My mystification on the Connecticut coast
The Column: 7.21.21
A quiet week at my wife’s family’s summer house on the Connecticut River, which sounds fancy but is a cottage full of furniture bought at yard sales. And there, this week, I make a big discovery: even after twenty-six years of marriage, I hadn’t realized the depth of her love of gardening. It was hot and she spent hours weeding a flower bed, three wheelbarrows’ worth, and came back to the porch happy and dripping with sweat.
When I met her in 1992, she was a freelance violinist in Manhattan, a Minnesotan trapped in semi-poverty by her love of classical music. We had a three-hour lunch, I fell in love. Nothing was said about yardwork. But here she was, in 2021, giddy after hours of weeding in the hot sun, the very thing I hated most growing up and so became a writer in order to avoid. I edit; I don’t weed.
The misery of weeding was what led to slavery. In the South, they couldn’t bear to work in the fields in that heat so they bought people in chains and beat them up. Slaveholders were people just like us who liked to be comfortable and that meant making other people hoe the cotton. You realize this on a hot day. The difference between us and the South is that it didn’t stay hot long enough in Minnesota for us to think of hauling people in in chains, but we would’ve done it, given time. But the beauty of love is that it leads you down a long path of discovery whereby you come to understand another person, and here was my love, sweat pouring off her, feeling exhilarated about weeding.
She felt like going to the theater that evening so we drove to Old Saybrook and went to a show at The Kate, a little theater named for Katharine Hepburn who had lived nearby. It was a comedy by the Ephron sisters, “Love, Loss & What I Wore,” and I noted, sitting down, that I was one of a handful of men in the room, fewer than a jury, and the thing got underway, and I sat silent, surrounded by laughing women. A lot of jokes about the emotional ties of various outfits. I met Nora Ephron once, walking along Broadway at 79th Street, and we stood and talked and I was struck by what a kind soul this famous funny woman was. So I’m disposed in her favor. But I didn’t laugh.
About halfway in, the play gets onto the subject of bras and boobs and here the real hysteria set in. Women screeching and shrieking at jokes that, had a man said one at a dinner table, he would’ve been shamed and maybe sent to his room. My wife, who is my judge and jury when it comes to comedy, was laughing. Boobs, the problem of flat-chestedness, the search for the perfect bra: all hilarious to the women around me, material for which a man would be heartily condemned as juvenile.
I got in deep manure once with a limerick I recited on the radio, which I still think is one of my best.
There was an old lady named Jude Who, imagining her solitude, In warm weather chose To take off her clothes And walk around town in the nude And old men and rubes Would stare at her boobs And think thoughts licentious and lewd She was eighty, Miss Judy, And not a great beauty But O how she lightened the mood.
The emails were brutal, I was accused of “objectification” and a childish fascination with breasts that’s been linked to sexual violence, but here was a roomful of Connecticut matrons laughing their heads off.
I think it was the hot weather that affected them. We are all sinners in extreme heat. You lie awake at night listening to mosquitoes and in the morning there’s no milk for your coffee and something snaps and you put on your mask and go to the store and — Sacré bleu! there’s a pistol in your hand! — and you tell the lady to open up the cash drawer. But this is a small town, and she says, “Oh go home and soak your head, Keillor. You don’t impress me with that little peashooter. Go back to bed and get out on the other side.” An old writer on the brink of felony is saved by the kindness of a neighbor. I’m sure it happens all the time.
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THAT'S ME I'm a minimalist from Minnesota, Don't waste my time and I won't waste yours. You are the woman I love, of course. I'm crazy about you and I always have been. And I hope I never have to say it again. Cause I'm a minimalist from Minnesota A man of brevity. That's me.
“We are all sinners in extreme heat.” I like that, especially since there’s more than one way to read it.
Being born into a farming family, your disdain for weeding is familiar to me. I can remember running to my bicycle to escape the mandatory gardening/weeding chore under my father’s supervision. Here was a man who was born to a tomato farmer and had to spend much of his young life as a farmhand keeping the farm going. After his obligation to the country spent as a Corporeal in the US Army stationed in Germany post-WWII he came home to find work in any other job than farming. He became a bricklayer and did that for forty years.
Now you would think my father had had enough of the farm life, but no. My mother and he bought a modest home with a large property and he started his own tomato farm on a smaller scale. As Carl Perkins once said “You can take a boy out of the country but you can’t take the country of the boy”
By the way, my father always caught me before I could escape. Darn.