The #Midwessay: Leslie Lindsay, Fragmented Thoughts on Being a Missouri Girl in "The North"

 

Fragmented Thoughts on Being a Missouri Girl in "The North"

Leslie Lindsay 

*

1. When I first moved to Minnesota, on New Year’s Day 2002, it was snowing. I was wearing a parka. ‘Locals’ were wearing shorts.

“This is warm,” they cheered. 

“If this was warm, what is cold?” I inquired, a smirk on my face.

They assessed me with blank stares, like, ‘We don’t do humor and sarcasm.’

 

2. I grew up in the “Show-Me-State,” where we do a lot of showing, not telling. Show me your back forty. Show me your garden. Show me your wild, inventive ways. This leaks into my vernacular.

“You don’t say, Missour-ah,” a colleague commented. “Or do ya?”
“I don’t know. Show me,” I said. I might have winked.
“We drove through Misery on a trip awhile back,” he said. “Horrible place. The Ozark mountains. Steep, narrow roads, hillbillies.” 

“That’s not the area of Missour-ah I’m from,” I said with a glint in my eye. The irony was lost. 

3. Before I moved to Minnesota, my mother: 

a. Warned 

b. Threatened
c. Cautioned
d. Lovingly told

…Me

a. That’s one of the coldest places we have in our country.

b. Laura Ingalls Wilder lived there. 

c. You might have to learn to love ice fishing.

d. Are you sure? 

4. Show me your front porch. [1] Show me your local watering holes. [2] Show me your underground caves. [3] Where is your red earth? [4] Your locusts with wax-paper wings and fire-y eyes? [5] [I detested those; they were fine to leave behind]. Show me Anheuser-Busch beer [6], the Arch [7], and sticky cheese pizza on Saltines. [8] You don’t have Toasted Ravioli here? [9] What about flowering trees? [10]

The people of Minnesota have: 

[1] Closed-in three-season porches, like a vestibule to the front door. It’s often confusing to know which door to knock on. If you’re invited. And invited, you must. Minnesotans do not appreciate the ‘pop-over.’ [This is the first time I used the word ‘ante-room’ in conversation. In Minnesota, it’s where the snow boots, and house shoes are stored, the coats, gloves, scarves, mufflers, hats].

[2] “A Tavern, you mean?” We found a few good ones. Run by a British guy. With a Ploughman’s plate and Irish dancers on Friday nights. They didn’t have Anheuser-Busch, but we began to enjoy Summit and Schell.[6]

 

[3] No caves. Unless you count that ice fishing thing my mother mentioned. [See 3-c-c above]. 

[10] Very few red bud trees and dogwoods. Do they have sweetgum trees? Do they have any trees that flower? Very little. Lilacs. But not until May or June. Honeysuckle? I don’t think so. Locusts? [5] In the trees? In the red-earth ground? What’s red-earth? Mostly, it’s mosquitos. Because Minnesota is ‘the land of ten-thousand lakes.’ The mosquitos can be as big as the seventeen-year cicada I loathed. They are feared as much. 

[7] The “Twin Cities” where outdoor art sculpture presides: a giant cherry on a more-giant spoon, but not the arch. You can also see the tiny little spot where the Mighty Mississippi starts, just a trickle, really. You can jump over it. It’s not the same as the Archfront. At all.

[8, 9] Attend local Lutheran Church* and stay for the fish fry. They will serve lutefisk, not Imo’s pizza or barbecued brisket. Or barbecued ribs. Or barbecued anything. But if you’re lucky, you might get a delicious cookie salad or something made from a canned Pillsbury product. Remember: you must be invited. Minnesotans keep to their own kind. 

*In St. Louis, I grew up within a stone’s throw of about 809 Catholic Churches, soccer leagues, and peers in PSR. [Parish School of Religion]. In Minnesota, the predominant religion appeared to be Lutheran ELCA, and sometimes: Methodist. Being Catholic was more…unusual. 

5. I went to work one day and say, “Oh my word.” And also: “What in the name of Sam Hill is that?” A few other things bubbled to the surface. “Boy, that sure does smart, doesn’t it? I exclaimed, “Bless your heart!” and mumbled, “Bless your heart.” I also said, “Well—blessyourheart,” and walked away. If you’re from Missouri, you know how all of these have different connotations. 

6. They started calling me a “Southern Belle.” I couldn’t decide if their comments were because I had a bit of a twang, because I wore sweater sets and blazers to their plaid flannel and clogs, because I said, “Oh My Word” to their “For Pete’s Sake.” I may not have been raised on a dairy farm or shown prize-winning swine at the state fair, or consumed fried candy bars on sticks, but I did not come from a wealthy Southern family or a palatial home draped in crepe myrtle and Spanish moss. I came from the middle of the country. South to Minnesota, sure, but not the Deep South. 

