Blogologue = Blog + Travelogue

If we are to survive, we must have ideas, vision,      and courage. These things are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself.                       –Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a Columbus, Ohio native

 

 

 

Nov 2 Election Week: 

 

When I planned the trip to Ohio two months ago, I didn’t know that Barack would be in Columbus the Sunday before the election.  The purpose of my trip when I booked my flight was to visit with my Uncle Bob and Aunt Giny, both in their late 80’s, see my brothers Dave and George and my good friends Mike and Frank, and do a little politicking (I had done some in Phoenix but many volunteers were steered towards the swing states New Mexico and Colorado).  No one knew at that time how big a swan dive the economy would take leading up to the election and that Barack Obama, not John McCain, would benefit in the polls from the economic fallout. 

 

However, two days before my departure, Mike called with the news: Barack would appear that Sunday at the Ohio State Capitol at the same time as a matinee of a Huck Finn musical.  Mike had already purchased the tickets to the musical, knowing how much I loved Twain.  What to do?

 

Chuck the musical and go to the State Capitol we agreed without hesitation.

 

Indian Summer, once known as “St. Martin’s Summer” in England as the unofficial end of the last days of summer, had arrived in Columbus.  Azure blue skies provided the backdrop for the muted colors of oaks and maples, less vivid this year I was told because of a dry spell and the lack of a good hard frost but still worthy of a Currier and Ives painting, certainly not the George Bellows painting I was expecting.

 

 

Indian Summer

 

 

My brother Dave and I met Mike downtown around 8AM.  The line had already begun to form for a 1PM scheduled appearance from Barack and his family.  We were two blocks from the start of the line that soon would snake around the downtown streets.  Obama events had been enormous wherever he appeared.   This one would prove not to be an exception.

 

 

Mike and Dave Queue Up

 Meanwhile, coffee, I needed coffee.   Dave had made a pot before we left his apartment, but the grinder of the combination grinder/brewer didn’t grind.  Instead of a cuppa Joe we had a cuppa bean bath.  Worse yet, we stood in front of a Starbucks apparently observing Sunday Blue Laws and yet I saw a stream of fellow coffee drinkers who had copped the drug.

 

I asked one coffee drinker directions to the holy font. Dave and I then walked several blocks to wait in another line at a Starbucks that recognized a captive audience when it saw one.  Twenty minutes later with coffee in hand, we now had a little less than three hours to wait before passing through metal detectors to the lawns of the State Capitol building.  The crowd was jubilant, expectant.  We wanted our country back, our good name restored.  We wanted…change, and judging from the size of the crowds he was drawing, Barack was our man.  A legion of youthful volunteers with British accents, male and female, persisted in trying to sign us up to volunteer for the remaining days of the campaign.  Would I have done the same for Tony Blair’s successor?  Doubtful.  What compelling reason did twenty year-olds from a foreign land have to urge us to do our civic duty as Americans, namely get off our asses and vote? 

I asked if the stronger pound made the job a holiday. 

One female Brit groaned and complained instead about their struggling currency (still, the US dollar at that time had two-thirds the value of the pound).  The only explanation I could come up with was that Barack had become a planetary symbol for something other than the old guard.  He had tapped into a longing and yearning so many people had for a saner world and a healthier planet and more creative and inventive peoples and a more equal sharing of the wealth, a phrase Obama had used in his last debate with McCain (the Republicans seized on what they perceived as Obama’s gaff but discovered instead that it resonated with a global village of Socialists).  At least that’s what I read into the behaviors of the crowd, although I have been told many times I’m especially good at making this shit up.   

 

11 AM.

 

The line began to move and we made good progress towards the scanners.  Mike, Dave, and I reached the machines, handed over our cameras, including Mike’s lens the size of Galileo’s first telescope.  Vergers moved us towards the front of the podium where we were expertly layered like a velvety wedding cake.  Now, the real waiting began.  We were soon surrounded by the young and old, black and white, short and tall (I felt guilty being a tall guy standing in front shorter people—I eventually let a few move around me when The Man took the stage).  Children sat on parent’s shoulders for this momentous occasion, possibly a first glimpse of the first African-American President to-be. 

 

 

Awaiting the Obamas

Meaning that those of us old enough to remember couldn’t help but worry about the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.  The west side of the Ohio State Capitol building is penned in by the US Bank building and other tall office skyscrapers.  I looked  through my telephoto at the rooftops but the only swat teams I saw were visibly posted on the top of the Capitol Building with high-powered binoculars and, Mike claimed, a book of America’s Most Wanted photos (this I never saw, but I didn’t doubt him).   How did the police sweep every floor of every surrounding building and lock them down?  Or did they? 

 

 

False Sense of Security

 1 PM

 The tension mounted.  What does tension do otherwise?  Planes and helicopters buzzed the crowd.  Rumors swirled that Barack was going to parachute into the crowd, a bit risky I felt for someone so close to the Top Job.  Looking over the heads of the folk around me, I could see their extent but not their limit.  Security had set up fences on the perimeter we later learned to hold back the overflow crowd.  Time simply didn’t permit to scan the number of people who had shown up to bear witness.  The pipe simply couldn’t handle the water flow.

 

 

A New Generation of Voters

 

The crowd passed around a plastic beach ball, forgetting they were at a political rally and not the bleachers of Fenway Park, until an Ohio Trooper grabbed the ball and disappeared inside the Capitol building, Perhaps he gave it to John Glenn, another of America’s firsts, who was announced to be inside the Capitol Building but never made an appearance.  I thought this a bit odd unless he’s taken a few too many G’s over the years and couldn’t walk the distance.

 

 

Obama Ball

 

1:30 PM

Local dignitaries gave the introductions.  Mayor Coleman of Columbus, Governor Strickland, the State Attorney General.  Their message was the same: if you haven’t already voted, get your ass cross the street and vote IMMEDIATELY even if you have to wait until Five A.M.  An African-American minister gave the benediction, speaking more about the power of the vote rather than the Rod of God.

 

 

Power of the Ballot Box

And then, out walked Michelle Obama across a transom to the main platform, resplendent in autumn pastel colors.  The cheers erupted while Michelle acknowledged what could be a make-or-break state for her husband.  She spoke eloquently of Barack and the long row he has hoed.  Hell, there’s no reason why she couldn’t be president, I thought.  I couldn’t help but compare her to that woman from Alaska, old what’s-her-name, Ms. Tits-for-Brains.  Michelle was wearing blue corduroy pants, a white blouse, and yellow sweater, a perfectly casual combination for the autumnal blue sky and amber leaves.  J Crew, I wondered?  The crowd loved her, I loved her.  She’s not some drug-addled Republican in a cloth coat.  She’s young, articulate, attractive, hip, hell, SHE’S A MOM!  Flash back to Camelot and the Kennedy court, this time with a different patina.  The big difference, however, is that the Obama’s have earned their place in history, something the Kennedys bought instead.  But that was then and this is, well, a scene I never would have fathomed in my lifetime.  How schizo is this country to swing from a Texan yahoo who doesn’t know the difference between a noun and a verb to an Ivy League couple with no pedigree other than their hard work and commitment to a better world? 

 

Michelle

 

Go figure, I can’t.

