*
The following program
is a PBS Wisconsin original production.
[warm, relaxed piano and acoustic guitar]
- Michael Perry: I took my daughters-- all of us--
went to the Shakespeare Festival in Winona,
at the university there.
It was my younger daughter's first exposure to Shakespeare.
She loved it.
And then, two days later,
I took them to Augusta Bean and Bacon Days
to the Demolition Derby.
And we had a great time at both places.
We have wonderful memories of both days.
That Shakespearean actor we saw,
who came here from New York,
and did those amazing things for us in Winona,
we'll never forget that.
On the other hand,
[cracking up] we saw things at the Demolition Derby
that were transcendent,
and representative of a whole different spectrum
of human behavior.
And they both struck wonder in their own way.
But I don't know.
I always say, "I'm a writer with a small 'w.'"
Nobody asked me to solve the world's problem
with my keyboard,
and I don't presume that I can.
But I have, I think, over time, striven for one thing,
and that is to try somehow to knit these two backgrounds.
This background of being a blue-collar,
rusted out pickup truck-driving, deer-hunting guy
who had a whole other set of worlds opened up to him
by poets and dancers and artists,
and delicate people who showed me great beauty
that I didn't know existed.
And I'm so happy in either of those worlds,
and I'm trying somehow in my work to say,
"It's okay, you can-- Both of you."
Poets can go to dirt track stock car races, also.
And I think probably I failed. [laughs]
But, if nothing else,
I'm working on myself all the time.
[upbeat music]
[vehicle engine noise]
*
- Michael Perry: Where I Come From
was funded in part by
Ron and Colleen Weyers,
Greg and Carol Griffin,
Zack Halmstad,
Stanley Mujwid in memory of Donna Mujwid,
Thomas and Eleanor Wildrick Family,
Sam Murty,
Focus Fund for Wisconsin Programming,
and Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.
[wind rustling leaves]
[sentimental music]
- Michael Perry: I grew up on a little dairy farm,
north of New Auburn, Wisconsin.
Dad milked 18 cows.
We had sheep year-round.
And then, in the winter, we logged.
People always ask, "How many people were in your family?"
And it's a hard one to give a straight answer to
because it fluctuated.
My folks took in all kinds of foster children,
and I have some adopted siblings.
And Mom and Dad did respite care for kids
that have some high-level medical issues or other issues,
and maybe their parents just need a weekend.
And so, they would come and stay with us.
And then, a lot of the foster siblings that I had
also came with pretty complicated medical histories.
And so, I grew up in a household
where we were--
As kids, we knew how to change out oxygen tanks
and do tube feedings at the supper table.
You know, I don't know what people think is normal,
but we just grew up with a wide spectrum of behaviors
and became very comfortable with that.
I'm the first-born of all,
and so I always joke that my parents had me,
and then immediately decided it was time to adopt,
[chuckling] when they saw what they'd produced.
But I think--
I know that my father, as a young man,
always wanted a large family.
And then, my parents also just--
To this day they've lived a life of charity and humility,
and I have to believe they felt
that was part of their service to humanity,
was to take in those who needed taking in.
Sometimes, I'd come home,
and you wouldn't recognize everybody at the table,
but you just assumed that
they were supposed to be there. [laughing]
And we'd have guests for dinner
and the food would come around
to this big, long table filled with kids
and my dad would see the guests being tentative, or polite,
and just taking a little bit, and my dad would always say,
"You better take what you need now,
"'cause it ain't coming around again."
[laughing] So...
it was a busy house.
It was some faces coming and going all the time.
And I was left to my own devices a lot.
And my mom, in later years, has apologized to me.
She said, "We just didn't pay enough attention to you."
And I said, "You know, I was fine." [chuckles]
I basically could do what I wanted.
I mean, I was a regular knucklehead country kid.
I remember,
especially my brother that's two years younger than me,
that we spent days on end, playing in the swamp,
playing in the fields, playing in the woods.
Taking-- We had a double bit axe
that we took to the woods on a regular basis.
I don't know why we still have toes
'cause we played with an axe in the woods
for hours and hours, day after day.
Dug holes and trenches, and built forts,
and climbed trees.
But we were left to our own devices, pretty much,
just because there was so much else
that Mom needed to do.
My mom was-- They were both city kids.
And my dad actually is a chemist by training,
and my mom is a nurse.
All the time they were growing up, my mom,
from the time she was a little girl through college,
she said, "I don't care who I marry,
as long as I don't marry a farmer."
[chuckling] So, she married my dad,
who was a city kid with a chemistry degree,
and about two or three years into the marriage,
he decided he wanted to be a farmer.
So, I was two years old.
We were living in Nekoosa.
He was working at the paper mill.
She was a nurse and taking in foster children.
And, they bought a farm north of New Auburn
and moved across the state to become a farmer.
He got sheep.
And then, he just started accumulating cows.
I still remember our very first dairy cow.
We bought it from an old neighbor,
a guy named Jerry.
He was, I think, a second-generation immigrant
from Eastern Europe.
And he took my father under his wing
and taught him how to farm.
But our very first Holstein milk cow
we got from him,
we didn't have a trailer or a truck or anything.
So, at the time, we had a pretty good passel of kids by then.
And we had an old Ford Falcon station wagon
and he put a bunch of us kids
in that Ford Falcon station wagon.
And it was three miles to the farm where the cow was.
Big old Holstein.
And dad tied a rope from the halter
to the back bumper of that Ford Falcon.
It had a tailgate we had down.
So, my brother, John, and I,
we sat on that tailgate backwards, watching the cow,
and the other kids were in the seats, looking out the back,
and dad drove that Falcon home just real slow.
And that poor old cow just walking along
behind that Falcon with all them kids staring at it.
