A couple of weeks ago, I returned from a more complete tour of Mee-neh-soh-tah than I ever expected to undertake. And still, I'm not done. I have unrealized dreams for this intensely American, Northern, reluctant and quiet state.
I want to spend more time at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, of course, which is not only a blinding bright light in its field, but darn nice and eager to embrace the ignorant new student, you betcha -- unlike some of the similar institutions on the left and right coasts that are so eager to remind you that you are ignorant and new. I may never be a native (that takes generations) but I am included in that hospitable embrace.
"Minnesota is a place where if you ask the audience to sing with you, they will. They've been brought up to. In the key of G. Singing a song brings us together -- we are a union."--Garrison Keillior
I also have been flattered by the kindness and respect of some local folks who told me (no doubt to make me feel special, a Minnesota talent) that I should return to talk about, or teach a class, on book arts, or paper arts, or whatever it is I do. I have no expectation that these blandishments will materialize, but it is a dream to do someday, somewhere. Until a few years ago, an unrealized dream I never expected to achieve was to sell something I made with my own hands. I've done that. Another was to win a prize for same, and I've done that, too. So maybe someday, I can try to share my excitement and bottomless fascination for the secrets and participation possible with the book form, broadly defined. It might happen. I'd like it to happen first in Minnesota, which is, oddly, counterintuitively, open to the arts and the strange creative urges of the restless.
"Lake Wobegon was founded by missionaries trying to convert the Ojibwa Indians by the art of interpretive dance." -- Garrison Keillor
In California, when I was barely 13, through the active conspiracy of grown-ups who knew one or both of us, I was introduced to My First True Love, a 14-year old boy named Joel. It shouldn't have happened, in the normal course of things. It was highly manipulated, this meeting. But despite the artificial machinations, they were right. We were both intensely geeky, four-eyed, bookworms, never been kissed, smarter than the average bear and socially retarded. Our first conversation was about Ray Bradbury, and moved on to Kurt Vonnegut. We were hopelessly in love just about right away. I don't know whether it was simple psychological imprinting, like the little ducks that follow the first thing they see after hatching, or a true intervention of the goddess Venus, but it has lasted all our lives. Sure, as kids we drifted apart after a year or so. We were geographically distant and reliant on the driving of parents to get together. I think it just became too difficult. We touched base a few times over the next ten years, sometimes meaningfully. By age 22 or so, we separated for many years. But in my brain, as well as his, my icon of love has always worn his face, and his, mine. Mostly on the back burner. In the deep subconscious. This year, for the first time in all those years, we have come together again as free adults. It is huge, it is healing, and I am deeply grateful for this moment.
"The age I am now, I'm not that interested in the adult stuff. I want to go back to ... that loose dreamy feeling you had when you were 12 or 13 years old. We saw the real clear truth when we were children and we spend the rest of our lives trying to remember what we saw." -- Garrison Keillor
So a few weeks ago, I spent a week in Minnesota with Joel. We went from the Minneapolis airport to the far upper right corner of the state, the North Shore. It held unearthly beauty, misty, moon-filled, lapping lake waves a counterpoint to the fireplace in the room, to our tentative blood-deep familiarity with one another. Then a long drive to the far lower left corner to Joel's farm, green, intensely fertile, full of chickens and a cow and two dogs, two cats, five kittens and eight or nine hens. And one man's vision of a life, with his past peeking around all the corners. And mine.
Another reason to go back: I'm told that the world's largest ball of twine resides somewhere in Minnesota. My life will be without meaning if I miss that. http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/2128
"We live in our own time, and we also live in the past. That's the only healthy way to live. We get to the past by singing old songs. Then we go home .. as we drive over the hills to the grain elevator ... was that all real? What we think happened in the past?" -- Garrison Keillor
Up until about six years ago, I never thought I'd go to Minnesota. Why go? I was a hot city chick, either LA or San Francisco, slick and cool, and felt like I'd seen America through a single trip in a camper in the '70s with my dad and stepmom when I was 16. That was enough. We drove from LA to Kansas City, Missouri and then on to Kenosha, Wisconsin to visit their respective families of origin. It was not quite a trip to Mars, but close. I needed to decompress afterward with the realization that I had relations living such an alien life.
(Fortunately, for a kid of showbiz parents, we wrapped up the trip in Las Vegas, where Goldie Hawn's first and then husband, Gus Trikonis, a member of my dad's posse, was directing Goldie in her Hilton headliner show. We spent the night in the Hilton penthouse, former Elvis headquarters, phones in all six bathrooms,. With Goldie, we watched her new dachshund puppy chase the crickets. Little known fact: That uber-headliner residence is incurably riddled with chirpy insects because the huge neon lights just below the penthouse lure these poor deluded bugs from all over Nevada, no matter how stellar the human residents. It was the kind of bizarre environment that made total sense to me at 16, much more than Kenosha or Lake Wobegon.)
"I moved back to Minnesota from New York when my wife and I had a little girl and decided she deserved to be brought up in Minnesota." -- Garrison Keillor
In the intervening years, while I married, moved to San Francisco, divorced, practiced law and remarried, my First True Love had several children in California, when I wasn't looking. His mother's home state was Minnesota. A while after his mother moved back, he decided to do the same, admiring the small-town values that he thought could benefit his kids. So in the mid-80's, he bought a farm in the southwestern corner of the state and went on to raise those kids, endure hard winters and worse betrayals, periods of short days and great darkness, beautiful fertile summers, final insults and a divorce, a personal rediscovery and a remarriage. Joel continued his journey as an artist, a teacher, a four-eyed geek, but always stayed true to the kids and always to the soil of his farm, the rocks, the weeds, the karst underlying the corn.
