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Hedlund, Martha Krebsbach, Carla Minnesota Living Dead Powdermilk Biscuits Raw Bits Walleye Phone Company
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Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. I was trying to think of what I was going to say next. That was it. It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. It was graduation up at the high school on Wednesday, Wednesday at the football field out out behind the school Wednesday evening, all 87 members of the class of 1986, all lined up in their black robes and caps and ushered into a new chapter of their lives to the old music of Elgar, sweet old music that we all hear and think of the end of our childhood, all 87 of them there. including Carla Krepsbach, part of the graduating class, who this last week, I think it was Sunday night, was lying in her bed at home in the evening looking at her yearbook, the copies of the leaf, the Lake Wobegon leaf, the annual came out last Friday, was looking at it and she thought, wouldn't it be nice if instead of 87 members of the class, there were 86? It would be like a good omen to have 86 in the graduating class of 1986. And then she thought, my God, what have I thought? What wish have I made? What a terrible thing that one of my classmates die? God forgive me, she thought. And as she looked at her yearbook, her eye fell on the picture of her classmate, Dale Eaker, his long black hair combed up like he never combs it ordinarily. And she thought, he'll die. Because I thought that, he will die. And in his expression, in his picture in the yearbook, he looked to her as if he might already be dead. That her saying that had just killed him. He'd crashed into a tree in his car, or he had hung himself from the pipe in the basement, that her classmate Dale was dead because of what she had thought. She thought, Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner. And she went straight downstairs to call him up on the phone. She said, Dale? This is Carla. I just called to see how you are. She had never called him before. It was a short, awkward conversation. But he was there on Wednesday night when they all marched, all 87 of them, marched across the dirt lot where the skating rink is in the wintertime and down past the hot dog stand onto the cinder track and around in front of the stands by the football field on Wednesday. a beautiful summer evening at approximately 7 p.m. sharp, all 87 marching in approximately processional order, more or less to the music of Elgar, and on to the green field where the Lake Wobegon-Leonards won two games this last fall and almost won a third and filed onto the field between the two 40-yard line stripes into the eight rows of folding chairs, all of them standing there in formation as flash bulbs exploded in the bleachers, like parents' heads catching on fire, bursts of light. All the members of the class looked at Miss Falconer, the choir director, who made sure she was making eye contact with all of them, made her gesture, and all of them sat down in one motion. Nobody fell over. No chair collapsed. Nobody was left standing alone and then had to dive for their chair. They all sat down just as they had rehearsed it for several hours in the lunchroom on Tuesday. Miss Falconer does this every year, rehearses the senior class in the art of processionalism and the art of all sitting down in a graceful and unified manner. She is an elegant woman, Miss Falconer, so elegant that when you look at her, if you are 17 years old, even if you took a shower that morning, you feel as if you have things all over you. She is so elegant and so graceful that she makes a 17-year-old kid feel clumsy. Standing in front of them in the lunchroom on Tuesday, rehearsing them and sitting down the eight rows of folding chairs, over and over they did it, trying to do it right for her, as she stood in front of them and clapped her hands. Not like that, she said, and don't just collapse in a chair. Don't just flop down in it. Don't just drop in it like a load of bricks. Sit down gracefully. And they tried again and again. Sitting, something they had done as recently as that morning. Suddenly they could not do it anymore. as she walked up and down the rows, correcting them. Not like that, Dale. Don't drop in a chair like that. Just bend your knees and settle into a chair. On Wednesday night they would be going out into the world, into a new age to fight for peace in the world and understanding between nations and a community of men and women based on learning and understanding and compassion and love. On Wednesday night they would be doing that. Here on Tuesday afternoon they couldn't sit in a chair. as she hovered over them, her creme de la creme perfume flooding them. This woman, so elegant that if she were to drop dead, the undertaker wouldn't have to fix her up at all. She's so perfectly groomed. You'd just have to dust her off where she hit the floor and she'd be ready for a reveal. Sit, she said. Sit. And they couldn't do it. Dale, she said, it's not that hard. But it was hard, especially for him. Because... Dale knew that he wasn't going to graduate with the others on Wednesday night. He had pretty much resigned himself to it because he had flunked Mr. Dently's math exam the previous Friday. He knew this for a fact. And as he sat in the lunchroom... and rehearsed sitting and standing and walking with the other 86 members of the class of 86. Dale waited for the knock on the door and waited for Mr. Halverson, the principal, to come in and look for him and say, Dale, could I talk with you in the hall for just a few minutes? As everyone else stared at him. and thought to themselves, drugs, heroin, probably, heroin and car theft and probably some type of sex crime too. And he'd walk out in the hall and Mr. Halverson would say, I'm sorry, Dale, but you're gonna have to come back next year and repeat your senior year because you flunked math. He'd resigned himself to this, knew it was going to happen, and was just waiting for it to come. Math always had been a good subject for him, but something happened on Friday. He just sat down and looked at the paper and the questions, and it all looked foreign, like math had not been invented yet. And somehow he was supposed to invent it, like he was back in the 13th century and had to create something like mathematics, which would take him years, but here he was supposed to do it in one hour and figure all of this out. He looked at it for 20 minutes and he couldn't make sense out of it, the questions on the exam. And then he thought to himself, relax, just relax. So he sat and relaxed for a while. And then he saw he'd spent 10 minutes relaxing. And he just started writing down everything that he could think of that made any sense at all on the math exam. As everyone around him seemed to be working and solving the problems, he was