The Falcon burned a little oil,
so the cow was walking through this blue haze.
Right before our farm,
there's a swamp on either side of the road,
and it's got that beautiful salty-sweet smell of the marsh.
I think my brother and I, at that point,
had bailed off the tailgate and were running alongside,
and I just thought, what my poor mother
in the farmhouse there, probably at the kitchen window,
seeing this oil-burning Ford Falcon
dragging a Holstein cow,
and the kids running around on the road.
Just what she thought she had gotten herself into.
But it's a beautiful--
It's a surreal memory,
and yet it's utterly literal.
And that's kind of what I love about my childhood,
is that it was very down to earth,
very agrarian, very much "do the chores,"
but it was also, in some ways, odd and strange,
in the most beautiful sense.
Yeah.
[gravel crunching]
[sentimental music]
We grew up in this old farmhouse,
and at one point, we just had so many kids,
that Dad and my uncle built an addition on the house
using lumber that had all been cut and sawed in our own woods.
But when they got done with the addition,
our house was bigger than the barn,
which-- [laughing] that, I think,
spoke to their needs and their priorities.
One of the children that my parents took in
was never officially adopted
but was with us her entire life.
I had a little sister who came to us
when she was one- or two-months-old,
I believe.
She had Down syndrome.
She had a cardiac defect called Tetralogy of Fallot.
And, in those days, you couldn't do much for it.
She did have a lot of open-heart surgeries.
She also had a lung disorder.
And so, we knew that... she was...
probably... gonna die young.
And she was on oxygen.
But she was active and fun.
You know, we have wonderful memories of her to this day.
And I just remember, she would...
get really bad,
and my mom would have to drive her down to Eau Claire
to the emergency room.
And then, eventually, drive her to Madison for surgeries.
And at the time, if I remember correctly,
we had an old beat-up Volkswagen van
or some other old car,
and because Dad was a farmer,
and had to milk cows twice a day, every day,
I remember terrible snowstorms and my sister having an attack,
and me riding with Mom
to go down to Eau Claire to the hospital.
[inhales]
When that little girl's condition advanced to the point
where we knew she wasn't gonna recover,
and we knew that we were in a...
a situation where...
it-- it was a hospice situation.
I don't believe we probably called it that,
but we knew it was coming.
My dad sold his cows [exhales through nose]
so that-- [getting choked up]
that he and my mom could take care of that little girl
[sniffles] 24 hours a day,
which meant they had no income.
They had to live off what they got from selling their cows.
And so, I saw that selflessness firsthand.
[wistful music]
I can't call that a favorite,
but I call it just a-- a really significant memory.
Yeah. [inhales]
I always say, we were a poor family
by definition, by economic standards,
but I never went to bed hungry.
And I never went to bed
worrying about whether or not I was loved.
And so, [pfft] it's the greatest privilege in the world.
[farm tractor growling]
[sentimental piano music]
Truly, one of my most cherished memories
is my dad plowing on an old Ford tractor,
and I'm running behind him in the dead furrow.
There's just something about that moment;
I remember the clarity of it.
I remember the 'pat, pat' of my bare feet on the dirt.
I remember the way the soil would fold over,
and the grubs falling out of the slice in the earth,
and blackbirds, grackles, and cowbirds coming in.
And I just remember that absolute freedom,
and then, of course,
the metaphorical, symbolical stuff just overflows.
You know, running behind your father,
beneath the universe, basically.
And that even though I would not turn out to be a farm er ,
that's the path that I was set on from an early age,
following my father.
That clarity of memory is one thing that's been of use to me.
I'm very scattered.
I can't keep track of things.
I have to always write lists.
I get very frustrated with myself.
If I go to the shed for three things,
I can only remember one.
But I somehow have a photographic retention
of images, and feelings, and colors, and senses.
And...
as long as I don't run it all by my brother,
'cause then he'll go, "That's not how it was!"
[laughing]
That's another story.
The other farm work memory that I truly cherish
was lambing season.
Lambing season is a death mark for the shepherd,
for my mom and dad.
They're already taking care of all these kids,
but then March, basically, was lambing season,
and it's 24-hours-a-day for four weeks.
Because if a sheep is having trouble delivering,
you gotta be there.
Every dead little lamb is a loss.
My dad would take care of everything
and he'd get up in the middle of the night and check on 'em.
He'd sleep for a couple of hours.
Then he'd go out and check on 'em,
then come back and get some more sleep.
But my mom took care of all the obstetrical emergencies
because she: "A," was an OB nurse,
and she has very slim hands.
And so, she would go in if a lamb was breech,
or if, sometimes they get tangled,
she'd go in and sort all that out
and help deliver them.
And so, I have wonderful, wonderful memories
of getting up in the middle of the night
and going to the sheep barn with either my mom or my dad,
checking the sheep.
The sound of sheep chewing their cud
in the silent night, inside of a shed.
The sound of a new lamb.
[baby lamb bleats "mah, mah"] And if there was a new lamb,
you'd get 'em set up in a little pen with the mom,
and make sure everything was going fine.
And you'd make sure they latched on
for that first little bit of milk.
And then, we'd go back into the house.
And a lot of times that time of year,
it was snowy and cold, and beautiful stars above,
and we'd always stop, and dad would get out--
We had dewberries, canned dewberries.
And dad would always let us have a little bowl of that
before we went back to bed at three in the morning.
So, very precious, very precious memory.
Again, this whole simultaneous thing
of them teaching us
that you have to work hard, and this is not an easy life,
and yet, there are these moments of great beauty and gentleness.
[tractor engine chugging]
And you were trusted to do stuff really early.
I mean, I was driving tractors when I was nine,
and Dad would send me out to cut hay,
or send me out to rake, or send you out to disc or drag,
and try not to get stuck.
