Radio

Krista Westendorp

In the crook of the big maple tree in our front yard in Michigan, my brother’s transistor radio balanced on my thighs, I held a new world. California surfing beaches, Motown, or Greenwich Village sent my insides throbbing with beats reliably steady, or careening sideways with unexpected musical swoops. At ten, I didn’t know what Donovan was talking about, “could have tripped out easy,” from “Sunshine Superman,” my favorite song that summer. Or what exactly Aretha’s chain of fools would look like, but I wanted more of it. The “chain, chain, chains” were mesmerizing. That same summer, when “Fever” came on, my brother held up the radio on our neighbor kids’ front step, and five of us belted out “Fever!” as loud as we could, along with Peggy Lee, then collapsed into laughter, me because it was outlandish to think that someone would want fever. Snatches of these songs in my head back in the house, I’d close my bedroom door against the sacred classical music blasting from the hi-fi, replaying the new songs in my head.

The songs on the radio were different from the ones at church, for sure. We’d be lulled by hymns like “Abide With Me” on Sunday evenings, or yanked to our feet by my dad playing the pipe organ right next to us in the balcony, where the organists’ families sat, when he’d pull out all the stops for a full-throttle “Great is Thy Faithfulness.” All of that music contained me in safety zones of promise, a kind of bedrock of being, but there was more music in the world that spoke to us too, and its genesis and expression were beginning to resonate with me.

I didn’t know then that I’d need skills and points of connection with a broader world than the reliable, hardworking Dutch community surrounding me during childhood. I’d need to learn to trust different ways of being in the world, and to understand that a more diverse community would inform so much of where I found myself in the years ahead.

By high school the disc jockeys interested me almost as much as the music. In their modulated voices they made clever remarks about the songs I loved, and when I called into the station, they played the songs I asked for and announced that the song was going out to me. I couldn’t get over how cool that was, a whole region listening to “my” song. I would be babysitting during these calls, because they wouldn’t be allowed at my house. After the little ones were bathed, read to, and tucked into their beds, the phone and radio were mine. I talked to the disc jockeys, staying on hold while they went on the air. Wandering around the kitchens, stretching out the phone cord as far as it would go, I felt grown up, talking about the music, winning prizes for answering questions about rock and roll songs, being the eighth caller on the request line to snag The Doors or Carly Simon’s new album. I practiced being an adult during these conversations with men who were safely across town. Perfect for an introvert who had very few social privileges, whose male friends at the Christian high school seemed oafish, and where I, no doubt, showed up as supremely awkward.

Songs on the radio taught me about suffering, romantic love, war, revolution, themes not addressed at our family table. The singers’ voices pierced my heart with their passions carried on intense rifts of song, and I added my own evolving conflicts to theirs, feeling heard. My teen agonies were fairly simple: lack of freedom, loneliness, limited social feedback. We’d moved to a new neighborhood when I was ten, leaving all of my friends behind. I was only allowed to go out to work, ride my bike in the neighborhood, go to the library, church, or basketball games at the high school.

By then I had my own record collection, and I liked different music than my brother. I loved the Beatles and Beach Boys like he did, but I also gravitated toward music that explored protest themes, civil rights, and women’s issues. Sometimes I’d tape a song I liked when I heard it on the radio, and listen to it over and over, straining to hear every word, memorizing the lyrics. I’d take my records across the street to my younger friend Gerry’s house. She had a hi-fi stereo in their finished lower level, and she and I sang along to “American Pie” or danced to “Light My Fire” next to the pool table, leaning in to lock eyes for the big moments in the song.

 My high school art teacher allowed us to take our albums to class and play them while we painted or carved linoleum prints. The cover to my Leon Russell Carney album was worn to the bare cardboard by the end of junior year from carrying it back and forth. I found a few friends in art class who grooved to his timing with me. Leon sometimes languorously filled his mouth with words before sending them out, holding them just long enough, or whipped up the tempo and the register of his voice to sell images like his “Queen of the Roller Derby.”

