Garrison Keillor, Poet Laureate of the Midwest

As the weather begins to soften down here, I'm given more and more to reminisces of milder temperatures and the peace of mind they afford. Last year around this time, I remember how much the coming of spring salved the severity of my anxiety about graduation, and how easy it was to convince myself that I could live forever in the lazy hour or so between TGIF and dinner, and that the pink magnolia blossoms would linger all year, and that everything I needed I could find for myself. To fully immerse myself in a perfumed fantasy world, I turned to master storyteller Garrison Keillor, and my extensive News from Lake Wobegon podcast archive, to see what he had to say on the subject of the promise of spring. This episode, from May 9, 2009, is so beautiful, and I couldn't find a recording of it anywhere on the internet. Thinking that it totally belonged out there for the non-podcast-subscribing public's consumption, I just transcribed it (I knew this internship-specific skill would come in handy some day!). If you listen to Garrison Keillor speak, you know that it wasn't easy to translate his stories using conventional punctuation. Sorry that there's no visual aid in this post, but one of things that's so great about Lake Wobegon is that it exists in the collective imagination of the Midwestern people, and so I couldn't define it for you, even with the help of google images. Even putting a picture of Garrison up kind of ruins the magic. Ok well I encourage you to read this piece, because it's really quite beautiful.

"... The wildflowers are out in the woods - if you walk out in the woods, which many older people, people my age do not do because we grew up hearing the story of the man with black teeth who was out there in the woods. He was a man who you would see lying in the weeds along a path, and you would stop, as a good person should, and ask him if he was all right. And he wouldn't say anything. So you would kneel down by him, and ask him if he needed help. And he would look up and grin at you with his little blackened teeth, and he would snatch you, and take you away, and you would never be seen ever again. We used to go around at Halloween with blackened teeth and scare the bejabbers out of each other. And we never stopped to think it through, that if people were snatched by the black-tooth man and never seen again, then how did we know about him? We just didn't go into the woods, that's all. We just stayed, stayed out of the woods.

But you need to go into the woods, because the Morell mushrooms are there, and the beautiful flowers are there. You find Morells by looking for a dead elm tree. You may find it by following the hummingbirds, the ruby-throated hummingbirds. Green and white, they move very fast, and they make a humming sound. And this humming sound excites you and it quickens your senses so that you're able to find a tree that's gone down. And around it are these beautiful morsels.
It's a form of courtship in Lake Wobegon; you go with someone you love out into the woods where you can be alone, and you can talk to each other without other people watching you from a distance and wondering how you're doing. You go off into the woods so that you can look each other in the eye, and say what you think, and feel... some of what you think and feel. And you look for a fallen tree. Other people have found their own fallen trees, but you can find yours. And around it you will find these delicate morsels, this great prize which sells in grocery stores for $60 a pound, you'll find for free and bring them home. All you can eat! And you'll cook them up lightly in butter, and salt and pepper, and it'll be beautiful. A great many marriages have begun in just that way, when you're able to find something beautiful and delicate on your own.

Out there in the dimness, out beyond where we can see, there is a young couple walking around. And he is skinny, and he wears a black jacket and skinny black jeans, and his hair is combed straight back on the sides, and he has what appears to be a tattoo on the side of his neck. This skinny young man in black, and this heavy young woman. She just got back from the city - Cheryl Krepsbauch, Margie and Carl Krepsbacuch's youngest daughter - she went down there to get into the theater, and it didn't work out for her. And she worked at the cosmetics counter at Wal-Mart for a year and she gained a lot of weight just through sheer disappointment. And she came back, and she found him. We don't know who he is, he's from Millet, he's not one of us. He came in from outside.
And here they are. And when they think no one is watching, they hold hands. These two children who have been made fun of by other children since they were small. And this has drawn them to each other; they would never make fun of each other, or think less of each other. They walk, they walk around in town, careful who might be looking at them. And if you watch them, surreptitiously as I do, you can see the delicacy of holding hands, and what a beautiful thing this action is, taking another person's hand in yours. There's so many different ways to do it - hundreds of variations. And you can read the other person through their hand; you can tell who is reluctant to hold your hand, and who wants to, and who wants to do more than hold your hand. You can read all of this without ever having to say a word.
And there they are. They have not been touched by other people - except he, held in a headlock by an older brother, and thrown down on the ground and fallen upon. But nobody's held him since he was small, nor she. And here they are, and their touch is so delicate, and so delicious to each other. They savor every time they reach out and touch each other.

The story of the black-tooth man is that he was a boy who was held back in the grades. He stayed in the sixth grade in a little country schoolhouse, where the schoolteacher slept in a back bedroom so that she could light the fire in the wintertime. He was held back until he was the biggest boy in the sixth grade, and he terrorized this teacher. And one day, as he was walking across the fields, sheep chased him into the woods.
And there he is today - so we older people believe - ready to snatch anybody who walks out there. And so we, who grew up with this story, have not seen so many of these beautiful wild flowers, the trilliums out there, and the swamp marigolds. We've not seen them ever. We've been afraid and stayed on the well-lighted paths in town. But we did our children the great favor of not telling them the story of the black-toothed man, and so our children go out there. This young couple goes out there on the weekend of the corn-planting moon. They walk through the streets of town after the sun has gone down. People busy, people cutting their grass, people planting flowers, people digging in their gardens, people cleaning their garages. People working for the simple purpose of being out in the open where other people can see them and come and interrupt them. And so we can stand around in warm weather and we can converse with the smell of flowers in our nostrils, and not notice this skinny young man and this heavy young woman as they head out around the lake, out into the deep woods, where there is no black tooth man. He's not out there. That was a story somebody made up. He doesn't exist. Don't live your life as if he did.

That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average."