7. Also, at work, I didn’t know how to say Oronoco, a nearby town. I called it “O-ron-o-co.” I got it wrong. Very wrong. I didn’t know that ‘uffda’ pretty much translated to ‘oh sh*t’ and I discovered the slight difference between Norwegian and Scandinavian. I taught them the difference between Appalachian and Ozark. 

8. “No, no,” I said. “Missouri is smack in the middle of the U.S. It’s Midwestern.”

a. “Ya took geography, eh?”

[Yes, ma’am. I’m from the middle of the country]

b. “Did ya bring your ‘sneakers’ to phyed?” 

[pronounced ‘fi-ed,’ not ‘fiz-ed,’ as we said in Missouri, or even just plain ol’ ‘P.E.’ Note: what are sneakers? We call them tennis shoes.]

9. In Missouri, we have ‘outer roads,’ in Minnesota, it’s a ‘frontage road.’ Minnesota has ditches and you sure as heck don’t want to get your car stuck in one during a white-out. In Missouri, the snow comes, it’s gone in 24-48 hours, tops. In Minnesota, you’re wearing sweaters October thru May. 

10. I went to one Twins baseball game. It was almost cold. It was nothing like the humid, hot-dog-thick air of Busch Stadium. 

11. Every town brings trauma and displacement for a writer. Some towns more than others. Rochester was it for me. The Mayo Clinic loomed large, a medical mecca of steel and glass and healing, but also: the IBM headquarters. It’s a company town consisting of families and tract homes, flatness and whiteness, in both landscape and people. I was not yet a family; just a couple. We were cold, and far from ‘home.’ 

12. I loved Northfield. But the 1920s stucco house we lived in had slanting floors. Nothing was square or plumb. It had a three-season porch and an old, shaded vegetable garden we could barely grow in. I started thinking of Minnesota as a dying construct. 

a. Sometimes I was fully immersed in my new home. 

b. Other times, I felt I was on the margins, trapped between being “a Southern Belle” and a Viking. Was I oozing sweetness and naivete or standing firm and stoic, a little bit stubborn, maybe? A hybrid Missouri-Minnesota girl? 

c. I made a life there. 

d. Two of them, in fact. They emerged with red hair and blue eyes. 

e. And I emerged, too. Fully grown. And changed. I knew the lingo, the place names. I made friends. I saw how the Midwest was divided into ‘upper’ and ‘lower,’ a construct I never once realized. 

13. The cows, the earth, the food. I’ve absorbed the lights and sounds and the character of this place, even though it’s not of me, it made me. 

a. Stronger

b. More resilient

c. Charming

d. Inventive

14. So much lives outside the boundaries of traditional documentation, even as an outsider.

15. I see now how the people of the Midwest are woven together like a patchwork field of color, dialects, and experiences. We are fibers of the earth, great swaths of golden wheat, yellow corn, brown rivers and green fields. We’re spooled together, like a loom of color, a glorious tapestry of humanity. In the end, Minnesota gave me “material.”

*

 

Leslie Lindsay's writing has been featured in ANMLY, The Tiny Journal, The Rumpus, Hippocampus, Psychology Today, Mutha Magazine, Ruminate’s The Waking, Manifest-Station, Literary Mama, Pithead Chapel, Cleaver Magazine, Motherwell, Visual Verse, Flash Frog Literary, Agapanthus Literary, and A Door = Jar, with forthcoming pieces in The Millions, Levitate, The Florida Review, and Brevity. Her memoir, Model Home, is currently on submission with Catalyst Literary Management. She was recently accepted to the Kenyon Writer's Workshop and has participated in Kathy's Fish's The Art of Flash. Leslie resides in the Greater Chicago suburbs and is at work on a memoir exploring ancestral connections. She can be found @leslielindsay1 on Twitter and Instagram.  

*

 Like fellow Midwesterner and incredible essayist Sonya Huber, I loathe the harmful writing advice of “show don’t tell.” Yet, I am also a writer born and raised in the Show Me State. While Missouri is steeped in Southern front-porch storytelling, the Middle West’s characteristic pragmatism, understatement, and complicated* past and present are perpetual in our prose. We want it both ways: to show and to tell, to be Southern and Midwestern. Ultimately, there’s a certain resilience and toughness Missouri essayists must harbor because we can’t assume you, dear reader, share our points of reference or understand why we stay or live in this place, however long. Ultimately, though, describing what others do not know or have the words for makes for wilder, more inventive stories. The Missouri essayists in this project share the very Midwestern joys and terror of what it’s like to be in a state with “no particular place to go.” What constrains and releases us may surprise you.

Missourians: we'd love to have more essays riffing and rumbling on the #Midwessay! Contact me at michaella.thornton at gmail and I'll be happy to include your thoughts and insights in this project.

 —Michaella A. Thornton

* And by “complicated,” I mean openly racist, homophobic, transphobic, sexist, ableist, xenophobic, and more. We have a lot to unpack and improve on here.