 

Finally, Barack took the stage with their daughters Malia and Sasha.  I only saw a flash of their daughters’ smiling faces and waving hands before their mother whisked them away to safety.  In a random crowd of thousands and thousands of people, guarantees don’t exist about personal safety.

 

Barack delivered what had become his standard stump speech that most of the crowd had committed to memory and heard in their dreams: tax cuts for the middle class, a commitment to alternative energy sources, creation of new jobs in new high-tech industries, a renaissance of education where parents turn off the TV’s and turn on their children’s imagination, an end to the Iraq incursion.  He sported a blue blazer, a white dress shirt open at the neck, an American flag lapel pin.  His grandmother would die that evening.  The thought of her must have preyed on him, but he soldiered on as he would through the following Tuesday.  He cracked a joke or two about John McCain, but otherwise Barack took the high road as he generally did through a campaign fueled by aspiration, not desperation.

 

 

Barack

2:30 PM.

The Finale 

 

We encountered only one a-hole the entire time, a man who attempted to push his way through to the front until he was shamed by the crowd into a belligerent retreat.  Mike thought the guy’s face may have been in the Swat Team’s picture book.  The crowd slowly dispersed, continuing to soak up the day’s moment.  The late autumn sun had begun to throw angular shadows across the street.  Vendors had marked down the prices of their Obama-Wear.  T-Shirts were now $10, buttons two for $5.  The variety and creativity surpassed anything I had ever witnessed in campaigns past, a harbinger of a new generation of design-conscious youthful voters.  The grounds were relatively clean as the crowd wandered about.  Mike and I along with another spectator began gathering plastic water bottles and candy wrappers until Dave persuaded us to leave the job to a Union employee.  Dave’s dog Shade was back at his apartment and needed to empty his bladder and stretch his legs.  We needed to rest ours after standing more than six hours on concrete.  But no one complained.

 

Monday, Nov 3^rd

 

Barack’s grandmother died the night before and yet he continued to campaign in North Carolina. 

 

Noon:

 

Mike received from a political website the name of a disabled grandmother and her granddaughter who needed a ride to the Board of Elections.  They lived in Franklinton, due west of downtown Columbus, a neighborhood sometimes referred to as “The Bottoms” because it lies below the level of the Scioto and Olentangy Rivers (accounting for the unwillingness of banks to loan money to a buyer in a floodplain).  Mike called Margaret and arranged to pick them up early that afternoon.

 

 

Franklinton Neighborhood

 The neighborhood was a case of benign neglect.  Every other house had a trim yard.  The house next door to Margaret’s had a yard full of weeds.  Margaret and Mary lived in a two-story frame house showing some signs of care but had no accommodation for a wheelchair.  Margaret, the grandmother, was seventy, and was confined to her chair because of recent heart surgery and a bad case of emphysema.  Her grey hair was pulled back and tied in a bun.  She wore a blue housecoat, the kind my mother fancied in later years, loose with deep pockets.  Mary, her granddaughter, was short and plump not from poor diet so much as an early pregnancy.  Her sweatpants and shirt could have stretched and conformed to any shape and size.

 

Mike had been asked to drive Margaret to the polls in his van as it had already been retrofitted for his daughter Irene’s wheelchair.  The van’s navigation system took us to their front door.  Mike knocked while I marveled that despite the dilapidated state of the street, it had a rough charm you don’t find in suburbia.  Columbus is the land of two-story frame duplex homes.  I had lived in several while attending Ohio State.  The typical features are high ceilings, pocket doors, and a complete lack of insulation.  The summers were spent on the front porch, winters under the covers in long johns.  The fall ritual involved cutting and taping thick mil plastic around the inside window frames to cut down the drafts.

 

Mike is a pro working the van ramp and the belts.  Margaret wedged her wheelchair between two back seats and Mike tied her down.  Mary slipped into a seat next to her grandmother.  As we headed east on Broad Street to the Franklin County Board of Elections downtown, grandmother and granddaughter began to converse as if we were the invisible cab drivers.  They were polite, but unworried about our overhearing their conversation.  The topic of conversation was how many children Mary should have.  Margaret wanted Mary to have more, Mary wanted to wait and see how she handled the one in the oven.  Conversation snapped back to us when I interrupted with a question about their voting habits.  Margaret trumpeted that she hadn’t voted in fifteen-twenty years but she was fed up and wanted change.  Mary had never voted; her first would be for an African-American.

 

 

Mike at the Helm

Feeling guilty about typecasting based on the twang of their voices, especially Margaret’s, I asked if they were originally from Columbus.  No, they came from an unnamed hollow in West Virginia, a place not on the map and intentionally difficult to find.  Margaret had to move to Columbus because of her heart problems.  She wanted to return to the hollow, but family wouldn’t let her.  She needed to be close to a hospital.  Grandmother and granddaughter lapsed back into their private/public conversation about the optimal family size.  Mike continued our drive down Broad Street in fine crisp weather that continued to hold, the Land of Oz in our windshield, the crumbling Franklinton in the rear view mirror.

  

The Franklin County Board of Elections, dedicated in January 1906, is one of the magnificent old stone buildings lining East Broad Street, constructed when material and labor were cheaper and public buildings were considered monuments to the ages.  The deal was this: the BOE was not an “official” polling location, meaning that voters had to wait in line, have their absentee ballots printed inside, take the ballots outside, record their vote, and deposit the ballot in what looked like a drive-by book drop.  The line going into the BOE was long, but manageable.  The weather continued to sparkle.  The variously complexioned and attired crowd waited patiently, eagerly.

 

Mike unhitched Margaret at the entrance to the BOE and parked the van.  We asked a security guard about special dispensation for the handicapped but none was offered.  Margaret and Mary had to wait in line just like everyone else.  So the wait began.

 

 

Mary and Margaret Waiting to Vote

Fortunately, Mike and I are easily entertained and distractions abounded.  First of all, a sociologist would have had a field day with the makeup of the crowd.  Pick a descriptive adjective and you would have probably seen it in play. 

 

 

 

I politely asked permission of subjects before I took their pictures.  Only one elderly man declined.  Most were surprised that someone would want to take their picture.

 

 

Infinite Variety

The entrance was a stone’s throw from Broad Street where we first heard then saw a small group of twenty-somethings  in green t-shirts chanting slogans.  Supporters of the Democratic Congressional candidate for the 15^th District, Mary Jo Kilroy’s, her squad of supporters apparently knew about a staged media event for Kilroy’s  Republican opponent, Steve Stivers, and were awaiting his arrival (Stivers we later learned had alerted a local TV. news station that he was going to place his ballot in the mailbox). 

 

 

Kilroy Commandos

Suddenly, a van of Stivers’ supporters pulled up to the curb and piled out, outnumbering Kilroy’s supporters while carrying larger signs.  The competition was friendly as Stivers waved to the crowd from the other side of Broad Street, and then crossed the intersection followed by a mannequin of a wife as he was awaited by the typical blonde news reporter juxtaposed in a satiny dress.   (News alert: Republican Congressional candidate Steve Stivers places vote for self in mailbox…details at 10PM…) Basking in his fifteen minutes of fame and glory after casting his ballot, Stivers lingered. Mike finally notified the reporter that Stivers’ proximity to the BOE entrance constituted electioneering and suggested Stivers should back up the regulation distance.  The reporter whispered in Stivers’ ear, he smiled, and strutted towards Broad Street, a few inches beyond the legal perimeter undoubtedly known to him.

