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5 THE MILLSTONE 6 Rochester, Minnesota, is a rich little town. The Clinic had been producing buckets of cash since the 1920s—and let it be noted here, 1920s money was real money. The large houses that began springing up around the Clinic were baronial estates built in a time when “cutting corners” meant cutting actual corners, like the edges of magnificent scrolled woodwork surrounding a home’s five or six fireplaces. Many of these estates went up on the hills southwest of the Mayo Clinic, an area nicknamed “Pill Hill.” Our home, however, was four miles out in the country. You couldn’t just pull into the driveway of the home my father purchased in 1954. That would be the cymbal crash without the drum roll. No, first you had to drive up into the hills and after turning off onto successively thinner and thinner roads, you came at last down a lane shadowed by fifty-yearold balsam fir trees that stood like bodyguards obstructing your view of the house until the last possible second. And then . . . then, when you turned into the driveway between the giant stone gateposts, you’d had the proper warm-up for your first viewing of the great house we called the Millstone. This would be the part where the opening horns of Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio Italiane would begin and the camera would crane up and pull wide to show the four acres of Minnesota summer that were the sovereign kingdom of the owners. It wasn’t the size of the Millstone and its grounds that made you want the house; it was the sense of stability to the thing. It had been there a quarter century by the time my father pulled into the driveway, and the ivy already clung to its sides; the red slate roof was veteran to a thousand Minnesota snowstorms, and the windows on the third floor looked down on you and said no matter how long you lived, the house would outlast you. Even as an owner, you only rented. Half-timber English Tudor in style, with a mix of brick, stucco, and THE MILLSTONE 6 wooden accents, it featured a circular tower topped with an imperial cone, giving the overall effect of a castle masquerading as a family home. My father came up with the name Millstone in a sour mood as he signed the first of many checks assuming ownership. In biblical times, of course, millstones (once they’d served their grinding purposes at the mill) were tied around the necks of condemned prisoners before they were pushed into deep water. Had it been my mother who’d named the house, she’d have christened it with a gentler, more poetic name—in fact, she did so, in two letters: “Green Gates” in one, “Meadowlark” in another. Like many homes of English design, the rooms were small and you warrened your way from one to the next. Kip, seven years old when we moved in, often found himself calling to his mother from “somewhere” to ask “where he was.” It was indeed a large house. Sudden wealth is an idea America has grown used to, even bored with. But in 1954 it was still called without embarrassment the American Dream, and here at the Millstone it came true for my parents, Roger and Myra. Since moving to Rochester in 1950, the young couple had lived in a tiny farmhouse and now found themselves moving into a thirty-room mansion. Back in the farmhouse they’d had only a few rooms to furnish, and so the first year at the Millstone saw rooms that were sparsely furnished or bare. But they had money now and Roger and Myra weren’t ashamed to spend it. In 1954, they began living their American Dream without a trace of today ’s cynicism or self-consciousness. This was a time long before America became aware of its consumerism, its debt, and its profligacy. Myra and her hardworking husband had done their time. They’d scraped by on a medical student’s salary, lived off the vegetables from the farm’s garden, burned Sears catalogs in its furnace against the winter, taken the bus on their big night out, and split the entrée when they got there. Now after a year of residency at the best and most famous medical institution in the world, Roger had been asked to join the staff at the Mayo Clinic full-time. They had arrived...

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