The summer after my first year of college, my friend Linda’s huge black 1964 Galaxie 500 flew toward the beach on the old highway between Grand Rapids and West Olive, the wind from all four open windows whipping snarls into our hair, the Rolling Stones snarling too as Linda slapped the steering wheel to the beat and we bellowed out the lines to “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” By then I’d finally bought my own transistor radio to take along, with money from my first paycheck as a cashier at Haan’s Foods. My parents had given my older brother his radio when he was eleven, ignoring pleas from me for a radio every Christmas and birthday since then. I’d gotten lacy bathrobes and a sewing basket, which reigned me in instead of offering me a bigger world.

Linda’s dark hair hung straight to below her waist. Her brown eyes sparked fire. She was afraid of no one. She had a few inches on me, standing six feet tall, and carried herself like a lioness—languid yet fully alert. She’d recently been pinched on the backside as she crossed the street in downtown Holland, Michigan, where she lived. She whirled around to face the startled man and screamed in his face, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?!” Not bad for a seventeen-year-old in our seemingly genteel, polite part of the world, in 1975. Doug, my new college boyfriend, had introduced us. They’d been high school friends in Holland, thirty miles from me.

I situated my Panasonic radio in the center of our big cotton blanket, extended the long antenna across Lake Michigan toward Chicago, and tuned to WLS, the ultimate rock and roll outlet. Favoring Coppertone Suntan Oil, SPF 0, we shone from head to toe around our suits, a heady tropical scent mixing with fresh aerosolized water from the crashing waves. I tied my curly brown hair up and replaced my high-correction glasses with new prescription sunglasses, satisfied that I now looked like anyone else wearing just sunglasses. We liked to go to the tiny no-frills public beach at the end of Riley Road, a sleepy section of shore where we could claim any space as ours and not be bothered by anyone. We’d tear into the waves at top speed, diving, sputtering from the cold, laughing at the force of the water and shock of cold. The sun, waves, and music told us we owned the world with our strong bodies, our jobs, and a car to go anywhere we wanted, at least on days off from our retail jobs.

My husband Doug and I met in a freshman drawing class at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. We fell for each other a couple of months into the semester. I immediately liked Doug’s deep, clear diction. We married at nineteen, after both deciding to take a break from school until we had more solid plans for our majors.

At twenty, Doug and I took a job together as houseparents for a group of sixteen men with various disabilities, most of whom had just been released from the Kalamazoo State Hospital. Benson House had been built with a social services grant. In 1977 they didn’t know that sixteen people with extensive disabilities in the same house was just a smaller institution. Still, between some of our residents’ psychotic breaks, we did our best to be a family. We piled into the van for trips to Burger King, the movies, the bank, shopping, always playing Top 40 radio, the men and me singing out the words—often wrong words—with unabashed exuberance.

Eddy, with an undiagnosed cognitive disability, loved his radio at least as much I loved mine. He walked around the group home, hair askew, with a huge metal radio planted on his shoulder, up against his ear, a country station or the Wolverines football game blasting. His favorite song was “Your Cheating Heart,” and even when it wasn’t playing on the radio, he’d sometimes stop in his tracks and yell out “Your Cheatin’ Heart!” so loud that his eyelids fluttered at the commotion as he assumed a disco pose.

Once, in an effort to help Eddy save money on batteries, his previous houseparents had shown him how to plug in the radio in his bedroom. Shortly thereafter, the entire house shorted out and Eddy appeared at the foot of the stairs looking puzzled, a scissors in one hand and the cord end in the other. He’d cut the cord, needing to move, not understanding the concept of the wall socket.

I understood Eddy’s need to move through space with his radio as it transported him out of his limitations onto a stage where he projected his big heart, one open hand stretched up and out, the other holding the radio in place on his shoulder, his voice ringing up and out, eyes closed, front foot forward, sending his bliss out to the world.

When Doug and I moved from Michigan to Minnesota at the end of 1979 to live in Pease, a tiny town in the middle of the state, I didn’t anticipate how much I’d miss my Michigan radio stations. We made the move with our baby, Jessica, to take care of Doug’s Grandpa Jake, who’d become a widower the year before. Grandpa wasn’t equipped to care for himself. Grandma had done practically everything until she died suddenly of a heart attack. In that town of 117 souls, in the middle of dairy-farming country, neighbors and relatives were welcoming and friendly, but I couldn’t find any frequency on my radio dial that spoke to me. We were too far from the Twin Cities. St. Cloud didn’t cut it. There were religious and sports stations in Princeton, but they weren’t our style. We had a record player, at least, and recorded music. But it wasn’t the same as turning on the radio and being surprised, with someone choosing music in sets for me, music that flowed, one artist into another: Carole King’s “Far Away” to Elton John’s “Levon,” to Joni Mitchell’s “Circle Game.”

