Read Online Pilgrims by Garrison Keillor - Free Book Online Page A

yammering nonstop. Wore you out so you caught all the viruses they brought home, which they got over in twenty-four hours, and you were a zombie for two weeks. They crawled into bed with you at 2:00 A.M. and threw up. One of them only ate food that is white and another one loved to walk into the room and scream and another one needed to make Getting Dressed in the Morning into an Ibsen tragedy. At night, she was so exhausted that the thought of having sex was like the thought of runningthe high hurdles. No, she lay in bed thinking of all she must do the next day, organizing the cakewalk for the spring carnival and baking brownies for the bake sale and encouraging the bloom of individuality—Carla the queen bee and Carl Jr. the gifted misfit and Cheryl the comedian—and offering basic financial/transportation/ shopping/counseling services, twenty years of steady interesting work, plus teaching eleventh graders the difference between “anxious” and “eager,” and “nauseated” and “nauseous”—and you get the kids out of the house finally, the last one gone. You give a graduation party for her—nobody gives one for you , no party for graduating parents. (What do you graduate to? Nobody knows.) You must’ve learned something from parenting—and no, there’s nothing. You know less about it than when you began. You learn about prayer. Which you do when there’s nothing to be done. It’s up to You, God . You wish you had prayed more and yelled less. You regret that you didn’t laugh more, that you told them 2,000 times to pick up after themselves when 850 might have been enough. Parenthood was a huge stupefying parenthesis in your life and now you must pick up where you left off (which is where, exactly?) and meanwhile you’ve learned nothing about life except that you want more of it. The three little Krebsbachs were gone and all the advice she’d dispensed to them didn’t seem so useful to her. Be careful of free offers. Get up early and do what you need to do before you have time to worry about it. The way to do hard things is to do them. Trouble is easy to avoid so long as you stay away from it . Good cautionary advice but she had lost her caution in the course of teaching it to her children. She was hoping for free offers. And to find trouble.
    She strode onward, map in her pocket, no fear of getting lost.If she got lost, not a problem. She was well lost already. Nobody here knew her, nobody expected her to smile and say hello to them. Nobody was going to stop her and ask how is Carl, is Carla pregnant yet, did Cheryl get the job? Nobody would ask why she couldn’t come to the spring choral concert and hear “Shenandoah” for the thirty-seventh time. Nobody would look at her and think, “Back in high school we all thought she was going to go places. Wonder what happened?” Nobody would think, “Gee, I liked that outfit she was wearing yesterday better. And those old brown oxfords have seen better days.” She walked steadily on, crossing busy streets against the light, darting between slow-moving walkers, and when she heard a snatch of English, she turned her head away and quickened her step. She was Marjorie Parmigiano and she was en route to a lunch date with Enrico. She ducked into a shop, snatched a six-foot scarf off a shelf, bright green, paid up, tossed it around her neck, marched on. She had a feeling she was being followed but she didn’t care. This was the way to travel. Solo. Nobody to make small talk with. Like it says on the sign in buses: PLEASE DO NOT ENGAGE DRIVER IN UNNECESSARY CONVERSATION . And there is so much of that in the world, people announcing the obvious. In Lake Wobegon, a man stopping another on Main Street: “So you’re in town too, then.” “Ja, I thought I’d come to town. Why not.” Two men announcing their presence. Dumb. No, a person should travel alone