They Put My Congressman Out to Pasture and Didn't Even Send a Card

First of all, before I even get into it, I want to say something about the website I read this on, because nobody ever talks about the website, everybody wants to talk about the "story," fine, the story, but the website loaded up with four different boxes moving around on their own, one of them was a woman with very white teeth trying to sell me a walk-in tub, and I don't have stairs, I live in a rambler, I've told this walk-in tub woman a hundred times in my mind, I do not have stairs, and still she persists, she is relentless, she is like Sheila from the DMV who would not let you leave the counter without initialing four times, four times, for a license renewal, a renewal, not a new license, just a sticker basically, and the ink on those DMV pens was always dying, always, they'd hand you a pen with maybe six more words of ink left in the whole barrel and say "sign here" like it was a normal thing to ask of a person.

Anyway. Larson. They took my Congressman. Well, not mine exactly, I don't believe I've voted since — that's not the point, the point is a man goes and serves and serves and serves and then some fella half his age with a haircut like a weatherman shows up and says "time for a change" and everybody just — claps? They just clap. Nobody asks what the plan is. "Generational change" is not a plan, that's a bumper sticker, that's what you put on a Trapper Keeper, I had a Trapper Keeper in — well it wasn't 1982 exactly, might've been '83, my memory on the Trapper Keeper is not what it used to be, but I remember the metal snap on it, it had a real satisfying snap, like a bear trap but for folders, and Gregory Pell — big kid, wore his gym shorts backwards on purpose, I never understood why, some kind of statement I suppose — Gregory Pell had the wolf one, the wolf howling at the moon, airbrushed, and he would not let anybody touch it, would not let you so much as breathe near it, and one day it just disappeared off his desk during a fire drill and nobody, to this day, nobody knows what happened to that Trapper Keeper, there was a rumor it went out the window, there was a rumor Sister Adelaide took it, she taught music, hard woman, played the accordion like she was strangling it, and I bring this up because — I don't bring it up because of anything. It's just there. It sits in the drawer with the other stuff.

Where was I. Larson. Experience. That's what they threw out, is what I'm saying, they threw out experience for a message, and a message is not a thing you can point to, you cannot hand a message a wrench and say fix the pipe, an experienced man can fix the pipe, and I don't even know if that's true about him, about Larson, whether he's a pipe man, probably not, they don't let Congressmen near the pipes anymore, insurance, everything's insurance now, in '82 a man could still get up on a roof without eleven forms —

And another thing — nobody under thirty knows what a busy signal sounds like, and I don't see what that has to do with electing anybody but I feel it's related, somehow it's all related, the busy signal, the beep beep beep, and you'd just sit there with the phone against your ear listening to the beep beep beep like a fool, hoping it would turn into ringing, and it never did, you had to hang up and dial again, the whole seven digits again, no redial button, redial button hadn't been invented, or if it had, we didn't have it, the Kowalskis had it, they had everything first, they had the big satellite dish before anybody, size of a wading pool, pointed at the sky like they were expecting company from up there, and Mr. Kowalski would not tell you how much it cost, just "oh, you know," which meant either very little or a fortune, there was no in between with that man —

I've lost the thread. That's fine. That happens. It's what happens when a generation decides experience is a liability, that's a wonderful attitude, throw out the man who knows where the bodies are buried — I don't mean that literally, I want to be very clear, I do not mean that literally, I mean it in the sense of knowing how a committee works, knowing which door sticks, that kind of thing, procedural knowledge — throw him out for a fresh face, and I'd like someone to explain to me what happens in year two of fresh, because fresh doesn't stay fresh, fresh turns, milk turns, I watched a carton of milk turn once over a long weekend because the fridge door wasn't sealing right, Frigidaire, avocado green, ours or somebody's, and by Tuesday it had a — well I won't describe it, but the smell got into the egg drawer too, and eggs hold a smell, everybody knows that, eggs are basically little sponges, and my mother would not throw either of them out, the milk or the eggs, she said "we'll see," which in her language meant absolutely not throwing them out, and I don't know what became of them, I believe the eggs are still, theoretically, somewhere.

Klobuchar's in this too, apparently, over on the other item, the governor thing, they picked the Demuth woman over the pillow fella, and good, frankly, a pillow is not a credential, I don't care how patriotic the pillow is, my second cousin Wendell sold pillows out of a van for one summer, one summer only, this would've been — after '82, I think, maybe '85, doesn't matter — foam ones, not the good kind, the kind that goes flat by August, and he'd park the van outside the roller rink because that's where the money was, teenagers with pocket change and nowhere to spend it, and he undercut the actual bedding store two blocks down so bad that the bedding store put up a sign, hand-painted, said something about "van pillows" not being insured, which as far as I know is not a real category of insurance, pillow insurance, but it scared people off anyway, and Wendell folded the operation by Labor Day and went to go work for his uncle doing something with gutters, and I never did find out if the gutter thing panned out, we lost touch around Thanksgiving of that year over a dispute about a card table, don't ask, it's not interesting, I only bring it up because pillows came up.

And another thing — the press people, the correspondents, wanting "protocols" now because somebody pulled a stunt with an airplane, protocols, everybody wants a protocol, in '82 if a man wanted to pull a prank on the press corps he just did it, there was no protocol meeting about it afterward, there was no committee, Walter — not Cronkite, a different Walter, a produce manager I knew, unrelated entirely — Walter used to say "a protocol is just a rule for people who already know the rule," and I didn't understand it then and I don't understand it now but it felt true at the time and it feels true now, in the way a fortune cookie feels true, which is to say not really but you eat the rest of the cookie anyway.

The generational change fella, the one who beat Larson, I don't know his name, or I did know it and it's left me, it does that now, names leave, faces stay but names go, like steam off a window, you can still see the shape of what was there but the label's gone, and that's the whole problem right there if you ask me, that's the whole country in a phrase, shape without label, everybody so eager to wipe the window clean they don't stop to read what was written on it first, experience, procedure, a man who knew which door stuck —

— and I never did find out what happened to the wolf Trapper Keeper, that's still open, that's still bothering me, forty-some years and it is still bothering me, somebody in that school building knows, somebody always knows, Sister Adelaide's long gone now I'd imagine, but the truth doesn't die with a person, it just goes quiet, and quiet things have a way of turning up when you least — well.

That's all I've got. That's not all I've got. I've got plenty more, I just don't have the arm strength for it today.

— Edgar, watching the walk-in tub woman circle back for a third pass, no stairs, ma'am, no stairs