Lake Wobegon Days Read Online Free Page A

Lance broke us up. We sat and glared at each other. We fought once more, and went home to supper.
    I lived in a white house with Mother, Dad, Rudy, Phyllis, and we raised vegetables in the garden and ate certain things on the correct nights (macaroni hotdish on Thursday, liver on Friday, beans and wieners on Saturday, pot roast on Sunday) and sang as we washed dishes:
    Because God made the stars to shine,
    Because God made the ivy twine,
    Because God made the sky so blue.
    Because God made you, that’s why I love you.
    God created the world and ordained everything to be right and perfect, then man sinned against God’s Will, but God still knew
everything.
Before the world was made, when it was only darkness and mist and waters, God was well aware of Lake Wobegon, my family, our house, and He had me all sketched out down to what size my feet would be (big), which bike I would ride (a Schwinn), and the five ears of corn I’d eat for supper that night. He had meant me to be there; it was His Will, which it was up to me to discover the rest of and obey, but the first part—being me, in Lake Wobegon—He had broughtabout as He had hung the stars and decided on blue for the sky.
    The crisis came years later when Dad mentioned that in 1938 he and Mother had almost moved to Brooklyn Park, north of Minneapolis, but didn’t because Grandpa offered them our house in Lake Wobegon, which was Aunt Becky’s until she died and left it to Grandpa, and Dad got a job with the post office as a rural mail carrier. I was fourteen when I got this devastating news: that I was me and had my friends and lived in my house only on account of a pretty casual decision about real estate, otherwise I’d have been a Brooklyn Park kid where I didn’t know a soul. I imagined Dad and Mother talking it over in 1938—“Oh, I don’t care, it’s up to you, either one is okay with me”—as my life hung in the balance. Thank goodness God was at work, I thought, because you sure couldn’t trust your parents to do the right thing.
    Until it became a suburb, Brooklyn Park was some of the best farmland in Minnesota, but Lake Wobegon is mostly poor sandy soil, and every spring the earth heaves up a new crop of rocks. * Piles of rock ten feet high in the corners of fields, picked by generations of us, monuments to our industry. Our ancestors chose the place, tired from their long journey, sad for having left the motherland behind, and this place reminded them of there, so they settled here, forgetting that they had left there because the land wasn’t so good. So the new life turned out to be a lot like the old, except the winters are worse.
    Since arriving in the New World, the good people of Lake Wobegon have been skeptical of progress. When the first automobile chugged into town, driven by the Ingqvist twins, the crowd’s interestwas muted, less whole-hearted than if there had been a good fire. When the first strains of music wafted from a radio, people said, “I don’t know.” Of course, the skeptics gave in and got one themselves. But the truth is, we still don’t know.
    For this reason, it’s a hard place to live in from the age of fourteen on up to whenever you recover. At that age, you’re no skeptic but a true believer starting with belief in yourself as a natural phenomenon never before seen on this earth and therefore incomprehensible to all the others. You believe that if God were to make you a millionaire and an idol whose views on the world were eagerly sought by millions, that it would be no more than what you deserved. This belief is not encouraged there.
    Sister Brunnhilde was coaching a Krebsbach on his catechism one morning in Our Lady lunchroom and suddenly asked a question out of order. “Why did God make you?” she said sharply, as if it were an accusation. The boy opened his mouth, wavered, then looked at a spot on the linoleum and put his breakfast there. He ran to the lavatory, and Sister, after a moment’s thought, strolled