Saving Graces (34 page)

Ryan Montoya, who managed the entire trip—from making sure my luggage was with us to queuing the music for my entrances—was almost always unflappable. He must have been thrown off balance once, though, when, at a Sioux City senior center, a woman tapped his shoulder and said, “José? José?” “Why,” asked Ryan, “do you think my name is José?” Completely unintimidated she just repeated it, “José, do you teach Spanish lessons?” He came back to the hold room and complained to Karen, Hargrave, and me, so, sympathetically, we called him José for the rest of the week. It was Ryan who pointed out the road signs for an upcoming Dairy Queen on a long drive to Tucson. In forty miles. In thirty. In ten. Bob Rolin, the unbelievably agreeable Secret Service agent from South Carolina, allowed that we could stop if I wanted. So we did, and we bought Blizzards for the agents who had never been in a Dairy Queen, and we generally upset the entire place for the twenty minutes it took to feed all of us.

I talked to the families in Dairy Queen, and I would speak to young people wherever I went. The politically astute nine-year-old on the flight back to Washington who recognized me and talked politics the whole way. The Florida boy outside the fruit market wearing a Bush T-shirt. (Tell me why you support George Bush.
I like war
. Now that’s a conversation stopper.) The round-faced boy with a Mohawk haircut at the Dickinson County Fair on the Michigan Upper Peninsula showing me the goldfish he had won. I refrained from reminding him, as I would have reminded my own children, that all balloons pop and all goldfish die. In September I read one of my favorite children’s books,
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,
to Connie Chouinard’s second-grade class at Lincoln Center Elementary in St. Paul, and that afternoon, after being introduced by the student body president, Marcus Mason, I spoke to incredibly well-informed high school students at John Marshall High School in Rochester, Minnesota. Mostly they were worried about the rising cost of college, although I did get an interesting existential question, which I couldn’t have repeated immediately after she asked and I cannot repeat now, from a beautiful girl dressed entirely in Gothic gear. The daily schedule for that visit warned, “There is no air-conditioning in John Marshall High School.” They were warning me, from North Carolina, that there was no air-conditioning in a Minnesota school in mid-September? Hargrave and I had a good laugh.

In August and September, I visited people’s houses to hear the stories of their neighbors and friends and answer a few questions from the press. The campaign hoped that the event would get enough press coverage to justify the expense of putting the whole thing together. Long before in the primaries, I had abandoned attempts to manipulate press coverage, and that left me to what I enjoyed most, having conversations, with the homeowners, their neighbors, the participants, and yes, with the reporters. Whatever happened happened. Some of what happened was funny. At the Gonzalez home in Burbank, I sat next to a man who was in all the press photographs of me and bore an uncanny resemblance to Dick Cheney. It must have confused more than one newspaper reader.

In a hilly Little Rock neighborhood I sat in the home of George Word, who had been in the military but was having trouble getting the military to continue health care coverage for his wife, who was in a coma. I remember his neat home. I waited before the event in the bedroom shared by his two daughters—decorated sweetly, carefully, by a man with much too much on his plate. In Green Bay, I sat next to Donna for a midday house party she hosted. It was midday because the Packers game was at 4:15, and she was not going to miss it. Donna, her husband, her children and her house were all dressed and decorated for the game. The picture over the sofa was of Lambeau Field. When she opened her home to me, she told me the story of buying it. She and her husband and two boys had been living in a mobile home, but they worked two and three jobs each to save for a house. Finally they were able to buy this immaculate, well-loved house, and she told the story of when she told their sons they were moving to a house. A house, she said, with a sidewalk. A sidewalk. And they didn’t believe her. No, she told them, choking away the tears, we really do have a sidewalk. I fell in love with these people.

