Crossroads (Eric Clapton Album)

I can play a little, and it sure cheers me up when I've got the blues, but I think Eric Clapton is still safe. 3 My mother's people were named Pillsbury, and came originally (or so she said) from the same family that produced the Pillsburys who now make cake mixes and flour. The difference between the two branches of the family, Mom said, was that the flour-Pillsburys moved west to make their fortune, while our people stayed shirttail but honest on the coast of Maine. My grandmother, Nellie Pillsbury (nee Fogg), was one of the first women ever to graduate from Gorham Normal School-the class of 'oz, I think. She died at age eighty-five, blind and bedridden, but still able to decline Latin verbs and name all of the Presidents up to Truman. My maternal grandfather was a carpenter and, for a brief time, Winslow Homer's handyman. My father's people came from Peru, Indiana, and much further back, from Ireland. The Pillsburys, of good Anglo-Saxon stock, were levelheaded and practical. My father apparently came from a long line of eccentrics; his sister, my Aunt Betty, had mental fugues (my mother believed her to be a manic-depressive, but then, Mom never would have run for president of the Aunt Betty Fan Club), my paternal grandmother enjoyed frying half a loaf of bread in bacon fat for breakfast, and my paternal grandfather, who stood six feet six and weighed a cool three hundred and fifty pounds, dropped dead at the age of thirty-two while running to catch a train. Or so the story goes ...»