(PIANO)
GK: I grew up on the frozen plains of Minnesota, (BLIZZARD), where my family lived in a sod hut with our animals. (PIG)
SS: Move over! (PIG SQUEAL) Quit hogging the bed!
GK: The animals ate with us and slept with us and then we sold them to rich people and when I drove a cow (COW & COWBELL) up to the back door of some wealthy person in St. Paul and looked in the window and saw the chandeliers and crystal and candles and people eating dinner, and not cold potatoes and blood sausage, but poached fish and jasmine rice and arugula and it wasn't served on hubcaps but on china plates --- I promised myself that someday I would be like that --- be elegant.
(TRIO SONATA, 1ST SECTION)
GK: Elegance. What did we know of it in that dim squalid dirt hut living with livestock? (KONK) Ouch.
SS: Whatcha hit Buddy with the shovel for, Papa?
TR: He gets on my nerves with his talk about elegance, that's why. Who does he think he is?
SS: It ain't going to improve his attitude if you keep whanging him on the head with farm implements, you know.
TR: Maybe I'll hit him just right and get some of the circuitry working, you never know.
SS: I doubt it. You care for another bat?
TR: Sure. Let me try and catch one for you.
SS: You care for more bat, Buddy? They're real good, buttered.
GK: I didn't care for bats, and as my father swung his shovel at the dark forms flittering around the hut (TR EFFORT), I thought to myself, I have to get out of here.
(TRIO SONATA SECTION 2)
GK: I borrowed books about elegance from the library and I read them, every one, even though the pigs ate some (PIG CHEWING BOOK) and I learned that elegance is an art, it's the art of proportion, of gesture, of gracefulness, of conversation, and you can usually tell the difference between lowdown crude talk....
SS: Boy, the dog threw up on my shoe, I about barfed in the Jell-O.
GK: And high-class talk....
SS: I threw my shoe up in the air for the dog, and my scarf got caught in my cello.
GK: Oftentimes, the difference is slight, a matter of a few words. Between trashy talk....
SS: Boy, talk about your plumbing problems, we had a toilet overflowed the other day, it stank to high heaven, I about lost my lunch....
GK: And well-bred talk....
SS: The plum blossoms are so fragrant, like toilet water, they smell heavenly, let's have some lunch.
GK: And then, when I was fourteen, I invented something. A china dish, you put it on the bathroom counter, and its full of little scented wood shavings. I called it "a potpourri dish". I put it in the outhouse and then (PIG) one day the pig ate it, and a few nights later, I caught the midnight freight (WHISTLE, TRAIN CHUGGING OFF) to Memphis, hoping to make my fortune.
(TRIO SONATA SECTION 3)
GK: I jumped off the train into a ditch and there was a gravel drive lined with poplar trees, that led to a graceful antebellum mansion called Woodlief, and I walked around back and there was a courtyard, dappled with sunlight, and a man and a woman eating salad and free-range tarragon chicken on a bed of fettucine.
TR: Welcome. I'm Bobby Peabody and this is my wife, Phoebe Peabody.
SS: Would you care for iced tea or lemonade?
GK: The Peabodys were elegant: they didn't talk about bodily functions, they conversed about important things.
TR: According to Plato, the meaning of justice is to tell the truth and to pay your debts.
SS: Yes, and yet one feels a deep yearning for something for which unfortunately Plato had no definition.
GK: They had long slender fingers and sat at the table drinking coffee and writing sensitive thoughts in their journals.
TR: Phoebe has been somewhat distant since the death of our cat Pookey, as if she held me culpable, because I was at Mama's helping to smash ice for juleps for the cotillion, and was not here to administer smelling salts. We buried Pookey today, in the kitchen garden, and afterward I read Tennyson's "In Memoriam".
SS: Robert seems sorrowful, as if Pookie's death had robbed him of a true confidante. Today, after lunch, I wrote a sonnet about death and then sketched some ruins, after which I went to the conservatory and wept. What a bitter joke life is.
GK: I loved Woodleaf, I loved the Peabodys and their friends (HORSES WHINNY. CRIES OF GREETING) --- on Saturday mornings, the Winchesters would ride over or the Overtons and we'd ride to hounds (WHINNY AND GALLOPING AWAY) all morning and return for lunch in the courtyard and a quiet afternoon reading Trollope or Smollet or Jane Austen, it was everything that Minnesota was not, I was supremely happy....