The #Midwessay: Lena Crown, The Colossus of St. Louis

The Colossus of St. Louis

Lena Crown

*

There were eyes on the walls as we danced. Each one round and black with an imploring fleck of light inside the pupil, bound by concentric circles of yellow and red, as if putting out a homing signal. Red brick peeked through the paint, and in the center of the room, cement columns stood apart like bodies.

I knew this gaze intimately. Eyes are nestled all over St. Louis like security cameras, the signature of a local graffiti artist. By the night of the party, I’d met a thousand eyes on the wall of my favorite brewery, tracing their tessellation in the wallpaper as the scent of hops pricked my nose like pepper. They glimmered from the wooden fence bordering the highway in the glare of my headlights, and they peeked up my skirt from the sewer grates when I jaywalked.

It was the thick of summer. As hours passed, the party picked up speed: upstairs, we flailed to electric funk in our own pillars of empty space; in the parking lot, we knit our fingers through the diamonds in the chain-link fence as we flirted with friends of friends of friends. The eyes on the wall seemed to wink in the headlight beams that melted over us and away like disappearing ink. One boy challenged another to a wrestling match, their shapes shadow puppets gobbling each other on the asphalt. A new DJ took the helm, a tall man with long red hair who twisted knobs back and forth with his eyes shut. The air clung in hot pearls to the peach fuzz at the napes of our necks as we closed the space between us.

That was three years ago. It was just a night, really. Nothing special. But that’s kind of the point—what I find myself craving from writing about the Midwest is indulgence, abundance, fun. It’s hardly fair for New York to hog all the nights that bleed into morning, the headlights, car horns, glitter, stranger sweat, apartments crumbling in a charismatic way. I want to read about unexpected destinations in cities like St. Louis, I want the names and faces that slip viscous and slick through your fingers when you take them in your hands. I think we deserve to be frivolous with our images, lavish with our gaze; we deserve to look and be looked at by a thousand eyes. We deserve excess. Yes, the land flings its arms wide and open; yes, there is space to fill. Watch as we fill it. 

We climbed my fire escape that night heavy with the satisfaction of a story in our bellies. We didn’t sleep for a while yet. Instead, we sat outside the back door to my apartment, next to the antique dresser a previous tenant had left on the landing. The top was stuck all over with melted candles, their white wax hardened into a tide pool topography. I lit every wick just to watch them work. Each flame glimmered at the heart of a dark wet halo. We made our own eyes and watched them dance.

*

 

Lena Crown's work has been published in Sonora Review, The Offing, the North American Review, and Porter House Review, among others. She is currently stationed outside Washington, D.C., pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at George Mason University. Find her on Twitter at @which_is_to_say.

*

 Like fellow Midwesterner and incredible essayist Sonya Huber, I loathe the harmful writing advice of “show don’t tell.” Yet, I am also a writer born and raised in the Show Me State. While Missouri is steeped in Southern front-porch storytelling, the Middle West’s characteristic pragmatism, understatement, and complicated* past and present are perpetual in our prose. We want it both ways: to show and to tell, to be Southern and Midwestern. Ultimately, there’s a certain resilience and toughness Missouri essayists must harbor because we can’t assume you, dear reader, share our points of reference or understand why we stay or live in this place, however long. Ultimately, though, describing what others do not know or have the words for makes for wilder, more inventive stories. The Missouri essayists in this project share the very Midwestern joys and terror of what it’s like to be in a state with “no particular place to go.” What constrains and releases us may surprise you.

Missourians: we'd love to have more essays riffing and rumbling on the #Midwessay! Contact me at michaella.thornton at gmail and I'll be happy to include your thoughts and insights in this project.

 —Michaella A. Thornton

* And by “complicated,” I mean openly racist, homophobic, transphobic, sexist, ableist, xenophobic, and more. We have a lot to unpack and improve on here.

The #Midwessay: David Schuman, 40

 

40

David Schuman

*

My kid and I are driving west on the highway when she pipes up.

     “What is Missouri famous for?”

     It’s the kind of random question she asks a lot these days, but it hits me because I’ve been thinking lately about the fact that she’s from here, and I’m not. She was born right here in St. Louis at a hospital called Missouri Baptist, which is a funny thing for me, a Jew from New Jersey, to tell the folks back home. 

     New Jersey is famous for a lot of things, not all of them positive. Okay, most of them not positive. But I’m proud of being from there, at least as far as one can take pride in something they had nothing to do with. I like that I grew up in the shadow of New York City, that from the northeastern corner of my suburban town you could make out the Twin Towers in the distance if the air was clear. I like that the roads and towns of my youth are memorialized in Springsteen songs. I like that my commute to the industrial park in the Meadowlands where I worked in my twenties featured several of the landmarks from The Sopranos opening credits. Not to mention the pizza, the pizza, the pizza. And the Jersey attitude, even if I’ve never really been able to pull it off. Sometimes by way of argument, or explanation,  I’ll say to someone, often with a shrug, “I’m from New Jersey.” 

     I want my kid to have the same sense of pride about the place she’s from. 