 

 

Stivers on Parade

Margaret and Mary finally exited the building.  Mary has had a snafu with a recent change of address and wasn’t allowed a ballot even though she and her grandmother submitted their change of address on the same day.  I suggested returning to Mary’s original polling place to rectify the situation but she appeared to have lost interest in voting.  Margaret, however, marked her vote and piloted her wheelchair to the mail box.  She slipped it through the slot and smiled.  Fait accompli.

 

 

Margaret's First Vote in Twenty Years

 

As we drove Margaret and Mary back to Franklinton, I asked about life in the hollow and the presence of moonshine.  Margaret cackled and told us she once accidentally drank from a mug some of the toxic liquor.  “It felt like fire going down and I haven’t touched the stuff since,” she boasted.  Mary added she was more a fan of Jagermeister, a sickly-sweet liquor made from cane and beet sugar, popular among the college crowd.  Somehow, I figured Mary felt more comfortable in Franklinton than back in the hollow.

 

 

Home is Franklinton

 

 

Mike and I had delivered one vote for Obama in two hours, or four man-hours I calculated.  I extrapolated the handicap vote and figured we and the like-minded with handicap vans may have made the difference and had put Barack over the top.  Mike pulled up next to the house, unhitched Margaret, and helped her back down the ramp.  We almost lost control of her chair in the gravel parking spot, but we caught and steadied her cart as she began to tip over.  Properly righted, Margaret drove up the grassy bank next to the house as a pack of dogs barreled out the front door.  Margaret cursed someone unknown to us for letting them out.  They howled and barked as they stampeded our way, but she shouted them into submission, turned her head and waved to us, motoring into the gloom of the house, dogs in strict obedience.  Most likely, Margaret and Mary will never vote again.

 

 

Margaret

 Mid-Afternoon:

 

Mike looked up volunteer offices in Columbus and located one in Grandview, a Chimney Sweep’s building on the near west side.  Once a university neighborhood where I watched the World Series in a cinderblock corner bar with chums during the halcyon days of English grad school, Grandview had morphed into an upscale retreat for young professionals.

 

We walked in and I immediately worried.  Where was the buzz, the phone banks, the stream of volunteers coming and going?  The times had changed and so had the rules.  Early voting had changed the campaign office dynamics.  Most registered democrats had already cast their ballots.  The game plan now involved knocking on doors, leaving door hangers, and dragging the procrastinators to the polls.  A middle-aged Democratic Party member, short, squat, with graying hair, turned to us as a young self-proclaimed gypsy woman (we never did learn her name) sporting a Liza Minnelli haircut, blue jeans, and a navy blue sweater vest and white blouse noticed us over her computer screen.  They made for an odd couple, the old and the young.  They look puzzled at first until we explained that two geezers had shown up to volunteer.  Mike and I first met in 1976 during the Democratic primary, working for Mo Udall (my first venture into politics was the disastrous McGovern campaign of ’72).  We were old hands at the ground game.  Tell us what to do, where to go, and we’ll get the job done, we explained.

 

 

Mo Udall

Gypsy Woman was impressed with our bravado.  She gave us a key fob providing entrée to a large apartment complex nearby.  The key belonged to a resident who needed the key back by five PM.  It was already two o’clock.  We were on the move.

 

The Meridian Apartments had the labyrinthine structure of a Great Society high-density dwelling.  Mike and I had walking lists of registered voters, but the apartment grid did not readily correspond to the logic of our voter lists.  Odd and even numbered apartments resided in separate buildings.  Beginning and ending apartment numbers appeared to be laid out differently depending upon the floor.  The hallways were dim, hot, airless, and had the feel of student housing.  Occasionally we’d encounter a resident in pajamas walking down the hall with muffled footsteps, more interested in her cell phone than the odd appearance of two greybeards roaming the floor mid-afternoon.  Through a combination of hurried efficiency and body memories, Mike and I climbed stairs, checked off names, and completed our lists with a few minutes to spare.  We never saw a security guard or resident manager.  When you live anonymously, so goes your security, I guess.

 

 

Monday Evening, The Short North Tavern

 

I sat on their couch at day’s end watching Hardball and Countdown with Mike and his wife, Lana.  Everyone was tired, Mike and Lana’s fatigue compounded by an erratic and unreliable schedule of day and night nurses who help care for their daughter Irene.  Mike finally got up and paced the floor.  He wanted to meet his monthly group of fellow politicos to prognosticate the next day’s election at the Short North Tavern.  Once a museum to Columbus’ past, the long stretch of abandoned department stores, go-go clubs, and lightning bars between the university and downtown, now dubbed generically “The Short North,” had gone gentry   Empty art galleries, overpriced eateries, and a lack of parking now replaced the infamous strip where as college students we used to venture when looking for cheap beer and cheaper thrills.  The Short North Tavern had long ago adopted the name of (or had it lent its name to?) the fledgling neighborhood and had since moved to a new location, much to the disgruntlement of more than one regular.

 

Except for a few close friends and relatives, I am now a stranger to Columbus.  I left town in the early eighties headed for East Chicago (or West Gary depending upon how you spin it) and the ghosts continue to pile up every time I return.  Mike, however, has a huge following of friends collected over a lifetime of living in the same city.  I envy him for this even though I’m not sure I could have stayed put that long. 

 

 

Mike Easily Makes Friends

However, irony of ironies, the first person I saw and greeted was Greg Haas, a state-wide and national political consultant and campaign manager whom I first met when he was a high school student and I was a college dropout, working on the McGovern campaign in my home town of Mount Vernon.  Greg would pocket his lunch money every day and come in after to school to work the phone bank.  He’d deposit his coins in a McGovern container that I still have labeled “Small Change for Big Change” (most probably containing some of Greg’s lunch money). Greg had the political itch at a young age and continues to scratch it.  He stood tall and lanky in a sports jacket with a somewhat weary look, mileage from all the late-night campaigns, I’m guessing.  Still, he had the grip of a wrestler and gave me a big bear hug.  He told me how I was looking more and more like my mother with the passing years (another acquaintance I hadn’t seen in several years told me a few days later when we met that I resembled my father more and more as the years go by.)

 

Greg and I discussed the prospects of the next day’s presidential election.  Everyone was guardedly optimistic.  After all, we were dealing with the Republican Dirty Tricksters.  We moved on to the topic of great presidents.  Barack will be one, no doubt, once elected.  I rattled off the obvious ones: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, bypassing JFK.  The omission was palpable to Greg and a cohort.  I took serious flak for suggesting Kennedy hadn’t held office long enough to prove himself and that from what we had seen, he wasn’t going to pass any significant civil rights legislation.  And what about the Cuba thing?

 

Che and Pal Fidel

 

That was enough to give me outcast status.  I was quickly shunned until I was accosted by a man known amongst the Short Northers as “The Tuba Man” because of his penchant for playing his tuba on the street corner while wearing his Tam o’Shanter.  Mike was now sitting with friends at a high-top bar table, looking at me apologetically while the Tuba Man lectured me on the need to return to the Silver and Gold standard and to outlaw paper money and the Federal Reserve.  Realizing that I wasn’t necessarily a bimetallist, the Tuba Man proceeded to lecture me on the perils of asymmetrical warfare.  Some of what he said made sense.  The Tuba Man obviously was a passionate student of American politics.  However, I had come to drink beer and converse with the hopeful and instead found myself locked in by the Tuba Man’s political agenda.  Suddenly, I noticed a waitress delivering a tray of fries to the buffet counter.  “Fries!” I exclaimed to the Tuba Man.  “An Irishman never turns down a potato!” he shouted as he ran off to queue up.  I sidled over to Mike’s table and watched the Irishman return to the bar where he threaded fries into his mouth.  The next time I looked in his direction he had disappeared.

