LIFE WITHOUT IRONY:

A Rich Boyhood in the Plain Void (James Lileks, July/August 2004, American Enterprise)

It's October 1965 in Fargo, North Dakota, and I'm wearing a plaid plastic windbreaker with scratchy elastic. I have a red wagon. The handle bites my hand if I hold it tightly; they didn't plane everything smooth back then--who'd sue? I load the wagon with bags of apples gathered from the backyard tree. One sack, one dozen, one dollar. Who first? The Hermans across the street, perhaps; Mr. H. worked for a bank, and was therefore rich as Mr. Mooney. On their left flank were Mormons, and that was a wild card. They didn't watch TV, which was scary weird. They went to church on Saturdays, which was just wrong. Their grandma yelled at me last summer for riding a girl's bike. Apparently that was indecent in ways I could not possibly understand. Did they believe in apples? The house three doors down was occupied by a nice lady who had a son but no dad. (He was always at work, maybe. I mean, everyone had a dad.)

This was my territory. Zoom up to see the terrain in context: two blocks to the south, the State Fairgrounds. A few months before, I'd sat on the steps in the buttery light of late summer and heard the screams from the Midway. You could see the Ferris wheel plough the sky from our lawn. Turning right from our drive- way, Northport Shopping Center, a postwar strip mall that had everything you'd ever want in the world--candy, pet turtles, Big Daddy Roth model car kits. Zoom up some more and you passed the edge of town. Nothing for a hundred miles in any direction.

Home, all of it. Standing in the driveway with a wagon full of apples, I thought I was poised at the edge of a fine adventure. I was on my own; no parent hung behind to make sure I wasn't scooped up by a molester. I wouldn't be dunning my neighbors with the suggestion that they help my soccer club. We didn't have soccer. We'd never heard of soccer. Who'd kick a ball when you could hit it with a bat? You can take an apple from the wagon, toss it in the air, and knock it out of town. Anything's possible. Now hit up your neighbors, and turn the backyard produce into greenbacks. That Lego expansion kit won't buy itself. Look, Mom's watching from the window--give her a cursory wave, and head off. Otherwise you'll miss cartoons.

And now, the Ironic Twist: There is absolutely no ironic twist.

This is the point in the narrative where the Grim Truth usually gets dragged out--the kindly neighbor was a Kluxer, the childless family next door had lost a son in a threshing accident, the fair burned down, the apples were infested with Burmese mealworms, Dad pawned his WWII medals to buy the apple tree seeds, etc. Sorry, not so. I had a Norman Rockwell childhood. Blame Fargo. I grew up in a safe sane place with parents who loved me. Sometimes a picture of a kid standing in the driveway with a wagon full of apples is just that--a good and hopeful thing in a good and hopeful place.

But you don't get dates with the snarky girls in college unless you find the Dark Side. There has to be something amusing and contemptible about this tableau; there has to be a payoff. You can't just be a little apple vendor heading into the golden light of autumn. Where's the painful personal conflict? Where's the bittersweet ambiguity, for heaven's sake? How can anyone be suitably complex when he's born in a Capra set?

For many years I looked down on Fargo, and found my big city peers agreeing. Why, the very word brayed provincial cluelessness. It was part of the American lexicon of two-syllable dunderheaded dullness. Fargo. Edsel. Nixon. I left at the earliest possible opportunity. Once free, I never made a secret of being a North Dakotan, but I used it to get praise from the clever crowd. You crawled out of that rude clay? Yet you're so worldly. You know history, you know art! I shrugged; one did what one could.

Gaah. What an insufferable twit I was! I had no idea how lucky I'd been to grow up in Fargo, to be dropped in the middle of this continent in the middle of that century. This is my apology to Fargo, and to North Dakota.

Up here, we sit on our porches of a Summer night, watching the kids run around, and think what pitiable fools the rest of y'all are.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 11, 2004 8:42 AM