We Are Still Married (26 page)

We cruised around spraying jet fuel into the night sky over the Baltic Ocean, and I remembered those years in the broadcast trade and thought that, if our wheels touched ground again and we walked out into the wet salt air of Denmark, I would devote more time to ambling around and having fun. In Denmark, by national law, everyone gets five weeks of paid vacation per year, even if you're unemployed. Five weeks times fifteen years is seventy-five weeks of vacation, of which I had used about twenty, wasting an entire year. I regretted that lost year very deeply. My life had been entirely too sober and determined. We had left three teen-agers back home in Minnesota, all leading full rich lives, and breakfast with them was a high point of the day, from which I descended into the dark radio mine, carrying my canary in a tin cage, who usually died before 2:00 in the afternoon. I regretted not lingering longer over breakfast.

A DC-10 carries a major load of fuel and there was plenty of time to regret a number of things.

I regretted the narcissism that goes with being a writer. We assume that the world is anxious to hear what we think, a useful assumption if you're going to spend your sunny mornings at a typewriter, but do we have to be
this
self-centered?

I regretted that “A Prairie Home Companion” was lured into television. Radio was so sensual and delicious and it injured the show and insulted the audience to allow cameras to tromp around in it. Once, during a rehearsal, a cameraman told Kate MacKenzie, “Move the microphone down, it's obscuring your face,” and she said, sweetly, “It's the camera that obscures. The microphone
reveals.”
Television has no patience and little curiosity, and so the picture jumps constantly. A guitarist can sit and pick the most stunning simple version of “Wild-wood Flower” and achieve a moment of transcendent grace but television is deaf, it can't sit still, it circles the guitarist, shoots his hands, his face, jumps in back of him, crouches, circles, until the viewer is completely separated from the performance. You don't need this if you want Leo Kottke, whose appeal is through his music. What you want television for is a celebrity guitarist who is more interesting for who he is than for what he sounds like. For example, if a Doberman pinscher played “Go Tell Aunt Rhody” on the guitar, you wouldn't be satisfied to listen to him on the radio and hear the announcer say, “That was Rex playing. Good job, Rex.” You'd want to see it for yourself.

I regretted that I hadn't
done
more. Not good works, necessarily: I did my part for the homeless, the alkies, public radio, various losing liberals, an open school, the Save the Spiders Foundation, the Home for the Moody, the lower-spine association, the Suspicion Center, some others. I regretted never having played the accordion, seen New Mexico or Maine, learned to dance the fox-trot, met Victor Borge, read
Moby Dick
or
Don Quixote,
eaten supper in the Oak Room at the Algonquin, fished Rainy Lake, known a little physics, talked to my dad about his father.

I regretted some bad shows I did.

I regretted having hurt some people.

We landed smoothly and deplaned and were met by a dozen reporters from the Copenhagen dailies and Danish radio and TV, who played the story big the next day although the captain insisted that the emergency was simple and the ship was never in danger. The flight was rescheduled for the next afternoon. All the hotels in Copenhagen were full, so the airline would take us to Malmö, Sweden, and put us up there for the night. My wife and I decided to strike out on our own, and wound up at a friend's apartment in Holte, where we slept on the floor. I woke up six or seven times in the night, and the next day's flight was scrubbed for some other reason, and we spent a night in a cheap loud hotel downtown, and the following evening packed into the economy section with hundreds of other bitter travelers. When we landed at Kennedy, I had hardly a regret left. Just wanted to get on with life in America and that's what I've done.

I
'M NOT ONE WHO READS food labels closely. The taped music at our supermarket makes me jittery and I'm in no mood to inspect labels for BTL or RSVP or any of the chemicals that make laboratory rats' tails stand straight up—I feel like a rat myself and run up and down the aisles throwing things into my cart and get out as fast as I can and feel fortunate. I don't read labels once I get home either, because there's no point in it. The food is bubbling away in its plastic cooking pouch in the boiling water, and why torment yourself with doubts and fears at the last minute? If it weren't good for us, I figure, the government would not allow it to be on the shelves.

