With Mother's Day Approaching...
Let's Talk About You and Your Mother
April 25, 2006
I'd like a word with you about your mother, and I want you to read this column all the way to the end, otherwise I will slap you so hard your head will spin.
I realize that Mother's Day is a fake holiday perpetuated by the greeting card industry and the florists, but it's here to stay, so make the best of it. The president is a fake, too, but we still pay our taxes. And it's time you did something nice for your mother.
I bring this up well in advance of Mother's Day so you can plan a little bit and not roll out of the sack on SUNDAY, MAY 14, and fritter away the morning and then dash over to Mom's and on the way pick up a cheap box of chocolate-covered cherries at the gas station, or a gallon of windshield cleaner, or whatever you were planning to give her.
Cheap chocolates are not appropriate for your mother, nor is a bouquet of daisies marked down 50 percent at the convenience store. What you owe your mother is a sonnet. A fourteen-line poem, in iambic pentameter, rhymed, just like Shakespeare's "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcaste state." Look it up. You can do it, if you try.
Your mother loves you, she has loved you from Day 1, she loves you on your good days and your bad. She was on her way to Broadway and Hollywood was taking a look at her when your father got her in a family way and she put glamour and fame behind her and had you instead. Think about it. All that pain, and then out you came, not the high point of her day, believe me.
She changed your poopy diaper when the stench was such as to make strong men dizzy. And when you hopped up and ran off, leaving a brown trail behind you, she mopped that up, too. At a certain age, you put everything into your mouth - dirt, coins, small toys, cufflinks - and when she stuck a finger down your throat, you refused to vomit. Nothing would come up. All she could do was pour Listerine in you and hope for the best. But if she tried to coax you to eat green leafy material, then you would throw up quarts of stuff. And she'd clean it up and take you in her arms and comfort you although your breath was rancid.
You were not a bright child. I realize that you think you were in the accelerated group, and that was your mother's doing. Her great accomplishment was to protect you from the knowledge of your own ordinariness. The rest of us knew. You didn't. Nor did you realize the extent of your bed-wetting. Three a.m., you sat in a stupor, while Mom changed your urine-soaked sheets, tucked you in, and sang you to sleep with "If Ever I Would Leave You" from "Camelot."
She loved you through the dark valley of your adolescence, when you were as charming as barbed wire. You surrounded yourself with sullen friends who struck your mother as incipient criminals. Her beloved child, her darling, her shining star, running with teenage jihadists, but she bit her tongue and served them pizza and sloppy joes, ignoring the explosives taped to their chests.
When you were 17, when other adults found you unbearable and even your own aunts and uncles looked at you and saw the decline of American civilization and the coming of a dark age of arrogant narcissism unprecedented in world history, your mother still loved you with all her heart. She loves you still today, despite all the wrong choices you've made. Don't get me started. Go write your mother a sonnet.
It costs you nothing except some time and effort. Do not buy her chocolate. She doesn't care for it. She only pretended to, for your sake. Do not take her out to dinner. She has eaten plenty of dinners with you and one more isn't going to be that thrilling. She might prefer to snuggle up in a chair all by herself and watch "Singin' in the Rain" and have a stiff drink. (You do know your mother drinks, don't you? Ever wonder why?)
Get out a sheet of paper and a pencil. Here's an idea for a first line: "When I was disgraceful and a complete outcaste." You take it from there.
© 2006 by Garrison Keillor.
April 25, 2006
I'd like a word with you about your mother, and I want you to read this column all the way to the end, otherwise I will slap you so hard your head will spin.
I realize that Mother's Day is a fake holiday perpetuated by the greeting card industry and the florists, but it's here to stay, so make the best of it. The president is a fake, too, but we still pay our taxes. And it's time you did something nice for your mother.
I bring this up well in advance of Mother's Day so you can plan a little bit and not roll out of the sack on SUNDAY, MAY 14, and fritter away the morning and then dash over to Mom's and on the way pick up a cheap box of chocolate-covered cherries at the gas station, or a gallon of windshield cleaner, or whatever you were planning to give her.
Cheap chocolates are not appropriate for your mother, nor is a bouquet of daisies marked down 50 percent at the convenience store. What you owe your mother is a sonnet. A fourteen-line poem, in iambic pentameter, rhymed, just like Shakespeare's "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcaste state." Look it up. You can do it, if you try.
Your mother loves you, she has loved you from Day 1, she loves you on your good days and your bad. She was on her way to Broadway and Hollywood was taking a look at her when your father got her in a family way and she put glamour and fame behind her and had you instead. Think about it. All that pain, and then out you came, not the high point of her day, believe me.
She changed your poopy diaper when the stench was such as to make strong men dizzy. And when you hopped up and ran off, leaving a brown trail behind you, she mopped that up, too. At a certain age, you put everything into your mouth - dirt, coins, small toys, cufflinks - and when she stuck a finger down your throat, you refused to vomit. Nothing would come up. All she could do was pour Listerine in you and hope for the best. But if she tried to coax you to eat green leafy material, then you would throw up quarts of stuff. And she'd clean it up and take you in her arms and comfort you although your breath was rancid.
You were not a bright child. I realize that you think you were in the accelerated group, and that was your mother's doing. Her great accomplishment was to protect you from the knowledge of your own ordinariness. The rest of us knew. You didn't. Nor did you realize the extent of your bed-wetting. Three a.m., you sat in a stupor, while Mom changed your urine-soaked sheets, tucked you in, and sang you to sleep with "If Ever I Would Leave You" from "Camelot."
