THE OLD FOLKS CAMPAIGN
Walking into the Obama for Change campaign headquarters in St. Cloud Minnesota was like appearing in the chapter room of a Midwest fraternity. Like a displaced housemother. Old. Weathered. Worn. The boys all looked up. They in their tattered jeans, their backwards baseball hats, their layered tees, their hair over their eyebrows and down their necks, their slim, buttless bodies. The Obama for Change staff.
“I am your deputy field director, sent up from the Chicago headquarters.” I announced.
Sure I was. This crew needed a deputy field director like I needed a prom dress. Laid back, grunting greetings, back to their laptops they turned. So much for sociability. It would take all the energy I could muster just to appear as cool as they.
“Is John Sylvester here?” He was in charge. He was expecting me. He would settle me in. Not so.
“Yeah, he’s back there,” indicating with a nod of a backward baseball capped head.
“Back there” was a dark sectioned off miniscule of an office with one desk claimed by a permanent campaign director for a state-wide candidate and a table capable of holding two feet, connected to two legs that held a laptop into which an intense face peered. John Sylvester. The St. Cloud Minnesota Obama for Change campaign field director faced with the most conservative electorate the state contained.
That’s why I was there. I had wanted St. Paul or Minneapolis, two prime cities in this battleground state. “Too liberal for you.” They said in Chicago and in St. Paul. “We need you in St. Cloud.”
“Oh well, one saint is as good as another,” I thought, wondering who the hell was St. Cloud and what could he/she be the patron of?
I found out. Pro Lifers. The city was overrun with them.
I became the baby-killer. Didn’t matter that I was against killing Iraqi babies, against killing felons, against lynching, against genocide. This was a one-issue town and we, the boys and I, were to bring in the vote for Obama in spite of the fact that he held a complicated stand on the issue. I had five weeks.
“So what can I do to help you?” I asked. John looked around, perplexed. He had never had a deputy field director, nor did he know what they were capable of doing. I didn’t know what I was capable of doing.
“Why don’t you fill those bags over there with campaign literature? There are people going out this weekend knocking on doors.”
I am a team player and I filled the bags. I am not an eager team player so I disgruntledly filled the bags all the while plotting my return to Chicago. “I’m too good for this,” I reasoned.
“I’m too good for this,” I said to John when I had finished. No I really didn’t say that. I said, “If that’s all you have for me to do maybe I better go back to Chicago.”
“What do you want to do?” he asked.
“What are you doing for seniors?”
“Nothing.”
“How many do you have?”
“Seventeen thousand.” Lying fallow in the fields of Minnesota.
“Give them to me.”
So I became the grand pooba of the elderly of central Minnesota. And what a crew they are. They live well into their nineties. Their children unapologetically live with them or next door to them into their forties and beyond. They tell their stories ad infinitum over and over again, same stories, told the same way. War stories. Farm stories. Raising children stories. Angels in the wings stories. Depression stories. Times they were in Chicago stories. I listened to them as long as I could and then cajoled them into calling the 17,000 elders on our registration lists to find out where our Obama voters might be. Where the fence sitters might be swayed. My ultimate team of several dozen hung on the phones for a month, whittling out the known McCain voters until we had a list of “surebees” that we called on Nov. 4 reminding them to vote. The polls closed in Minnesota at eight. They were still on the phone at7:45 pm when I left St. Cloud on the first phase of my final trek home.
My seniors loved the challenge. They would come into the office for an hour and stay the afternoon. They would say they would be back on Friday and come in on Wednesday. They would take lists of voters home with them to call before their first coffees of the day.
My phone duties were of another sort. I was given lists of potential volunteers over 60 that I called to entice them into the office to do the actual voter calling. I went through five lists, each a little broader than the one before. They had mundane names – like ”Senior Calls” and “MK’s AM calling” and MK’s AM calls” and MK’s Senior Calls.” Then they got frantic when I went into some zippity do category like MK’s sassy jazz that I have forgotten, so silly it was. I went through that one too but by that time I had seniors coming out of the woodwork to help get our guy elected.
