A Christmas Blizzard by Garrison Keillor Read Free Book Online Page A

you’d come but I suppose you can’t.”
    The question hung in the air— Would you come with me?— but then she felt very ill and headed for the bathroom. She came back a few minutes later looking wan and depleted. She was sorry. She would come to Hawaii if she could, it all depended on how she felt, and right now she felt like death on toast.

9. Why he must change plans and fly to Looseleaf
     
     
    U ncle Earl was the brightest penny in a handful of loose change. He was the happiest man in Looseleaf, who every day did all he could to put a sunny smile on the gloomy faces around him. He loved electricity. He was the superintendent of the county hydroelectric station, a spotless brick building alongside the Stanley River, and he believed in hydroelectric as God’s gift to man and the cheapest and most reliable source of power and if somebody’s lights went out in the middle of the night, Earl climbed into the truck and went off cheerfully to repair the problem. He was a fixer-upper and a friend to all and he was James’s salvation as a boy growing up in a desolate dusty town in an eternity of wheat and soybeans. He took James fishing summer mornings early when the mists hung over the water of Lake Winnesissebigosh and recited Poe and Longfellow and Edgar Guest.
    He was a cheerful optimist in a family of cranks and grumblers and mournful men and sour women with hound-dog faces all aggrieved about money and cars and worried about kids poking their eyes out with sharp sticks and having to learn Braille and go around with a dog on a leash or the baby eating fistfuls of toilet bowl cleanser, or communists taking over, or a small plane crashing into the house, or the Christmas decorations strung above Main Street coming loose in a wind and fifty-pound angels falling down and killing someone. And of course the danger of Christmas tree fires. And there in this sinkhole of anxiety stood Uncle Earl, smiling, bowtied, neat moustache, hair parted in the middle, and a carnation in his lapel, and if a priest walked by, or a blond, or someone from Minnesota, Earl had a joke for you, or two if you showed interest—and fresh ones, not the tired old jokes you’d heard before. Out of sheer good will, he was apt to break into “Kathleen Mavourneen” or “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue, Has Anybody Seen My Gal.” He carried ginger snaps with him that had a real snap to them because ginger stimulates clear thinking. He’d make ginger ale punch and put on a record of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing:
    By the old Moulmein Pagoda
looking eastward to the sea,
There’s a Burma girl a-settin’
and I know she thinks of me.
For the wind is in the palm trees,
And the temple bells they say,
“Come you back, you British soldier,
come you back to Mandalay.”
    And the man and the boy stood and marched in time to the chorus, swinging their arms, and sang at the tops of their voices:
    On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flying fishes play,
And the dawn comes up like thunder
Out of China cross the bay.
    Earl had no enemies and held no grudges and when a new county board was elected in 1953 on a platform of fighting Communist infiltration and decided to abandon hydroelectric for a giant diesel generator and took trips to New Or-leans, Dallas, Las Vegas, and Phoenix to search for the proper generator, and in Tucson met a diesel salesman who took them out to a fine steakhouse and introduced them to three young women named Tammy, Bambi, and Trixie, and the next morning the board signed the contract, and the diesel was shipped to Looseleaf, the hydroelectric plant was shut down, and the diesel got hooked up and ran, more or less, for a couple of years, and the price of electrical power tripled, and Uncle Earl was fired and replaced by the brother-in-law of an anti-communist, that didn’t darken Earl’s nature at all. He just opened a vegetable stand and sold watermelon, sweet corn, peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, and Swiss chard. And he told