Mother, the queen of my heart

The Column: 02.06.25

Feb 07, 2025

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 44, it 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, which 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 Bronko Nagurski was actually Canadian.

She 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 could be quite forceful about it. She worried about me, how I enjoyed lighting fires and how I loved to play on the Mississippi shore though I’d been told not to. She worried about drowning and about tornadoes and in the summer if a storm came up we always went to the southwest corner of the basement as authorities said to do. All except me. I liked to stand in the yard and watch the storm arrive and the branches of trees shake, hoping for the sight of the funnel cloud.

When I was sad or disappointed or 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 to write 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 that. 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 Pohlad family. Carl Pohlad, the richest man in Minnesota, sat next to my mother at the premiere, and the two of them carried on an extensive conversation, which didn’t faze her a bit. I was proud of her. My mother was one of thirteen children of William and Miriam on Longfellow Avenue South in Minneapolis and sometimes during the Depression she went door-to-door peddling peanut butter sandwiches she’d made. When Mr. Pohlad said, “You must be very proud of your son,” she replied, “I am very proud of all my children,” which is the correct answer.

I have two nephews who are very good to their mother and I stand in awe of them and think, “There goes the man I meant to be.” They are 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 (1) married excellent women who recognize the royalty of the grandma, (2) produced delightful grandchildren, (3) gotten excellent jobs in law and engineering so they can afford to fly the grandma to visit the grandchildren and vice versa. I am the recipient of videos of visitation scenes and it is clear that the delight of the grandma is a factor in the production of fabulous grandkids.

I remember my grandmas as austere figures in dowager outfits whom a child was to revere and maintain silence and not be 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 chortle and climb all over her and it’s clear they’ll grow up to save the world and not become an old sourpuss like me.

People look at me and say, “What’s wrong?” It’s the stone face, the lowered brow, the grim affect. It was the effect of eating toast with dog urine on it. But when I take my Minnesota cup down and fill it with coffee, I think of my mother and I smile. Her 110^th birthday is coming up and I should do something special in her honor, such as write something about her that makes you feel good.