When I think about campaigning, I don’t think about the anxiety of speaking to strangers, of the hesitation in eating unfamiliar food, or of the fear of being trapped in some obligatory and excruciating event. I am certain that because I grew up in so many places, surrounded by the faces of so many ever-changing people, I long ago quit worrying about that and started enjoying the ride. And let me tell you what letting go of all that anxiety, hesitation, and fear gets you: you get to enjoy, completely enjoy, an experience like I had on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I had spent the morning in Lansing with the incredible Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, and I had left a health care discussion in Traverse City. Now on a bright September day we were flying across Lake Michigan, low enough to see the shadow of the plane on the water, to inspect the tiny forested islands near the coastlines. My guides were Bart Stupak, the congressman from the district and his wife, Laurie. It was a Route 2 visit: first one way on Route 2, then the other. First was the Dickinson County Fair, where during a bingo game, I was introduced to the unique accent of the Upper Peninsula. Bee-ee fou-our-de-en. I was intrigued. Karen was just delighted I didn’t win—she did not want a bingo prize to be the press story of our visit.

After an afternoon at the fair we went to Iron Mountain High School. It was Friday night, and on Friday nights on the Upper Peninsula, just like on Friday nights in Raleigh, North Carolina, your whole world is playing, or watching, high school football. The Mountaineers were playing Gwinn High School, also from the U.P. Gwinn was built as a model city for returning World War II veterans, and the team is burdened, or blessed, depending on your point of view, with the team name The Modeltowners. Fewer than five hundred students attended each school, and yet in the stands and rimming the field there were two thousand people, in black and gold for Gwinn or, confusingly, yellow and black for Iron Mountain. And there must have been more at home or at work listening to the game on the radio, because both teams broadcast the game on different radio stations.

After I posed with a group of four-year-old cheerleaders, dressed in perfect miniature replicas of the Mountaineer cheerleading uniforms, I sat down to watch some football. It wasn’t pretty. As the first half neared the end, the Mountaineers had scored at least three times, and I don’t recall a single Modeltowner first down. My press secretary Karen came down to get me out of the stands. “They’ll let you join them on the radio,” she said. As we climbed to the press booths high above the field I said, “That’s great.” And I thought,
And what do you want me to talk about?
I talked football—John playing high school and a little college ball, my Dad being a stand-out college player. The two Mountaineer announcers, who did terrific fast-paced color and play-by-play, asked a mild political question or two, and I gave a mild answer. I knew the people who were listening to this, and even if they liked politics, they were listening to hear football. So all I was really saying was who we were—Friday-night-football kind of people. And then I moved to the Gwinn booth. There was only one announcer, one exhausted fellow trying to find ways to convey any excitement over the airwaves when his team was getting so badly beaten. I sat through a play or two, as Gwinn failed to get a first down, listening to this overwhelmed but still game fellow try to do the play-by-play. It was painful. Had the regular play-by-play announcer abandoned him, gotten up in disgust at some point in this game and left him to carry the whole load? Whatever the problem, it was highlighted when Gwinn punted. “All right, there goes the punt,” he said. “It’s a high one. Number twenty-eight for the Mountaineers has picked it up in the end zone. He’s running it out. Now he’s down, and—oh, there’s a flag.” And then he stopped talking. The referees were conversing, but there was no sound going out over Gwinn radio. Nothing. It’s radio. Finally, I couldn’t stand it and I said, “Pretty much has to be a clip.” Karen was standing behind me, her lovely brown skin turning white, thinking,
What is she saying? Does she know what she’s talking about?
It was a tremendous relief to her when the voice came over the stadium loudspeaker. “Penalty on the Modeltowners. Clip.”

For me, it was a perfect night. Not for the Modeltowners, obviously, but it was crisp and clear, the setting was verdant and alive and, well, American. I used to sit in the YMCA in Raleigh and watch Wade, and then Cate, play basketball on Saturday mornings. Parents in sweatpants and glasses—no one having put in their contact lenses yet—sat in folding chairs with their hands around warm cups of coffee watching seven-year-olds dance down the court or shoot at the wrong basket, and no one would criticize. And if, by chance, one of the seven-year-olds scored, the coffee cups would be set between knees all the way down the row and the parents of both teams would clap. And I used to love to see it. This is what we are about, isn’t it? This is the America I missed as a child, the America I embraced as a parent. And I was embracing it that night in Iron Mountain.