     “Well,” I tell her, “there’s The Arch.” 

     “Hmmm,” she says, considering this. “I guess?’

     The Arch isn’t enough for her, it’s just that thing we bid farewell whenever we leave town, a family ritual. “Bye-bye Arch,” we say, crossing the bridge to Illinois we’ve dubbed The Ugliest Bridge In the World.  

     “Chuck Berry is from here,” I say. 

     She nods in approval, though I know this is for my sake, because she knows how much I care about rock and roll.  

     We’re out past the city limits now, west enough so that Missouri starts to look like Missouri. Fields, big sky, megachurches, warehouses advertising feed and tractors. Limestone pokes out of the ground here and there. Over the Missouri River to our right, high above, a flock of white pelicans banks and their wings catch the sun. 

     “There’s that,” I say, pointing. 

     “Yeah, but those birds are probably from Louisiana.”

     It’s true. 

     Maybe the reason I’ve been thinking so much about here and there is because my parents are still in New Jersey, and my dad’s not doing well. His memory is almost gone, and my mom’s heart is broken over it, and the distance between me and my parents, between my parents and the grandchild we’ve decided to raise out here in the middle of the country, can no longer be calculated only in land miles.

Our errand for the day is to check out a sewing stool someone is selling out in Wentzville, which to me has always sounded like a town made up by Dr. Seuss. 

     “It looks okay in the pictures online,” my wife told me. “But make sure there’s nothing wrong with it.” 

There’s something wrong with it. One of the plastic castors is cracked and will need to be replaced. But we’ve driven an hour, and the old guy who’s selling it to us is so nice. He wears a Cabela's trucker’s cap high on his head and a plaid shirt over a prominent beer belly. If he were forty years younger you could mistake him for a hipster. He details the finer points of the item, tapping his thick fingers on the vinyl upholstery to show me how sturdy it is, pulling it open to show us the plastic tray that fits inside. 

     “There’s a place for pins and bobbins and whatnot here, and you put your spools of thread on these little pegs here.”

     We both avoid looking at the broken part, as if it’s a secret we agreed long ago not to mention. My kid’s poking around the guy’s garage, which smells like sawdust and motor oil and tools, an essence no room I’m associated with will ever acquire. 

     He closes the lid and gives the stool a little poke to send it a little closer to me, which I recognize as a closing tactic. It wobbles. I suppose Home Depot carries castors.  

     “It was my wife’s” he says. 

     The way he says it I assume his wife is dead, but almost as if in response the door to the house opens and a woman comes into the garage. She’s pretty, with white hair, wearing a quilted robe incongruously with a pair of duck boots. 

     “Erin!” she exclaims. “John, why didn’t you tell me Erin was here!”

     She’s looking at my kid, who is standing there holding a fly lure she was probably going to ask if she could purchase for herself to wear as an earring or around her neck. She looks caught and not a little afraid under this woman’s beaming scrutiny. 

     “Aren’t you going to give your grandma a kiss?” says the woman. Her robe is slightly agape at the chest, and all of us in the garage want to look anywhere but at her cleavage. 

     “Jude, that’s not Erin,” he says. “These people have come to buy the stool. This is…another girl.”

     “What stool?” asks the woman, her smile falling. “My stool? Why would you give away my stool?” 

She turns to me. 

     “He’s always doing this.” Her voice has turned bitter. “He gives away all my nicest things.” 

     The old guy decides it’s time to usher her back inside. 

     “If you want it, just leave the money,”  he says, putting his arm around his wife’s waist, turning her toward the door. “Or just take it, I guess, either way.”

     I press a twenty onto the workbench and weigh it down with a rubber mallet. It was only supposed to be fifteen, but I don’t want to wait around for the guy to make change. I hold out my hand for the lure, which my kid passes to me regretfully. I put it down next to the money. 

     As we’re pulling out of the driveway, the couple come out onto their front porch. The woman’s robe has been refastened, chastely, up to the neck. The guy puts up a hand, and the woman waves wide, then blows kisses, one from each of her fingers. It’s clear she’s saying goodbye to someone who isn’t her, but my kid rolls down the window and puts out her arm to wave back. 

     We drive in silence for a while. My kid has only recently gotten big enough to sit up front, and neither of us is quite used to traveling this way. She sits formally, her hands on her knees, observing the road ahead as if she’s got a new responsibility to do so. 

     This morning, my mom told me over the phone that my dad had been denied participation in a promising trial. The problem, she told me, is that he’d need to get weekly MRIs. “He forgets where he is and he sort of comes to inside the chamber and gets scared. They told me he kept on trying to sit up in there.” I consoled my mother with something from an article I’d read, which, while heralding the trial as the cutting edge of Alzheimer’s research, cautioned that it had insofar only shown promise in mice. A researcher quoted in the article said, “When it comes to Alzheimer’s, it’s always good to be a mouse.” 