 

Saved By the Potato

 

I listened in on the more rational conversation at Mike’s table.  I avoided talk of JFK and the sanctity of the Democratic Party and thought about the morrow.  Would Obama really live up the pollsters’ expectations and win this thing?  Could it be? 

 

Election Day, Nov 4^th

 

The buildup to this was worse than that leading up to Princess Di’s wedding.  The main difference was, someone would be left at the altar.

 

Mike and I returned to the Chimney Sweep’s, asking for more work. We weren’t sure what effect our volunteering would have on the election’s outcome, if any, but the weather was so fine and the memories of campaigns past so deep that we didn’t care.  Mike and I had cemented our friendship during the Democratic primary in 1976, travelling from Columbus to Pittsburgh to Detroit working for Mo Udall.                                          

 

Mo was a long shot in a race including the unlikely mix of Scoop Jackson, Jimmy Carter, Franck Church, Sargent Shriver, George Wallace, and Lloyd Bentsen, among others, but we liked Mo’s populist stance, his sense of humor, and what later became our moniker for those with a taste for power who attempted to climb the backs of others in the campaign hierarchy, his “horseface.” 

 

This time the Gypsy woman greeted us with delight as we returned for more work.  A young married couple entered at the same time.  They had been sent to the Meridian Apartments only to be chased out by Management.  Mike and I flaunted our prowess.  WE had no problem getting the job done.  We volunteered to finish the task but Gypsy Woman acknowledged that we technically did not have the right to be on private property without permission.   Instead, the neighborhood to which we were assigned bordered the university.  Volunteers were to canvass targeted neighborhoods three times during the day to drag bodies to the polls.  Mike and I made the first pass of our assigned precinct.  Few people were home.  We left Obama-Biden hangers on their doors reminding the occupants that today was Election Day although even Rip Van Winkle would have known that today was “E” day.  Why this day isn’t a weekend day or a national holiday like it is in the rest of the civilized world I fume.  The idle rich needn’t worry, but what’s left of the working class is subjected to a poll tax.  Those who can’t afford to take time off from work don’t vote, simple as that.

 

Mike and I made short work of the precinct without incident, returning to the lair of the Gypsy Woman.  She pointed us to food in the back room where the Chimney Sweep had temporarily moved to run his business.  

 

 

Gypsy Woman

 

 

 

Another sign of the passing of the generational baton: we were offered pasta salads, barbequed tofu, multi-grain breads, and exotic sounding cheeses.  And bottled water and juices.  Gone were the cold pizza, hoagies, and cheap beer that I remember from campaign days of yore.  Mike and I nibbled on the offerings in a building largely contained by silence.  A few individuals in the back room stared at computer monitors.  I’m unsure if they were fellow chimney sweeps or volunteers.  Occasionally, a young man grunted something out about an exit poll.  Missing was the Election Day fervor and buzz of the ground game.  The computers now called the shots.

 

Mike and I wandered back to the front office after Mike’s daughter Mara called him about an “A” she had just received on a paper.  Mara is attending Ohio University where we will visit in a couple of days to celebrate her twentieth birthday, either as happy Democrats or desperate citizens.  Gypsy Woman and her sidekick had a new game plan for us.  Would we consider going to a different neighborhood where help was desperately needed, they asked somewhat sheepishly?  The neighborhood turned out to be off Cleveland Avenue, as I recalled a predominantly black neighborhood on the near north side of Columbus.  I recalled driving down the same avenue with my mother when I was younger, in the late sixties and early seventies, accompanying her to a ceramic supply company where she would buy pottery clay and supplies for her kiln (my mother, a highly accomplished but unrecognized artist, returned to the plastic arts in her later years).   

 

 

Loitering Not Permitted on Cleveland Avenue

 

 

What could have been more appropriate and prophetic than to canvass a largely African-American precinct, I thought (the appellation having changed from “black” to “African-American” over the intervening years)?  The Gypsy Woman asked if we would mind giving Zoe, another volunteer, a ride to the Community Center on Cleveland Avenue.  Zoe was a somewhat doe-eyed and laconic young woman in her twenties who taught yoga at three different locations (yoga-teaching apparently being an itinerant profession).  On our drive to the community center I tried interesting her in several stories of my past exploits including a séance in a Native American sweat lodge belonging to a former student of mine, a Sioux Indian, but Zoe didn’t take the bait.  More likely, she was checking the car doors for inside handles.

 

 

Zoe Turns the Other Cheek

 The trip up Cleveland Avenue ended in polite silence.  Along the way, maybe ten miles or so, I had seen what I would have sworn was an Obama field office on every block.  I had mistakenly identified so many storefronts for our destination along the way that I finally shut up and quit pointing while Mike read the GPS in his Prius (one up for us: Zoe had never ridden in a Prius before).   The Linden Park Community Center, a low-slung cement block building resembling a large underground bunker, had the buzz and excitement I had looked for the past couple of days.  At the bottom of the entryway to the basement, a smiling woman spilling over a metal folding chair asked us our purpose, signed us in, and pointed to a room across the hall where we’d received our assignments.  Volunteers were milling about, asking what they could do in the waning hours of Election Day.  A field worker paired Zoe up with another woman looking for a companion.  Mike and I would once take to the streets for the last time this election.

 

Meet and Greet at Obama HQ

The Linden Park neighborhood lies north of Hudson and just west of Cleveland Avenues.  Festooned with Obama-Biden signs, most homes had aluminum siding and well-manicured yards.  My mother grew up in Columbus and used to tell me Morse Road once was the beginning of the countryside when her family took Sunday afternoon drives.  Linden Park is now a little more than six miles south of Morse Road, originally a suburb built for soldiers returning from WW II., now swallowed by the push and sprawl of the metropolis.   Mike and I crisscrossed our streets, meeting childrenon the front steps waiting for their parents to come home from work, or retirees who indicated they had voted as had all their neighbors.  More than one person looked me steadily in the eye, convincing me that Barack “was gonna do it.”  Our job by this time was perfunctory.  Most homes on our list had been checked off by the previous canvasser as “Already Voted.”

 

 

We knocked on the remaining doors, a few looking like they hadn’t been visited for days based on the  

number of grocery store circulars and pizza delivery ads scattered around the door, and returned to the  

Community Center. 

Some Simply Weren't At Home

Mike and I felt buoyant.  The disenfranchised had signed up, young and old, black and white were on board this time, eight years of the neo-Gilded Age were drawing to a close.  We hoped.