Notice when
the soil is getting wet,
and the color's changing, and the texture,
that maybe if you go one more pass too close,
you're gonna get stuck, and if you get stuck,
that's gonna be an hour or two lost off the day.
'Cause if you really get stuck,
you're gonna have to pull off the disc
'cause you can't pull it out with the disc on.
I was the oldest,
so I was the first to get out on the equipment,
and my brothers rapidly passed me,
'cause one brother, all he ever wanted to do,
from the day he could express himself, was farm.
I'm a decent laborer.
If someone tells me what to lift and where to put it,
I can do that all day long.
But I'm bad at being in charge,
and I'm really bad
at mechanics and electricity and stuff like that.
Just don't get it, I've tried.
It's actually more frustrating-- I joke about it a lot--
but I'm actually very frustrated by it
because that kind of thing is valued where I come from.
At some point, we put in regular milking machines,
put in a vacuum system.
And you could always tell
if you were late to help dad with the chores,
'cause if you were walking across the yard from supper
to the barn,
that wonderful sound [vacuum whooshing] of the "ch-shh, ch-shh,"
you knew that he had already started
so you tried to hustle a little bit.
I associate my best milking memories with winter
because it would be really cold outside
but inside the barn, you've got all these cows,
and this very low-ceiling place.
There's huge insulation-- bed of hay above you,
and so, everything is kind of muffled and warm.
And then you have that "tch-shuh, tch-shuh" going.
But we had the kind where, at first,
we had to carry the milk and dump it into the bulk tank.
And it was pretty heavy, and you had to lift it and tip it,
and, of course, not spill any of it because it was very precious.
But there was a thing at that time called a Step-Saver®,
which is just a bucket that sat out on the walk,
and it had a hose that went all the way to the bulk tank.
You could just dump the milk there.
We didn't have that,
and I still remember, people would ask my dad,
he'd say, "Well, do you have a Step-Saver®?"
And he'd point to me and my brother,
and he'd go, "Yep, I've got two of 'em."
[laughing]
But milking was,
man, that was an important time because
you could come to the barn angry and grumpy
and mad at dad for whatever rule he had put down.
And you can't milk for an hour and work together,
and not eventually just talk about something.
And then that leads to something else.
Maybe you didn't solve the issue,
but you maintained that thread of communication.
Mom, I could talk to her for a long time about anything.
Dad, it took more of those 'working together' moments
to sorta sort things out on a subterranean level.
Dad was taught to farm
by what were then the old-timers.
And in that part of the country, you did three things.
You milked cows year-round.
That was your main source of income, sketchy as it was.
If the sheep did well enough, they'd cover your taxes.
And Dad said, "Sometimes that's how it worked."
And then, you logged in the winter
because everything was froze up,
and not only could you not get in the fields,
but during the summer,
you couldn't necessarily skid the logs out
'cause they'd get all muddy, and they don't want muddy logs.
And we were very small scale.
I mean, it was Dad with one chainsaw.
We had 160-acre farm, and he logged that farm
for all these years.
He didn't just knock everything down.
He was selective about it.
And then, us boys would be out there
with the little Ford tractor, and a logging chain,
and we'd just skid logs and throw brush.
And you'd accumulate all the logs and get 'em stacked.
And then, in the spring or summer,
the sawyer would come in with the mobile sawmill,
and you'd get a crew together.
In our case, half the crew was from the supper table.
And you would just saw all those logs,
and then, Dad would sell the lumber.
But, of all the jobs
I ever did on the farm,
the one that I absolutely do not miss
is sorting and stacking lumber.
And I'm gonna be a little hard on my father,
who's a good and gentle man,
but he loves lumber like I love words.
He draws a 2" x 6" off the pile,
and he looks down it, and he sees poetry.
He reads the grain.
I mean, there are times when he can tell you where--
what corner of the 40 that board came from.
And it's a marvel to observe.
And, it gets really old
when you're stacking wood for three hours. [laughs]
And the truth can be told,
I just didn't care about lumber the way he did.
And I wanted to get it,
let's get it stacked, and get it done,
'cause I wanted to get back to reading cowboy books.
[guffaws]
Like, my dad has very rarely seen me do what I do.
He's been at a couple of events,
but I'm not sure I can sufficiently convey
how unimportant that is to me,
based on everything he gave me up to that point.
Me making him sit at a poetry reading
would be like him making me stack lumber.
It's like, "Look, we both know we don't wanna be here.
Let's just spare each other the agony."
[belly laugh]
[swing set chain squeaking]
*
I kind of thrived at school.
I think I liked the order.
Coming from a big farm family, I liked the food.
Everyone loves to talk about how horrible school food is,
but to me, it was like, "This is great,
"and I can have more?" [laughing]
So, my mom had already taught me to read
before I went to kindergarten, so I was reading voraciously.
I remember the kindergarten teacher
calling the first-grade teacher down,
and then calling me in the back of the room
and handing me Cat in the Hat
and saying to the first-grade teacher, "Watch this."
And so, I read Cat in the Hat or something like that,
and it was like,
they had this hot new prospect coming along.
[laughing] And then,
at the time, there was a lot of testing out of things.
And so, I remember in second grade,
I would go to fourth grade for reading class.
But I also like to point out
that I peaked in elementary school. [chuckling]
And by the time I came out of high school,
I was batting very average.
I was very used, already, to finding quiet and solitude
in the midst of madness.
Growing up in the family I did,
I could easily sit in a corner reading my book
while nine other kids, and troubles, and crying,
and sick, and farming, and stuff going on.
I was used to living in here .
Not unhappily-- just that was the best place.
So, I prefer to be alone.
