Just A Few Minutes of Bliss LEAVING HOME

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Dear Gary,

You'll be glad to know that it has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, even though quite a few copies of Leaving Home are circulating there. Mavis and I drove up last weekend to see how her Mom's doing after the gallbladder operation. Most everybody was talking about your book (except the Norwegian bachelor farmers, who were not to be diverted from their predictions of a dire winter to come). They had all heard these stories when you told them on A Prairie Home Companion. But radio evanesces. Print is history. It's like going to church: you worry how you look coming in the door.

At the Chatterbox, where we stopped in for the usual (mushroom soup and a cheese sandwich), we found a lively moral-literary debate in progress. There was a school of thought, led by Carl Krebsbach, holding it was wrong the way you "build things up." It was perfectly true he had to miss the homecoming parade the time his daughter Carla was elected queen because he was digging up his parents' old septic tank and transporting it to the town dump. But, he said, it was just a . . . well, prevarication to say that hauling his load of "thirty years of family history" (nice phrase), he made a wrong turn and ran smack-dab into the National Guard tank that was Carla's float in the parade.

"Ya, sure, Carl," somebody said. "But I thought I saw you right around the corner there on McKinley when the tank came by. Or maybe smelled you, it was." Everybody laughed, and Judy Ingqvist, Pastor Dave's wife, spoke up, "It's called dramatic license. You improve on reality a little bit, in order to make a point. Like the parables in the Bible." There was an uncomfortable silence after that. Sounded like more of Dave's gosh-darn liberal doctrine to them. The Bible as literature is not a concept that has made much headway around here.

Later I dropped by the Sidetrack Tap and fell into another kind of discussion. Wally, the proprietor, was arguing that your books are good for the old home town: "Put us on the map, after all these years," he said. "That's all well and good," Daryl Tollerud replied, "but when they read the map, what are people gonna think?" Daryl had to admit that story you told on him -- about the time he let the skunk into his parents' bedroom -- was pretty funny, but he didn't like you "writing up" what he was doing there, 42 years old and going through papers in their bureau drawers, like some stupid kid, trying to find out the deepest, darkest of all Midwestern secrets, which is what kind of money they make.

I must have laughed, because they all glared at me. But later, walking home in the almost dark, with the sweet-sharp smell of burning leaves in the air, I got to thinking what a hard job you've taken on. "My people aren't paradise people," you say. You imagine them arriving in heaven and somebody saying "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."

That's our thing, isn't it? Denial -- of pleasure, of all the stronger emotions. But of course they are there, and I admire the patient way you dig them out of our frozen soil. Dale Uecker flunking his algebra final his senior year and bravely tasting the glories of humiliation ("Tests and graduation don't matter because now I know . . . that the important thing is life itself") and being pulled back from the brink by good gray Mr. Dentley giving him a C ("Basically you understand the material"). David Tollefson and Agnes Hedder breaking up their marriages and running off together to Washington State and, years later, David's daughter-in-law making sure her husband does not burn the poem that won Agnes' heart ("A love so true sings out to me . . .") along with the rest of the papers he inherited from the dad he'll never learn to forgive. Your shy Aunt Myrna enduring the Bake-Off at the state fair, with all those people watching and Joey Chitwood's Thrill Show roaring around her. She managed to talk the judge out of giving her chocolate cake the prize it deserved ("I don't know . . . This isn't very good at all. It's gummy"), but still rose to her moment: "Oh, I'm glad it's over. But it was fun. I was so scared. And then I just forgot to be."

Humble as these moments are, they are our epiphanies. They deliver us belatedly from the cruel satirical embrace of Sinclair Lewis, the last Minnesota author anyone paid attention to, and, perhaps, restore to us our humanity. Hard to fly over us uncomprehendingly after you have read Garrison Keillor. Epiphanies? Did I really use that word? I'm glad I didn't speak up at the Sidetrack. I might've tried to use it conversationally. "Cheess, Rollie, you been down there in the Cities too long," somebody would certainly have said.

Maybe the last word should belong to Mavis' mom. When I got back I found her reading Leaving Home. She looked up and shook her head. "That Gary," she said. "Didn't I always say he was above average?" She smiled. Maybe it was the kind you describe in the book, "the smile she has used all her life on people she'd like to slap silly." But I thought it was more genuine than that.

Your old pal,

Rollie Hogebohm