 

Zoe and her partner hadn’t returned yet.  I wandered down Cleveland Avenue a few blocks with my camera while Mike dutifully waited for Zoe in the parking lot.  Standing cattycorner from the Community Center, I took pictures of the late afternoon sun at play on the surrounding buildings.  A young woman came out of nowhere and asked what I was photographing and would I mind taking her picture?  She hurried off and returned with a large Obama for President sticker.  Shooting portraits this time of day is tricky, at least for me.  You don’t want your subject squinting in the sun, nor do you want her shrouded in shadows.  I asked her for a quarter turn, snapped a couple of shots, and started to move on.  Would I like to come inside and take more pictures of even more Obama material, she asked?

 

 

Sefonia

Inside where?  I didn’t realize I was standing next to a beauty parlor called “Beauty All Over.”  Always up for an adventure, I followed my new friend, Sefonia I believe her name turned out to be, possibly Delores, inside after she pressed several security buttons to gain access.  What looked like an abandoned building on the outside was all glow and glitter on the inside.  Chrome, mirrored glass, bright green sequined chairs threw light everywhere.  Sure enough, the first thing I saw on the opposite wall was a framed copy of Obama on the cover of Time Magazine.  Sefonia led me into the main part of the salon where I was greeted by several stylists all wanting to pose for the camera in their Obama t-shirts.  Two women ran off and returned immediately in ObamaWear.  Feeling a little out of my league, I pretended like I knew what I was doing and snapped away.  

 

Beauty All Over

A serious looking young man wearing a bandana approached me and asked what I was going to do with the pictures. “Not post them on any web site,” I stammered.  He grinned and asked if he could get copies for himself.  Never had I witnessed such excitement over a presidential campaign.  But then, I had never been inside an African-American beauty salon on the verge of electing an African-American to the most important job in the country, either.  Sefonia posed for one last photo, several people gave me their email addresses, and I was thanked profusely as the electronic buzzers popped and I returned to the sidewalk.

 

 

History in the Making

  

Across the street, Zoe had returned and we climbed back into Mike’s Prius.  Zoe was more talkative on the return trip to Grandview.  She probably decided while canvassing her neighborhood that Mike and I were eccentric but harmless.  More likely, she didn’t give us a thought at all. 

 

The witching hour approached.  Back in Grandview, the Gypsy Woman thanked Mike and me for our expertise, calling us her “angels” for coming out of nowhere to do the hard work.  She invited us to a meet-up that evening with Grandview Progressives to drink beer and watch the returns.  We bid adieu to the Gypsy Woman and Zoe and headed back to Mike’s for the curtain to rise.

 

Election Night:

 

Once again, I was comfortably splayed on Mike’s couch, this time controlling the channels, something I rarely get to do at home, flipping between MSNBC and CNN and the local Columbus channels.  McCain won West Virginia, Obama New Hampshire, and then the returns appeared to freeze.  Mike began to pace the floor again.  He wanted to head downtown to the Renaissance Hotel where the Democrats were meeting.  I was feeling lazy and more than willing to drink Mike’s beer and watch the returns with Lana.  We both needled Mike about his restlessness.  He gave me a dirty look that lifted me off the couch and directed me to the door.  But first, we headed to Grandview.

 

The bar was above the Grandview Café, a thunderous room full of wood and brass and plasma screen TV’s.  The place was a roomful of strangers to me until I spotted Gypsy Woman and her cohort nearby.  I bought Mike and me a Guinness that we downed quickly, got a hug from Gypsy Woman who told us how she had lived all over the country but had finally found her home in Columbus, and we headed downtown. 

 

Parking was hell.  Getting into the hotel was even harder.  A line had formed outside and security (i.e., the Fire Marshall) would let no one in until someone came out.  The hotel had maxed out.  Somehow, I managed to slip in through the exit door (Mike later told me I was wearing a cloak of invisibility).  Standing in the hotel lobby I found Bedlam.  

 

Democrats Making Merry

                                

 

I don’t particularly care for crowds but in the past several days I had found myself in ones I tolerated only because of the moment.  When I was in High School, the local Democratic Party in my home town of Mount Vernon would meet at Mazza’s Restaurant across the street from the Knox County Board of Elections buildings.  Sometimes I’d act as a runner, going across the street to get the latest results phoned in, and then jogging back to Mazza’s to write the numbers on a chalkboard.  These get-togethers were relatively small, and somber, as Democrats were not much for winning elections back then.

 

The Renaissance Hotel was anything but intimate.  Still, standing in the middle of the lobby, towering over the crowd was Greg Haas.  He saw me, beamed like a lighthouse, and gave me another bear hug as I approached him.  He made reference to our days on the McGovern campaign and was quickly swallowed by the crowd.  I didn’t see him again that night, nor during the rest of my stay in Columbus.

 

Mike finally finagled his way into the Renaissance and looked as confused as I did.  No matter which way we turned, the crowd ebbed flowed from ballroom to ballroom where the resistance was least.  Escalators groaned under a crowd of Democrats seemingly riding up and down without purpose.  We had something of a goal, to find Mary Jo Kilroy’s party, but the few people Mike recognized and asked seemed equally confused. 

 

 

M.I.A. - Mary Jo Kilroy

No one had seen her since it was announced her race against Steve Stivers was a dead heat.  We rode up the escalator to a second floor ballroom but were stopped by a security guard from entering an “invitation only” party.  Mike tried to reason with the cop that we had been invited to Mary Jo’s party (Mike had held a fundraiser at his house for her earlier in the campaign, raising over five thousand dollars), but he wasn’t wearing the requisite armband.  So much for inclusiveness, we thought.  Mike attempted to ignore the cop who wasn’t in a generous mood.  Meanwhile, I tried an end run to the left but found my way blocked by a hotel dick.  The cop gripped Mike by his jacket and returned him to his proper place where they exchanged words until Mike offered his hand in a conciliatory gesture.  The cop had no choice but to return the handshake.

 

We wandered off and hooked up with Dan Stewart who had successfully run for his third term as the Ohio State House Rep from the 25^th district.  Dan’s room didn’t require armbands.  He had a TV tuned to CNN, a night stand covered with bottles of poor man’s vodka and scotch, and a few loyalists lounging about, quietly sipping drinks and poking fun at Mary Jo’s disappearing act.  Every political caucus appeared to have its own room.  We wandered off to the Human Rights campaign and several other politically anointed rooms, but still no Mary Jo Kilroy.  By this time, we had formed a parade of ten or fifteen of her loyalists and supporters who were a little pissed that their candidate had ditched them.  Down the escalator we headed to the main ballroom to watch the returns.

 

The same occasion in 2004 at the Wyndham hotel in Phoenix was a sobering return.  Once CNN announced that Bush had won Florida, I turned to my wife and begged off from the rest of the evening.  Four years later, the roof was coming off Renaissance Hotel. Democrats were dancing, cheering, clapping.  Local party chiefs took the stage, basking in the warmth of a feeling rarely experienced by Democrats: winning.  The numbers continued to roll in as Obama began to tally up the electoral votes.  When Pennsylvania was called for Barack I felt giddy.  And when Ohio went for Obama as well, I knew that he had won the election.  Sure enough, sometime close to midnight, CNN projected that Barack Obama would be the 44^th President of the United States.  The ballroom went nuts, the dancing took on a more frenzied beat and rhythm, strangers hugged, tears were shed.  The Democrats tasted something they hadn’t in eight long years: a victory based primarily on ideas and the personal integrity of their candidate.  The ground game had done its job.

