Free Pilgrims by Garrison Keillor

dictionary. Learning the language was going to be a cinch. ( Facile. Ordinario .) No sweat. ( Senza sudare .) A piece of cake. ( Un pezzo di torta .) The coffee came in a demitasse. She put a spoonful of sugar in and drank it, a bitter syrup, and signaled for another. And a croissant. And before the second coffee came, a tall woman stood grinning in front of her. She wore a black shirt and slacks, green wool jacket, brown oxfords, and carried an enormous umbrella and a canvas shoulder bag. Margie stood up and Maria took her hand. She doffed her red woolen cap and kissed Margie twice on each cheek, left cheek smack smack and right cheek smack smack . And held her close and tight and then at arm’s length and laughed. A handsome head on a long neck, her black hair streaked with gray and parted in the middle and pulled back in a silver clip. She had the long Norlander nose and she had Gussie’s sweet smile. “Now at last I have a sister,” she said and hugged Margie again. And held on.
    Margie got tears in her eyes. It had been so long since anyone had found her so interesting. Nobody in Lake Wobegon hugged her like this.
    Maria sat down and said a few words in Italian to the waiter and said to Margie, “I have waited for this moment for sixty years.” She set the shoulder bag on her lap and opened it and took out five photographs: a blond kid with a big grin and several teeth blacked out, painted freckles, holding a pitchfork; the same kid in the third row of an old Lake Wobegon Leonards football team, a leather helmet under his arm, looking a little tentative; same kid holding up a cornstalk and tassel; him in a Whippets uniform, holding his bat up high, looking determined; a formal portrait of him in steel-rim glasses, a checked sport coat, white shirt with open collar, unsmiling.
    â€œMy papa,” she said. “I never knew him. He died before I was born, in the liberation of my city. I grew up with my mother’s memory of him and a feeling of terrible loss. I was a sad little girl. I felt that life could never be as good as it could’ve been if Papa had lived. God cheated me. And so Lake Wobegon was my El Dorado. My paradiso . I was going to visit there when I was twenty-one and then my mother got sick. I planned to go before I turned forty and then suddenly I was forty. Lake Wobegon was where everybody was full of love and sunshine and told jokes and poured syrup over their cakes and danced the hopping dance. Big fish the size of trucks leaping from the water. Paul Bunyan and his blue cow. Cold winters. So cold that words freeze in the air and in the spring they melt on the ground and people sweep them up into baskets. Big farms and tractors, enormous pumpkins that people carve doors and windows in and live inside. Bigtomatoes. Thousands of lakes. Birds who make a wild warbling sound like a woman crying.”
    â€œThey’re called loons.”
    â€œAnd they’re real?”
    â€œYes, of course.” And Margie leaned forward, opened her mouth, tilted her head back, and made the high-pitched gurgley yodelly wail of the loon. The waiter approached, as if ready to apply the Heimlich maneuver.
    â€œBeautiful,” said Maria.
    And she pulled out a slip of paper. “I wrote down questions,” she said.
    What is the population of Lake Wobegon now, and what was it in 1941 when Papa left home? About the same, two thousand . Why do they call it “Wobegon”? Doesn’t that mean “sad and bedraggled”? Yes, but it’s also an Ojibway word that means “the place where we waited in the rain for you for two days and two nights .” And what about the dogs who play baseball? Mother told me about that. And does the snow get to be three and four meters deep? And do people stand on the ice and fish and are farmers not allowed to marry? We have a baseball team called the Whippets, but they’re men. Old guys. Not very good. I don’t think the snow