Lonesome Whistle Blowing

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Keillor always starts out his radio monologue by apologizing: "Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown." He always ends on a diminuendo, with the formula "That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong and all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average." In between, for 20 minutes or so, he discourses wonderingly, without notes, on a place where a dog lying asleep in the middle of Main Street will live out his days. In eleven years of talking about Lake Wobegon on A Prairie Home Companion, he has not run out of material, nor does he seem likely to. He begins, on a recent show, to reflect in a misty way about married love, then cuts the mush short of flood stage with a rambling, funny story about how a middle-age Wobegonian and his wife were getting set to spend a night in their camper. But he had parked on a slight incline, and his wife asked him to move the camper to a level spot, and he said she could do it herself, he was not about to go outside in his underwear, and she stomped out, and just as he took off his underpants and reached for his pajama bottoms, she threw the truck into first and popped the clutch, and out the back door and onto the gravel he rolled, clothed only in his astonishment, and she did not stop but kept right on driving.

If it is hot in the hall where the show happens to be playing, he may drift in reverie to legendary hot summers past and recall that his parents, God-fearing Protestant Fundamentalists, "believed there was a verse in the Bible, they couldn't find it, but it was there, maybe in Leviticus somewhere, that forbade air conditioning." Thinking of religion may turn his mind to Father Emil, pastor of Lake Wobegon's Catholic congregation at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility Church, and his annual sermon on birth control, based on the precept "If you didn't want to go to Minneapolis, why did you get on the train?"

Summer brings to mind the town's old Norwegian bachelor farmers, stolidly harvesting wheat with their antiquated, clattering six-foot combines. The Norwegian bachelors were not impressed by modern 20-footers. Sure, you got done faster, but that just meant waiting longer till it was time to go to bed. This is a good laugh line, as close to a knee slapper as Keillor lets himself get in the monologues. But like his uncle Lew, he tells stories, not jokes, and he goes on to say that "the clatter brings back memories of old days of glory in the field when I was a boy among giants. My uncle lifted me up and put me on the seat so I could ride alongside him. The harness jingled on Brownie and Pete and Queenie and Scout, and we bumped along in the racket, row by row. Now all the giants are gone; everybody's about my size or smaller. Few people could lift me up, and 1 don't know that I'm even interested. It's sad to be so old." He is only 43, but he can work himself up to feeling old at moments like this.