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Keillor writes: "My father, John, would've been 106 years old on Columbus Day and though Columbus has been taken down a few notches, my dad is still on a pedestal."

Garrison Keillor. (photo: MPR)
Garrison Keillor. (photo: MPR)


The Days Pass, and Now and Then One Stands Out

By Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website

18 October 19

 

y father, John, would’ve been 106 years old on Columbus Day and though Columbus has been taken down a few notches, my dad is still on a pedestal. He left us at the age of 88. He’d been through some miserable medical procedures and said, “No more,” and went home to his eternal destination.

He was a handsome farmboy, and fell in love with my mother, a city girl. They met at a Fourth of July picnic and were both smitten but it was the Depression and they had no money and years passed and one day he wrote her a long letter. I knew him as a taciturn man who never told stories or talked about himself but he was in love and wanted her to know it. So he described how, two days before, he’d driven a double team of horses to spread manure on a field and on the way home the hitch of the manure spreader clipped a horse in its hind legs and it reared up and the four horses bolted in panic and young John hauled back on the reins but couldn’t stop them. He braced himself and held on for dear life as the team galloped home and turned sharply in toward the farmyard, overturning the manure spreader, as John leaped and landed on the wreckage, suffering contusions, abrasions, lacerations, but his neck was unbroken. He wrote this in a simple narrative style, excellent penmanship, and then noted that he would be driving to town with his sister Josephine to help her select a bedroom set and that he hoped that he and my mother would soon buy one for themselves. A narrow escape from death, followed by erotic intimations.

I felt closest to him when I was 11 and accompanied him on a trip to New York. He’d spent the war years in Manhattan, sorting mail in the Army Post Office, in the building with the saying about “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night” on the façade, and he wanted to go back and see the city again. It was the first time I realized that not all soldiers were heroes; some of them had had a wonderful time in the war, had gone to shows and were treated as heroes.

We drove out from Minnesota, he and I, and walked around midtown Manhattan, and he took my hand. Big flashing billboards high above and all around us, theater marquees, crowds of people, but what I remember is my own pleasure that he took my hand. He didn’t want to lose me in the crush. We walked down into Grand Central Station and took the subway to Brooklyn and now when I walk into the station, I think of my dad. It was hot that night, no air conditioning, his friends in Brooklyn whom we stayed with were making passionate sounds from their bedroom. I’d never heard moaning like that and asked him if they were okay. “Yes,” he said. We slept on a fire-escape landing, to give the lovers their privacy.

A few months after crashing the manure spreader, young John borrowed his brother’s Model A and drove to Minneapolis to see his sweetheart. A few months later, she discovered she was pregnant. Her father demanded to see a marriage license; they didn’t have one. But they were in love for the rest of their lives, and after my mother died at 97, we found the marriage license: January 1937, five months before my brother was born. Now we understood why they didn’t celebrate their anniversary.

I’m sure the scandal made them more forgiving. My dad was a skilled carpenter, auto mechanic, and gardener, and I wrote fiction, which he found embarrassing, but he avoided comment.

As he lay dying, I brought my three-year-old daughter to visit him. She stood at his bedside, poking his foot as it moved under the blanket, and this got his interest. He wriggled his toes. She tried to grab them. He wriggled, she giggled. She tossed a ball to him, and he threw it back. She was delighted and the dying man was amused. The hospice handbook tells you how to make peace with the dying person but my father never went in for big declarations, except for that letter he wrote. I had disappointed him badly but the little girl was my peace offering. She kissed his hand. Had I kissed it, he would’ve had a coronary. I bless his memory.

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