But there's also-- I ain't gonna lie to you--
and people who know me including probably my mother and siblings
would want me to point out that
there's a performative aspect
to hanging out in school.
Like, "Oh, I made a wry observation, and everybody laughed.
"Let me try another one."
And when I look back, there's no doubt,
I mean, I was voted 'class clown,'
and I remember being kind of a ringleader.
So, I think that I really enjoyed school.
I was very fortunate.
I had great public-school teachers.
My kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Amodt,
very strict, very severe, but put in me
a desire to hit the mark, do the right thing.
First-grade teacher, Ms. Jens,
she's the one I'd love to go back to first grade,
only with my 50-year-old eyes,
'cause I think she was kind of counter-culture.
But I didn't realize it at the time. [laughing]
Second grade, Mrs. Zastrow.
I don't remember a lot about second grade,
although we all agree that Mrs. Zastrow threw things.
[laughing] I don't think you're allowed to do that now.
Third grade, Mrs. Kramschuster, who was just very good to me.
I was a bad kid in third grade.
I went through my rebellious phase in third grade
rather than junior year.
I just was working some stuff out in third grade.
But she was a very patient and good teacher
and she handled me without me realizing it.
Fourth grade, Milo Fossen.
He was a legendarily good teacher,
a giant of a man with a huge beard.
He would line us up in the hallway and march,
and we would shout out our cadence.
* Hold your head up, hold it high *
* Fourth grade class is passing by *
And, then again, I'm not sure that you'd be able
to enforce all of these particular teaching methods
in this day and age,
but here's what Milo Fossen did that I will never ever forget.
I've been talking about the fun I had as a kid in school
and honestly, most of it was fun.
And school, to me, was just a hangout time for 13 years.
But you look back, and you realize,
you were part of cruelties that you were not aware of.
We had a classmate who was unusual
compared to the rest of us,
and we teased her pretty mercilessly.
And I remember one day Mr. Fossen said,
"Mrs. Kramschuster in third grade needs help with a project.
"Is there anyone here
"who would like to volunteer to go over?
"And you can go now, during our class time.
You can go help her."
And all of us shot up our hands.
And then he picked the girl we all picked on.
And he said, "Why don't you go?"
And after she left the room, he closed the door,
and he sat down, and he said, "I want you all to notice something.
"When I asked which of you would like to go help Mrs.Kramschuster,
"everybody raised their hand except one person.
Do you know who it was?"
Of course, none of us knew.
He said, "It was her.
"'Cause she's afraid to do anything
because you're all so mean to her."
And I don't know if I'm quoting him word for word, but he--
And I've never forgotten that.
What a smart and powerful and important thing
that he did in that moment.
And I wish I could say that from that day forward,
I never teased anybody, or I was never part
of some cruelty, but, of course, I was.
You do things when you're young,
and you look back, and you just can't believe...
My friend Ricky, he lived about two miles away from me,
which was almost the closest neighbor.
We just sort of hit it off
because we both liked to adventure.
We'd meet up on our bikes, and we played in the ditches.
There were these two culverts down by his place.
So, the farm I grew up on was very flat.
It was either trees, fields, or swamp,
sometimes all three [chuckling] in one spot.
[clears throat]
So, I was always fascinated by running water
'cause we didn't have any, except in the spring
when things would melt, and you'd go out
and you'd spend your whole day engineering the hydro-flow.
You know, I'd read Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn,
and so, I was always building rafts
and dreaming of lighting out for the territories.
And Ricky, here,
he had Beaver Creek running right through his backyard.
And again, it was just a time where,
"Mom, I'm going to Ricky's."
And you'd ride your bike two miles
and no cell phone to check in, nothing.
You just went and did it.
And... you know... [laughing]
I remember playing in the ditch,
and the water was running down the ditch
toward Beaver Creek, and it was sandy in the ditch,
and the water was crystal clear.
And Ricky, we'd cup our hands and we'd drink the water.
And Ricky would say, "You can see it's pure."
And my mom got wind of this. [laughing]
And my mom was really pretty laid back
about dirt and bugs,
and she would be of the opinion you need some of that stuff.
But when she found out
we were drinking ditch-water from the source,
she said, "OH, NO, no! "
Then she taught me about things like Giardia,
and she's like, "And you didn't notice the dead, bloated deer
"half a mile up the road, laying in the ditch
and what the beavers are doing in there?"
So, Mom kind of shattered our dreams
about us being pioneer folk,
just able to live off the crystal-clear flowing waters
of the ditches of the Town of Sampson. [chuckling]
But Ricky was
troubled and came from a difficult circumstance,
and as he got older, he went his own way.
It's not one of those things that lasts a lifetime.
Ricky wound up taking his own life later.
And...
I always said, he just was one of those guys:
he had a depth to his eyes.
He seemed like one of those people
that was just too...
too reflective, too sensitive, too open... for this world.
And again,
my main memories of Ricky-- I was a little kid.
So, I can only look back and interpret what I was seeing then
through the lens of my older eyes.
But I think those were good days.
And I probably drive across those culverts once a month,
going up to visit my folks or something.
Never pass over them without thinking about Ricky.
But that's the kind of memorial I like, the personal ones,
where you just drive over those culverts,
and I see two young guys
sitting with their knees, their feet dangling...
chucking rocks into the water.
[lawn mower growling]
Ready, set, hut!
I caught a lucky bad break when it came to sports.
Dad told me when I hit seventh grade,
I was allowed to go out for two sports.
I had to choose,
I couldn't do 'em all, I had to choose two.
So, I chose football and basketball,
because those were the two most high-profile, popular sports.
Played football, really enjoyed it.
Went out for basketball, I was atrocious.
I was horrible: can't dribble, can't shoot, pretty slow,
other than that, naturally suited for the sport.
