21

CORN

It was a dazzling Fourth even without Uncle Sam on stilts and the circus bandwagon with sunburst wheels and carvings of elephants and wizards on the sides and the 16-Percheron hitch, the teamsters in silk cracking their big whips. No Betsy Ross blanket toss—men in powdered wigs holding a canvas net and throwing a woman wrapped in Old Glory 30 feet in the air— no Whistler’s Mothers in gray skirts and capes, marching along and whistling “Colonel Bogey March” and no FFA Precision Pitchfork Drill Team, but it was dazzling nonetheless. The old parade used to go around twice so people who watched it the first time around could march in the second circuit. No time for that now. The old parade died in 2016 when it attracted a crowd of 20,000 and afterward people complained that Clint was too bossy and didn’t listen to other people’s ideas and so, modest man that he is, he stepped down as chairman of the Fourth and the people with their own ideas came in, sort of, and formed committees and appointed chairpersons, and there was a great deal of discussion, and the next year it was mostly a parade of schoolchildren and was not widely advertised and 2,000 came and now it’s just us, which is fine. The old glories fade quickly, time is relentless, our day is brief and when it’s done it is so utterly done. We leave behind no legacy, just some papers in a box that somebody else has to throw away. So make the most of the summer.

“Do they still do the Living Flag at the football field?” I said to Alice.

She said yes but it was a smaller Living Flag than it used to be.

I stood up. “Let’s go,” I said.

She said, “Before we go, I have to apologize for what I said to you. I read your book last night and I’m glad you wrote it. It’s mostly true and it has a lot to say, and I was moved by what you wrote about yourself and I’m sorry I misjudged you.”

“The Lake Wobegon Virus???? How did you get your hands on that?”

“It was in a wastebasket. The pages were out of order but I got it figured out.” And she handed it to me. “It’s all true except for Lenny—she’s not a bacteriologist, she’s an epidemiologist.”

“Then I guess I’m an apologist. My specialty is regret.”

“Oh, enough with the humility,” she said.

The five of us fell in behind the band. She gave me the manuscript in a green manila envelope, and the crash and boom of the percussion ahead of us got to me. I wasn’t in marching band in school. I was too cool for that. But I don’t care about cool anymore. I want to tell about the people I left behind when I set out to become successful, now that I’m old and the great democracy of death approaches and success means practically nothing. A few hundred townspeople stood on the field holding red and white and blue umbrellas. Someone gave me a white one and I stood in a row of whites, between two rows of reds, forming stripes of Old Glory. Alice was on one side of me, an old man on the other. We crowded in tight, umbrellas over our heads, forming a flag that we ourselves could not see, but we could feel our own solidarity. It was very moving. To me, it was. Having set out at a young age to distinguish myself as a unique individual, and here I was, anonymous, in service of an ideal. The band struck up “America” and we sang, “My country ’tis of thee,” and then the school fight song and then a boy read into a microphone, “Breathes there the man with soul so dead who never to himself hath said, ‘This is my own, my native land,’” and then, to my amazement, a girls’ trio sang:

Wobegon, I remember oh so well how peacefully among the woods and fields you lie. My Wobegon, I close my eyes and I can see you just as clearly as in days gone by.

My song. I wrote that. And the verse about My old dog takes his walk, sniffing ev’ry tree. Ev’ry smell seems to tell his biography. And By the barn, cattle turn, murmur in the pen. Strong and pure, cow manure: I know where I am. I am home again. And Little town, I love the sound of water sprinklers on the land. The siren tune at 12 o’clock noon, the booming of the marching band.

I told Alice, “That’s my song. They’re singing my song.”

She said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” The old man said, “I remember that song from when I was a kid.”

It was a miracle. A song I wrote long ago had now become Anonymous. A great tribute, to become part of the common language. I wrote it to show off my talent, and now it was public property.

