakes to prove no repetition? She scraped at the crusted noodles on the bottom of the big aluminum bake pan and looked out the little window fogged with grease at the faint white yard. One more year that Merle wouldn't get that '52 Chevy pickup running. Too late now. It would be a deadster through April when he'd talk about it again. When the Chevy was newer, they went to movies in it at the Cloud-Nine drive-in near St. Cloud and necked in a halfhearted way. Merle didn't seem to understand that a man is supposed to lead the way, not sit there and wit for lightning to strike. A man should be passionate, make mistakes if he has to, get out of line. She could keep him in line but he never got out. He parked the pickup behind the Cafe when they were still going together. It needed a new carburetor, which somehow he never got around to. "That's a good old truck, she's got a lot of miles left in her," he had been saying for six years now. Meanwhile, he married a skinny girl with bad skin from Bowlus, whose name Dede couldn't remember, and had two kids. Dede guessed that What's-her- name didn't cook, judging by how often they ate out, about four times a week, and the kids ate like pigs and ran around with snot running down their faces. No two people are exactly alike, was what her mother said, but Merle and his family seemed common as dirt to her. They lived in a trailer by his dad's chickenhouse, surrounded by trash and filth. It took a good snowfall to make that place look decent. Bud was the only customer. He had been out with the plow, but there wasn't much he could do. The state plows weren't out yet, he said. So he sat and drank coffee. "She's going t be a hard winter," he said to Dorothy. "You can tell by watching the squirrels. The way they walk around hunched over. They know. They;'re thinking about it." "You say that every year. I'd like to know what an easy winter is. I don't believe I've been in one." Well, your winter of '35 was a mild winter. Or was it '38? One of the two. School never closed and I don't believe we got more than forty inches of snow." Forty inches is above my bosom, Dede thought. "It was nothing like '51 or '65. Whew! Sixty-five." Dorothy swabbed the deck and tried to recall 1965. "Remember the water main froze?" Bud laughed at this grim mem- ory; he had to put his coffee down. He wiped his eyes. The main froze solid, cutting off water to the north side of town. It was Saturday evening. People who were taking baths didn't notice it but the showers started running boiling hot, and people had to jump out. He wished he'd been there to see it. Soap all over them. Yelling. Thinking some- one had flushed a toilet. People take water for granted. It comes out of a tap like some God-given right. Some of them had to get dressed, covered with dry soap, and drive to their mother's on the south side to rinse off. That was the night they appreciated old Bud for once. It was thirty-five below, he had to jump-start the backhoe. He knew right where the trouble was, it was exactly where he had told them for years it would be if they didn't spend the money to re-lay the line, and that's where she was all right. It took him three hours to uncover the pipe, the ground was so hard. Men standing around the hole with flashlights, utterly useless. The sort of help who watch you do it and then when the pipe appears, they all yell, "I think you got it, Bud!" Thirty feet of pipe he uncovered and laid hot coals on, and then it was two in the morning and hardly a soul around. Gone to bed so they could get up for church. Oh yeah. Go to church. Real good. But they hadn't called Father Emil or Pastor Ingqvist when the water went out, now did they? No sir. Church is a comfort, all right, but your water and your sewer, those are necessities. And roads. People can skip church, but they do not skip water and sewer. When it really comes down to it, it comes down to plumbing. And plowing in the winter. But you got a bunch of windbags on the town council who don't know pipe from a hole in the ground, want to spend money on a library but think water and sewer is some sort of natural fact, like a river, what can you do? This museum of antiques they call a system, you just do what you can and hope for the best. And you hope that when the thing falls apart the members of the town council are sitting on their toilets reading books from the library. Man in the can reading Giants in the Earth. Goes to flush, no water. Goes and gets water, pours it in, but the pipe is clogged, and his mess runs out all over the floor. Right then is when he finds out something. The he wakes up finally. The council's annual debate on snowplowing and the use of street salt came in October. Item 3, Line 2, Additional Expenditures; Salt: $287.38. The War of the Roses. Ladies of the Garden Club were present as were some gentlemen who own ancient cars, to cry out against salting the streets to melt the ice. Salt eats car bodies, it kills grass and flowers. Salt the streets, then it snows again, Bud plows, and the blade throws the salt on your lawn, and your roses gasp and shudder in their deep sleep and give up the ghost. Ladies speak against the salt holo- caust, and the Florian stands up and says a few words about his '66 Chevy. Forty-two thousand miles on her — he has two doormats glued to his garage floor where, when the car is parked, they're in