But quite shortly into the basketball season,
I ran afoul of my English teacher,
and my parents would always back the school.
So, they said, "Nope, you're off the basketball team."
And the only time that I ever remember my parents
showing a little bit of wiggle room was on that.
And what I remember is that it was so early into the season
that I hadn't really even gotten started.
So, they said, "Nope, you're off the basketball team.
"We'll see how you do.
"If you keep it together until spring,
you can go out for one of the spring sports."
And so, I went out for track.
And found out that I was decent.
So, I ran the mile and two-mile
and might have won conference a year or two.
I don't really remember, but I know I finished high.
I would always make it to sectionals,
but there were two guys down the road that I trained with
that were better than me, and they would always go to state.
I never made it to state.
But I was the only guy on the track team
in New Auburn my senior year.
I think, my junior year, there were four of us.
My senior year, I was it.
So, if I wanted to train,
it was either by myself, with my coach,
or there were these two guys
that were really good milers, and two-milers, from Chetek,
so sometimes I'd train with them.
Well, they were just measurably better than I was.
And we raced all the time, we competed,
and they always finished 10 or 15 seconds ahead of me,
consistently, me trying as hard as I could.
And I always remember that
I cherished that because it gave me such a great lesson.
Every time I hear someone go,
[in motivational speaker tone] "You just have to believe!
You have to try harder!"
I just go, "NO!
They're just 15 seconds faster than me."
It's not about [in mystical voice] me finding the right inner spirit.
It's like, I just got the wrong equipment.
So, yeah.
One of the things I love about running
is how your body just sort of takes over,
and your mind is this separate entity just floating along
while the body does all of the physical things
it needs to do.
And to this day,
a lesson that I have to learn and relearn as a writer
is when I'm stuck,
one of the best things I can do is go for a run.
Now, the running these days, [chuckling]
it's a little grimmer.
I'm packing probably an extra 20 pounds
from when I was cranking out 4:48 miles.
I wouldn't necessarily even call it running now.
Down, set, hut!
So, football... I just really enjoyed football.
I was an unabashed fan of the violence of it.
And that may seem counterintuitive
'cause I avoid conflict at all cost,
but the thing I loved about football was
you had this frame in which
violence was not only accepted, it was encouraged,
and it was an outlet.
So, I played center and guard on offense.
Anchored the line at 165 pounds.
Then again, these memories are getting so burnished
that I don't know how they'd withstand fact-checking,
but I'll stand by 'em, give or take 3%.
My senior year, I was on the field
for all, but I believe it was seven seconds
of the entire season.
So, I played offense.
I started offense, defense,
kick coverage, kick return, all of it.
And I like to bring that up occasionally,
and people go, "Ohhhhh, you're pretty good."
It's like, well, yeah, except for the part
that it was 11-man ball, and we had 17 people out, right?
So, it just meant that I was a big enough farm kid
that they could leave me out there.
The other thing I loved about football,
I loved being part of a team.
I don't like being the one in charge.
I love the idea that
we all gotta do our jobs if this is gonna happen.
In track, I learned other lessons,
where it's totally up to you.
But I liked the team aspect of it.
I liked the idea that there was still
that "root, hog, or die,"
get in there and work hard, and you just might make it.
[soft tranquil harmonica melody]
To this day, nobody's bigger anti-smoker than I am.
But one of my favorite memories in the whole wide world
is the smell of Friday night grass,
dewy under the lights
and cigarette smoke wafting across the field.
It's gorgeous, love it!
Introductions were like that.
You couldn't wait for introductions.
You got to run out on stage.
And you were doing all those dumb young-male things.
Being all macho, and, of course, you don't have a clue.
But I remember loving that,
but then I would be terrified before the game started.
And then, you would get hit once,
and all of a sudden, some other switch went,
and now, it was like, "Oh, yeah, let's go.
This is the most fun I've ever had, ever."
But I also was very lucky,
in that my father made sure I didn't get
too caught up in all this silly macho stuff.
My father was a very competitive
and successful athlete when he was young.
And as part of his conversion
into the beliefs that he lives by now,
he started to take the idea of humility very, very seriously.
And he also, keeping in mind that our house
was full of children who had serious health problems,
if I came home complaining about being hurt in football,
his line, I can recite it to this day. [laughing]
He'd say, "Unless there's broken bones,
and lots of blood, I don't wanna hear about it."
And then the other thing that he did was,
Saturday morning, was clean the heifer barn time.
And no matter what glories
I might have been part of on Friday night,
I knew that by 9:00 a.m. on Saturday morning,
I was gonna be in the heifer shed with a pitchfork,
literally up to my ankles in horrid manure,
chucking it until it was all gone.
Another one of the things,
this again is gonna make my dad sound mean,
but it was great, it was character building!
Mom and Dad, all these kids, a lot of them needing extra care.
Dad farming, working so hard
that he would fall asleep sitting up at the kitchen table.
And so, if I wanted to play football,
I had to get myself to football practice and back.
And I didn't have a car,
and for the first few years of football,
I'm not old enough to drive.
So, I had a clunky old 10-speed bike.
I bought it to Coast To Coast Hardware Store,
probably weighed about 84 pounds.
It was a 10-speed, so I felt like I was on a racer.
I would have to get up in the morning,
ride my bike six miles to school
to get there in time for class, then go to football practice,
then ride my bike six miles home.
And I remember on the way home,
there was one long hill that really isn't very big,
when you go back and look at it now.
And there was an apple tree at the top of it.
And so, coming home from football practice, I'd always look forward to that.
I would pull over and I'd grab a couple apples,
and then, I'd descend Nadelhoffer's Hill,
riding "no hands" and eating apples.
[chuckling]
[footsteps]
You know, one of the most moving things I remember
about my father is, we would play softball.