In the early '80's, my mother found this crazy little radio show, and shared it with me. We've been listening ever since, off and on, to this big four-eyed geek, Garrison Keillor, as he told us about his home town, about bachelor Norwegian farmers, the joys of rhubarb pie, and a land where all the children are above average. It might as well have been Oz, to me, but it sounded, faintly, like home, the soft round home you see in Grant Wood landscapes, or the tempera on the refrigerator, with lollipop trees and the spiral of smoke from the chimney under the smiley-face sun we all drew in kindergarten, even those of us who grew up with palm trees and electric fireplaces.
Keillor is parodied and belittled and a tourist attraction for the Twin Cities, but he is a unique American artist. Somehow he took the Southern Gothic tradition, of Faulkner or O'Connor, of total sense of place (in a more flamboyant culture) and did the same thing with the quiet private spaces of Northern Middle America. And on radio, yet! I admire him enormously. About 10 years ago he wrote an article about poetry (and he is not a poet) that was enormously insightful about the 98% crap that is modern poetry and what sets the other 2% apart. Because of this I knew what poetry of mine was good and why what I try to write now is crap. I'm grateful I can make that distinction instead of having the painful experience of having it pointed out to me.
"It's not a great moment when you turn 65, let me tell you, it's like walking into a brick wall. You're faced with regrets for all the things you wish you could have done differently ... and then you see your child and realize you can't possibly regret anything in the great chain of events that brought you here." -- Garrison Keillor
In San Francisco, slick, hip and cool, and suddenly middle-aged, in 2003, I was at a dead end in my life. A few months before, I had talked to one of the adults that had brought me together with My First True Love. I asked her about Joel, it had been over 20 years and I was still intensely curious. She was dismissive -- he'd moved to Minnesota and become a farmer, and she, an interesting 83-year old, couldn't care less. For some reason, I was furious with her. I burned, resenting her attitude, for days. On a foggy afternoon, I Googled his name and found him. He wasn't "just" a farmer, he was a college professor of art. I sent an email: do you remember? The response was immediate. The message line said: "Wow." The reconnection was as innocent, as dumbfounding, as our original selves.
My beloved cousin-sister Ginny gave this interesting metaphor for the next few years. "It's like the first time you see a turtleneck sweater, you first put your head through this sleeve and that, you put it on inside out, you find all the ways it doesn't fit. And then it does."
Whatever else we did wrong, we knew that there was a fragile but deep and lifelong bond. We didn't know where to put it, how to act on it, what mold it fit in, and ultimately decided there was no roadmap or mold. It was what it was. In 2007, I went to the wilds of Minnesota for the first time. I enjoyed a book arts tutorial at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, and a few days with Joel and his wife, Ruth, downstate on the farm. I loved him, loved her, loved the beautiful and terrifying and unforgiving landscape that in May is a Sunday-school vision of heaven. We stayed close by email and the ether and occasional visits back and forth. Through horrible times for us both, and ultimately, a superlatively awful time for him when in the course of 8 months he lost to death both his youngest son and Ruth, his generous, brilliant, deep-down decent partner and wife. We had nothing to give each other but kindness.
"Their hearts went out to the lonely, to the grieving. They did not let their shyness stand in the way of kindness and charity, because that was how they were raised. Kindness is a constant presence in America. In the same spirit I walk around St. Paul and think... this a great country, and it wasn't made by angry people. I love this country and that's the kind of dumb discovery you make when you're older." -- Garrison Keillor
So I went to Minnesota, to be with Joel to explore what it was like to be with the lifelong icon of love, free and adult, a novelty for us. It was perfectly imperfect. The bond is there. It can't be more than it is but it will never be less. We have tentative plans for him to return to California in August, which will be the 40th anniversary of our first meeting, on the very same California beachside soil. A bit of Minnesota will follow with him, though, a bit of San Francisco with me, our whole separate history will of course be present.
I hope to go back to Minnesota again, too. Maybe there will be a cover story through book arts, teaching or learning, but it will be about Joel. Still, there is another dream. I hope to time it so that we can spend a night in Mee-nee-ap-oh-lis and we can catch Prairie Home Companion in person. During all those years apart I feel I was preparing, all unaware, for my visits to Minnesota through Keillor's voice, his messages from another planet. I had no idea I would ever have a Minnesota link.
I'm going through a periodic affair of the heart with Garrison Keillor, it happens semi-annually. Actually, when I hear Joel talk, his pauses, his thoughtfulness in what he says, I hear Keillor. Or vice versa. And now I have a tiny sense of home when I hear about Lake Wobegon. Who knew. It's wonderful and karmic and totally in keeping with the weird and wonderful reconnection and the circle of life.
Actually, I just love old geeks.
"I was afraid of living an ordinary life and I realize that's what we all get. We all live an ordinary life and it's good enough." -- Garrison Keillor
As we say in Lake Wobegon, it could have been worse.
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