An Excerpt from Jon Hassler's "Days Like Smoke"

Jon Hassler, ed. Will Weaver | Days Like Smoke: A Minnesota Boyhood | University of Minnesota Press | September 2021 | 128 Pages

Chapter 6
GROCERIES

In which the author, in tracing his novelistic habits and skills to their beginnings, is led back to his boyhood spent in the Red Owl Store in Plainview, Minnesota, where the episodes in the lives of the shoppers were revealed to him like the chapters of a book.

A very heavy, elderly lady named Mrs. Gitts may have been our first customer. If so, her visit did not result in a sale. I see her waddling along Broadway in an ankle-length dress and turning in at our door, inquiring about the price of something and telling my father she can find it for less at Eggers’s across the street. She turned out to be a steady inquirer, not a steady customer, but her visits to our store ended a year or so later when one of our schoolboy employees, a senior in high school named Paul, smarted off to her. “Is this any good?” Mrs. Gitts inquired, examining a jar of grape jam. Paul replied, “If it kills you, we’ll give you your money back.”

My mother and father, who happened to be standing nearby, heard this remark. My father reprimanded Paul for not showing respect to his elders. My mother, on the other hand, spread the story among her few acquaintances with great delight.

Beyond the occasional drama with customers, there came to be an unforeseen and wider dilemma at the grocery store: closing time. Saturdays were endless. Along the sidewalks, people lingered, discussing their crops and the weather and telling jokes. Some sipped beer in the pool hall while watching card games at the round oak tables or gathered around the pool tables. Some couples went to the show, and too many of these, in my parents’ opinion, waited until the second movie let out at eleven o’clock to sell us their eggs and to shop. us, the last hour of the week was the most hectic and exhausting, and we dragged ourselves home well after midnight and fell into bed. One night, listening to a conversation from the next bedroom, I heard my father say, “But closing at twelve is what they’re used to.”

“Oh, they can be trained to shop earlier,” was my mother’s confident reply.

And soon, my father—surely at her behest—had prevailed upon the Chamber of Commerce to close at ten o’clock.

At the age of ten and eleven, I spent these Saturday evenings doing odd jobs around the store, most of them in the back room—trimming lettuce, bagging cookies, taking the wrapping tissues off oranges—and was visited week after week by a boy named Warren Kruxmann. I think Warren was older than I—certainly, he was bigger—but he was a failed scholar and a year behind me in school. Of course, I was pleased—at least at first. Although wearing an apron like my father’s and doing the work I had watched my father do filled me with dread. For I had seen Warren’s father around the card tables, paying him no attention, and talking endlessly. Like Warren himself. Having learned from his father that the first thing you did when you went to town was to find a patient ear, and the second thing was to pour your pent-up words into it. Warren, I could see, was well on his way to living a life in imitation of his father.

Like me.

During the wartime manpower shortage, there were a number of women who hired on temporarily and did a man’s work at the store—unloading freight, stocking shelves, lugging boxes of groceries out to customers’ cars. Perhaps the most capable of these employees, due to her great and muscular size, was Lorraine of Elba, who, after a few weeks, began to show signs of a troubled psyche. I remember the evening she growled at a couple of customers and snapped at my father, who fired her on the spot. She had been brooding for most of the day, going about her work in an absent manner, as though lost in a dream, and now, during the busiest hour of the week, was standing at the checkout counter visiting with an elderly woman she’d known in her youth who’d come in to buy a loaf of bread. They were talking about Elba, a village even smaller than Plainview and hidden in the bluffs along the Mississippi, Lorraine’s birthplace.

My father’s reprimand—“Make yourself useful, Lorraine”—was answered by a sudden look of fury in her eyes and her voice rising to a screech:

“Oh, don’t be such a persnickety old boob!”
“You’re red,” he said. “Turn in your apron.”

Whereupon Lorraine of Elba dropped the loaf of bread into an oversized bag and told the elderly woman, “I’ll help you out to your car with this,” and the two of them drifted out the door and down the street, continuing their visit as though Lorraine hadn’t just lost her job.

“Here, give her this,” said my father, handing me her week’s pay from the till. “And get her apron back.”

I hurried after them, and when I handed her the money, she looked at it curiously as though she’d already put the Red Owl so far behind her she’d forgotten she ever worked there, and when I asked for her apron, she didn’t seem to hear or understand. I didn’t insist. I watched them join the crowd at the end of the block, where the high school band was beginning to play, and then I went back to work.

Whenever I read Fern Hill and come to the line where Dylan Thomas speaks of himself as “prince of the apple towns,” I picture myself going about my father’s business on Main Street, and I remember the satisfaction of living in a community small enough to fit your mind around. By the time I graduated from high school and went off to college, I had come to know all our customers by name, where they lived, whom they were related to, and, most important to a novelist-in-waiting, I had watched the events of their lives unfold year after year like chapters in a book: births and deaths, house res and suicides, new cars and picnics, fiftieth wedding anniversaries attended by hundreds. Although I would put o writing for another twenty years, I’ve always thought of the Red Owl Grocery Store in Plainview, Minnesota, as my training ground, for it was there that I acquired the latent qualities necessary to the novelist: from my dear German father, endurance, patience, resilience and sound working habits, and from my dear Irish mother, the fun of picking individuals out of a crowd and the joy of finding the precise words to describe them. No one took more nourishment away from that store than I.

Yesterday, having finished writing the foregoing pages, I went for a walk along the river and learned another lesson. Pausing on the riverbank, I considered the leaves hanging orange and golden in the elms and maples across the river and the leaves floating brown and golden on the moving water. The floating leaves, cupped and mostly dry except for that small part of them that served as the keel, seemed eminently seaworthy—destined for New Orleans and beyond, perhaps to some foreign shore touched by the gulf stream. But they weren’t seaworthy at all. The leaves I watched float by like sturdy little ships had actually embarked from a tree only thirty yards upstream, and by the time they were thirty yards downstream, some were already flattening out and foundering, sinking the way scenes in books sometimes do when the author presses on with them too long.

The trick, perhaps, in writing as in life, is to move nimbly from one scene to the next, giving your reader the illusion of uninterrupted buoyancy, and not letting him or her witness the demise of style and believability, the lack of freshness, the loss. Walk to the edge of any wooded riverbank in autumn, and, pausing for a closer look, you will notice the countless shipwrecks sinking out of sight. Yet we can be charmed and uplifted by the enduring flotilla that carries on, steadily downstream, confident of new life beyond.

Used with permission of the University of Minnesota Press.
© 2021

Jon Hassler (1933–2008) was writer in residence and Regents Professor Emeritus at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. His many novels and short stories were often set in small-town Minnesota.