Speaker 1: Long ago, when I bought a Manhattan apartment, my mother Grace,
gave me a clay coffee cup with Minnesota painted on
it and our state bird, the Loon, so i'd remember
where I come from. Though at age forty four, was
pretty well embedded in me in college announcing on a
classical music radio station, I managed to refit my Minnesota
accent to sound educated, but I still have a keen
sense of insignificance like all other Minnesotans, comes with the territory.
Scott Fitzgerald and Bob Dylan are our big claims to success,
and Scott died young and alcoholic, and Bob is famous
for obscurity. And Walter Mondale was the politest candidate for
president in American history and the biggest loser, and Broncol
mcgirski was actually Canadian. My mother was a good mother.
She told stories about me, how when Dad went off
to join the army in World War Two, I wouldn't
let anyone sit in his chair at the head of
the table. Daddy's chair, I said, and I could be
quite forceful about it. She worried about me, how I
enjoyed lighting fires, and how I love to play on
the Mississippi shore, though I'd been told not to. She
worried about drowning, and about tornadoes, and in the Glamor
if a storm came up, we always went to the
southwest corner of the basement, and as authorities had said
to do, everyone except me. I like to stand in
the yard and watch the storm arrive, and see the
branches of trees shake in the wind, hoping for the
sight of a funnel cloud. When I was sad, a disappointed,
felt cheated of life's pleasures, she always said to me,
what's the matter? Did the dog pee on your cinnamon toast?
Which always made me grin the thought of our aged
cocker spaniel climbing up on the table and lifting his
left hind leg. It makes me smile just to think
of it now. It was her own unique line. No
other mother said it. She knew how much I loved
toast with butter, sugar and cinnamon on it. It was
her line for me. I was not a good son.
A good son is one who visits his mother regularly,
and I was too busy to do then. I ran
around a lot. Sometimes I traveled in fancy company. I
was once in a movie directed by Robert Altman and
financed in part by the poh Lad family and Carl Pohlad,
the richest man in Minnesota, sat next to my mother
at the movie premiere and the two of them carried
on an extensive conversation which did not phase my mother
a I was proud of her. My mother was one
of thirteen children of William and Merriam on Longfellow Avenue
South in Minneapolis, and sometimes during the depression, she went
door to door peddling peanut butter sandwiches that she had
made herself. When mister Poland said to her, you must
be very proud of your son, she said, I'm very
proud of all of my children, which of course is
the correct answer. I have two nephews who are very
good to their mother, and I stand in awe of them,
and I think, there goes the man that I meant
to be. They're polite to their father, but they dote
on their mother. She lives in Minnesota, and one boy
lives in France and the other in Vietnam. But they
have married excellent women who recognize the royalty of the Gramma,
and they have produced delightful grandchildren, and they have gotten
excellent jobs so they can afford to fly the grammar
to visit the grandchildren and vice versa. And I have
looked at videos of visitation scenes, and it is so
clear that the delight of the grammar is a factor
in the production of fabulous grandkids. I remember my grammas
as austere figures in Dowager outfits, whom a child was
supposed to revere and maintain silence and not bechruck childish,
and not expect physical contact due to their fragility. I
was to present a picture of perfect rectitude, even if
it wrecked me, which it sort of did. My sister
in law's grandkids whoop and they chortle, and they climb
all over the grammar, and it's clear that they will
grow up to save the world and not become an
old sourpuss like me. People look at me and they say,
what's wrong. Well, it's the stone face and the lowered brow.
It's the grim effect. It was the effect of eating
toast with dog urine on it. But when I take
my Minnesota coffee cup down and I fill it with coffee,
I think of my mother and I smile her one
hundred and tenth birthday is coming up soon, and I
really should do something special in her honor, such as
talk to you about her in a way that makes
you feel good.