 

 

When we left around two a.m., the crowd showed no signs of leaving the Renaissance. Merrymakers spilled out of downtown pubs.  The night was still young.  A few blocks from the hotel, what looked like the entire Columbus Police Force had cordoned off a city block.  Curiosity seekers stood on street corners spreading rumors.  I walked over to a news cameraman and asked him what had happened.  Officer down, he said, struck by a car, but not killed.  Unfortunately, the assailant was not so lucky.  Policemen pumped five rounds into his car.  That’s one guy who wasn’t going to witness the dawning of a new era thanks to the fraternal brotherhood of policemen.

 

Weds, Nov 5^th

Mike kindly let me sleep until 8AM in their upstairs bedroom.  The Republicans had not reversed the election results, no need for the Supreme Court to step in and reverse the decision.  Mary Jo Kilroy was still M.I.A.; her race still too close to call as was that of U.S. Senate races in Georgia, Minnesota, and Alaska.  The Democrats for a change had piled up an impressive number of gains in the Senate and House.  President-Elect Obama had a mandate and close to a filibuster-proof Senate.  Be careful what you ask for, I thought.  The bumper sticker posted in the front window of our house in Phoenix rang even truer today: “DRUNKEN FRAT BOY DRIVES COUNTRY INTO DITCH.”  Barack had his work cut out for him.

  

 

Drunken Frat Boy

 

The weather report said the Columbus weather would begin to turn sour on Thursday.  Mike and I decided to enjoy the last bit of Indian Summer and take an afternoon drive to Serpent Mound in southern Ohio, near Peebles, Ohio.  For all the years I lived in Ohio growing up, I don’t recall having visited the site. 

 

The sky still held its azure blue color since I had arrived on Saturday and the trees seemed more brilliant the farther south we drove on Route 62, a two-lane highway known as the “Columbus Washington Court House Road.”  Mike and I had had breakfast in Columbus before heading out of town.  We went out for breakfast in part to find any newspaper with the headline of Obama’s victory.  Gas stations and convenience stores had sold out of the early morning edition of the Columbus Dispatch, but we queued up at a Barnes and Noble bookstore until they opened their doors at nine a.m.  Mike snagged copies of the Dispatch and the New York Times for our personal archives.

 

Not a Dispatch to be Found

 

 

By the time we reached Mt. Sterling, a small town some twenty-five miles south of Columbus, we were hungry for lunch.  Least-Heat Moon had taught us to seek out the local café with the most grain feed calendars hanging on the wall.  The Corner Restaurant was such a place.  One table was filled with what appeared to be locals enjoying conversation over empty plates.  Otherwise, the restaurant was empty.  Lugging cameras and equipment with us, Mike and I were the obvious tourists and might have resembled a National Geographic film crew.  Daily specials were on the chalkboard: chicken and dumplings ($4.75) and grilled cheese with a cup of vegetable soup ($4.00).  I had the former, Mike being the vegetarian the latter (he ignored the fact that his soup probably was made with beef stock). 

 

 

Corner Restaurant Daily Special

 

 

While ordering, I asked our waitress about a large stone mansion we had seen on the north side of town as we were driving in.  The table next to us came alive.  “That’s the Arbogast House,” one woman informed us.  Mike and I learned that the mansion was recently built and received patients from around the world who needed prosthetic limbs.  William Arbogast started his own company in the early 1900’s after losing a leg and fashioning his own limb because he was unsatisfied with the one provided for him.  Our unofficial tour guide told us what sounded like a local urban legend, that Arbogast would nail his socks to his leg whenever his socks slipped below his ankle.  The story sounded plausible to me and I accepted it as fact.  After my return to Phoenix, Mike coincidentally saw an article in the Columbus Dispatch about William Arbogast.  It appears that the twenty-one year-old railroad brakeman had been working between two cars when the train jerked into motion.  One leg was severed above the knee, the other just below it.  Arbogast dragged himself to a railroad shack and set it on fire as a call for help.

 

Securing a Prosthetic Limb

 

Arbogast survived his accident and went on to start the Ohio Willow Wood Company in 1907, using the woods full of willow trees around him to make more supple prosthetic devices.  The fourth generation of Arobogasts now runs Ohio Willow Wood where the clientele have shifted from the victims of farm or industrial accidents to the victims of war.

 

We turned to our lunches that our waitress set before us.  The dumplings and chicken stew were home made, as was Mike’s soup.  Yes, I had a Proustian reverie and recalled dumplings I once had at my grandfather’s house on Neil Avenue in Columbus.  We finished with a slice of coconut cream pie made, I suspect, with a lard crust although I didn’t want to know.  After we finished lunch and paid the modest tab, Mike and I walked across the street to his Prius.  Our waitress sat on the curb at the side of the restaurant smoking.  Mike walked over and asked if he could take her picture.  She pointed to herself saying, “You want to take MY picture?  Why would anyone want to take MY picture?”  She was young and modestly pretty and had probably never posed for a tourist’s camera before. 

 

 

Harvest Time

  

We stopped several times along the way to Serpent Mound to take pictures of the autumn harvest, of grain silos, abandoned cattle stalls, and lonely outbuildings of an unknown purpose. 

 

Resilience

 

Mike began to doze off after a heavy lunch and a lack of sound sleep.  He and Lana had been juggling nursing schedules all week and had spent most of the week so far without a night nurse.  I finally made him move over and let me drive while he power-napped.  Meanwhile, I took in the Ohio I remembered most fondly, the brilliant autumn colors, the shorn fields, the crows and buzzards flapping large wings towards some unknown destination, the rolling hills covered with maple and hickory, the two lane bridges traversing busy streams and rivers. 

 

 

Turkey Buzzards

 

We drove through small towns whose names you would never know unless you had been there:  Bloomingburg, Leesburg, Hillsboro, Berryville, Belfast, names belonging to a locale for reasons unknown to us.

 

 

Mt. Sterling Residence

 

 

Serpent Mound is easy to miss driving down Route 73, just past the turnoff on Route 770 to May Hill and Tranquility.  It sits on a plateau overlooking Brush Creek Valley and is known among those in the business across the world as the largest and finest serpent effigy in the United States.  A small sign pointed in the general direction of a road weaving uphill to the park station and small museum.  Otherwise, we saw no signs announcing its existence to tourists:  “Stop!  Turn Around!  You Have Just Passed Serpent Mound!  The World’s Largest Spiritual Serpent Mound!”

 

 

Off the Beaten Mound

 

 

What I know about the origins of Serpent Mound is what I read on the signposts.  Nearly a quarter mile long, the site was excavated in the late 19^th century by Harvard University archaeologist Frederic Ward Putnam.  He also identified the Serpent Mound as the work of the builders of two nearby burial mounds belonging to the Adena culture (800BC-AD 100).  A third mound and village site near the effigy’s tail has been identified through radioactive carbon dating as the work of the Fort Ancient culture (AD 1000-1550).

 

As with so many of these Native American sites such as the Anasazi Indians of the Four Corner region with which I’m more familiar, we can only speculate on their purpose and use.  spiritual gathering and burial sites, centers of trade and commerce, defensive positions, or more simply the spot where the wagon broke down, today the theories are the dusty places of archaeological speculation.  To me they are fine pieces of real estate with amazing views and few crowds to bother with.