We had a pretty big family, so we didn't have enough
to make two teams, but we had enough
to put three, four people in the outfield,
and then, a couple of you bat.
And great variation in abilities, from young to old,
to some people were athletic, some weren't.
But he would finish milking the cows,
and we would go out and play softball
in the field 'til dark,
using feed bags for bases.
And there was a fence, where if you hit it over the fence,
it's a home run, and I couldn't--
I was the biggest, and I could never do it.
And my dad, who's a tiny little guy,
but he had these Popeye forearms,
and he would just [pow] pop that ball.
And I still remember the sound of the softball
crashing down through the white pine branches,
and us kids going, "Wow, he's amazing."
Yeah, but...
when I look at--
As a father myself now,
who often is worn out at the end of the day,
and doesn't do the things with my kids
that my dad did, I go, " How did he do that?"
He was up before dawn.
He was falling asleep at suppertime 'cause he was so tired.
Yet, he went out, milked all the cows, did all the night chores,
still got out, and made sure
he played ball with all of his kids until dark.
Just... [sentimental music]
my parents' priorities were so pure.
Mm.
[chickens clucking, foraging]
[chicken squawks]
[sentimental music]
I was so fortunate in my high school years,
in that, the place was small enough
that you knew everybody, and our class,
at least by the time we were in high school,
there really weren't enough people to have cliques.
Not that everybody got along all the time,
and not that there wasn't trouble,
but you just kind of knew everybody involved.
And, there also...
[exhales in whistle]
there's just sort of a relaxed openness to it
that I think maybe affected me for the rest of my life
where I always feel like, now, that I don't quite belong,
and I talk like a farmer,
but there was this sense that, "Well, we're from here.
We just do what we wanna do, why not?"
I learned that EQ would get you a lot further than IQ.
[laughing]
How you handled situations,
how you interacted with the adults.
I was a pretty good kid.
I was not malicious.
I kind of "poor mouth" my scholarliness
because I wasn't overly aggressive.
But I did take anatomy & physiology,
and trigonometry, and those classes.
But, as I recall,
I did just whatever it took to get a good grade,
and nothing more.
I remember taking typing
as sort of a cop-out way to fill an hour.
This will be easy.
I'll just kinda pretend that I'll learn how to type.
Ms. Grant was the teacher.
And somehow-- I, to this day, don't know how she did it--
but she got me to take it seriously
and taught me how to type, and...
I'm a fast typer.
I make a lot of mistakes.
I'm not an accurate typer,
but I can cover a lot of ground. [chuckling]
And she taught me how to type,
and then, I never really gave it a second thought.
But what a gift she gave me because I type every day
for a living now, for almost 30 years.
[wind whispering]
And I had a history teacher, Mr. Olson, who was a Marine.
He was a Vietnam veteran.
He had worked for the State Patrol,
and then he wound up teaching.
And he's another one where
he was a tough guy.
I 'member one time, he took me to task for something
in front of the class.
And afterwards, I stayed,
and I said, "You're not supposed to do that.
You're not supposed to belittle me in front of other people."
I don't know if I used the word "belittle" or not,
but he said, "Well, I used you
"because I know you can do better.
And other people are looking at you as an example."
He went on to be a mentor, even into my adult life.
I had an English teacher, Mrs. Rehrauer.
We were used to underlining the noun,
and circling the verb, or whatever it is you do.
I've never been very good at grammar.
I still can't diagram a sentence.
If I see a who or a whom situation ahead,
I'll do everything I can to take left turns to avoid it.
But one day, we came into class
and she had taped a black-and-white photograph
of an old farmhouse to the chalkboard.
And she said, "Your assignment for today
is to write whatever you want about this photo."
An open-ended assignment like that,
we weren't sure what to do with it.
But then, I 'member, I started writing and it was pretty awful.
I dug it up recently!
I found it in a box.
But, I still remember that I got an actual, visceral thrill
in the act of creation,
in the idea that I could create whatever character I wanted.
She planted a seed.
And years later, when I started to get back into writing,
and when it was the memory of that feeling I had
that day writing in that class, that made me think,
"Oh, maybe this is something I want to pursue."
I have one teacher that when she died,
I wrote her family a letter of apology,
and I meant it.
I mean, I was really--
I was hard on her.
And... upon reflection,
she probably was
in a difficult situation.
And I said that I apologize.
I mean, that was me as a teenager,
but still, I feel bad about it.
But she did something interesting.
So, there we were, a little rural school,
she was a very well-read woman
and she would always bring in her used copies
of The New Yorker and put 'em in a stack.
And I just remember wandering over there one time,
and opening up The New Yorker, going, "What's this?"
I mean, we never read stuff like that,
and New York, and art, and whatever, and literature.
And I thought, "Oh, there's something abstract here."
And I didn't even have the terms for it.
I didn't have any way to put into words
what I was hearing.
And that, again, it was just an important little increment
in pushing me toward this appreciation of something
in the abstract and in the artful.
And so, when I wrote my letter of apology to her family,
I included that story just to let them know
that she had changed the course of my life
with her leftover New Yorker magazines.
[chuckling] Yeah.
I did win the Biggest Primper award
'cause I was always very concerned about my hair,
which is pretty ironic. [laughing]
I did most of my dating in my dad's old F-100 farm truck.
It was pretty much shot by the time I hit "Romeo mode."
Holes in the floor and the mud shot up,
and you had to sit sort of off to the side
if you had your nice clothes on.
And, your date would probably sit next to you
because there was a hole over there, too.
Plus, she probably couldn't get the passenger side door open
because it was tied shut with binder twine.
And it pulled-- that truck pulled to one side,
so you'd have to turn all the time
to keep it going straight.
