We Are Still Married (24 page)

To the danger of ice now was added the greater danger of speech, a slippery step for a ceremonial person: consider how many men, invited
ex officio
to snip a ribbon or toss a shovelful of dirt, have stepped to a microphone and given more of themselves than the occasion called for—I remember a Methodist minister who stood to give the invocation at my son's soccer-awards banquet and couldn't resist the chance to tell a joke about a man found hiding in the closet when the woman's husband came home early from work. We laughed (nervously) at the punch line (“Everybody's got to be somewhere”) and then he tried to top that joke for about ten minutes before he finally turned to God in prayer. I wondered if the microphone would be right in my path across the ice so I'd have to step around it and my silence would look sneaky or arrogant (“Big Shot Snubs Crowd, Has No Comment as Thousands Sit in Stunned Disappointment—‘We drove all day and all night to see him,' said unemployed father of eleven, comforting his weeping wife, eight months pregnant, ‘and he didn't say a word, this is the low point of our lives, I don't see how we can go on' ”) and I tried to think of ten or fifteen terrific words I could say about Winter Our Favorite Season, or Hockey in a Democratic Society, but that seemed to lead toward a major speech (Crowd Attacks Man Who Delays Hockey Game in Mid-Ice Filibuster—“ Someone lower down in the organization invited him to drop the puck,” said tight-lipped North Stars execs, “and we expect to know their identity within the next thirty-six hours”).

I asked John Mariucci, a Stars exec and an old friend, why I was chosen, and he thought for a long time. Mr. Mariucci is almost seventy, a former defenseman, a man sometimes called the Father of Minnesota Hockey but more often called John, and he put his hand on the back of my neck and squeezed it. “We've had our eye on you,” he said in his sweet high voice. “We've seen you drop quite a few things over the years and we like your style. You have a good release.”

And then suddenly it was my cue. The young guy put a puck in my hand, a muffled voice boomed my name in the darkened arena, there was light applause like water going over a small dam, the spotlight swung toward me, and I smiled affably and stepped down the runway through the door in the boards onto the ice. A tall woman in a brief spangly suit skated over and took my left arm—on skates, she towered over me—“just so you don't go down,” she said, as I padded out onto the ice, “be careful, it's slippery”—and she propelled me across the white ice. I looked down. I barely noticed the microphone in passing, or the hockey players standing at attention along the blue lines. Two players waited at center ice. They smiled two big toothless smiles, I shook their hands (both dry) and wished them each a good season, and they then faced each other, bent over, sticks ready, and I bent and then—with what some North Stars officials told me later was a graceful but economical motion—I dropped the black rubber disc on the white ice, the players feinted a swipe at it, one of them picked it up and gave it to me, the spangled lady took my elbow, and I padded back past the microphone to the runway to a second, fainter wave of applause, stood at attention as a tenor sang the Anthem, nailing the high note (“land of the
free
”) in a thrilling voice, and the moment was over. Nobody that evening confessed to the slightest disappointment that I had not spoken. I sat and watched the game, which the Bruins won, 5—3, and drove home and was in bed before midnight.

O
NE FALL DAY I went to the kitchen and got out a bag of flour and made the first apple pie I made in my life. Made it from scratch, including mixing butter with flour to make a great crust, and loaded it with sour apples and brown sugar and nutmeg, baked it to a T, and of course it was delicious. My guests for dinner were a couple who seemed to be coasting from a bad fight. We ate the pie and sat in a daze of pleasure afterward, during which the wife said that it reminded her of pies she ate when she was a little Norwegian Lutheran girl in Normania Township on the western Minnesota prairie. “We had love, good health, and faith in God, all things that money can't buy,” she said, glancing at her husband, apropos of something. “This time of year, we were always broke, but somehow we made it. We'd fix equipment, feed the animals, and sleep. My mother made apple pie. One year she made thirty in one day. My dad was sick and thirty of our neighbors come in with fourteen combines and harvested his three hundred acres of soybeans. It took them half a day to do it, at a time when they were racing to get their own soybeans in, but out there, if your car broke down in the country, the next car by would stop. My mother baked thirty pies and gave one to everybody who helped us.” Naturally I was pleased, until later, when it occurred to me that I would never bake another one as surprisingly good, having hit a home run on my first try. (They are still married, by the way.)

A
MAN WHO IS NAMED one of the ten sexiest men in America by
Playgirl
magazine has a responsibility to his fellow men to say a few words about it, especially if he is forty-four at the time, a Midwesterner who majored in English at a Big Ten school, and wears glasses and grew up fundamentalist—not to gloat over what is, after all, a God-given asset (how many men does God put in the top ten, anyway?)—but to offer help and counsel. Unfortunately, it's 10:30 on a Saturday night and I'm about ready to head upstairs, so this will be a shorter lecture than what you hoped to hear, perhaps. (1) If you have a choice between poetry and football, choose poetry. Football wrecks your legs and you can't use it for anything. Other guys put their arms around you in football. You write a poem for a woman, you give it to her, she is speechless. What can a jock give her, his socks? So I chose to write poems about her delicate body being like a shy deer nibbling the blossoms of an apple tree. It's not an original image but it was an easy choice. A quarter-century later, my wife remembers it. (2) The human elbow, particularly the
tip
of the elbow. I don't want to say more. (3) Foreign women release something in men, and perhaps vice versa, so don't shy away from your foreign side. I'm Scottish with some Canadian. (4) Fundamentalists have more fun. You can't enjoy sex to the fullest unless you've spent some time in the wilderness, being repressed. (5) Sex is better in marriage than anywhere else you can imagine, like the song says: It's all right to get your appetite walking round town just as long as you eat supper at home. (6) Eating in bed afterward is perfectly natural. (7) It gets better.