We stood and listened to a teacher read the first paragraphs of the Declaration (“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal …”) and we sang the National Anthem, the sopranos floating up high over “the land of the free,” and then the band marched off with a great ruffle and flourish, and we turned in our umbrellas. Alice said it was the biggest Living Flag in several years. She’d been worried about the number of e-mails she’d gotten from people saying, yes, they’d take part but not if they had to stand next to so-and-so. A measure of peace had been restored. Father Wilmer was in the Flag next to Father Powers, Liz was there with some Lutheran ladies, and Hilmar Bakken had flown in from Seattle to be on hand. He looked very snazzy in a blue suit with red tie and white shirt.

The crowd smelled sweet corn and that lit a fire under us and we headed for the Our Lady parking lot, where a dozen Knights of Columbus were husking at high speed, grabbing ears from a trailer full of bushel baskets, and ladies tended the pots of boiling water on the line of camp stoves. I bought six tickets for a buck apiece from Ingrid at the cash table and she said, “Hang on to those, they’re for the big drawing too” and I got three ears of corn and slathered them in butter and salted them down and stood in the crowd of eaters, and bit in. It was transformational. I am just a sentimental old man but the taste of fresh hot corn filled me with love of my town and my country. People had worked hard to pick the corn rapidly at the last minute so that it traveled from field to pot to your hand in 20 minutes, which is the difference between very nice corn and transcendent corn.

Alice said the feast and the lottery were financed by Rollie Hochstetter, whose granddaughter Natalie had that spring earned a bundle online at the age of eight after she visited her grandparents and a month later they noticed an odd item on the Visa bill for $12,345.67, which she’d put into stocks, looking at the listings and seeing shapes of animals and where the animal’s left hind foot was placed, that’s where she put the money, which now was worth almost $64,000 and a month later had grown to $117,000. They tried to get her to do more but she had lost interest. Rollie cashed in the stocks and put half of it into a scholarship fund for little Natalie and donated the other half to the Fourth of July, so that’s what paid for the corn and the convertible for the lottery was donated by Clarence. A 1958 Ford. Clint drew the winning ticket and played it for drama, reading off the numbers slowly and came to the last digit and noticed Mary was in agony, shaking her head, No no no, so he said, “Excuse me,” and revised the next-to-last number to her vast relief. She was worried that Senator K. would own a white convertible and be a menace to the town and exterminate several kids on bikes. It was won by a nun from St. Cloud, Sister Frances, who’d forgotten she’d bought a ticket. She’d renounced material wealth and now she’d won some. On a sudden impulse, she gave the ticket to Father Wilmer, not knowing he’d been defrocked, and he was thrilled. He’d made a date with a clergywoman named Patricia in Fargo and now he had a car that would compare well to other cars in Fargo.

It was my first sweet corn of the year. I was standing between the Krebsbachs, Carl and Margie, and Lena was there with her dog, Bruno, who once was a fishing dog but lost interest after he was bitten by a bullhead and now was eating an ear of corn that hung from his neck. Clarence was chewing on an ear, working his vertically, circling the ear, and I was working mine horizontally— like a typewriter—and our eyes met in a glance of brotherhood, and I was moved to stand up and give a speech. Nobody asked me to. I stood up on an empty wheelbarrow and Clint dinged on a glass and there was silence, except for quiet mastication.

I am an old man, privileged to return to the place of my birth, and I am only sorry to see so few of my generation with us today—they went off like Cortés and Pizarro in search of conquest and adventure, and instead they found jobs in offices and spouses who don’t understand them, and now they’re old and disillusioned, stranded in Florida and Arizona in luxurious death camps, trapped by clement weather. You and I who stayed where God planted us are the fortunate ones. We had all the advantages of a bitter winter. Every year, nature made several sincere attempts to kill us. But there always was someplace colder. Ely, Minnesota, on the Canadian border. If it was 10 below here, it was 17 below in Ely, so you got a sense of God’s mercy. You lay in bed and read a story about San Diego in the National Geographic and thought how wonderful it would be to live there and play golf in January. Every year, you reexamined your life. People in California don’t have that opportunity. The weather is always pleasant and if you can’t be happy in Southern California, there’s no hope for you, whereas in Minnesota we live on hope. We sit in our cave, the wind howling in the chimney and we think, I could go to La Jolla and be 27 years old. People in La Jolla can’t go to Minnesota; they would walk out of the airport and freeze to death before they get to the rental car lot. But a Minnesotan has options.