Because of the constant calling, my voice is gone. It may never come back without major throat therapy. At first I lost it about six each day. Then it began giving out earlier and earlier. By the end of my five week stint I was horse before noon. I lived on Fisherman’s Friend Cough Suppressant Lozenges by day and Tylenol PM by night. Most women need to smoke cigarettes and drink whisky to achieve a voice like mine. But unlike smoking, the St. Cloud campaign didn’t shorten my life. It gave me new heroes – ninety-year-old heroes. Like the woman who called “the boys” early the morning of Nov. 3. “I am dying of cancer. The last thing I want to do in life is vote for Barack Obama. I don’t get around much. Can you help me?” The boys shrugged and looked at me, champion of the old and dying.
“I’ll go,” I said. “I’ll take her to the county building so she can register absentee.” Minnesota’s version of early voting is by absentee voting application, filled out and traded for a ballot. I drove around to her senior housing, met her in the hall, escorted her into and out of my car, up the stairs of the county building and into the auditor’s office, where absentee balloting was being conducted. Her enfeebled appearance drew the attention of the entire staff, who placed themselves at our service to get this woman’s vote cast.
I was allowed into the makeshift voting booth and pencil in hand I formally asked her who she wanted as President. “Barack Obama.” I filled in the oval beside his and Biden’s name.
“Who for Senator? Al Franken?”
“Oh, no, no, no.” I am a Franken fan and it took every legitimate gene in my body to pass over that name.
“Congress?”
“Who’s that?”
“Tinklenberg,” I offered. Also on my list of good guys.
She said, “Oh all right,” and I knew she had reached the limits of her stamina. So we took the barely marked ballot and turned it in. She sighed and said she could die happy.
Obama did not carry scarlet red St. Cloud. But Minnesota turned lavender then blue. I hope she is happy for that. I am happy – I survived fraternity life.
THE DARK SIDE
At first I started watching the clock about dinner time. We worked the “Obama for Change” campaign in St. Cloud Minnesota from nine in the morning until nine at night. At first it was only about three or four hours I had to survive after my psyche started sinking. As the weeks went by, I began checking the time earlier and earlier in the day making the afternoons seem longer. It didn’t help that daylight savings time ended mid-campaign so that dusk and darkness came an hour earlier. Add that to the wait.
A political campaign is about contact. It starts out putting every registered voter in the target area – a district, a precinct, a geographical conglomerate – in your sights. In our campaign, encompassing a portion of central Minnesota, we had seventeen thousand registered senior citizens. Most of them ultra conservative, a vast majority of them very vocal advocates of the McCain/Palin ticket. They were my focus.
A formidable challenge to me, a lakefront liberal never tainted by a conservative thought in her adult life, they were mine to bring into my Obama fold. What was an exciting challenge at breakfast time became a numbers game at noon and by six, looking at the piles of pages of still unattended names, addresses and phone numbers, a debilitating exercise. By eight it seemed purposeless and I often spent that last hour making tidy the mess atop my desk the day had created.
Clicking off the hours, then the minutes innerved me, like stepping on rocks across a surging stream. Every night I somehow reached the other shore and would drive to my basement room in a grand house, on loan to me by a candidate for the Minnesota House. With no television, only the local NPR radio station and a spectrum full of right-wing radio commentators, I had no idea how the rest of the world was faring. All I knew was that I was tired and was often in my pj’s, under the covers by nine-thirty, asleep by ten.
But being in bed, asleep, by such an early hour of course springs you to life early in the morning, not so much rested but alert. I started out the day with burning eyes, a headache and nothing ahead of me but what had gone the day before. I missed my Chicago sunrises, my floppy down pillow, my heavy comforter, my deciding whether I would move out of bed or not. Eventually, I began counting the hours until the day ended as I stirred up my oatmeal and peeled my banana, my standard every morning, morning after morning.