Our new friends in town, Mike and Bonnie, lived down the block. There were only two blocks in town. They were renting the home of Marion, an eccentric missionary who showed up at our door soon after we moved in and insisted we meet her new renters. I felt a little put off at this strange old woman telling me what to do. She reminded me of Granny on The Beverly Hillbillies, with her bossy manner and feline vocal range. But we soon ran into Mike and Bonnie on the street, and found that they wrote and sang their own music together, folk music. Bonnie taught grade school at Community Christian School. Bonnie’s voice was resonant, her lyrics full of references to the part of the country she loved, South Dakota near the Missouri River. Soon Doug was playing guitar with Mike on piano, all three of them singing together. They practiced in the church, because none of us had pianos.

In 1981 Bonnie told me about a radio show they listened to, broadcast through the public radio station in Collegeville, forty miles away.

“What? I thought public radio was only classical music and news!”

“No! It’s two hours, every Saturday at 5:00 pm, and the host is fun to listen to. They have musical guests, their own band, do skits, read poetry sometimes, and the host tells a story every week, about a mythical small town in Minnesota. It’s always interesting.”

“What kind of music do they have?”

“A variety. Classical, folk, bluegrass, gospel, rock and roll, hymns. They do fun versions of old classics, they have artists performing their own music, and the host sings with the musical guests too. It’s called A Prairie Home Companion.”

Doug and I tuned in the next Saturday at five and loved the sound of the show. Garrison Keillor, the host, kept things moving with his smooth baritone voice. He was funny, in an ironic, deadpan way. Someone named Butch Thompson played honky-tonk piano. A Peter Ostrushko played mandolin beautifully, and a woman named Stevie Beck played the autoharp. In between the musical pieces Garrison had skits and told rambling stories about fictional Lake Wobegon, “the little town that time forgot.” His characters were so much like the people we knew, people who lived next door, and our families too—self-conscious, sometimes full of bluster, doing everyday things, having spats. The characters were just exaggerated enough to be funny, but they were also human, with fears and foibles.

Regularly listening to A Prairie Home Companion during the early 1980s was like being surrounded by artistic friends. Listening to Garrison’s character sketches helped me—in my early twenties with a lot of responsibilities—understand myself and others with joy, humility, forgiveness, and humor. After we’d listened to a couple of shows, Doug said, “I know, let’s record the show and listen to it throughout the next week, especially the music…”

“Do we have a blank tape?”

“I think I have one. We can use the same tape every week, just record over it.”

We played parts of the show every evening when we did dishes and other evening chores. We got familiar with the house musicians, heard guest musicians we didn’t know, and refreshed our recordings wish list. Listening to hymns on the show I’d learned as a child reminded me that, even 650 miles away from what still felt like home to me, I was part of the same family of God. Hearing the hymns side-by-side with the folk music I’d grown to love taught me that we belonged to the wider family, all of creation, and to work created by diverse people made in God’s image too.

Grandpa watched Gunsmoke, Wheel of Fortune, and sometimes the news on TV. Doug and I didn’t watch TV at that time; we wanted to raise our kids without it if we could. Radio and recorded music were our go-to accompaniments at home. The first years after leaving our families and friends behind in Michigan were difficult for me. Our budget was tight so we couldn’t make long-distance calls very often. I was home with Jessica, Grandpa, and a new baby, Jill, in 1981. The days were long. Garrison’s shows were dear companions to me during those isolating years.

In the fall of 1982 I started nursing school, commuting thirty miles each way to a three-year program at St. Cloud Hospital. I wanted work that I could do wherever we lived, and caring for people seemed right to me. We hired a caregiver for Grandpa and the girls while I was away. I remember being in the car as much as I remember being in class or working as a student nurse in the hospital. Doug and I still had our weekly ritual of taping A Prairie Home Companion and re-listening to parts of it during the week. We loved the songs of Twin Cities musician Greg Brown. With the deepest voice, he sang his songs about love, parenting, the ironies of entering middle age. On a rare date, Doug and I drove to Minneapolis to see Greg Brown at the Coffeehouse Extempore. The lilting way he used the gravelly warmth of his voice made the songs sound like they included eye twinkles. After the show we told him how much we loved his music and he signed his One Night album for us.

