Love Me by Garrison Keillor Page A

you,” said Iris. “I can’t keep you from running around with other women or going to New York or anything else. You’re going to do what you want to do, so you may as well do it and get it out of your system.”
    “You could come with me.”
    “And do what? Sit and polish my nails and wait for Mrs. Rocke- feller to invite me to tea?”
    I could have gone into therapy, or read a book about happiness or filled my pockets with rocks and waded into the Mississippi, but I’m an American, so I left town and went to New York. That’s how we do it. We move on.

7
    The Bel Noir
    There was no farewell party for me. Iris kissed me good-bye when she left for work. “Take it easy,” she said. At 9 A.M., the taxi pulled up and honked and I threw my suitcases in the trunk and got in and rode away. Mr. Ziegler watched me from his front porch, a large sad man in yellow shorts. And I went to New York.
    There is a restless strain in the Wyler family going back to the Welsh side and our ancestor David Powell, who started out in Pennsylvania, married, moved to Ohio, then Indiana, then to De Kalb, Illinois, and then to Charles City, Iowa, and Missouri. He was a farmer but he had the Powell in him and every few years he had to load his household in the wagon and head west. His children left the nest as the nest moved west and they stayed put in Illinois and Iowa and his wife put her foot down in Missouri. David, after a side trip to the Colorado gold fields, pushed south and joined the Oklahoma land rush of 1889 and put his marker on a claim and sat down under a cottonwood tree with a blanket over him and died there in the heat and the dust. A good death. His long pilgrimage had kept his heart fresh and eager, and he was taken up on angel wing to the alabaster city and set down at the Lord’s Table without an ounce of regret, unlike his bourgeois children, who loved their homes and yards and furniture and cars and took their leave of this earth with great reluctance and fussing with medicine and entertaining false hope, but to David, Ohio, Illinois, Colorado, Oklahoma were only stations on the way to Glory.
    And so, in the Powell spirit, I being in good health and of sound mind, walked away from my good life and the plane took off over the magnificent Mississippi and Fort Snelling on the bluff and ascended over Hastings, Red Wing, Wabasha, La Crescent in the summer twilight, the cows resting in their green meadows, chewing and dreaming, grain barges heading downstream, the diligent farmers tilling loam—I headed into the clouds and gallivanted off to New York City.
     
     
     
    Life presents us with certain gifts. The fog lifts, the coast is clear, time to be venturesome. You’ve spent fifteen years in the potato fields: try the jazz life for awhile. Some odd experience is available now that might not be later. Put on your walking shoes, put $100 in your pocket, bring an umbrella.
    Adventure. It saves us from smugness, the sin of the Midwest: that extra topspin you put on the truth when you know they know you’re right; the vanity of the modest, their reflexive remorsefulness, their humorlessness—a little glorious stupidity can be a tonic.
    We are good people and we are mean sons of bitches: we’re fractious, susceptible to envy, suspicious, cruel. We did not fall to earth from a distant galaxy; we arrived via mortal beings with splendid faults, many of which we inherited. Mine is restlessness. I hate boredom. It terrifies me. Good-bye, Minnesota.
    I flew into New York LaGuardia and a Lincoln Town Car picked me up and drove me across the Triborough, the towers of Manhattan shining softly in the distance, and through Spanish Harlem into Central Park, crowded with walkers, joggers, skaters, bikers, and I told the driver to let me out at the corner. I got out at 96th and Central Park West and fell in with the crowd flowing south past the ball fields, the Delacorte Theater and Belvedere Castle, around the lake of lovers in green