Eventually the city comes into view. The eastern approach to St. Louis on Highway 40 is like landing a plane. It all stretches out in front of you; the suburbs, the green swath of Forest Park, the giant grain silo rising over the railyards, the modest skyscrapers of downtown. And in the furthest distance, like a handle you could use to peel the whole thing up, The Arch. 

     We both take it in, just driving. 

     Then she turns to me and says, “I like it here.” 

The #Midwessay: Melody S. Gee, After Our Roots Have Thirsted

After Our Roots Have Thirsted

Melody Gee 

*

Because the Los Angeles suburb I grew up in was built in the 1960s, carved out of abandoned citrus groves and dairy farms, the 1927 brick bungalow we bought in St. Louis felt more than old. It felt ancient. It was from another era. Our house’s previous owner lived and died alone. Neighbors told us he struggled with mental illness, and that he painted dragons. Once, he showed up to a neighbor’s door at 6am with his painting supplies and offered to put a dragon above their fireplace. House flippers painted over the dragons in our living room, but their single thin coat in the basement still lets one winding red creature peek through when the sun is right. While they updated the house nicely, our plaster still cracks everywhere. There are no square corners or floors that won’t slide balls to one end of the room. I turned 40 this summer and am starting to love our old house, and its similarities to my older self. The house contains our family and has weathered tornadoes and Mississippi floods and arctic freezes. While its parts wear out and need replacing, the house has never once just broken down, knock on wood. 

The Midwest teaches me about age and aging. My parents bought their house from my father’s sister in 1970 because it’s what they could afford, and it cut down on overwhelming paperwork and dealing with too many Americans who spoke too fast. My mom never entirely got over that it wasn’t a brand-new house and she never bought anything second-hand again. Every morning my parents try to make themselves new again with supplements and creams that promise to regenerate and revive. I think it’s partly because, as immigrants, their very lives are defined by being new. Their severed roots still search for receiving ground, even sixty years later. They have no elders to anchor them the way the old and deep networks of St. Louis connect, hold, and identify those born here. 

St. Louis feels like the most real place I have lived. Anywhere I go, the brick, the black gum and redbud trees, the fleur-de-lis, and the slightly aggressive neighborhood flags all tell me you are here. The small city I grew up in, bordering endless other small cities that make up the vast and nameless suburbia south of Los Angeles, never felt like anywhere, exactly. It’s not L.A proper, not the Inland Empire, neither of The Valleys, or any of the Beach Cities. We drove from one place to another, paying little attention to what passed between. Life was a collection of places without a sense of place. But perhaps this is what immigrant life is because the realest place has long been left behind. When I bristle against my parents’ overly manicured and curated suburb, I remember that their newer house is really the most ancient place I know, filled with ancestors and Cantonese and millenia of ritual and sacrifice.

This summer, my husband is planting a native Missouri garden of coneflowers, phlox, and blazing stars. We want to be surrounded by what was here before us, before people started changing everything with what they couldn’t bear to leave behind. What belongs and what doesn’t, what’s old or new, what’s real or not—these are all questions of people whose roots have thirsted. Who’ve come and gone, fled and settled, repainted and replanted, staking belonging long before belonging arrives.

The #Midwessay: Sebastian Stockman, Home and How To Get There

Home and How To Get There

Sebastian Stockman 

*

Fly to Kansas City International Airport (MCI).

     Rent a car. 

     Take I-435 to I-70. 

     Head east on 70, toward St. Louis. (Don’t go to St. Louis!)

     Drive for an hour.

     Take the exit at Concordia. Take a left at the end of the exit ramp, driving under the highway you’ve just departed.

     Drive north on State Highway 23.

     After seven and a half miles, as the wraps to the right on a mild descent, note the silver, peak-roofed water tower. “ALMA” is painted on its side in a large sans serif font. Note the gravel road on your right. It’s the first entrance into town—but don’t take it. Note the sign on your left—“Welcome to Alma: The Cleanest Little City”—just as 23 passes under a railroad bridge.

     Let another road pass on your right. This is the blacktopped second entrance into town.

     Continue as 23 ascends gently and bends back to the left.

     On your right, note the field planted with, depending on the year, corn or soybeans. Beyond the field, note the long brick building with “HOME OF THE CHIEFS” painted on it—that’s the back of your high school.

     Come to a stop at the intersection with the blinking red light.

     Turn right onto State Highway 20. You’ll pass the newish (in the last 20 years) gas station on your left, just down the hill from where the Stolls’ house was erased by a tornado a few years back. 

     Follow 20 up and over the hill. Take your next right.

     Nod at the 25 MPH speed limit sign and the small green rectangle beneath it:

CITY LIMIT

ALMA

POP. 402

Welcome to the center of the universe.

*

Amateur politicians staffed local government. Claxton Joy was the janitor at my elementary school (Trinity Lutheran, 100 students, grades K-8). He was also the mayor. Both of these positions were retirement gigs. Silver-haired with wire-rim glasses, Claxton patrolled the tiled halls with a pushbroom and a large potbelly straining at his polo shirt preceding him. His uniform at City Council meetings was the same, sans broom. 