And then winter is over, and we have a cold rainy spring, and then it is summer, and now we know why we stayed. There are four main pleasures in life, the pleasure of knowledge, and the pleasure of walking with God, and the pleasure that some of you thought of first, and then there is sweet corn, fresh from the field, quickly husked, briefly boiled, buttered and salted, and here we are, drunk on it, out of our minds with happiness. I don’t look happy because I have a fundamentalist face, but sweet corn is taken internally, not applied to the face, and inside I am a completely happy man. It’s my belief that no person can have all four pleasures, and if I had to choose which to sacrifice, I would give up knowledge, which as anyone can tell you only leads to misery because with increased knowledge comes the knowledge that many people know much more than you and they are assholes. Absolute nincompoops have no idea of their nincompoopery, but the scholar climbing toward the summit sees others ahead of him and they are rolling boulders down the slope, trying to kill him.

No, sweet corn is the summum bonum, the sine qua non, due to its rarity—a pleasure denied to most of the earth, but God is generous to the Midwest to make up for our miserable climate, our blazing summer with tornadoes and bleak fall and deadly winter and rainy spring, with a few pleasant days ruined by mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds, mosquitoes that go deep, searching for arteries, insect repellent has no effect on them, a crucifix helps but you have to hit them very hard. What we are enjoying right now, you and I, is a pleasure available to a chosen few—you won’t find it in Paris or London or Rome, it was grown right here by people you and I ran around with on the playground, our cousins, our old pals, back in the day of the big garden in the backyard, back when our aunts brought us up in the basic catechism—Be Kind To Others—Do Not Use The Lord’s Name In Vain—Honor Your Mother and Father—and Always Give Thanks for Life’s Good Things, and so I will simply add this: I love you all more and more, and forgive me for not saying it long ago but there is nowhere else I would rather be than here with you. God bless you, each and every one.

And I decided to sing. It just seemed like the right thing to do.

O sweet corn, O sweet corn, O sweet corn I can eat.

We’re black and white and Asian and we are all one nation and this is an occasion to be sweet.

I was dancing on a wheelbarrow and I am not a dancer but there I was and others started dancing too. A corn dance.

O freedom, O freedom, O freedom, we are born

To love one another, sister and brother, and put salt and butter on the corn.

It was a slow soulful dance, me coming from arrhythmic people as I do, and then a couple drums felt the urge, a bass and a snare, and we got something going.

O mama, O mama, O mama, look at me.

It’s the Fourth of July, and I am feeling high, and this song will never die, nor will we.

The Lutherans had been waiting to dance until they saw Pastor Liz and Clarence and Arlene dance and there they were, hands up over their heads, so the others did likewise.

O pleasure, O pleasure, some pleasure every day.

Live it cheerfully with grace and charity in the land of the free, the USA.

There was more but that’s enough. I stood down from the wheelbarrow. There was no applause because it wasn’t a performance, it was for real. I heard a few soft Amens. A couple hundred people watched me deliver this crazed rhapsody with gyrations, and Irene took a video, in which I am eating as I dance, some butter dripping down my chin. I look demented. I am holding a cracker spread with cheese. At one point, I reach back as if to adjust my pants and then decide not to.

Clint walked up, wearing an orange cowboy shirt so bright it would stop traffic. “That was a good speech and not a bad dance. People should confess happiness more often,” he said. “I have a friend I met out in that field of wildflowers, back when we drove Dick Dixon out of town. You’re a blessed man as I am, and it’s good to feel our blessedness and be grateful for it and proclaim it. And also it makes the Lutherans nervous that they’re scheduled to speak next.”