If you hit the brakes too hard, either nothing happened,
or they locked up completely,
and empty vaccine bottles came flying out.
And the worst thing was:
it didn't have an air-conditioner,
it just had vents.
And the vents on a farm truck,
they just collect chaff and horseflies.
You've got this beautiful young woman
beside you on the date, and she's got shiny lip gloss,
and her hair is up and everything, and then,
she reaches down and opens the vent,
and all these old horseflies come out,
and chaff, and pine needles, and it's in her hair,
and stuck to her lip gloss,
and there's a bug in her braces.
But you're young;
you kiss her anyway.
[belly laugh]
As graduation neared, I wasn't thinking much.
I was dumber than a box of rocks.
I don't know what other 18-year-olds were doing,
but, for instance,
I remember how I chose my major in college.
In New Auburn, if your grades were good enough,
when the university recruiters would come,
you were allowed to skip class and go to the library
and meet with the recruiters.
Well, my grades were good enough,
but I really wasn't thinking about going to college.
I just wanted to go to the library
and read the Sports Illustrated out of the magazine rack.
So, I still remember the day that I decided to be a nurse.
I was sitting at the magazine rack
'cause we got to skip out of English.
The recruiter was over at a table
with a bunch of the serious students
and going through, listing off possible majors,
while I'm thumbing through Sports Illustrated.
And I heard her say, "Business, economics,
biology, nursing, English."
I remember-- didn't even look up-- I went, "Nursing.
"Oh, that sounds interesting.
I'll do that." [phew]
And that was it.
Now, my mother was a nurse.
I was very familiar, with having many siblings
who had been ill and needed care.
So, that part of me,
I wasn't naive about what I was choosing,
but the process of reflecting,
or going, "Is this what I feel called to do?"
[in disengaged tone] "Oh, no, that sounds interesting."
That was literally it.
I've never really seen life in milestones.
First book, graduate from college,
graduate from high school,
it was just like, "Okay, what's next?"
I enjoyed things, I mean, of course.
High school graduation was wonderful
because I celebrated with over half our class.
We'd known each other since kindergarten.
So, of course, it was joyful and fun, wonderful memories.
And I, to this day, love to run into my classmates
because we share that, no matter where we've gone since then,
we shared that good time.
And we had a graduation ceremony,
and I think I gave a speech; I don't 'member.
I think Dixie Fuss was the valedictorian,
and Mark Horbinski was the salutatorian,
and I came in 3rd.
Dix-- [sighs]
Dixie Fuss,
she-- she beat me in the sixth-grade spelling bee.
I took 2nd; I've never forgotten.
She earned it.
Nothing-- nothing crooked,
just whenever I see her, I just go, [groans] "Oh, 2nd."
[chuckling]
[door creaking]
[upbeat music]
[door hinges squeal]
I headed for college, I took a detour to Wyoming.
When I was 16 years old, I started working on a ranch.
My dad had worked there when he was a young man
and had a lot of stories about the ranch.
And so, he said, "Let's go to Wyoming."
And I was excited because I'd just heard all these stories
and I'd never been West, and I read a lot of cowboy books about the West.
And we went out to Wyoming, just for a few days.
And then the day that we were supposed to go home,
we were sitting in the living room at the ranch house,
and the boss had said, "You know,
"we need someone to drive a hay swather,
"and you've got experience driving farm equipment.
I wonder if you could do it?"
And I just looked at my dad, thinking he was gonna say, "No,"
'cause I knew he couldn't get along
without me helping him at home.
And he said, "Oh, we'll talk about it."
And so, we talked about it that night,
and then he said, "Yeah, sure."
So, I wound up working there for the next five years.
And it wasn't until I was in my late 30s
that one night, we were having a family get together,
and I said to my dad, "You knew they were gonna offer
me that job before you hauled me out there, didn't 'ya?"
And he just smiled.
'Cause I think I had hit the age where
I was giving him all the help he needed.
He was ready for me to help someone else.
I worked out there into college,
and that's partly how I put myself through college.
And I got into nursing school.
Nursing school curriculum is pretty constrained.
I mean, you're on a path, you're on a track.
The first year was just taking all those hard classes
and trying to get a good enough grade point.
So, it was pretty busy, but it was one of those
dreaded liberal arts educations.
And I was pretty against that.
I came from practicality and pragmatism.
And I would always say why am I sitting
in Introduction to Film,
when I should be studying pathophysiology?
Well, I was studying pathophysiology
and taking some Introduction to Film.
And so at one point,
I had to fill one of my humanities credits,
and I took a creative writing course,
just because it was there.
And I thought, oh, maybe--
I like books, maybe this will work out.
And I loved it.
I couldn't wait to go.
Not only did I love the writing, but I loved the criticism.
It was the first time the instructor was really tough,
and he would read your stuff, and in public,
mark it up, and criticize it.
And I was surprised that rather than reacting defensively,
it took me right back to my football playing days.
And he'd say, "This line could be better."
And all I heard was my coach going,
[crusty voice] "You can hit 'em harder."
And I'd go, [gruff voice] "Yeah, I will, okay!
I'll really work hard on this poem."
And, something about that reaction to criticism,
and just rediscovering the love that had I felt
way back in seventh grade
when I had that quick little writing assignment.
I went, "Oh, my gosh, I remember this feeling."
But then, of course, I had to finish nursing school
and study for my boards.
And so, I did that
and got my first nursing jobs.
And then once I was working as a nurse,
that's when I really started.
I had a friend who sold an article to a magazine
about canoeing on the Red Cedar River.
Why, I grew up canoeing the Red Cedar River!
And I thought, "Oh, I didn't realize
you could write things and sell 'em."
I was that naive.
There was never a moment--
People always say, "When did you know
you wanted to be a writer?"