None of this had anything to do with being a Republican or a Democrat. Maybe the best politicking doesn’t, and shouldn’t. It shouldn’t in Canton, North Carolina, or Asheville, where John and I toured after Hurricane Ivan devastated those mountain communities. It shouldn’t in Millvale, a working-class town in Pennsylvania where Ivan left some of his last markers, and where I visited in late September. The people in these places were cleaning up and helping each other out, no questions asked. I filled plates at a makeshift cafeteria in Millvale and then ate a little lunch with those who were taking a break from cleaning. The room was filled with people, with strollers and walkers. And young people, high school boys, I’d bet, wearing baggy skate-boarder pants covered in mud, were sweeping the floors, taking out the trash cans as they filled with paper plates, just doing what they could. And when their crew had finished eating, they put down the brooms and went back outside to work again, picking up their shovels at the door. I left Millvale, this devastated place, with a sense of real hope for us all, because people, even young people who were supposed to be too self-absorbed for such things, cared about their communities.

The day’s lessons weren’t over, either. That night when I got to Ohio, a group of Ananias, who had told my staff we might be related, was waiting for me at the Holiday Inn. The staff set up a little room with sodas and snacks, and I went down to meet these Ohio Ananias who might be related to my dad, a Pennsylvania Anania. Here’s what I discovered: it doesn’t matter if they are family or not—they are “family.” Pete Anania, his arms crossed as he stood against the wall, clearly the one who’d had to be convinced to come, and his wife, Betty; Vicki Anania with a collection of handsome children and grandchildren, Angela and Eric and Dominique and—how did he get in here?—Tyler; Tony Anania, more like my father than any of the others, always a smile and another story. And more cousins, pretty girls who looked like my own cousins. We spent an evening being family, and I am still on their e-mail list and suspect I always will be.

At first we traveled commercially, but after canceled flights and one incident when state troopers boarded to arrest a passenger, the campaign decided I should fly privately. The first forays into chartered flights were not happy. We had a tiny plane from Los Angeles to Reno in late August. There was no room for everyone’s luggage, except for the two pieces I carried with me—a garment bag and a duffle bag, both lime green so Ryan could find them easily—and there was not nearly enough room for the agents. Three agents sat at the rear of the plane on a bench seat on which I might have put Emma Claire and Jack. Hargrave took hear-no-evil-see-no-evil-speak-no-evil photographs of them wedged in there. As we landed, all the oxygen masks on the plane dropped down, which was alarming enough, and in addition they were nasty looking. We had to get back on that plane an hour later to go to Las Vegas, and when we boarded, the pilot was taping the oxygen mask compartment doors shut. Taping them shut! The plan was that we would fly again on this plane from Las Vegas to Washington. “I’m not doing it,” I told Ryan. No one would ask anyone else on this campaign to fly on a plane like this. “It’s not safe. I have a credit card, I can get my own commercial flight back.” The Secret Service started to get fidgety; they don’t like changes in plans. “There are no commercial flights to Washington,” Ryan said calmly. “Then I’ll fly to New York, I’ll stay with Cate if she’s there, or with my brother. I am not getting back on that plane.” We did fly commercially, to Baltimore, an hour from Washington, and Kathleen started pressing the campaign again for a safe plane.

Our next private plane looked like a crop duster. I am five feet two, and I could step directly from the tarmac into the plane, no stairs necessary, it was so low to the ground. Ryan, who had plane envy looking at every Gulfstream or Challenger at the private terminals we used, called it the “Belly Plane.” The food Kathleen had ordered for the eight of us—the only meal we would get between 7
A.M
. and 10
P.M
.—was delivered to a different plane, so we took off hungry. To make matters worse, the edges of Hurricane Ivan were causing terrific turbulence, and the little Belly Plane was getting tossed around. A Secret Service agent threw up—impossible to hide in a cabin about the size of a nine-person passenger van—and I, finding an old granola bar in the tiny galley, bit into it and broke a filling. Most of the disasters associated with the Belly Plane were not its fault, but Ryan vowed not to fly on it again.