Minnesota
(The 32nd State, 1858)
Its
people are a northern breed,
with
elements of Norse and Swede,
where
natives love lutefisk and lefse,
will
say “Uff da” and “Yah, you betcha,”
and
strangely find deep snow and ice
is
no big deal and maybe nice!
Ten
thousand lakes means lots of fish,
which
explains a favorite wish:
here
up Nort’ to be a winner
means
you caught walleye for dinner!
We
will find the landscapes varies
from
woods and hills to great wide prairies,
and
from the Range to Lake Calhoun—
delights
to fill three months of June!
Now
here for you is my short test—
“Which
Twin City is the best?”
You
may think hard— you may think long—
And
half the state will say, “You’re wrong!!”
1818
That year, Mary Shelley (nee
Wollstonecraft Godwin)
was in the midst of what we’d
call a bad patch:
at nineteen she had already
buried two babies with two
more deaths to follow.
Orphaned at her own birth, she
was no stranger at funerals,
and everyone around her
seemed in peril: she lost
friends, and before long,
her husband, but she gave
birth to a book called
Frankenstein, a tale still alive two centuries
later,
and the world still wonders
how this precocious author
caught a glimpse of the atom
and DNA so many years
before the rest of us.
There was
a genuine Prometheus
around, and a few months
later he introduced his
Grand Sonata for Hammerklavier
in B Flat Major,
which mystified Europe for
the rest of the century,
and from the first was
declared unplayable. The maestro,
by now inured to controversy,
was untroubled. He had
never allowed the needs of
his music to bow to the frailty
of human fingers or breath, and
now an elderly 48,
and securely sentenced to the
land of the deaf, Beethoven
sat serenely at his Broadwood
piano and moved his hands
across the keys, making
sounds that he heard only
in his imaginings.
In our infant empire John
Q. Adams
began a brilliant tenure at the
State Department
and found some unfinished
business in that last corner
of eastern real estate not
yet securely in the Republic,
Spanish Florida.
Jackson was sent off to rattle the saber,
and the Spanish decided to
sell rather than fight,
earning Old Hickory laurels
he’d use to his advantage
when he and Adams squared off
in the election of 1824.
The Secretary now moved on to
the next pressing issue—
where Canada began and we
ended, still unresolved
after two wars, and agreed to
the Boundary Waters
and the 49th parallel, a
decision still applauded
in our day when we feast on
the walleye caught
in those brisk northern
waters.
Science
could not sit still
while its lovely consort,
Nature, continued to amaze:
Venus occulted Jupiter, the
last time it would happen
before 2065, but hardly the
last time that an agile woman
overshadowed a bully.
Off in the Paris laboratories
of the Ecole Polytechnique a
chemist of great skill,
M. Louis Jacques Thenard,
discovered hydrogen peroxide,
a chemical whose useful life
still lay in the future. What
Louis Jacques thought he
might do with it I do not know,
but I am sure he did not
envision me in the next century
watching it bubble and fizz
over some cut or scrape,
before my mother put on the
bandage, pronounced me fit,
and sent me back out to play.