 

 

View From the Serpent's Head

  

Speaking of which, Mike and I had the park to ourselves that day.  Our car was the only one on the lot, our footsteps the only ones to be heard along the trail that follows the contour of the uncoiling shape of the serpent.  Markers along the way suggested astronomical pointers to the solstice and equinox. 

 

 

Serpent Uncoiled

 

The sky was high and clear, the cawing of crows mournful, the breeze a slight stirring of desiccated leaves.  We walked down a trail to Brush Creek and walked along its banks.  The water was still and mirrored perfectly the birch and poplar on the opposite side.  A few invisible birds chirruped in the distant brush.  The small ripples in the creek were soundless. 

 

I’m glad Barack Obama is the president-elect, but I’ll take this solitude any day over the crowds of loyal followers.

 

Mike and I clambered out to the top of the plateau at the serpent’s egg.  The shadow show had begun, marking our time to go.  As we began to pull out of the parking lot we met the only other car we had seen in the park.  The driver looked confused, turned around, and drove away.  We shrugged our shoulders. 

 

 

Brush Creek

 

 

As we returned to the highway, Mike chose to continue down Highway 73 to the town of Locust Grove for no other reason than it wasn’t the way we had come.  On the right side of the road, just before the crossroads at Locust Grove, we spotted a lean-to shelter displaying wooden birdhouses the various colors of a parrot.  The off-angle sign above the shelter read “Knot Normal,” a slogan we had to investigate.  Mike turned around and parked in a pullout.  No one was minding the shop until we heard a barking dog at the far end of a long gravel driveway soon followed by his master. 

 

 

Knot Normal

Nancy, a middle-aged woman who gave off a whiff of a late afternoon (or early evening) whiskey or two, greeted us and immediately engaged us in conversation.  Her husband, Larry, we learned, wasn’t doing so well and was “up in the house in bed with midget” (Midget, we later learned, was a small black and white terrier and not a circus performer).   Nancy once was a volunteer at Serpent Mound until the Ohio Historical Society had to begin cutting back park hours because of budget problems.  She was knowledgeable about the native lore, the geography, and the artifacts that she selectively gathered and turned into curios such as a healing stone, one of which I bought for my wife Margaret.  The subject then somehow turned to politics as rambling conversations sometimes do.  Mike and I had seen mainly McCain-Palin signs in the hill country, but Nancy teased us about her politics until she revealed that she had voted for Obama (Larry, however, voted Republican; we’re not sure about Midget).   The local Obama organizer had come to Larry and Nancy’s house one day before the election, a friend of theirs, but the organizer lit into Larry when he announced he was supporting McCain, calling him a few choice names, and screamed and shouted that she would never set foot in their door again.  Nancy said the friend so far had kept her word.

 

“That’s why we try to avoid discussing politics and religion,” Nancy said.  “You lose a lot of friends that way.”  I have always wondered why this is with matters so important, but I guess some beliefs are so close to the bone that to rattle them forces a rearrangement of molecular structure.

 

Mike who is something of a rock hound asked Nancy where she found her rock specimens.  She points in the direction of Locust Grove, towards the “House of Phacops,” where Tom and Debbie Johnson have one of the largest trilobite collections in the country (one trilobite is so large that the Johnson’s had loaned it to the Smithsonian).  We thanked Nancy for the Healing Stone and the local lore and continued down the road.  She had appeared more interested in conversation than in selling bird houses.  Unfortunately, no one was home at the House of Phacops.  When I returned to Phoenix I found their web site and noticed the Johnsons lead “spiritual and intellectual” trips to Egypt.  Perhaps that’s where they were, at Cheops Pyramid.

 

 

Along Highway 41

 

 

We turned north on Highway 41 through Sinking Springs when Mike suddenly shouted out, “That’s where Fort Hill is, I knew it was around here somewhere!”  Mike had led a father-daughter’s group outing to Fort Hill several years ago when his daughter Mara was still attending the Columbus School for Girls.  Again, ours was the only car in a gravel  parking lot that resembled more an open field next to Brush Creek   Coon hounds brayed in the distance; I recognized their sound from my childhood.  A farm house sat lonely on an opposite hill, a filigree of smoke coming from its chimney. 

 

The Hopewell Indians had built the Fort Hill site sometime around 100 B.C. as a ceremonial site although some have mistakenly assumed it to be a defensive structure because of its location.  The ascent is steep—the site sits on the western slope of the Allegheny Plateau—and we climbed halfway before stopping. 

 

Canopy

 

The tree canopy was thick and the remaining daylight faltered.  We turned around and returned to the car.  The last of the sun gave the fields a golden glow.  Heading the car north, we passed an Amish man and woman riding opposite directions on electric bicycles, a small concession to modern ways.  How did they charge their batteries, I wondered? 

 

Our last stop was “Who’s Place,” a main street restaurant in Greenfield off the town square.  I didn’t see any calendars on the wall, just a framed photograph of President Bush smirking at the camera, oblivious to the local dignitary next to him.  A corn silo stands mutely in the background.  Four years from now, will the photograph be replaced with one of Barack and the leader of the some local Radical Movement?  Only time will tell.

 

Thursday, Nov. 4^th

Morning:

The clouds have begun to move in.  I spent a couple of hours walking around the Ohio State campus, returning to the English Department Building where I no longer recognized names on the faculty list, unsuccessfully stopping in to see a former professor and mentor, David Frantz, who is now busy with the business of being a trustee, and ended up killing time on the Oval, a large green space in the center of the university intersected by paths leading to unknown destinations.  A street preacher shouted across the expanse.  A few curious students approached him to discuss matters of religion and intellect.  I wondered if the Preacher knew the Tuba Man and if so, do they discuss God, Gold, and asymmetrical warfare?  I had an appointment to keep, lunch with my long time friend Frank, erstwhile English graduate student at Ohio State and now the founder and publisher of the long-running “Buckeye Sports Bulletin.”

 

The Buckeye Sports Bulletin (BSB) staff occupies the basement of a non-descript orange brick office building on West Fifth Avenue in Grandview, a building that does not reveal its identity or purpose from the outside.  I was a few minutes early and talked to my brother Dave who has been a copy editor and front office buffer for the BSB for the past couple of years.  Dave like the rest our family is eccentric but apparently fits in well with the small operation. 

 

A Bit Eccentric, Dave Still Seems to Fit In

 

He handles crank calls, takes phone orders, enters data, and on Sunday evenings during football season, reads and rereads a mountain of copy that examines every aspect of the latest Ohio State football game.

 

 

Small Business Growing Smaller

  

Frank is one of a dying breed of small independently owned and run newspapers.  After finishing graduate school, he worked for the Madison Press in London, Ohio where he sometimes hired me as a stringer for high school basketball games.  He left the Madison Press to work for an independent Ohio State sports publication that he eventually bought from the owner and turned into the product that remains much the same as it was twenty-five years ago: The Buckeye Sports Bulletin (“For Those Who Need to Know More About Ohio State Sports”).  Frank has a good product and an endless supply of football and basketball games as well as fans, but the advent of the Internet and web publishing along with the graying of his long-time subscribers are making the independent print publishing business tougher and tougher.