     The man who cut my hair—and my brother’s, and my grandpa’s—was Harlan Mieser, though everyone called him “Mouse.” He was and, as of this writing, still is, one of three Lafayette County Commissioners. 

     It was something like an understaffed community theater production; everyone played multiple roles. Bob Kurth was president of the Alma Bank. A Navy veteran who’d seen much more of the world than many of his fellow-townspeople, Bob smoked Marlboro Reds and drove a beat-up Chevy truck. His dad, Homer, was the long-time pastor at Trinity Lutheran, and Bob has been the choir director since before I was born. 

Alma Kiehl (always both names, so as to differentiate her from the town itself) was the cat lady. 

     Alma Kiehl’s tale, as recounted by the elders, was a cautionary one. According to Grandpa, she’d gone “to New York and pickled her brain on dope.” She walked everywhere in this town where people drive if they have to cover more than half a block. But from her paint-chipped white house next to the railroad tracks (one classmate heard there were fifty cats in there, someone else heard a hundred and fifty) she ventured out on her daily rounds: post office, grocery store, and sometimes the restaurant. For 50 years or more, there’s only been one restaurant in town, though in different iterations. Lately (read: the last 30 years) it’s been Cathy’s Country Restaurant and before that it was called D’s Cafe and before that it was Poodle’s.

     Cathy’s was the only place she might be confronted—and then only if she just came in to chat and not to order—as the ever-present scent of cat urine was bad for business. In my memory, she wears a fraying, long brown overcoat year-round, plus a tattered old hat. (Although as I re-read this recently I recalled a summer when she might have had her hair tied up in a red bandanna). If Alma Kiehl chanced to address us directly—“You coming from school?”—we followed the lead of our parents and mumbled vague agreements to our shoes. Her difference was dangerous. 

     The way she dressed up to venture out, her sad attempts at vanity, the way people’s embarrassment for her led to feigned indifference which led to behind-her-back scorn. A poignant figure, ridiculous and sad. But at the same time one who, as the object of gossip and speculation as to her history, revealed less about her and more about a community’s own fears and preoccupations. 

Here’s a story: one night in the late ‘50s or early ‘60s someone tripped the alarm at Alma’s general store on the town’s main drag.

     The store isn’t there anymore. It closed years before I was born. So did all six of the town’s saloons that, legend has it, once thrived on railroad traffic. Passenger trains would let travelers off for a pit stop on their way across the state. No one alive remembers the saloons. You can get a beer at Cathy’s, but she closes at seven, sometimes eight. Trains still stop in town every now and then to take on a load at the grain elevator, but there are never any passengers.

     There aren’t a lot of businesses in Alma, is what I’m saying. The building that housed the general store had been empty for years when, in the mid-90s, it was torn down to make way for a new post office.

     Anyway, very late one night or very early one morning in the late middle of the 20th Century someone tripped the alarm at the general store. Wilbert Fiene, the store’s night watchman, investigated, whereupon he surprised two Ozark hillbillies mid-burgle. The would-be felons fled the store and jumped in their truck, speeding south on a gravel road out of town. Wilbert followed only to find his hot pursuit thwarted before it’d begun; they’d let the air out of his tires. The night watchman’s next step was to rouse Renata Limback, the town’s telephone operator.

     Of course, there were no cell phones or 911, and even had there been the town has only ever had a part-time police officer, and that position often goes unfilled. What the town did have—what it would have until the mid-70s—was a party line. To get someone you’d pick up the phone and say “Renata, ring Virgil Beumer [BAY-mer] please. And then Renata would activate the line Virgil lived on. This would cause the phones to ring in Virgil’s designated pattern (two shorts and a long, say) in every house along the line. (This was great for snooping and gossip, as you didn’t have to hang up. You could listen in to any conversation happening along your line). If you’ve seen enough episodes of “The Andy Griffith Show” you’ve seen this in action. The phones worked just the same in Mayberry.

     So Wilbert woke Renata, who rang all the houses to the south and west of town, rousing sleeping farm families to let them know miscreants might be headed their way. A lot of these farmers—this story goes—went down to the ends of their lanes with rifles or shotguns, looking to get in a pop or two at the bandits’ truck as it sped by. It was probably Ronnie Rist who got one of the tires, which forced the burglars to abandon the truck and make their way on foot. 

     By now the rousted farmers had coalesced into an informal midnight posse and were tracking the fugitives with their dogs. The dogs were not practiced at tracking humans, but their baying would have been heard by the Ozarkers (whom I always picture as barefooted, overalled cartoons, like the animated Hatfields and McCoys from Warner Bros. cartoons), which would have added to an overall ominous sense of being, ahem, hounded.

     At some point the burglars doubled back toward town. They were found separately. One was discovered curled up at the bottom of someone’s cellar steps. The other was sprawled flat atop something called a self-feeder in the middle of a hog lot surrounded by some very disturbed sows.

