Great Openings III

The third in an occasional series. Previous installments here and here. Some links updated after the original post was written.

Today's installment comes from a collection of short stories by one of my favorite authors, Garrison Keillor. While it is intriguing to wonder whether or not the story is autobiographical, as the title suggests, the thing that catches my eye is the vivid description of adolescence (at least part of it, anyway) in full flight:

When I was sixteen years old, I stood six feet two inches tall and weighed a hundred and forty pounds. I was intense and had the metabolism of a wolverine. I ate two or three lunches a day and three full dinners at night, as my family sat around the kitchen table and observed, and I cleaned off their plates too when they had poor appetites or were finicky. There was no food I disliked except muskmelon, which smelled rotten and loathsome. Everything else I ate.

— "Gary Keillor" (from The Book Of Guys, 1993)

I remember feeling like this. In high school, I participated in a number of sports (whose seasons sometimes overlapped, leading to occasions when I had practices for different sports on the same day) year-round, so it was damn near impossible to gain any weight at all. Swim season, in particular, was insane—swim eleven or twelve thousand meters a day, and you can pretty much eat whatever you like, whenever you like. Sophomore year, in a misguided attempt to boost my caloric intake, I took to having a chocolate milkshake every night after dinner–and still lost weight. Nowadays, the wolverine, not so much–I'm thinking maybe a domestic cat. A golden retriever, tops. And it's not that I'm sitting on my butt all day–paradoxically, between work and just coping with being in a foreign country, I do an awful lot of running around. But it's not the same.

Keillor is perhaps best known for his staple opening line, "It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon," that led off many broadcasts of Prarie Home Companion and most of the short, heart-warming stories in the Lake Wobegon books. The collection that contains the story quoted above, on the other hand, is somewhat darker, perhaps because the common thread weaving through most of the stories is, roughly speaking, "Guy slams into midlife crisis; crisis wins." It's not exactly uplifting reading if you happen to find yourself speeding headlong into that particular ZIP code of your life. But this piece stands apart from the rest, I think because it so vividly describes a time when you feel so alive that don't have to worry about that stuff so much. I miss that.

I am so going to the gym tomorrow.