Word: lew
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...When I was a boy," says the yarn-spinning champion of St. Paul, Minn., "the storyteller in our family was uncle Lew Powell, who was my great uncle, my grandma's brother, who died only a couple of years ago, at the age of 93. In a family that tended to be a little withdrawn, taciturn, my uncle Lew was the friendliest. He had been a salesman, and he liked to drive around and drop in on people. He would converse, ask how we were doing in school, but there would be a point when he would get launched...
...parents would be in the living room, and my aunt Ada and my brothers and sisters. We would be eating popcorn. As it got later, I remember lying on the floor so my mother wouldn't see me. Uncle Lew would stop for a while, and then someone else would spell him, my dad or my aunt Ruth. And then Uncle Lew would come back. The period he talked about so well was about ten years on either side of the turn of the century. A beautiful time, I still think so. And I just wanted him to tell more...
...remember Uncle Lew's stories not as coming to a point, really, but to a point of rest, a point of contemplation. As I got older, of course, life was becoming strange. I just looked to those stories of his, and to the history of the family, as giving a person some sense of place, that we were not just chips floating on the waves, that in some way we were meant to be here, and had a history. That we had standing...
...impressed by modern 20-footers. Sure, you got done faster, but that just meant waiting longer till it was time to go to bed. This is a good laugh line, as close to a knee slapper as Keillor lets himself get in the monologues. But like his uncle Lew, he tells stories, not jokes, and he goes on to say that "the clatter brings back memories of old days of glory in the field when I was a boy among giants. My uncle lifted me up and put me on the seat so I could ride alongside him. The harness...
...marvelous kind of time machine, and listeners really can learn how those folks talked who are vanished now, and what they wore, what they did when the great snowstorms came. Keillor knows that childhood is the small town everyone came from. He talks again of his uncle Lew: "It seems to me that the presence of children is the redeeming feature in storytelling, his and mine too. Without them, it's all pleasant enough, but it's just nostalgic. And I'm not really very interested in that. For children, who have a great deal of curiosity about what happened...