Some breaks alleviated my clock watch. Halloween brought bags of candy to balance out the donuts and pizza I lived on during the day. Howard Dean dropped in for a visit. Al Franken was a steady. Seniors befriended me. The Obama paid staff began accepting me, old enough to be their grandmother, as cool enough to participate in their conversations. The hours passed. The days passed. And finally, the weeks passed and it was time to go home, job done, candidate elected. So I went into the night, swiftly and surely south toward Obama-land where thousands of disciplined well-wishers gathered in my beautiful backyard park. I cried all the way down I-94.
Now I am counting the hours until January 20.
COOL DUDES AND ME
My favorite piece of music of the late 60’s came out of the throat of Richard Harris who ended the song with, “Didn’t we almost make it this time?” A woeful lament about what might have been.
Although the lyrics are hopelessly romantic (as was I in the 60’s), they kept coming back to me as I worked side by side with a team of twenty-somethings trying to get Barack Obama elected in a flaming red battleground district in central Minnesota. “Making it” to me was not “bringing in the vote,” but getting the nod of approval from these same twenty-somethings.
They were the coolest dudes I had been around since leaving my teen-aged grandchildren the week before who had taught me a little about coolness – pants worn low on the hips, baseball caps worn back to front, sockless and coatless in thirty degree temperatures, bopping to music that was no more than rhythm, and the facial expressions that indicated “what?” “What are you trying to say?” “What does that mean?” “Are you in the same conversation we’re in?” “Where did that come from?”
In fact, “where did that come from?” was actually uttered when I pulled out my 1998 Gateway laptop, the thickness of Dostoyevsky’s War and Peace. I knew then I had to learn the ways of cool if I were to experience any social interaction at all during my stay.
Judging from these five weeks just spent in Minnesota, it ain’t easy being cool. When you are in the darker side of seventy, half-way to eighty, an untoward amount of energy is spent in the attempt. It doesn’t come naturally to curl up in a chair with your legs tucked under your armpits. Well, that’s what it looked like. It doesn’t come naturally to lean against a wall with one foot holding it up, flamingo style, for extended lengths of time. It doesn’t come naturally to eat granola bars for breakfast, pizza for lunch and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner, without a drop of coffee to wash it down. And when a soccer ball comes barreling at you from across the room it doesn’t come naturally to smash it back into the opposing wall. It doesn’t come naturally to whip through fourteen codes to pull up a computer program that completes all your paper work, organizes your life and writes to your mother.
And speaking of mothers, it isn’t cool to have one. I found a ladies’ mission store (not a cool shopping destination) around the corner from the Obama campaign office that sold handmade patchwork quilts. The color combinations were ebullient, the fabrics were cuddly soft, the prices were unconscionabley low. I bought three of them. And I suggested to one twenty-something that it would be a nice gift for his mother. The ensuing silence was accompanied by the above mentioned look. Pause. No, I guess it wouldn’t. “Well, what are you planning to get her for Christmas that would be better?” “Probably a scarf.” A scarf – now in my senior world, that is not cool.
One day the youngest of the twenty-somethings (he may have been nineteen) came into my back office and announced they were going to lunch. Thinking that I had been invited Igave myself a psychic high five. I had made it! Almost made it, as the song goes, because what the young man was looking for was not another companion at lunch, but someone to watch the front office while the gang went off to eat something better than peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
There went a nanosecond of joy following which I pondered what was so good about being cool anyway? Why should I want to be cool? All I really wanted was to be invited out to lunch.
SINNING WITH OBAMA
When the opening lines of an email read “of course even thinking about stealing makes you as guilty as if you had actually taken the poster of Obama…” gives one pause. That the thought, or reprimand comes from a Benedictine priest, 52 years a cleric, a campaign volunteer, a professor emeritus of St. John’s University, the author of “Newman’s Timeliness and Timelessness,” a specialist in physics, alchemy and the history of science and much at home discussing Euclid’s optics in the medieval curriculum to boot, puts one on one’s knees murmuring “mea culpa, mea culpa.”
