Lake Wobegon Days Read Online Free Page B

down the hall to the fifth-grade classroom. “Who wants to be a nurse when she grows up?” she asked. Six girls raised their hands, and she picked Betty Diener. “Nurses help sick people in many different ways,” she told Betty as they walked to the lunchroom. “They have many different jobs to do. Now here is one of them. The mop is in the kitchen. Be sure to use plenty of Pine-Sol.”
    So most of Lake Wobegon’s children leave, as I did, to realize themselves as finer persons than they were allowed to be at home.
    When I was a child, I figured out that I was
    1 person, the son of
    2 parents and was the
    3rd child, born
    4 years after my sister and
    5 years after my brother, in
    1942 (four and two are 6), on the
    7th day of the
    8th month, and the year before
    had been 9 years old and
    was now 10.
    To me, it spelled Destiny.
    When I was twelve, I had myself crowned King of Altrusia and took the royal rubber-tipped baton and was pulled by my Altrusian people in a red wagon to the royal woods and was adored all afternoon, though it was a hot one—they didn’t complain or think the honor should have gone to them. They hesitated a moment when I got in the wagon, but then I said, “Forward!” and they saw there can be only one Vincent the First and that it was me. And when I stood on the royal stump and blessed them in the sacred Altrusian tongue, “Aroo-aroo halama rama domino, shadrach meshach abednego,” and Duane laughed, and I told him to die, he did. And when I turned and marched away, I knew they were following me.
    When I was fourteen, something happened and they didn’t adore me so much.
    I ran a constant low fever waiting for my ride to come and take me away to something finer. I lay in bed at night, watching the red beacon on top of the water tower, a clear signal to me of the beauty and mystery of a life that waited for me far away, and thought of Housman’s poem,
    Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
    Is hung with bloom along the bough.
    It stands among the woodland ride,
    Wearing white for Eastertide.
    Now, of my three-score years and ten,
    Twenty will not come again….
    and would have run away to where people would appreciate me, had I known of such a place, had I thought my parents would understand. But if I had said, “Along the woodland I must go to see the cherry hung with snow,” they would have said, “Oh, no, you don’t. You’re going to stay right here and finish up what I told you to do three hours ago. Besides, those aren’t cherry trees, those are crab apples.”
    Now I lie in bed in St. Paul and look at the moon, which reminds me of the one over Lake Wobegon.
    I’m forty-three years old. I haven’t lived there for twenty-five years. I’ve lived in a series of eleven apartments and three houses, most withina few miles of each other in St. Paul and Minneapolis. Every couple years the urge strikes, to pack the books and unscrew the table legs and haul off to a new site. The mail is forwarded, sometimes from a house several stops back down the line, the front of the envelope covered with addresses, but friends are lost—more all the time, it’s sad to think about it. All those long conversations in vanished kitchens when for an evening we achieved a perfect understanding that, no matter what happened, we were true comrades and our affection would endure, and now our friendship is gone to pieces and I can’t account for it.
Why don’t I see you anymore? Did I disappoint you? Did you call me one night to say you were in trouble and hear a tone in my voice that made you say you were just fine?
    When I left Lake Wobegon, Donna Bunsen and I promised each other we’d read the same books that summer as a token of our love, which we sealed with a kiss in her basement. She wore white shorts and a blue blouse with white stars. She poured a cup of Clorox bleach in the washing machine, and then we kissed. In books, men and women “embraced passionately,” but I didn’t know how much passion