So it bothered me one day when I glanced at the label on a can of tomato soup and there was no
Reg. Penna. Dept. Agr.
on it. I already had dumped the soup glop in the pan and added one cup of water slowly and was stirring occasionally, and read the label to make sure the directions hadn't been changed to “add two cups of water quickly and whip to a white froth,” and there was no
Reg. Penna. Dept.
Agr. I checked other labels in the cupboard: no
Reg. Penna.
on jars of raspberry jam, apple butter, Ovaltine, Louisiana hot sauce, instant cocoa, marmalade, maple syrup (some benzoate there, though), molasses, blueberry syrup (actually corn syrup and blueberry juice), chicken-bouillon cubes, baking powder, Puerto Rican pickled peppers, soups, corn, cake mix, or on couscous, or linguini, or on a bag of enriched rice (22 mg. of carbohydrates per 1 oz. serving). In the whole cupboard, I found a single solitary
Reg. Penna.
A package of dried “Oriental Noodles & Chicken Flavor Packet” manufactured in Industry, California.

When I was a little boy learning to read, I read everything out loud, Burma-Shave signs, “Popeye” and “Jiggs” and “Little Iodine” and “Winnie Winkle” in the Minneapolis
Star,
the Monkey Wards catalogue,
No Trespassing, Post No Bills,
state slogans on license plates,
everything,
including food labels, and I remember that
Reg.
Penna.
Dept. Agr.
was on just about every package of food, along with
Made in U.S.A., Tear Along Dotted Line,
and
Follow Directions Carefully.
For a long time I didn't know if it meant Regulated By or Registered With or Regretfully Yours, and a little joke among the school lunchroom crew that flattened the big tin cans and took them out to the trash barrel was that it stood for Regurgitated By, but, in a vague way, it represented government approval of the food, an official kosher mark put on in Pennsylvania.

That's what Reg. Penna. Dept.
Agr
. means to most of us, I guess. It isn't as if the Supreme Court has upheld these peas as tender and delicious, but it's some sort of affirmation, and with Reg. Penna. on the label, you can be fairly certain that the food doesn't contain big dollops of potassium cyanide or any more milligrams of rodent parts than might be good for you. Its meaning, passed on to us from childhood, seems to be: “Eat what is put before you. Don't complain. It's good. Be glad you have it. Children in Asia would be very happy to eat this.”

If, as my cupboard study seems to suggest,
Reg. Penna.
Dept. Agr. is passing from American shelf life, it's probably because of militant consumers threatening lawsuits every time somebody eats a
Reg. Penna
. product and finds a hair in it. I suppose the
Penna.
people saw the handwriting on the wall and concluded that it was time to get out of the
Reg. business.
Their simple homely seal of approval had become an invitation for surly individuals to make trouble, so they quietly folded the
Dept,
and stole away. I don't know this for a fact but I surmise it, based on childhood experience. My mother had six children, all of us consumer advocates when it came down to the food that was set before us. Any food that struck us as the least little tiny bit unusual, we ran tests on until it was stone cold. “It tastes funny!” we said. “What's in this? It looks funny. It smells funny. Did you put green peppers in it?” Green peppers were our sodium nitrite. We blanched at the thought of them. We suspected every dish of containing trace elements of green peppers.

In the end, Mother surrendered to consumer interests and to the fear of green peppers. She gave her consumers what they demanded, which was spaghetti, hamburgers, hot dogs, and macaroni and cheese. I think of her when I see shoppers grab up any package of food labeled
Natural or No Preservatives.
What makes
Natural
better than
Reg. Penna. Dept. Agr
.? Will we allow ourselves to be ruled utterly by suspicion and fear?

Beside this typewriter is a bottle of rubber cement clearly labeled:
Danger
:
Extremely Flammable
.
Do Not Use Near Fire or Flame. N.Y.F.D.C. of A. 852
. Why would the New York Fire Department issue a Certificate of Approval to an extremely flammable cement? Does this mean that the N. Y. F. D. certifies that this cement, though extremely flammable, is nevertheless safer than other, downright explosive cements? Is it flammable only if used carelessly? Is there no chance that this bottle could be a bad one and burst into flames, ignited by sunshine, hurling jagged bits of glass and flaming red-hot cement drops right up into my face before I finish writing this? Is the N. Y. F. D. going to accept responsibility for that and pay me six million dollars?