I still don't know [laughs] if I wanna be a writer.
I just started doing it, and, you know, on one hand,
discovered this ineffable joy and spark and light
that I felt
when I was around people who were being creative,
or when I was hearing a beautiful piece of poetry,
or when I was trying to create something rhythmic with words.
But at the same time, I was realizing,
"Hey, I gotta pay the rent."
So, I was very pragmatic about that part of it.
I wrote every single day and I didn't know why.
I didn't have a plan.
I just thought, you know what, I've got a nursing degree,
I can get a good job next week, if I need it.
I'm gonna try this writing thing.
And so, I took a job proofreading brochures
for legal seminars.
And, it was a very straightforward job,
but the reason I took it was "A," it was working with words.
It was scanning. It was finding errors.
And then "B," it was the kind of job
that you could do it, do it well,
but then when you were done, you could go home,
and I could write all night, and that's what I'd do.
Whereas, as a nurse, I still felt
a commitment to my patients, especially as a new nurse.
And I was working in neurological rehab
with people who had traumatic brain injuries,
spinal cord injuries, stroke.
And so, I did not feel like I could just
punch in and out on that job.
I needed to think about my patients, even outside of work.
So, I thought, "Well, I'll just take this job,"
and that's what I did.
I would just go home at night in my little apartment
and I'd write, and write, and write, and send stuff out:
poetry, articles, essays, humor.
And just, I sent it everywhere.
And I got, of course, piles and piles of rejections,
but occasionally you would get a yes.
Studied about freelancing,
and how do you write for magazines?
How do you get a book published?
I started out--
I self-published my first four books.
And I would set up a folding card table
in the mall at Christmas time,
and just sit there and try to sell people my book.
I had a humor piece called,
"Never Stand Behind a Sneezing Cow,"
and I rented the local Unitarian Church,
and invited a bunch of friends and recorded it,
and then put it on a cassette.
And I took the cassettes to Kwik Trips,
within an 80-mile radius of New Auburn.
And I had a little cardboard display.
And I set it up there, and every couple weeks,
I'd make the rounds to all the Kwik Trips,
and collect my $12, or whatever,
and replenish the little display.
So, all the while that I was falling in love with writing,
that practical farm kid part of me was also going,
"Well, we gotta pay for the gas, too."
And it kind of has always continued,
sometimes to my detriment.
I often wish I was more purely artistic,
but now I've got kids and a mortgage.
So, there's always that part, writing from the heart,
but your eye on the mortgage. [chuckling]
Sometimes you get it right, sometimes you don't.
It's just like big words.
I get criticized
both by just folks,
and I've been criticized in some higher up literary places,
for my language choices.
Well, the gist of the criticism is usually,
"Well, he tries to pretend he's just a regular guy,
"blue jeans, farmer,
"and me and the chief, we was down to the café,
and then he'll turn around and use a big fancy word."
And my response to that is
if you're using fancy words to show off, that's tacky.
That's a tinhorn trick.
But if the word
has beautiful taste,
if it has beautiful rhythm that fits the line
and enhances the sensation of reading that line.
And if, "Oh, by the way," [suppressing laughter]
it means exactly what you're trying to say,
then I say, let's go ahead and use that.
Why let the fancy people have all the fancy words?
People say, "Well, I had to look those words up
[in deep voice] in the dictionary."
And I always say, "Well, where do you think I found them?"
Right? [laughing] That's where they keep words.
And then, at some point, I just got to where
I could survive.
I've been lucky, in that, I've had a book
on The New York Times Bestseller List.
It was #21 for one week.
I've had a book that sold far more copies
than I ever dreamed and has never showed up on a list
because it just sells slowly.
I've written for major magazines.
But I also was lucky, in that,
going back again to my dad, and the idea of:
you have the cows, the sheep, and the logging.
Between the three of them, you can make a living.
And with me, pretty early on, I realized,
"Well, unless I have that blockbuster book,
"I'm not selling enough books
to just live off the royalties or anything like that."
I could see what was happening to the print industry.
I knew that I was probably gonna have to
figure something out.
And so, that's when I started really doing a lot of speaking,
and even a little bit of music.
And the idea being that
as long as you've got a lot of different things going on,
when one of them's down,
hopefully, two of the others are working.
So, that was, again, the pragmatic part of me.
But none of it happens,
if I don't sit down and do the writing.
And that still--
This is the happiest thing I can report:
when I get up in the morning
the first thing I wanna do is write.
Feel pretty lucky.
[cheerful piano music]
My mother teaching me to read.
She loved books and she saw that I loved books,
and she sent away for a phonics cartoon book
from a Chicago newspaper,
and used it to teach me to read when I was four.
I think mainly, just to get me off her back
because I was bugging her to read to me all the time.
I've, over the years,
bragged about being able to read at the age of four.
And perhaps a little too much 'cause one day
my dad heard me tell someone I could read when I was four,
and he said, "Well, kinda."
I said, "Well, whaddya mean by that?"
He said, "Well, I remember when you were four,
"and you were quite proud of the fact that you could read,
as apparently, you still are."
And he said, "And I was taking you out to the barn
"and the neighbor's truck was parked
"with the tailgate facing out,
"and little four-year-old Mikey,
"so proud that he could read,
"pointed at the tailgate and said, "'Look, Dad!
F-O-R-D, truck !" [chuckling]
Whenever I tell the "I could read at four" story,
I have to give dad his shot.
*
Michael Perry: Where I Come From
was funded in part by
Ron and Colleen Weyers,
Greg and Carol Griffin,
Zack Halmstad,
Stanley Mujwid in memory of Donna Mujwid,
Thomas and Eleanor Wildrick Family,
Sam Murty,
Focus Fund for Wisconsin Programming,
and Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.