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One of my all-time favorite episodes of News from Lake Wobegon is “Truckstop,” performed by Garrison Keillor on a PHC broadcast from the Orpheum Theatre, in St. Paul, on, I have been reminded, February 23, 1985. I had mentioned “Truckstop” to Carol from time to time in these seven years (and three days) I have been acquainted with her, and I probably have a cassette recording of it safely stored somewhere among other archaeological treasures in our basement rec room (thank you very much, Bill West, for that tape), but I doubt I had listened to it in maybe twenty years, until this past Friday morning when, for reasons I cannot two days later recall, I finally got around to searching the Internet one more time. I had lucklessly looked before. This time, bingo!
Carol and I settled into our La-Z-Boy recliners and piped the YouTube recording through the good speakers of our living room TV. With our eyes closed, and with neither of us falling asleep, we went along with Florian and Myrtle Krebsbach, forty-seven years married, as they set out one February morning from Lake Wobegon in their low-mileage 1966 Chevrolet, en route to a medical clinic in Minneapolis. We were with them when they stopped along the way for coffee and pie at a truck stop on the Interstate. Florian, without Myrtle, returned late in the day in the same Chevrolet. That, I think, is enough plot description for this review.
At my present age of seventy I find poignant many details of the Krebsbachs’ circumstance, but I already loved the story when I first heard it on the radio when I was half my present age. Whatever your age, dear reader, whatever your experience, I will suggest you invest twenty minutes in listening to “Truckstop” on The News From Lake Wobegon.
That was Friday morning. On Friday afternoon, Carol and I drove from our home in Rio, Wisc., to a hospital in nearby Columbus. On our return trip, somewhat before our regular supper hour, we stopped at a big-name sandwich shop on the premises of a little-name truck stop just this side of Columbus, because one of us required a meal to go with a certain newly prescribed medication. It seemed a pleasant coincidence that we were visiting a real-life truck stop on the same day as we listened to a radio presentation about an occurrence at a truck stop, but I did not recognize the echoes of the Krebsbachs’ journey until late in our meal, and I won’t say more about those echoes until you, dear reader, have let me know you listened to the radio version and enjoyed it. But I will say, for whatever it may be worth to you, Carol and I each chose a sandwich at what is reported to be the fourteenth largest fast-food chain in America, and I judged my sandwich to be not nearly as wonderful as I had been led to expect by recent television commercials, even allowing for suspected puffery. I tried several bites of Carol’s sandwich, too, and awarded it a similar rating of Not Horrible.
Just to make sure we were being fair, I asked Carol to go back to the counter to choose some desserts. She selected a chocolate-chocolate cookie and an apple turnover. With my Leatherman knife I divided each of those items precisely in half, but Carol again cast a thumbs-down vote, and I ended up once more with the greater share of the sweets but an equal share of the disappointment.
I hope my remarks will prove in some measure helpful to you. Please let me know.
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