     My grandfather, Erwin Stockman, (who went by “Dick” so as to differentiate him from his brother Albert, whom everyone called “Pete”), was a dairy farmer. Every morning he drove into town to drop off the freshly-squeezed milk at the creamery and his only child, my young father, at school. The Stockmans lived about five miles out of town along the party line that had heard so much action the night before, so father and son left a little earlier than usual that morning to see the results of the fuss. 

     Of course they went to Poodle’s, site of the town’s early-morning farmer kaffeeklatsch (as D’s would be after it and Cathy’s is now). Instead of the usual four or five men trading monosyllables over weak coffee, the Stockman boys found a lively scene of backslapping along with a loud rehashing of last night’s manhunt. And, sitting there in a booth, they found the manhunt’s targets.

     There was no city jail, and really no other place to put them, so the accidental vigilantes hauled the hillbillies into Poodle’s to hold them until the Sheriff could make his way down from the county seat. As Dad recalls it, the posse was treating the captured crooks to breakfast—out of a sense of hospitality and maybe in gratitude for a night’s excitement.

Dad’s vague on many details—like his age at the time. But this is the kind of story I grew up with. It’s the kind of story that allowed me to watch “Andy Griffith” reruns growing up and see not a lampooning but a slightly-heightened version of rural small-town life. 

     I sat summer nights on the patio as Dad drank beer and grilled. We’d listen to “A Prairie Home Companion” and wait—through the “Powdermilk Biscuits” jingle and the Ketchup Council ads, we’d wait as Garrison Keillor insisted on joining his more-talented musical guests for a number or four. Then, in the last quarter of the show, Dad would pat me on the knee and say, “here we go” approvingly as Keillor introduced his signature bit: “It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown, out on the edge of the prairie.” 

     We might hear of a character who left Lake Wobegon, went East, only to return like Alma Kiehl—abashed, chastened, diminished—and in the process confirm all the Wobegonian priors about the outside world and the folly of venturing forth into it. 

The real treat came when something in the Keillor story reminded Dad of a piece of local lore—The Night of the Ozark Bandits, say. Ignoring the closing number, he’d tell me about the time Uncle Pete and “Fat” Limback got an entrepreneurial hair and set up a still at the old King place—which I knew only as a bare spot in a field, where a tiny family cemetery plot sat next to two grain silos, just barely visible from our seats at Dad’s house, over on top of the next rise. 

     Anyway, Fat and Pete went around to the barn dances to peddle their efforts and liven up the proceedings. But, as Colonel Schuette once quipped, “They never had quite enough product, as they were assiduous about quality control.”

     This is how, not quite 30 years later, after Keillor’s retirement and disgrace, I arrive at nostalgia for nights spent with a radio program whose subject was nostalgia for a place and time it fetishized, but one that, as far as I could tell, I lived in. The News from Lake Wobegon wasn’t, for me, the self-consciously old-timey, humor-adjacent nostalgia trap most people take it for. In my pubescent cultural firmament it was … the news. News from a place where, because everyone is cousins, most trespasses could be winked at, forgiven. 

     Everything except leaving. 

The #Midwessay: Conor Gearin, On Joe Pera and Midwestern Obscurity

 

On Joe Pera and Midwestern Obscurity

Conor Gearin

*

In the chorus of the song “Team,” Lorde sings, 

We live in cities you'll never see onscreen 

Not very pretty, but we sure know how things.

Whenever I hear that line, I cheer along, internally—I too am from an offscreen city, I think. But on reflection, it seems like non-hub cities are nearly always the ones you see on the screen these days. Think about the setting of Ozark and of Breaking Bad before it: the attention to the details of ordinary neighborhoods in the Southwest and Midwest, not ruined but in the slow process of ruination, homes built in the ’70s and never updated, small town business strips emptied out except for antique stores and city hall. 

     Think of how many people around the world now recognize Scranton, Pennsylvania; Pawnee, Indiana; or Letterkenny, Ontario. A story set in Manhattan? Sounds like a splashy, high-budget romcom from 30 years ago that starts with gratuitous helicopter shots of skyscrapers—a dinosaur, in other words. 1988’s Mystic Pizza and its exploration of a sleepy Connecticut town was a better indicator of what was to come than When Harry Met Sally, Pretty Woman, or Serendipity that came in between.

     On the one hand, this line from Lorde is just the classic gesture towards home, an artist representing the community she came from, trying to say that one of us made it for the rest of us. On the other hand, it’s probably false. In singing the line, it becomes untrue: she has put her city on a stage. 

     Obscurity is central to many Midwestern origin stories. In creating a personal mythology, being “from nowhere” makes “becoming something” a more interesting narrative. Obscure origins and interests become a point of pride, a reason to see ambition as worthy and not just ordinary upward striving that we share with people everywhere.

     Lorde is from Auckland, New Zealand. With a population of over one and a half million people, it’s the largest city in New Zealand, a small country notorious as a destination for tourism and as the filming location for Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films. And similar cities are onscreen, relentlessly. 

