[undocumented]
This transcription may have been auto-created from the audio. Can you help improve the text? Email us!
Well, it has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. This last week all the gardens are in, some stuff even coming up in some of them. In the gamblers' gardens, people who planted back around the first of the month. Down at the high school where they have the windows open, there'll be graduation this coming Friday. And you can hear the band practicing pomp and circumstance without the seniors, which reduces it from 12 to 7 persons. But even with a small band like that, they do still seem to get the main part of that wonderful march. I don't know if Sir Edward Elgar thought it was a big deal having written that. Maybe he just wrote it one day after breakfast before he went on to write a symphony or a concerto. But it sure is a fine piece of music, kind of a hymn to the end of childhood. I guess most of us have marched to it at some point in our lives, at that point in our lives. A definitive moment, and we remember the music. Graduation this Friday, my, the year's gone fast. Most of the seniors will be leaving Lake Wobegon, and most of them within just a few weeks. There being not much for them to do there other than lean around on the corner in front of the Chatterbox Cafe. So in anticipation of their leaving, they have been doing a little extra leaning here during these warm summer nights, especially those senior boys, 17, 18-year-old boys standing out there at night in front of the Chatterbox doing what they do. Shoving each other a little bit, hitting each other on the shoulders with their fists, making noises like, hey, they do that a lot. Got to get it just right. Hey, all right, far out, man. Gross. You would never know English was their first language. Hey, what you doing? Hey, all right, far out. Hey, you gross me out. Parents go by and look at them there. Think to themselves, good heavens, how are they ever going to support themselves? I think these boys are old enough to make babies. What would they ever do with them if they had one? Put them under their arms and stand around on a corner? Play catch with them or something? No. When you have a baby, when you are of an age to have a baby in Lake Wobegon, you graduate from the street corner to the porch. You move up in society. You become one of the porch people, which is the center of society in Lake Wobegon. Some people sit in their backyards, the ones who want to be by themselves. But people who want society sit out on their front porch overlooking the sidewalk on these beautiful summer nights. And the way it works is that after supper, the kids do the dishes. And mom and dad, they do a little bit of yard work or they work in the garden for a little bit and then they sit on the front porch. Some of them go for a walk. They go walking down the block. They go visit grandma or they go down to get a piece of pie, a cup of coffee from the chatterbox before Dorothy closes up. Or they go down to the nights in the gardens of Spain for the feature. So you got your people on the porch and you have your people walking down the sidewalk. And when somebody walks by in front of your porch, you always say hello to them. And you may just say a kind of a polite hello, in which case they'll say hello and keep on walking. Or you can say a friendly hello and the walkers will stop there and talk with you for a little bit. And then the people on the porch always say, well, come on up and sit for a little bit. And then the walkers are supposed to say, no, we can't, we're on our way down to grandma's or to the chatterbox or down to themovie. And then the people on the porch are supposed to say, well, just come on up for a minute and sit a little bit. And then the walkers can either say no, or they can come on up and sit. It's a wonderful system. Seems like such a much better system of visiting than the system of inviting a whole bunch of people over for a whole evening, don't you know? Come sit around in your living room. You go over to somebody's house for an evening, you're committed to it. You're expected to put in your time. Spend three hours there before you punch the clock, you know. You have to talk. You have to try to be interesting. But in Lake Wobegon, when they invite you up to the porch, they don't invite you to come up and talk. They invite you to come up and sit. You don't have to talk, though you may. People usually do, especially as the sun goes down and it gets dark on the porch. It's so much easier to talk, you know, in the darkness. It's kind of like radio, in a way. All sitting there in the wicker chairs, you and Mabel and Clarence and Arlene, and the smell of lilacs is in the air, and crickets, and the sprinkler out in the garden. The voices of your children singing as they do the dishes. Ah, those children are sweet, aren't they? A bunch of treasures is what they are. Just sit. Just sit and rock a little bit. Maybe talk, but if you don't talk, don't assume that you're not having fun. Don't assume that you're dull or lack imagination, because imagination thrives in silence. And if you do talk, it's good to know that the fire bell is going to ring at 10 o'clock, and everything will automatically come to an end. And that's the time to go home. It's good to have deadlines like that. You know, a time by which, if you haven't said it by then, probably another hour wouldn't make any difference. And I've reached mine. What a lovely town. What a wonderful summer it's going to be out there on the porch. Arlene says, can I bring you some coffee? No, thank you. I don't need any. How about some lemon cake? Ice cream? I don't want any, really. This is all I want. Just sit here. Be at peace with your friends on a summer night in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, where all the women are strong, and all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average, especially the ones doing the dishes. Thank you.
Audio of the News available as a digital download.
Archival contributors: Ken Kuhl