Our car cassette player had broken, and I sometimes took a battery-operated cassette player along on my commutes to school, with our Prairie Home tapes. It wasn’t ideal; road noise sometimes obscured all but the baselines, even with the volume all the way up. We had a few other tapes to trade out: Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Janis Joplin, Emmylou Harris. I loved how the songs could envelop me in the singers and their messages.

After three years of this school routine, our lives took a major turn. Grandpa transitioned to a nearby nursing home and our son Aaron appeared. Aaron was born with life-threatening disabilities the same month I graduated. A prenatal brainstem injury had caused spastic quadriplegia with extreme muscle weakness. He couldn’t swallow and needed round-the-clock care. While we had astounding support from nearby friends and Doug’s wonderful cousins who lived close by, our days became excruciating. The pain of our baby’s distress, willing him to take the next and the next breath, tore my heart apart. Mending on better days, tearing again with each crisis, I became a different person. One who would learn to question insurance companies, one who would call specialist after specialist until my questions were adequately addressed. We didn’t know if our baby would survive, and I felt suspended in a monumental, uneasy pause.

Our home became our whole world for Aaron’s first year of life, during the time he was most fragile. In Aaron’s room, where for months he lay propped in his crib, unable to move anything except his blue eyes, we listened to music, usually on cassettes, sometimes on the radio. We always played songs during the five times a day we did range of motion to help Aaron’s joints stay mobile, waiting for him to get strong enough to do it on his own. We moved his joints to the music, and we could tell he liked it by the ways he settled in and synced his breathing to the songs. After a while, he started to anticipate the next lines of songs he knew, and we felt him trying to move his arms and legs with us. By the time he was a year old, we were completing movements we felt him initiate. Slowly he started moving on his own.

Aaron was critically ill several times during his first year due to aspirating oral secretions into his lungs, too weak to cough. At age one his doctors agreed to place a tracheostomy tube so we could suction secretions that went down the wrong way. Up till then they always talked as if he would die, that he was too disabled for a trach to help enough. The trach meant he lost his voice, but Aaron’s face and jaw were permanently paralyzed, so he would not have been able to speak words. Still, I missed the sound of his voice. When I hear his happy cooing on videotapes we made during his first months, I pause to enjoy that fledgling voice.

It became clear that we needed to live closer to Aaron’s medical providers. In 1986 we moved with our three kids to Edina, a Minneapolis suburb. Grandpa Jake had died the year before. Doug and I squeezed our family into a two-bedroom house in a great neighborhood, our girls in bunk beds and Aaron in a crib opposite, surrounded by medical equipment. During Aaron’s second year of life, he started using sign language. The first thing he learned to sign was the song “Jesus Loves Me,” traditionally the first song kids in our church learned in Sunday school. He could sign while I sang to him if he was lying on his back, because there was less gravity to work against, that way. I saw, as he signed the words in exact rhythm to the tune, that music was wired into his core. He would go on to use music and rhythm as ways to be included, to contribute, and to celebrate the joys of song and dance with diverse groups: in church, bars, parades, concerts, and on the radio.

Instead of our world expanding in ways we’d imagined it might after I graduated from nursing school, it seemed to shrink to mostly what happened in our house. But I was starting to learn how a microcosm of family life could echo the macrocosm of community far and wide. Fighting for Aaron’s right to grow up with a family and have the medical care and community supports he needed, I met other parents with the same battles, and we gathered at the state capitol to lobby for changes in healthcare policy for medically fragile children and adults with disabilities. I learned how to testify to the legislature about programs that provided these crucial needs. I met representatives of other marginalized groups whose voices needed to be heard too, and paid a lot more attention to the legislative process.