TR: Buddy seems supremely happy here at Woodleaf, and we are gratified to have him in our midst.
GK: I was supremely happy.
SS: I envy Buddy his supreme happiness. All day he is busy making piles of wood shavings and dried flowers and putting them into tiny bags with drawstrings. Such grandeur of the imagination. I wrote a villanelle today and then repaired to the veranda for an hour of soft weeping. How restless and torn I feel --- but what is it that I long for? How should I know?
GK: The Peabodys were unhappy, but they had great style, and every evening, we dressed for dinner and ate by candlelight as a band of musicians in kneebritches and ruffled shirts and powdered wigs played for us, surrounded by lush ferns. My potpourri business was booming. I was very happy.
TRIO SONATA SECTION 4)
GK: It was about this time that my terrible habit of food spillage began. I had always been sensitive about my table manners, having grown up in a home with livestock---- (PIGS)
SS: Git your big snout outta the trough! Let me have some o' them vittles! (PIG SQUEAL)
GK: My father would sit, food dribbling from his mouth, (CHICKENS) and the chickens sat on his knees and pecked it off his lap (TR MUMBLING, CRY OF PAIN). And now, even though I tried to take tiny bites and chew with my mouth closed, sometimes I'd look down and ---- (GASP OF SURPRISE)
TR: Today, Buddy's shirtfront was slathered with Bearnaise sauce and he had pieces of meat and corn in his hair. And a leaf of lettuce on his forehead. I must speak to him.
GK: It was as if some malicious invisible force was drawing the food down from my fork, perhaps a force of lap suction (SPILLAGE) ---
SS: I noticed Buddy pour a bowl of clam chowder onto his lap and then insert his lamb cutlets into his ears. I must speak to Robert about this.
GK: The more I strove for elegance, the more vulgarity seemed to hold me by the ankles, pulling me down.
SS: Today, Buddy suggested that we purchase a lava lamp for the library. I think that we must soon ask him to leave.
GK: That evening, a lilac-colored Cadillac drove up to Woodleaf (CAR SLOW, HONK) and out stepped a man in a white polyester jumpsuit studded with rhinestones and a pair of blue aviator mirror shades---
TR: Hey there, chief, how's everything? (POP OPEN CAN) You want a beer, help yourself.
GK: No thanks. What can I do for you?
TR: Understand you're the one they call the Potpourri King. The one makes them little dishes of rose blossoms and stuff that I been seeing in people's bathrooms, that right, chief?
GK: That's right.
TR: I want to order a couple thousand of em. Want you to come to my house and put em in. Want to fill up my whole basement with dried rose petals. How's that, chief? Think you can do that for me?
GK: Sure. I'll come over on Monday.
TR: Good. Lemme ask you something, chief. If you're a king, how come you don't wear a crushed velvet jumpsuit? how come you're standing there in that wool plaid jacket and white shirt and blue jeans and pennyloafers? What are you? French or something? That ain't the outfit what a real American wears. It ain't got no soul, buddy.
GK: It's what I want. Crushed-velvet seems excessive to me.
TR: I donno. I thought excess is what art is all about, chief. (FOOTSTEPS ON GRAVEL) Tell you what I want --- I want that third star from the left right up there beside Venus--- see her? The real bright one? I'm gonna go get her. See you around, chief. (CAR PULL AWAY)
GK: Elvis spent more than a hundred thousand dollars a year on potpourri dishes and he introduced me to Martha Stewart and my career took off. Elvis also gave me four Cadillacs. They're in my Potpourri King Museum of Memories and Aromatic Gardens, on Interstate 40, twenty miles east of Memphis, open every day including Christmas and New Year's. I live there, surrounded by beauty. I never did solve my spillage problem, so I live alone. I'll be sitting and looking out across my gardens and I reach for the coffee and suddenly my white linen trousers are soaking wet. And there's dried egg yolk all down my tie. I haven't seen anyone for years. (TRIO SONATA #5 BEGINS HERE) My meals are left for me in the hall, and the musicians who play for my dinner sit behind a tapestry, an arras, upon which a very elegant elephant is dancing on his hind legs as the villagers run away in terror.
(TRIO SONATA SECTION 5)
© 1996 BY GARRISON KEILLOR