I was born in Boston and grew up in St. Louis, two places that productions have glommed onto because of the very nature of their grim ordinariness. Before Mystic River or Good Will Hunting, greater Boston was just another collection of post-industrial New England communities crumbling into poverty, not a well-defined cultural touchstone for corruption, Catholicism, and hard lessons about the way things are. Boston movies, in a way, set the precedent for why it could be fun and commercially worthwhile to feature cities outside of New York. 

     The film Up in the Air featured a George Clooney character traveling to various sad-looking Midwestern cities after the 2008 recession, but in fact they were all just shots of St. Louis, Mo., from different angles, including scenes in Affton, one suburb over from where I grew up. 

     There’s a memorable monologue where Clooney speaks up for St. Louis’s airport, once a hub for the vanished TWA. His sister had asked him to take a photo with Lambert in the background. Anna Kendrick’s character, taking the picture, asks him what the point is. “Are you kidding—Lambert Field? The Wright brothers flew through there,” he replies enthusiastically. “That domed main terminal is the first of its kind, it's a precursor of everything from JFK to de Gaulle.” He has the obscure secret knowledge that helps explain, after all, why St. Louis matters, why everyone else is foolish for not knowing about the place.

I could have stood up and cheered when I first heard it. But now, I think it’s a little like the Lorde song—the place’s obscurity is used as the justification for its value. And in talking about it to millions of viewers, the beloved obscurity slips away as soon as it’s recognized. 

     Is it actually interesting to have grown up somewhere outside of New York or LA, or is that just a useful myth for a Midwesterner trying to create meaning out of an ordinary life? Maybe—it depends. One thing I’ve learned is that I’m less interested in art that sets itself in a lesser-known place just to add an aesthetic grimness and more interested in projects that investigate the identity of a place on its own terms.

     That’s why coming across Adult Swim’s Joe Pera Talks to You shorts felt like such a revelation. The titular character is a middle school choir teacher who speaks directly to the viewer like Mr. Rogers or Bob Ross, trying to describe the constellation of places and things that make his corner of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, or UP, a place of wonder rather than boredom. In the middle of the informative monologues, he’s often derailed by other characters. In the first episode, “Joe Pera Shows You Iron,” a documentary about the UP’s rocks and minerals instead becomes an introduction to his friends and neighbors. Composing a musical about the Rat Wars of Alberta for his students to perform becomes an argument with Sarah Conner (Jo Firestone), a music teacher with whom he’s beginning a relationship, about whether his interest in obscure subjects actually matters in the context of threats from climate change and food insecurity. Like a good essay, the episodes begin with one topic and opens unexpected doors to others.

The episodes that follow chase that idea—do my obscure interests matter?—with a level of insight I did not expect to find in comedy shorts. It’s a show about young adults realizing they aren’t finished growing up, and perhaps never will be. Joe, raised by his grandparents and often acting out a character that is half obsessive teenager, half grandfather, grows into a more mature relationship to his passions. He’s able to balance healthy bonds with Sarah and others while trying to tell the outside world about Sugarloaf Mountain, growing beans, or the lighthouses of Lake Superior. He might spend days on his backyard bean arch, but he also helps care for his neighbor’s kids while the parents move through a rough patch in their marriage. 

     Joe Pera Talks to You feels like something that could only have been made in the UP, even when the plot isn’t necessarily UP specific. The grocery store, the middle school, and the local church give me the sense that the show lives in Marquette, Mich., even when it’s offscreen (after all, it’s only onscreen for 11 minutes at a time.) That, I think, is what makes it different from the way a show like Ozark approaches its setting. Southwest Missouri is there chiefly to provide an ambience of desperation and decay. Missourians might recognize the place, but ultimately the Ozarks could be substituted for other economically depressed areas without the show losing much meaning. Ozark is set where it is because Breaking Bad already covered doing crimes in the desert, not because it has much to say about the unique truths of living near an artificial lake in the lower Midwest.

     I’ve never been to the UP, so perhaps it’s not fair for me to judge Joe Pera’s verisimilitude. But what it stands for, in my mind, is art that’s of a place, not just incidental to it. It speaks truths shared by many Midwesterners: having a personal geography of places that sound largely uninteresting for tourists but are beloved to you, seeing a modestly-sized city like Milwaukee as a metropolis, smaller things like the weekly trip to a supermarket with wide aisles and familiar people. And it reckons with the question of obscurity: whether the obscurity of a subject is enough, on its own, to make it worthwhile. The answer the show comes up with is something like: not necessarily, but if you can show why the thing means something to you and your own story, then it could be interesting.

Even though I quibble with her phrasing, I think this is what Lorde was getting at in “Team”—what it means to love a place that most others see as uninteresting. “Team” and Joe Pera are trying to do something beautiful and strange, which is to explain love, as accurately as possible, to an uninterested third person. It’s the song I find myself singing all the time.