place to wipe your feet on before you climb in — she's like new all over, not a spot of rust. Salt will destroy this car as surely as if you took a hammer to it. Ella Anderson speaks up for tulips. Then Mrs. Langen in behalf of the cemetery, where the dead rest in their pleasant garden, attended by lovely plants which speak to us of the promise of resurrection and eternal life. Salt will turn the cemetery into a dump. When this hap- pens, she thinks she will move elsewhere. There is no need for salt, it is simply a lazy man's scheme for getting out of snowplowing — and all eyes turn to Bud, the czar of salt, and once again Line 2 is defeated on a voice vote. This year, Bud didn't go. Eloise wouldn't let him. His blood pres- sure has been up, and the doctor took him off salt last spring, and she was afraid the annual salt talk would make blood come out his eyeballs. Bud has said his piece on salt many times and it's like talking to a stone wall. Plowing cannot remove ice. Sand can't do the job alone. You need salt. Otherwise, you come to January and old people are trapped at home as surely as if you nailed the doors shut, sidewalks are deadly, streets are sheer suicide, and he (Bud) just hopes that when someone goes sailing off an icy road into a tree, that it is someone from the Garden Club and that, in the last moment before her body is hurled through the broken windshield like meat into a grinder, she thinks about the importance of road maintenance. Mayor Clint Bunsen sat through an hour of argument, trying to keep it from veering off into greener pastures. "I'm opposed to salt, too," said old Mr. Diener, "but I don't think it's the greatest danger we face here — which is (and I think everyone knows it): what is going on now in our schools. The other day —" and Clint no sooner put out that fire when Mrs. Langen got going on the need for a War Memorial. She knew for a fact that the Army was giving away old artillery pieces for use as monuments, and why the council couldn't get one, she had no idea — Salt was too mundane for these philosophers, they wanted to get at the big issues. "Excuse me," he kept saying, "but the motion on the floor right now is to spend money on salt." He thought about the legislature in St. Paul. People have told him he should run. Senators sit in big armchairs sat mahogany desks and bat around millions of dollars. The councilmen sit on folding chairs be- hind a folding table and listen to endless discussion of $287.38. Mr. Diener suggests that the salt money could be donated for cancer re- search instead; this terrible disease rages through the land, killing young and old alike including some dear friends of his whom he recalls with tears in his eyes, and though $287.38 may not seem like much, he quotes a poem ("For want of a nail, the shoe was lost") to show that little things may be crucial. They voted 4-1 against salt, Clint being the one in favor. Council- man Diener, nephew of Mr. Diener, moved that in the interest of avoiding bitterness and rancor they make the vote unanimous. They voted 3-1 for unanimity, Councilman Bauser abstaining.* *A memorable council meeting was that of 5/26/62 to discuss a motion to hold a special election to vote on a bond issue to repair sidewalks and install new streetlights. It was the late Leo Mueller who suggested that with a little more inner light ("Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet"), fewer people would need assistance walking home. He hinted that it was Lutherans who were walking into trees. It was the late Mr. Osterberg who said, "Men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil. John 3:19," and "Let the lower lights be burning, cast a gleam across the wave," and, in defense of sidewalk repair, "Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his path straight." "Wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction," said Leo's fiend, Mr. Luger, pointing out that our earthly path- way is not meant to be easy. Hjalmar Ingqvist, then the mayor, asked the speakers to please limit themselves to pertinent argument and be brief, and they all turned on him. Louie reminded him of Christ's admonition in the Sermon on the Mount, "When they bring you unto magistrates and powers, take ye no thought how or what thing ye shall answer, or what ye shall say. For the Holy Ghost shall teach you in the same hour what ye ought to say." What seemed "pertinent" to Hjalmar was not necessarily pertinent to the Holy Ghost who was leading them, and should one be brief where truth was at stake? The discussion began to range widely in the field of personal morals. At ten o'clock, Hjalmar banged his gavel, said he was tired, and moved for an adjournment, but all he got was an uproar. How could he think of sleep at a time like this? Now was the time for wakefulness. People cited the watchman who slept, the sleeping apostles, the parable of the wheat and the tares, until Hjalmar said, "I'm going home to bed. Turn out the lights before you leave.," He didn't run for reelection. "Politics brings you into contact with all the people you'd give anything to avoid," he said. "I'm staying home."
from Lake Wobegon Days
© Garrison Keillor, 1985
First published in 1985 by Viking Penguin Inc.
hardcover, pp.199 - 212
Submitted May 02, 2019 at 04:11AM by MarleyEngvall http://bit.ly/2UW6Wyw
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