One 1988 fall day, Doug came home with Keith Jarrett’s new solo jazz piano record, Dark Intervals. “I’m putting this on right now!” He cued it up on the record player on the far side of the long living room and entry area of our house. Doug had placed the speakers on the farthest edges of Grandma and Grandpa’s old cabbage-leaf wool carpet, salvaged from our house in Pease. Doug and I sat together on our small couch near the record player. Aaron, at age three, still not strong enough to crawl or stand, had learned to roll from place to place, his first independent locomotion. He lay on the carpet near our feet, attentive and still, as the first clear notes began. Then he tucked his weaker left arm and used the right to help roll himself to the exact center of the room, equidistant from the speakers, and stayed, letting the notes and pauses cascade around him until the music ended. “My work here is done,” I said to Doug, pointing at Aaron commanding the prime music-listening space in the room. As if my sole purpose was to guide Aaron to optimal music-experiencing situations.

“You wish,” he countered with a playful taunt.

At home we played Public Radio’s The Morning Show. It featured one of the regulars on A Prairie Home Companion, Tom Keith. He was a master of impersonation and sound effects and, with his co-host Dale Connelly, played several hours of the same kinds of music we heard on A Prairie Home Companion, plus a lot of wonderful historical blues, jazz, cabaret, and gospel pieces. The hosts educated us about the artists, their music, and the historical context of the music, as well as inserting the driest, kindest humor, with a hint of snark. Our kind of humor. Aaron loved listening as much as I did throughout his elementary and middle school years. He took note of the artists, their work, and the contexts of their creations and performances. On days he was home from school or when we were in the van headed to a clinic appointment, he signed that he wanted to listen to more music from the artists on The Morning Show and A Prairie Home Companion, things we all listened to around the house.

As the kids grew, making it through high school, and the girls through college, we all shared a love of music and radio. We went to many live A Prairie Home Companion shows where Aaron paid close attention to the mechanics of the show: timing, sound effects, adjusting for unexpected happenings, etc. Aaron met Garrison after the first show we attended, and Garrison befriended him. They shared emails. Garrison invited him to dress rehearsals and offered comp tickets for the show to Aaron and his family and friends. Years later, Aaron would say, “Garrison is why I got into radio.”

 A few years ago, after Aaron moved into his own apartment at age twenty-five, he was welcomed as a guest host at a small public radio station, KFAI in Minneapolis, by Dale Connelly, who’d become the news director there after leaving Minnesota Public Radio. Aaron hosted the syndicated Democracy Now for several years, after Connelly worked with technicians to make it possible for Aaron to control the soundboard at the station with his iPad, using his synthesized voice to comment and do promotional spots, as one of the first nonverbal people in the world to be a radio announcer. He’s been a guest host on a long-established music show at KFAI called Crap from the Past. Aaron’s monthly podcast, Aaron’s Cavalcade of the Mind, features his own kind humor, mildly snarky comments, and some music I wasn’t prepared for. He opened his first Christmas episode with Jimi Hendrix’s loose medley of “Little Drummer Boy/Silent Night/Auld Lang Syne,” heavy metal style.  Just last week he was invited to be a guest host at a favorite New York City radio station, WFMU, during a prime slot, eleven in the morning until two in the afternoon. I wasn’t familiar with any of the songs on his playlist and felt slightly fossilized reviewing them, but reading comments from all over the world online, I recognized the enthusiasm of young people reveling in the gifts of curated radio music. Just as I had, half a century earlier.

I could never have guessed how expansive the role of technology would become for me, all those years ago. How the joy of a transistor radio, introducing passionate artists who opened doors for me into the larger and larger rooms, would begin a lifelong love of so many musical genres. Or how a wide range of technologies would evolve to support Aaron’s breathing, voice, mobility, and his community connections.

I still love listening to radio, especially after discovering a Twin Cities’ Public Radio station, Radio Heartland. It plays roots music, folk and bluegrass, historical showtunes, early rock and roll, a vast range of new artists’ work, and more. Radio Heartland introduces me to music I’d never find on my own, giving me context on artists and concert information. But best of all, sometimes it flies me into the less complicated airwaves of earlier times, a confident voice on the air introducing me to my former self, loving maybe a Joni Mitchell song that had once introduced me to a bigger world. I never get over the awe of someone choosing the right song for me, in the moment, on the radio.

Krista Westendorp lives in Minneapolis with her artist husband and their imperious cat, Dusty. She’s a part-time hospice nurse. Her creative nonfiction has been published in the American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. Her passions include writing, cross country skiing, travel, and listening to music. She’s working on a memoir about raising her son, who was in the first generation of kids to survive because of advanced medical technology.