I told him that I said what I said from the heart, but I am a writer and want the truth and the truth is complicated. We had a good preacher in my childhood who preached on the street with a microphone and a speaker on the roof of his car powered by the car’s battery. He gave a great sermon once at Lake Nokomis about Jesus calming the waters of the Sea of Galilee that day when the apostles were scared silly because a crazy man had come shrieking out of a cemetery and Jesus had cast a demon out of him, a naked man waving his arms and screaming—the sort of thing that can ruin your whole day—and then the apostles got in the boat and a storm arose and the apostles were thinking, this guy isn’t the Messiah, this guy is bad luck. And then he woke and he stilled the waters. I was standing nearby when the preacher was preaching, and he got so carried away he dropped his Bible on the ground and bent down to pick it up and a blast came out of him like the trombone at the circus, three long notes and a short and a smell strong enough to strip bark off trees, and the preacher did not acknowledge what happened, didn’t say, “Oh my heavens” or “Goodness, that was a stinker,” he went on as if nothing happened, wanting to maintain his authority, but if you deny your own fart then you’ve lost your authority and embraced lunacy as an article of faith. So I gave up on authority at that point and I don’t trust people at microphones. That’s my new philosophy. I became an author so I could show off my superior sensibility, and I’m too old for that now. Nuts to sensibility.

I’d had six ears of fresh sweet corn, buttered, and after six, the effect wears off, so I dropped a couple twenties in the pot, Alice handed me my manuscript that I had dropped on the ground when I did my dance. The wind had blown it around a little, so if there are odd confusing passages in the book, that’s why. I’m sorry. I marched back to Main Street and got in my car. The pay phone in front of the cafe, which nobody uses anymore and which is out of service, rang, and I ignored it but it kept ringing and finally I picked it up and said, “Hello.” It was my wife. She said, “Where are you? I’ve been calling you for two days, I was about to call the National Guard.” I told her my phone’s out of power, I haven’t used it in months. She was home from her opera tour in Asia. She said, “I need you. I can’t sleep without you. I need you to rub my back.” “I’m on my way,” I said. I wanted to sleep with her when I met her 28 years ago and now it was nice to find out she couldn’t sleep without me. An old story: we marry for concupiscence and we stay married for companionship.

I headed south toward Minneapolis and my apartment near Loring Park, where Fitzgerald and I used to take the bus to Nicollet Field to watch the Millers play the Saints. I don’t know why people are so drawn to the story of the doomed artist dying young, I prefer the story of the cheerful artist growing old. I was driving past an auto salvage yard, a mile of wrecked cars, and I had a passing thought of tossing the manuscript out the window to rest among the deceased Fords and Chevies but I was not brought up to throw trash out the window, so I didn’t. I had the taste of corn and butter and salt in my mouth with a caramel roll yet to come, I still felt the camaraderie of the Fourth of July, and I could still hear the marching band go high-stepping by and the boom and clatter of the beat, and feel the sweet anonymity of the Living Flag and people singing my song who didn’t know it was mine. I am a happy man. It’s common to get in a crowd of people who agree with you—you march with the United Writers of Light Verse and enjoy feelings of fellowship while chanting protest limericks, and that’s satisfying, but to join a crowd of red, white, and blue umbrellas forming Old Glory on a July afternoon, celebrating a union of the bright and benighted, true believers and delivery boys, the over-taxers and the anti-vaxxers, and people whose credos defy description, is to know civic happiness, so love it. Here we are, one nation under God and (at the moment) under the weakest and most childish leader of our entire history, and we are good to go. I am no genius, but I mean well most of the time. Lake Wobegon almost went to pieces from a cheese-borne virus, but it beat back a disastrous mistake because the women are strong, the men are looking good, the children above average. Maybe the time you spent reading this book would’ve been better spent listening to the Fauré Requiem. So go do that. When you hear the “Sanctus,” say a prayer for me and the sweet corn crowd. Thank you. Dismissed.