She loved you through the dark valley of your adolescence, when you were as charming as barbed wire. You surrounded yourself with sullen friends who struck your mother as incipient criminals. Her beloved child, her darling, her shining star, running with teenage jihadists, but she bit her tongue and served them pizza and sloppy joes, ignoring the explosives taped to their chests.
When you were 17, when other adults found you unbearable and even your own aunts and uncles looked at you and saw the decline of American civilization and the coming of a dark age of arrogant narcissism unprecedented in world history, your mother still loved you with all her heart. She loves you still today, despite all the wrong choices you've made. Don't get me started. Go write your mother a sonnet.
It costs you nothing except some time and effort. Do not buy her chocolate. She doesn't care for it. She only pretended to, for your sake. Do not take her out to dinner. She has eaten plenty of dinners with you and one more isn't going to be that thrilling. She might prefer to snuggle up in a chair all by herself and watch "Singin' in the Rain" and have a stiff drink. (You do know your mother drinks, don't you? Ever wonder why?)
Get out a sheet of paper and a pencil. Here's an idea for a first line: "When I was disgraceful and a complete outcaste." You take it from there.
© 2006 by Garrison Keillor.
posted by Al Sturgeon | 5:54 AM
19 Comments:
Nor did you realize the extent of your bed-wetting. Three a.m., you sat in a stupor, while Mom changed your urine-soaked sheets, tucked you in, and sang you to sleep with "If Ever I Would Leave You" from "Camelot."
I'm offended, too.
On behalf of (former? We're not telling!) bed-wetters everywhere, I must protest the inclusion of these sentences as well. Poor form.
In fact, Al, maybe you should just take down the entire article...
(end sarcasm)
A better line to illustrate his point would have been "This author is a hack, but you're still reading the article."
Good grief, Joe. You people really are as humorless as prison guards where this president is concerned, aren't you? Out of all the targets of witticisms in that little essay -- the reader, the reader's mother, bedwetters -- you single out the most powerful man in the world as the one who has been victimized and needs protecting.
Does he really need that much . . . well, mothering? Cripes. Surely he's a big boy by now.
Just for the record, I don't think the President is a fake. Instead... No, I'll just leave it at that. (Those "self-control" therapy sessions are really paying off!)
Also just for the record, Terry is a bed-wetter. At least he was.
:-)
And more importantly, my mom is not receiving a sonnet. I just enjoy reading (and listening to) Garrison Keillor when I take the time to do so.
(Oh, and would all the attorneys that read this blog please refrain from informing me of copyright infringement laws in regard to posting articles like this? I supplied the link and listed the copyright, and I justify my motive in that I'm advertising for him as part of the Prairie Home team.)
Maybe Joe & Whitney aren't aware, but taking a swipe at the President is never "out of place" in a Keillor article. His readers expect them.
I suspected you'd think so.
:-)
And I'm shocked that you've kept Lake Wobegon from your wife all these years!!
Also just for the record, Terry is a bed-wetter. At least he was.
Was. Is. Forever shall be.
It's a gift, really. Like motherhood itself. Or puppies. Or gentle spring rains.
(Oops. Must change pants. Stupid gentle spring rains...)
I guess we’re through with contraception and vegetarians Huh?
Which came first: the egg or the eggplant?
Al, you're funny, too. Didn't want to leave you out. I like to hear you guys revert to your childhood name calling and picking. It's thoroughly entertaining.
Whitney, I'll be glad to call you some names if it will make you feel like part of the ol' Paragould gang. ;-)
For starters, you're a zhepix. I don't know what that is, but it's the word verification for this post.
Good philosophy. One, of course, Terry does not share.
Of course Terry is an exgkg.
Deriwbie.
Mc-Wee-Pee. That means he peed in his pants, often at McDonalds.
Thanks for taking the high road on that one. Lots of low-road options there...
Okay, to be humorless for a moment, because I can't let that "get off their duff" comment go by: welfare is pretty much over. Your tax dollars go to pay for the war in Iraq moreso than nonexistant welfare queens and their nonexistant Cadillacs. Moreover, my understanding is that the vast majority of people who were on welfare even when there was no time limit were on it temporarily after losing a job or some such thing rather than wanting to live off of others' largesse. There were people who abused it, certainly, but they were the exceptions. Try David Shipler's book The Working Poor for a balanced presentation (i.e., he calls people on their stupid decisions but also takes into account structural and environmental factors that influenced or coerced those decisions) of issues relating to poor people.
Moving right along ... Garrison Keillor writes for Salon sometimes, and I have always found his stuff kind of irrelevant. Can't relate to it at all. And on occasion, sexist. (You get about one and a half of those with me and then I don't like you anymore).
I promise to post some more controversial stuff next week. It's no fun unless there's an argument, is it?
I used to listen to PHC a lot, Cap'n. But the last few years it's gotten to be a little too Lawrence Welk for my tastes. Waaaaaay too much of Garrison singing or co-singing sappy old love songs or hymns.
I do like his religious humor, though. He did a bit years ago that was partly about religion and partly about his mother. It was hilarious -- and could easily have been about the CsofC.
I guess we’re through with contraception and vegetarians Huh?
Veal for everybody!
(My WV was useless as an epithet.)
Are we protecting some deep dark secerets here?
It's a way of preventing Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, you sfodi.
And spamming.
And to make bold letters, just hit the appropriate keyboard keys really hard.
Sorry, Cap'n.
Sometimes I can be a real xiylp.
Some northern sect that does share a lot of beliefs and hymns with older (early 20th century) CofC.
The Plymouth Brethren, which he generally refers to as the "Sanctified Brethren."
I particularly liked Keillor's description of them as being given to "a level of pissery and bs-ification that one normally experiences only in an election year." Pissery and bs-ification: that hits the CsofC right on the head.
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