Every day we walk a treacherous path through dark valleys and over steep mountains, and unseen hands reach out to guide us at every step. We plunge into unlikely romances with uncertified persons, we take off on difficult missions to defend unspecified ideals; daily we risk our known lives in behalf of sweet mystery, and all on the basis of the slightest of clues, and accept happily uncertainties compared to which
Reg. Penna. Dept. Agr
. is practically a covenant. Its slight guarantee is intended to free us from hypochondria and the fear of dark specks in the asparagus so that we may get on to our real work in the world, which is justice, brotherhood, and freedom.

L
AST WINTER, after our wedding, my wife and I decided to take our four teen-age children on a vacation trip out west as a way of sealing the family bond. Alaska seemed to call to us, and Hawaii, and the state of Washington, where I went on car trips as a boy, and then we heard Oregon and after that the whistle of the overnight express, and pretty soon we worked up a five-week, eleven-state tour ambitious enough to launch a bid for the presidency, and one fine July morning, before caution could overtake us, we struck out for the Coast.

Today, a month later, we are heading south on Highway 101 through California redwoods, cruising down from Crescent City toward Garberville and, tomorrow, San Francisco, with eight days and six states to go—states we'll cover on the California Zephyr to Chicago. We're riding in a rented Toyota van, light brown, with our daughter and me, seventeen and forty-three, in the back seat; two boys, nineteen and fifteen, in the middle; and my wife and another boy, forty-three and seventeen, in front. My wife, who doesn't like to drive and hasn't got the hang of mountain driving, is driving, and I am keeping to myself a few short sentences of advice (“Don't brake on curves. Coast into the curve and then accelerate. Use centrifugal force”). It's 9:30 A.M., we've been on the road since 8:00, and the children, whom I will call Curly, Larry, Moe, and Marilyn Monroe, are plugged into Walkmans, except Marilyn, who is writing a poem (“about death,” she told me a moment ago). Of our thirty-some days together so far, some have been better than others, and today is one of the worst. It is the ninth or tenth day of the campaign of Curly and Larry to avoid acknowledging, by word or glance, each other's physical reality. (The van swerves, brakes; we lurch forward. “Sorry !” my wife cries.) It is the fourth or fifth day since the children last looked out the window voluntarily and said something nice about the scenery.

We've tried to arouse them. “Natural beauty on the left!” I've yelled many times, and “Magnificence on the right!” and “Incredible rock formations!” and “Fabulous forest giants looming in the morning mist !” I end up sounding like an old emcee in a white tux: Coming up now, folks, one of America's most beloved mountains, so what do you say we all look out the window and show our appreciation of this terrific natural attraction—
Mount Hood!

Now my wife cries, “Just look out there!” and the children, who have seen Mount McKinley close up from a small plane, and the Arctic tundra and a gold mine, the beaches and tropical valleys of Kauai, and the big surf at Diamond Head, the glaciers and fjords around Juneau, the mighty Columbia, the windswept rocky coast and the Oregon sand dunes and the Olympic Peninsula and its deep rain forests and cold blue mountain lakes, and enough pure grandeur to make a person wish for an oil refinery: the children glance up at a grove of pre-Christian redwoods around us, shafts of sun, mist, deep greens and browns glistening, a sight so lovely you might expect to see a quotation from Thoreau underneath it—they glance up and they slouch back down into their music. It is music that makes me grateful for Mr. Sony and his wonderful invention: all I can hear from the tiny headphones is faint noises, like distant chain saws clearing brush. A line of motor homes lumbers northward up a steep grade, followed by a crowd of bikers on Harleys, and we fly south past them and glide, like a plane banking through cloud, between ranks of giant trees, and turn onto a small dirt road alongside a meadow, and stop.