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Luncheonette

I WAS CONCEIVED IN LATE fall, their third child, in their rented house on Jefferson Street in Anoka. They had been forgiven for the scandal of 1936 thanks to their having produced two obedient, truthful, well-behaved children in Philip and Judy, and now here came a third. I’d like to say I was conceived in patriotic fervor on December 7, 1941, the night of Pearl Harbor, but actually it was November 7, and I appeared August 7, 1942, at 6:40 a.m., Gary Edward Keillor, eight pounds, seven ounces, in Dr. Mork’s maternity hospital at 1841 Ferry Street, near where the Rum flows into the Mississippi. The long wall across the street by the Caswell house was built by my great-uncle Allie around 1911, of rock from the Rum, he who in his eighties went with his wife, Millie, to buy a new mattress at Thurston’s in Anoka and told the clerk, “I don’t like the firm mattress—I can’t get a good purchase with my knees,” and Millie blushed. My great-uncle Lew’s Pure Oil station was around the corner, and John worked there, pumping gas in his smart Pure Oil uniform with an officer’s cap, waiting to hear about his application at the post office. He had no fondness for farming, but thanks to his upbringing he knew about carpentry and auto repair, and was patient and soft-spoken by nature, having herded cows. He was hired by the post office and then drafted into the Army. America was at war. Anoka was a town of 7,000 with a classic Main Street, two banks, two newspapers, a county courthouse with a high steeple in a grassy square, a Carnegie library with dome and pillars, the county fairgrounds with dirt racetrack and the State Hospital for the Insane on the north side of town. The big news of the day was the landing of the 1st Marine Division on the beach and rainforest of Guadalcanal in the Pacific, the first land offensive against Japan after Pearl Harbor.

We moved around during the war, living with Grandma and then Aunt Jean, and when I was four and Daddy came home from the war, we lived in a duplex apartment at 39th Street and Bloomington Avenue in south Minneapolis for a couple years while he saved up to build us a house in the country north of the city. America had won the war and saved the world. Boys on the Bancroft School playground sang: Hitler had just one ball. Goebbels had two but they were small. Himmler had something similar, and Goering had no balls at all. My first dirty songs. I didn’t completely understand the words but I knew to sing it only to myself, not at home. Dad bought a movie camera and shot a scene of his children emerging from the front door on Bloomington one by one—“Don’t look at the camera and smile,” he said—so we looked down at the sidewalk and frowned, Philip, nine, with curly hair, and Judy, eight, straight and tall, and me, Gary, four years old, almost five, in a blue peacoat, and as I walk out the door, a streetcar passes, and I look up and smile.

I liked to sit on our front steps and watch the big yellow streetcars go by, the conductor clanging his dishpan bell, the long upright arm in the rear with the little wheel that rode on the electric overhead wire, sparking as it rolled. Mother and I often rode the Bloomington car downtown and she gave me coins to drop into the glass farebox, the coins dinging on the little metal flanges, and we sat in the woven-straw seats and women smiled at me, chubby-cheeked, and once the conductor in full uniform saluted me and called me Winnie—I was a dead ringer for Winston Churchill. And we rolled downtown to the department stores smelling of new clothes and perfume and floor wax and soup from the basement cafeteria, the elevators operated by uniformed women with white gloves, visions of elegance and comfort, and a man in a suit who knelt at my feet and slipped shoes on them, one after another, until Mother saw what she liked. And then we walked to the library.

One day, while Mother was visiting Mrs. Lindahl up the street, I stole money from her change jar so I could ride the streetcar downtown. Having ridden it with her, I had seen how it was done. You simply climbed the steps, grabbing onto a pole, and dropped your money in the glass box and took a seat. The motorman would throw the big wooden lever and the car would roll north and we’d wind up on the avenue of Powers and Donaldson’s and Dayton’s department stores, from which I could find my way to the public library and climb the stairs and look at the magnificent enormous picture books, of which they had hundreds at the library, spread across long tables, free for the looking. That was the extent of my plan.

Before leaving for Mrs. Lindahl’s, Mother told me to swat some flies and I had swatted them. The change jar was shaped like a strawberry, sitting on the counter by the toaster. I lifted the lid with the stem and grabbed a fistful of change. I headed down the back stairs and walked down the alley to catch the streetcar at 38th Street.

My mother told this streetcar story now and then, even as she got into her nineties, and once in Scotland, in Pitlochry, I went for a walk and got a powerful sense of the past, smelling coal smoke, and the acrid tang brought back Bloomington Avenue, the alley, the luncheonette. The past brought vividly to life by air pollution. My streetcar adventure was a large event in my life, maybe not so important as the apple that fell on young Isaac Newton’s head, but important.

So I stuck my hand in the strawberry-shaped change dish, stole a fistful of change, scooted out the back door and down a wooden staircase and up the alley past the little white garages lining either side. I was afraid of dogs, but none came after me. I got to 38th Street, intending to catch a streetcar, and walked by a luncheonette just as a strange man opened the door. He held the door open. He said, “Good morning.”

