Democracy, My Mother And Toast
Peter grew up in St. Paul and was used to Swedish and Norwegian dinner conversation. My mom and her sister had been raised in Oklahoma and had moved to New York. My aunt's husband's family had been lucky on the oil fields. My aunt had an oil fortune. My mom had my dad, an importer of men's hats, not a growing business in the 1970s. The two of them, because of their different situations, had developed very different political opinions, and on the night Peter came to dinner, my mother and aunt were discussing the oil pipeline in Alaska, though if you hadn't been to dinner with them before, you wouldn't know this. Because here's how the conversation began.
Caribou Vs. Toast
My aunt looked across the table at my mother, and said, with no apparent prompting, as if she was resuming an old refrain, "All I want, Mickey (my mom was called Mickey) is a piece of toast. Surely, that is not too much to ask."
Peter looked puzzled.
"And all I want — ALL I WANT — ", said my mother, "is to save thousands of innocent animals who will die for your toast."
There was a question forming in Peter's eyes.
" ... And no piece of toast, NO PIECE OF TOAST," my mom went on, "is worth that kind of suffering. When you think of all those animals ... I mean, really, how selfish ... "
"Selfish!" said my aunt, waving an invisible piece of bread in the air, "I'm not asking for a fur coat here, I am asking a single piece of bread, and I think, I really think that at this point, we, all of us, are entitled at least to that ... "
Peter looked at me. So I leaned over, and I translated. "My aunt," I explained, thinks we should have an oil pipe line from Alaska to the lower 48. If we don't, she believes America will be so energy depleted, so oil poor, that there won't be enough electricity for her to make toast. Not even one piece."
"Really?" Peter asked.
"Yes," I said.