from
Leaving Home
by
Garrison Keillor

Back in Minnesota where I come from, a good many people look on New York City as a sinkhole of degradation and squalor, so if you leave there and come here, they view the move as a moral collapse. They say, “Well, we always knew he was headed that way. [...] He didn’t have us fooled.” To Christians, on the other hand, it’s not so big a deal. What’s Minnesota to a Christian? The sun shines and the rain falls, and if you move to New York, it’s no more than a blackbird flying up from the alfalfa and into the tall corn. Christians take a long view.

Sweet corn was our family’s weakness. We were prepared to resist atheistic Communism, immoral Hollywood, hard liquor, gambling and dancing, smoking, fornication, but if Satan had come around with sweet corn, we at least would have listened to what he had to sell. We might not have bought it but we would’ve had him in and given him a cup of coffee. It was not amazing to learn in eighth-grade science that corn is sexual, each plant containing both genders, male tassel and female flower, propagating in our garden after dark. Sweet corn was so delicious, what could have produced it except sex?

Life is complicated and not for the timid. It’s an experience that when it’s done, it will take us a while to get over it. We’ll look back on all the good things we surrendered in favor of deadly trash and wish we had returned and reclaimed them. We may sit in a cool corner of hell and wish we had kept the ballpark, built the shops elsewhere, and not killed off all those cornfields.

Nothing you do for children is ever wasted. They seem not to notice us, hovering, averting our eyes, and they seldom offer thanks, but what we do for them is never wasted. We know that as we remember some gift given to us long ago.

A man thinks of the Dimmerses’ history when he drinks a Wendy, especially the first Dimmers, who ran away from responsibility, shirked his duty to his country, reneged on his debts, seduced women and lied to them—but, hey, who’s perfect? Those are the very sins a man goes into a tavern to contemplate committing.

He was about to tell her that he hadn’t left her, he’d forgotten her; then she said, “I love you, Daddy. You know that.”

He was going to tell her, but he didn’t. It occurred to him that leaving her on account of passionate anger might be better than forgetting her because of being just plain dumb. There wasn’t time to think this through clearly. He squeezed her and whispered, “I’m sorry. I was wrong. I promise you that I’ll never do a dumb thing like that again.”

There was a thin high-pitched whine in the air from clouds of mosquitoes and gnats, but we’re used to that. It’s summer and this is Minnesota [...] Mosquitoes are what don’t show up in the gorgeous color photographs of Minnesota, and we’re not supposed to complain, but you ought to admire us for living here, it’s an accomplishment, not everybody could do it.

It’s a primitive sense of justice: you do bad, and your Creator smacks you one—but there it is. One day you’re daydreaming at the wheel, you smash into someone’s rear end. She gets out of her car, looks at the busted taillight, and smiles. She’s relieved; she says, “Well, it could’ve been a lot worse.” You’ve just run into a guilty person. She did something in the past twenty-four hours that made her think the universe would land on her with both feet. She’d be covered with boils, wrapped in burlap, sitting in the ashes, flies on her, and lightning coming closer and closer, but all it is is a taillight. Not bad. She smiles and drives away. Now you start to feel guilty.

There’s a story about Lyle’s house, as there is about most houses in town. That’s why old people walk so slow, because they’re remembering all the stories. I’m not that old but I know a lot because I used to hang out with old people back when there used to be real old people. Now everyone is sort of my age or younger, and most people don’t know much more than I do. It’s disappointing to become a leading authority in the field when you still have so much you want to learn.

A big mood swing, from belief in eternal happiness with a loving God to atheistic nihilism and despair in twenty-four hours in a town of less than one thousand population. Fall is a powerful season.

In the Sanctified Brethren church, a tiny fundamentalist bunch who we were in, there was a spirit of self-righteous pissery and B.S.ification among certain elders that defied peacemaking. They were given to disputing small points of doctrine that to them seemed the very fulcrum of the faith. We were cursed with a surplus of scholars and a deficit of peacemakers, and so we tended to be divisive and split into factions. One dispute when I was a boy had to do with the question of hospitality toward those in error, whether kindness shown to one who holds false doctrine implicates you in his wrongdoing.

Arlene said, “Have a cup of coffee, that’ll perk you up,” and usually that’s all a Norwegian needs. Norwegians have often been revived by this method, including some whose EKG showed a flat line—a sip of coffee on their lips and the pen jumped.

This was Minnesota, they were Lutherans, and you didn’t just fly over to Hawaii for your own pleasure because you wanted to. It wasn’t right. You walk in the Chatterbox and say, “Guess what? We’re going to Hawaii!” and someone’d say, “Oh. Say, that’s great. Sure wish I could afford to go on a trip like that. That must be nice, being able to take off and go like that.” And guilt begins to fall like a gentle rain of rabbit pellets on your head. You shouldn’t go and you know it. The extravagance of it. The money you’re spending having a good time, while people you love are home, suffering, needing you.

We’ve lived in Minnesota all our lives and it took a lot out of us. My people aren’t sure if we’ll even like paradise: not sure that perfection is all it’s cracked up to be. My people will arrive in heaven and stand just inside the gate, shuffling around. “It’s a lot bigger than I thought it was going to be,” we’ll think. We’ll say, “No, thank you, we can’t stay for eternity,we’ll just sit and have a few minutes of bliss with you and then we have to get back.”

We were brought up to work hard, not complain, accept that life is hard, and make the best of what little we have, so when we come to the grandeur and grace of an eternal flower garden ringed by mountains beside the pale-blue coral sea under the continuous sun, we naturally say, “Oh no thanks, it’s too much, really, I don’t care for it, just give me some ice, please.”

When Lake Wobegon Lutheran women walk into heaven, they’ll think it’s church and look for the stairs to go down the basement, where the kitchen is. When the men arrive, they’ll look at the Father’s mansions and talk about siding: aluminum vs. cedar shakes.

My people aren’t paradise people, but when God loves you, then everywhere is paradise enough.