just writing down anything that he could. And looked at the clock... as he felt terrified and saw the minute hand was almost up to the 12 and then looked over at Barbara Soderbergh's desk and there was her exam in plain view with the correct answer to that last problem sitting there in big block lettering he saw it And he looked up at the clock and he didn't want to look at the answer. He looked up at the clock as the minute hand trembled just about to jump to the twelve and the bell would go off and he would fail the test. He looked back at her test and saw the answer as clear as day. And then he laid his pencil down and waited, and the bell rang, and he left. It was a wonderful moment. He thought to himself, this is not that important, to lie. None of this is that important to me. Graduating from high school, doing good on a test, getting good grades, being successful, it just doesn't matter that much to me. To be small. I don't need this, he thought. I don't need to pass this test. Not that bad. And handed it in. and walked out and went home and came back to school on Monday and Tuesday waiting for Mr. Halverson to knock on the door, waiting for Mr. Dently to talk to him, waiting to find out that he would be the first member of his family to have to repeat a year of school. He's an ambitious boy. He was looking a couple weeks ago at who's who and noticed there were no eakers in it and was thinking about becoming the first one and actually sat down with his typewriter to write his little biography that would be his entry in who's who, Eaker Dale. Born Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, March 2nd, 1968. Graduated Lake Wobegon High School, 1986. B.A., Harvard University, 1990. M.A., Yale University, 1991. PhD, University of Paris. Why not? 1993. Residence, Paris. Married, Danielle Montieu. 1992, four children, Yvette, Mimi, Roger, Doug, admitted to the National Institute of Arts, 1995, member of National Institute Bibliothèque Académie de l'honneur et gloire et l'héroïsme. author of numerous books, articles, recipient of many awards, frequent speaker, author, friend of so on. He waited Monday and Tuesday for the news that he would have to come back and do another year at school. And all the time thinking, this is not that important to me. And feeling so wonderful, feeling that his life was just starting. Sitting out in the yard by the steps to the school, signing yearbooks for his classmates, having his yearbook signed on Tuesday after school. Everyone seemed so alive, so vibrant, everyone so dramatically alive. Everyone sitting there by the lilac bushes in the grass where they'd sat so many times before talking after lunch. And all of them thinking, I will remember this for the rest of my life. I will remember these people and remember this moment. I will remember exactly how this feels for the rest of my life. He sat signing books. Carla Krepsbach was sitting next to him. She had asked him often since Friday, how do you feel? Are you all right? And he noticed that she had written lovely lines in his yearbook. She had written, In the darkest evening, when you see the evening star, know that you have one true friend, no matter where you are. He thought of it often and read it out loud to himself. and said her name as he thought of what he would do now that he was a failure. Catch a freight train, maybe. Catch a ship someplace. Go, just leave town. Travel. It didn't matter. Life is so wonderful. Life is so wonderful. It is almost all that we need. We don't need success. We don't need good grades. All we need is to be able to see it and to feel it. That's all that we need. And anything else that makes it harder for us to love life, it isn't worth it. No matter how important it seems, he thought this thought to himself over and over. Life is so wonderful. You don't need to cheat. You don't need to lie. It should have a heroic ending, this story, but it doesn't. Mr. Dently came to see him, found him on Tuesday in the lunchroom, and said, Dale, I want to talk to you for a couple minutes. Dale was ready for the news. Mr. Dently said, I was looking at your final exam. You didn't do that well. But he said, I looked at your worksheet, and I think that you were headed in the right direction. on most of these problems and I think that basically you understand the material you just didn't quite know where to go with it and he said I'm going to give you a C minus on the test and I'll give you a C for the year Dale said but I didn't answer the questions I didn't solve the problems I flunked he said Now, he said, I think that really you do know the material. I'm going to give you a little extra credit for class participation, and we'll call it a C. He felt so awful. He said, but I failed. I don't want to just sneak by. I failed. It was like having... having decided not to cheat. Now somebody was cheating for him. And he was being slipped through. And he couldn't make this tall, sad man with dry, thin hair understand that he, Dale, didn't need this. Because life is so wonderful, you don't need anything but just to feel and to see what's around you. You don't need this. He went to Mr. Halverson, and Mr. Halverson didn't understand him either. He said, but C is a perfectly good grade, Dale. He thought Dale was complaining and wanted a B. C is a perfectly good grade. I didn't do that well in math when I was a student. I would have been happy with a C. They all said, you don't understand, and they didn't. But for a lover of life, these disappointments don't last long. And Wednesday night, there was so much, so much in the music and the smell of the grass and the speeches and all the faces of the people around him that he forgot about it and started to feel better almost immediately. And though he was not called to the platform for any awards or honors, he felt honored somehow. And marched out with the others. And someone called his name and he turned and a flashbulb went off. And he smiled. And they went to Martha Hedlund's parents' farm for the party afterward. Her parents weren't at home. They were gone to Grand Rapids again. And he stood and somebody gave him a beer and he had a beer. And Carla Krepsbach came up and said, how are you? And he said, I'm fine. And put his arm around her and stood there. She said, so what are you going to do now? What are your plans? He said, I don't know, just hop a freight or just travel, just go. Life is so wonderful, he said. It's almost all that we need. She looked at him and she said, Dale, I meant to tell you. She said, I'm so glad that you're alive. That's the news from Lake Wobegon. All the women are strong. All the men are good-looking. All the children are above average.
Danish Constitution Day. Poem and history of Denmark. Teen party at GK's. Danny and the Juniors. Teen age tragedy songs in the 1970s
1986.06.06 Star Tribune / rebroadcast on June 11, 1988.
Archival contributors: Frank Berto