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Dan Kennedy (1:21)

Welcome to the Moth Podcast Hi, I'm Dan Kennedy. The Moth features true stories told live without notes. All stories on the Moth Podcast are taken from our ongoing storytelling series in New York and Los Angeles and from our tour shows across the country. Visit themoth.org the story you're about to hear by Garrison Keillor was recorded live at the Mothball, the Moth's annual gala.

Garrison Keillor (1:51)

I wanted to come because I've listened to the moth on CDs for so long and always admired the fact that after people tell stories, you can hear all of these women's voices going woo. And they never do that at A Prairie Helm Companion. I never knew how to get women to go woo before, but so it's nice to be in this company. Storytelling is an art that one enters into for all the wrong reasons, but it doesn't really matter. We get into it in order to show off and also to engage the interest of women. But if you stay in it, and if you're lucky enough to stay in it for a while, you realize that it is a premier performance art in which the purpose is to gain intimacy with people whom you will never, ever know. To get become intimate with strangers is the purpose of storytelling. Intimacy is a great luxury for young people your age, but as you get to be my age, it becomes a necessity of life without which you cannot possibly live. And it is through language that we achieve this. I learned this When I was a boy. When I was 12 years old, the summer my cousin Roger drowned in Lake Minnetonka, just west of Minneapolis. He was 17, and he had just graduated from high school and had gone out with his girlfriend in a boat. And they were swimming off the boat, he and the girlfriend, and in order to impress her that he could swim, he went paddling away and he went down. We got the call at our house, and I remember my mother's voice and that sound of hollowness in her voice. And the very next week, she. She signed me up for swimming lessons at the YMCA in downtown Minneapolis. In order to save my life. I got on my bicycle and I rode from my house, which was up on the Mississippi, up in truck farming country, and into the city. This is back in streetcar days, so that the edge of the city was a definite edge. You rode your bike through farms and there was the city. And then you rode your bike along Washington Avenue and through a factory district that no longer exists in Minneapolis. On a hot summer day when the doors of factories, foundries, metal shops were open. There was a cooperage, a barrel making factory. There were a couple of dairies. There were printing plants, and this acrid smell of ink wafted out from them. There were two lumber yards, which also were sawmills. So the smell of fresh wood. It was a gorgeous bike trip for a boy, all the way downtown and then up Hennepin Avenue, which was the show street in Minneapolis. The big theaters, the Orpheum and the State and the Gopher and the Alvin, which was still doing burlesque back then. Blaze Star was a headliner. Her name was on the marquee. There was the Rifle Sport Penny Arcade, and there were adult bookstores and men slumped into doorways. And you pedaled your bike up to 9th street and you took a left and there was the ymca, which reeked of chlorine. You went down into the cellar, and here you were in a group of 30 boys, all 10, 11, 12, 13 years old. You were told to take off all your clothes and to go into the shower, which was cold, and then into the pool area, where you sat naked around the edge of the pool. And the lordly swim instructor paced up and down and ordered you, three and four at a time, to go into the pool and to swim. He told you how to swim, and then when you got into the water, he made fun of you for how weird you looked down there. It was a cold, clammy place that reeked of chlorine. And I stood it for Three days in a row. And then I didn't go to the YMCA anymore. I rode my bike one more block up Hennepin to the public library in a great big brown stone building, a great castle. I leaned my bike up against it. There were no bike locks. Then we just leaned our bikes and we went in through the periodicals room. And we went up the stairs past the facsimile of the Declaration of Independence and past the Egyptian mummy that was on the landing on the third floor. And you went into the children's room. And here was the smell of fresh books. And that's where I spent my summer every morning, biking in through the factories and up Hennepin Avenue to read books and to sit and to read Dickens and to read Mark Twain and to read Robert Benchley and everything I could get my hands on. It was my first great act of disobedience in my life. And I've been repeating it ever so often, ever since then, all in search of the intimacy of stories on a page. To read, stories written by people who've been dead so long their bodies are moldering and yet they're speaking directly to you in your own language is such a great miracle. I never regretted it. But I've gone back to that story over and over again and tried to figure it out. Sometimes I'm the boy who drowns in the lake, and Roger is the one who goes to take swimming lessons and winds up at the lake library. The swim instructor pacing up and down in his swim trunks no longer is evil in my mind. He just is a man whose job it is to initiate a boy into a male world. And I chose not to go into it and to come into another world. And that's been my life ever since. I'm still trying to figure it out. I met the girlfriend two years ago on the plane from Minneapolis to New York. A woman of 70 walked up to me when we were boarding, and she said, I knew your cousin Roger. I was his girlfriend. I said, I really would like to hear that story. I've thought about you a lot. She said, I imagine you have. I gave her my telephone number. I gave her my email address. It's been a year and a half. I've never heard from her. I guess the story, even after 50 years, is still just terribly, terribly vivid to her. But I still have hope. So I'm just waiting to hear the rest of that story. Still waiting. Thank you so much.