“You jest, I trust,” I say to myself upon reading it remembering how I lusted after the life- size 4-color cutout of the candidate Obama, all six foot one and half inches of him, all navy blue suit and rep tie of him, American flag in his lapel. Flat Barack, we called him. He stood in our campaign office doorway, the handsomest of men, the kind you drool over if you are so prone. He was the first thing I saw as I began my twelve hour days. And the last as I crawled out the door.
He was the darling of the passers-by on the street. Couples would come in to be photographed standing by him, hugging him, kissing him. Lusting after him. In more creative and generous moods I planned to raffle him off, raising money to cover national campaign costs – more advertising, more fliers, more chartered airplanes, more bagels. Or to offer the opportunity to pose with him for dollars or time contributed to the campaign.
These ideas passed quickly because eventually every morning when I came in through the door, I smiled at him promising him that he soon would be mine, if I could just figure out how to spirit him out the door and into my car without the rest of the staff standing by taking notes. If I worked late -- but the paid staff was there long after our nine p.m. closing. If I arrived early and double parked in front of the campaign office -- but the street was filled with pedestrians in the morning hours. Rarely were there parking spaces. “It will be,” I whispered anyway.
But it wasn’t to be.
The guts of political campaigns are rallies. They make noise. They reward the volunteers with a look at big-time politicos. They serve free food, mostly bagels and taco chips, and drink, mostly apple juice and diet Pepsi. But for some I guess participating in a political rally entitles you to more.
We had a political rally about two weeks before the November election. Howard Dean was coming to town (that town being a tidbit of a community in the middle of Minnesota). No one else of import had come so Howard Dean was a great inspiration for a rally. After all, he had designed the scheme of the entire nationwide presidential campaign so it would encompass all the Democrats from New York to California in one passionate surge. He was worth a tableful of bagels and pop.
So all the people who liked us and Barack Obama gathered around listening to political speeches from the Dean down to the candidates for the Minnesota house and the daughter of Al Franken who we all thought was as adorable as Al Franken was not. They filled the room to overflowing and the milling around after the rally was spirited. It was exhausting – hard to fill a room, hard to feed a crowd, hard to get politicos in and out of the crowd without getting cream cheese on their suit jackets (or tee shirts, as in the case of Al Franken’s daughter). But we did it and were proud of the enthusiasm the rally had engendered. I looked over at Barack to toss him a nod and a “Well done, don’t you think?” (or were it another party, and another candidate, a wink and a “well done, doncha think?”)
But Flat Barack was gone. Some rally devotee decided that cheering and chomping were not enough to fill the day. The space by the door was vacant. All that remained were bagel crumbs, buttons and posters. Gone. Someone had accomplished what I had been plotting for weeks, perfecting the move, leaving not a clue. Gone. I was desperate, running out to the street, wailing. The street was empty and dark. I was alone while somewhere in central Minnesota someone was standing near Flat Barack, maybe hugging him, kissing him. The thought of it collapsed my spirit.
In my grief I confessed to the above 52 years a priest, professor emeritus and what have you hoping for some relief, some wisdom, some path to freedom from my desires and the emptiness of my life as it opened up to me now. And the above is what I get. Hell, if wanting is as sinful as having, the punishments being equal I presume, I’ll take the having any day.
celebrationsTHREE QUARTERS OF A CENTURY
ain’t nothing to be sneezed at
come celebrate my 75 years
Saturday, August 16, 2008
5 p.m. and beyond
5 p.m. to 7:
Lightning George solo steel drum concert
7 p.m. ‘til the food runs out:
beach grub and swill
Midnight:
roof-top champagne swim
The beach
is in sight
The pool
is open
The lake
is beyond
The bar
is stocked
The music
is cool
The kitchen
is hot
The balcony
is in heaven
I am
75
come enjoy
Mary Kaye
Absolutely no presents – your presence is the gift