Sex is a progression of sweet blessings, and one learns to enjoy each one of them whether or not it leads to the next.

After a while, each blessedness seems more or less as enjoyable as any other, except the last, which is distinctive.

I accept this honor on behalf of all fundamentalists, and all Midwesterners, and all forty-four-year-olds, and good night.

I
DON'T HAVE many friends who have done one thing so well that they're famous for it and could sit on their laurels if they wanted to, although I do know a woman who can touch her nose with her tongue, which she is famous for among all the people who've seen her do it. She doesn't do it often, because she doesn't need to, having proved herself. I also know a man who wrote a forty-one-word palindrome, which is about as far as you can go in the field of writing that reads the same forwards and backwards. And I know Chet Atkins, who is enplaqued in the Country Music Hall of Fame, in Nashville, and has a warm, secure spot in the history of the guitar. My own accomplishments fall into the immense dim area of the briefly remarkable, such as the play I made on a hot grounder off the bat of my Uncle Don, for which I felt famous one day in 1957. I backhanded the ball cleanly at third base and threw the aging speedster out at first, which drew quite a bit of comment at the time, but that was long ago and plays have been made since that put mine in the shade. It was a hot July afternoon at Lake Minnetonka, and the Grace & Truth Bible camp had spent the morning in Deuteronomy, where I have no competence at all, and then I went out and made that great play. I was not quite fifteen and generally unaccomplished, so it meant a lot to me. The ball took a low bounce off the soft turf, and I had to pivot, get my glove down fast, then set my right foot to throw. The throw got him by a stride. If you had seen this, you would remember it.

I first met Chet Atkins in 1982, backstage at “A Prairie Home Companion.” He was standing just back of the back curtain, humming to himself, and reached down and picked up his guitar, like a man slipping into a shirt, and put his right foot up on a chair and fooled around with a string of tunes that came to him, including the one he'd been humming. Then we made conversation about various things, and he asked me if I played golf. I said, “A little.” Golf isn't one of my good subjects. I don't have good memories of it.

He mentioned golf again the next time I saw him, and the time after that, and he told me to come down to Nashville whenever I felt like playing some golf with him, and finally, on a Sunday morning toward the middle of May 1984, I flew down for a visit, though golf was the last thing on my mind. In my hands, golf is a grim, catastrophic game that makes me into someone I don't want my friends to know—a person who, in fact, I already was when I got on the plane. There had been a sour smell in the air around me for weeks, from a hard winter of sitting in a small room and throwing wads of typing paper at a basket and missing, and I went South to get rid of it. Whenever I feel bad, Southern voices make me feel better, whether it's Dolly Parton or Grandpa Jones or a waitress in a café. When she says “Hi! Haw yew?” I am immediately just fine.

I met Chet about midafternoon at his office on Music Row, down the street from the studio where he made most of his albums and where he produced albums for Willie and Waylon, Eddy Arnold, Porter Wagoner, and dozens of other laureates, and we headed south in his black Blazer to the golf course at Henry Horton State Park, forty-two miles from Nashville, where he was going to play in the annual Acuff-Rose Invitational on Monday and Tuesday. He said he had flown in that morning from doing two shows in Denver with a jazz guitarist named Johnny Smith. “You remember him. He had that big record of ‘Moonlight in Vermont' back in the fifties.” Acuff-Rose is one of the big music-publishing firms in Nashville, the first in the country devoted to country music, founded in 1942 by Roy Acuff, of “Wabash Cannonball” fame, and the late Fred Rose, Hank Williams' mentor. Chet said that the tournament was just for fun. He had played in it for twelve years. “People in the music industry play, and friends of theirs. They see somebody on the street, they invite him. Everybody's played in it, from the chief of police on down.
You
could play.” I said no thanks. He was in a foursome, he said, with Billy Edd Wheeler, the songwriter, and a banker from Columbia named Smalley and his old friend Archie Campbell, the comedian. “Archie was the one who got me first playing golf, back in 1958 or 9. I saw how much fun he had, and I liked to be around him, so I started. I was too old to get good at it, though. You have to start young.” Chet was thirty-four or thirty-five at the time, and he's sixty now.

He pointed out Waylon Jennings' house, and Eddy Arnold's, and Tom T. Hall's studio as we drove along, and a church where a woman singer got married whose wedding he played for when he had an upset stomach and who was now divorced. He put a tape in the tape deck. “This is one Billy Edd wrote,” he said. A song called “Ode to the Little Brown Shack Out Back.” He said, “You remember that record Archie made? ‘Trouble in the Amen Corner?' ‘Old brother Ira, singing in the choir'? It was a real tearjerker, but it sold a lot, so RCA wanted to put out an album on him—of songs, you know—and we had Boudleaux and Felice Bryant go to work to write him some. They were sitting around writing all these sad songs about the old dog who died and that sort of thing, and finally Felice got sick of it. She said, ‘Let's write something
happy,'
so they wrote ‘Wish that I was on ol' Rocky Top, down in the Tennessee hills' and that was ‘Rocky Top.' The Osborne Brothers recorded it, but Archie takes credit for it. He said to me once, ‘They'd never have written it without me, Cock. Without me, there'd be no “Rocky Top. ” ”'

This pleasant monologue in Chet's soft, East Tennessee tenor took us out in the country down Interstate 65 and to the motel at Horton Park, and included so such more—about musicians and golf, and an old radio faith healer who put his fingers in deaf people's ears and yelled at them to hear, and a squirrel Chet kept for a pet when he was a boy (“He made a nest in our old upright piano and wouldn't come out, so I sat down and played the Lost Chord and he shot straight up in the air and we never saw him again”)—that when I finally climbed into bed that evening I had long forgotten what it was that I was feeling bad about when I got on the plane.