It was simple synchronicity. The friendly man said hello and held the door open for me and, politely, I entered. On a minor turn of fate hangs a lifetime. I walked into the luncheonette, a storefront the size of a one-car garage, and climbed up on a stool at the counter, and the cook asked what I wanted and I said, “A cheeseburger.” I put my change down on the counter and he took a few coins and put the patty on the griddle and it hissed and flames flared up. A man sat a few stools away, gazing out the window. The cook was smoking a cigarette, and the smell of tobacco smoke was new to me. Dance music played on the jukebox. It was all quite new. The cook set the patty in a bun on a white plate, and I noticed he’d forgotten the cheese and I pointed this out just as I felt a big hand on my shoulder. It was Dad. He pushed the plate away. I said to the counterman, “But I wanted cheese.” Dad led me out by the hand. I said, “But I paid for it!” I tried to go back, and Dad pulled me along back home. Mother was waiting by our garage, looking distressed. She handed Dad a yardstick and told him to give me a whipping and marched up the back stairs and into the kitchen. He and I sat in the garage on the bumper of our 1941 Ford sedan not looking at each other and he said something mournful about my having caused Mother worry and after a while he stood up and I followed him up the stairs to the kitchen. Dad was not a whipper. I was sent to my room, an enjoyable little closet with my books, my pencils and paper. Philip and Judy came home from school and were told what I’d done and they looked at me with, I thought, new respect.

(Had the man at the luncheonette not opened the door, maybe I catch a streetcar and ride downtown, get lost, maybe I step into the street, a truck honks, a man shouts, a big dog barks, I stand, weeping, and a policeman takes me home and my terrified mother, stricken with guilt, is watchful of me ever after and I grow up sensing the world as hostile and perilous and I take a cautious course in life, a job as a stock boy at Dayton’s from which I retire at 65, single, childless, and move into a high-rise and watch a good deal of television, but it didn’t turn out that way.)

Dad sang me a song that night as I lay in bed. He loved old sad songs and he sang:

Where is my wandering boy tonight,

The boy of my tenderest care?

The boy that was once my joy and light,

The child of my love and prayer?

My heart o’erflows for I love him he knows.

Oh where is my boy tonight?

I was touched by the song. My dad never said he loved us, but there he had sung it in a song. I’m sure he told Mother that he loved her, but men back then kept their affections to themselves lest they betray weakness. Brethren men spoke of God’s love, of course, but none of them ever looked at me and said, “I love you” and I would’ve been embarrassed if one had. This is still rare in Minnesota. My friend George Latimer said, “I love you” to me not long ago, but he was 85 and it was the cocktail hour and it was over the phone during a pandemic and he was feeling blue and it was snowing and George is a liberal Democrat.

The next day was Sunday, and we walked to the Grace & Truth Gospel Hall at 3701 14th Avenue for Sunday School and the Remembrance Meeting. Aunt Marion saw me and put a hand on my shoulder and said, “I understand you like cheeseburgers. If you want one, you can come to my house and I’ll make you one. With cheese. For free.” And she laughed and laughed and so did Uncle Bill. Aunt Elsie said something similar. My bad deed was amusing to them. My dad had told them the story. The thief was now a character in a humorous story. Even my mother laughed about it. She loved the Lord and yet she enjoyed comedians like her rascally brother George, who had left the Brethren for ungodly Lutheranism, but he could make her laugh out loud. My uncles weren’t so amused by the cheeseburger, but the aunts remembered it for weeks. They loved me and their laughter was proof of it. It was as simple as that.

Elsie and Don (Myrna and Earl).

A delicious confection of love and comedy, tasted when I was almost five. And so the die was cast. Brethren were opposed to shows, but thanks to Dad’s lenience and my aunts’ appreciation I grew up and became a show myself. Many years later, doing Prairie Home at the State Fair grandstand, knowing they were in the crowd, I put Aunt Elsie and Uncle Don into the Lake Wobegon monologue as Myrna and Earl, a story in which she entered her apple pie in the Fair’s baking contest held at the grandstand, and while the judges looked at the finalists, Myrna stood and modestly disparaged her pie, the crust especially, as Elsie tended to do, and so she won a red ribbon instead of blue, though the winner was more pudding than pie.

Eleanor and Grandma Dora, 1949.

Don and Elsie came backstage afterward and were clearly delighted though also faintly embarrassed at being made much of, even under pseudonyms. She asked if I remembered the luncheonette, and I did and I still do. She was my mother’s closest friend. They spoke every day on the phone until Elsie died, and that phone call was Grace’s steadying pleasure. She and Elsie were the younger, more ebullient sisters in the midst of Brethren austerity, two slender girls grinning at the end of the panoramic photograph of hawk-faced men and bearded preachers and their dour wives. She was my beloved aunt, jittery on the outside, strong on the inside, and she and Don went into the Lord’s work and ministered to far-flung isolated Brethren. When she lay dying, Don cared for her at home until the very end and was put off by suggestions that she go into hospice: “Of course I’ll take care of her,” he said. “I love her.” When I need to clear my vision as a Christian, I don’t read St. Augustine, I just think of Elsie and Don on my way to St. Michael’s, arriving late this morning just in time for confession, and there’s not room in the pew for a tall man to kneel comfortably so I twist into position, which reminds me of trying to make love in the back seat of an old VW—not where my mind should be right now—her name was Sarah, she had a laughing fit, which let the air out of the moment so there is no sin to repent of there, only the memory of a failed attempt, and in the prayers I whisper her name, and in the prayers for the departed, I envision the two girls in summer dresses in the photograph and I say their names, Grace and Elsie, Elsie and Grace.