 

Frank scurried around his lair of offices, absent-mindedly taking care of one task after another until he was ready to go.  I offered to drive in the Prius Mike had loaned me.  I pushed the power button and started the car.  “Is the thing running?” Frank asked.  We drove to a nearby restaurant “Cap City,” one of Frank’s advertisers, nicknamed affectionately by his staff “Cap Shitty,”  Our waitress, Ashley, seated us in the corner where unbeknownst to her my chances of offending the other patrons were minimal  Frank and I  rehashed the election, only two days old, and discussed the plight of the small businessman.

 

Mr. BSB

 

Frank looked the same to me as always, brown wavy hair, thinning on top, beard and mustache, prominent glasses, shirt and tie (sans jacket), but he tells me what all of us in our group are feeling: we aren’t getting any younger.  At some point in time, sooner rather than later, Frank would like to find a buyer but on his terms, i.e., a fair price from a buyer who would respect his staff and the company they have built together.  He has had some success on the first count but not the second.  The buyers are sharks, I philosophized, and they’ll treat you like small fry no matter what.  But in the current market, Frank would be divesting more from a position of weakness than strength.  Will Barack make good on his promises and help the small businessman turn this economy around?

 

Frank is an incessant coffee drinker.  We go through five or six cups before he decides he needs to return to the office and right the ship of state.  I have known Frank almost as long as Mike, shy of a few months, over thirty years.  I have crossed and uncrossed the paths of many people since then.  Only a few have stuck with me.

 

Evening:

 

A few hours later, Brother Dave and I drove to the McConnell Heart Hospital at the Riverside Methodist Hospital to see our Uncle Bob.  He is the oldest of my mother’s four brothers and the last survivor.  “Unka Bob” as I affectionately call him recently celebrated his 90^th birthday, but he has had heart surgery and his kidneys aren’t behaving properly.  His wife of many years, our Aunt Giny, was in the room with him.  Our Uncle stared at his dinner, a hamburger and fruit salad, and resignedly said he had no appetite.  He is a learned man, once having attended Yale Seminary only to be talked into quitting by his father, our grandfather, to join the company business, a precision-die company that employed numerous cranks and would-be inventors who helped drive the company into the ground (family lore has it that one of the inventors raised black widow spiders whose filament was used in the Norton Bomb Site).  Uncle Bob said he had stopped “peeing lemonade” and the toxins in his body were making him feel lousy, but he said this only as a statement of his medical condition, not a complaint.  He was excited about Obama’s victory and the amazing individual he appears to be.  Our Aunt Giny excused herself to head home, asking Dave and me if we could stop by their house later on with hamburgers.  Dave and I sat with our Uncle an hour or so, talking about politics, Hamlet (Uncle Bob’s favorite play), the Dead Sea Scrolls, going full circle to Obama.  Sound in mind, sick in body, that was Uncle Bob at this juncture.  Dave and I promised to return in the morning.

 

 

Olivier's Hamlet

 The rain had started to fall, the chill had come on.  The best Dave and I could do was a McDonalds on Olentangy River Road.  Our Aunt and Uncle’s house was only a couple of miles away and the fries were still warm when we showed up.  Aunt Giny had a serious look on her face.  Our cousin Jonathan who is a book unto himself, an odd duck of an adopted son who rarely joined us for conversation, sat with the rest of us at their small dining room table in the kitchen.  They were convinced that Uncle Bob wasn’t going to pull through this time.  His kidneys were shot and any treatments were too risky for a man Bob’s age.  Dave and I sat somberly, nodding our lowered heads, listening to the grievous news when the phone rang.  Our sister-in-law from Boston, Lorraine, had called to let Giny know Lorraine’s ninety-three year-old mother had died that afternoon.  Dada, I thought, we are trapped in a surrealist’s nightmare.  Jonathan, a diabetic, consumed most of the junk food while cursing one doctor after another.  I offered some meager optimism.  Maybe the steroids Uncle Bob opted for will jump-start his kidneys?

 

We reached a dead spot in the conversation and decided it was time for Dave and me to go.  We promised to stop by at the hospital the next morning and bring Uncle Bob some new reading material.  If nothing else, he will go like the rest of us, with book in hand.

 

Friday, Nov. 7th

The heavy grey woolen clouds I had been expecting since the beginning of my trip had arrived.  Dave and I visited with Unka Bob in the morning before I dropped Dave off at work. 

 

Dave Getting the Copy Straight

 

Bob was feeling better.  The steroids appeared to have helped and he was propped up in bed resting comfortably.  Dave had brought him a copy of Gary Wills’ “Lincoln at Gettysburg” and the latest issue of the Smithsonian Magazine.  We picked up where we left off from the evening before, talking politics and religion, the subjects that get us in trouble with most people.  Uncle Bob is a philosopher and I began to recognize some of my own behaviors.  Complaining does little good; framing my own petty problems against the backdrop of larger human suffering and misery gives me company.  As a writer-acquaintance of mine in Tucson once said, “People think they have a right to be happy.”  I had never seriously considered this thought before.  Happiness is a luxury, a nice to have, a bit of good luck depending in part upon good deeds and hard work.    

 

We stayed an hour with our uncle and bid him adieu.  I didn’t feel like this would be the last time I would see him.  He wasn’t  going anywhere, at least not yet, I told myself.  He’s too curious still, too ornery.

 

Rain sputtered as I dropped Dave off at the Buckeye Sports Bulletin.  He’d rather be at home with his dog Shade, or at least have Shade at his side all day long.  Shade is a good dog, looking most like a cattle dog, a healthy size, long black hair with splotches of rusty brown on his chest.  When all else fails, your dog never quits on you.  They should allow dogs at work.  In my mind, this should be President-Elect Obama’s first priority.

 

The rest of the day I spent with Mike and Lana.  We drove to Athens to visit their daughter Mara at Ohio University late in the afternoon and take Mara and her boyfriend to a small locally owned and provisioned restaurant.   But first, we had time to kill before dinner.  Mara played tour guide and pointed us towards what was once the local sanitarium, now a largely abandoned building waiting on Stephen King. 

 

 

Abandoned Sanitarium Outside Athens

 

 

The town of Chauncey most reminded me of the gritty dirty largely empty river towns dotting the Ohio River, towns like Portsmouth, Ironton, and Proctorsville.  After a dinner of mainly handmade pizza with local cheeses and vegetables, we returned Mara and her boyfriend (whose name I have rudely forgotten) to their dorms.  He had been quiet all evening until he burst into a Thespian revue of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  I don’t recall what provoked him but he was good, damn good, obviously having seen the movie more than once.

 

 

Hotel Chauncey

 

The return trip to Columbus was quiet. 

 

 

Mike Grows Pensive

 

We stopped at the Columbus School for Girls where Lana has left her car.  The streets were dark and plastered with slick soggy leaves knocked off their trees by a storm we have just missed.  The surrounding streets were without power, but the school appeared to be on a different grid.  Lana gave me a quick tour of the area where she works with pre-schoolers.  The room reminded me of a high-ceiling atelier in Paris, full of easels and children’s paintings. She’s proud of her work at the school as she should be.  I’ve never met anyone who cares about early education as much as Lana.  The world needs more such kindred spirits. 

 

We returned to Mike and Lana’s where Lana’s mother had been watching Irene.  She recently celebrated her eightieth birthday after working many years as a registered nurse.   Her nursing skills are particularly helpful when she kindly watches Irene on occasions whenMike and Lana need a night together out such as tonight.  An Ohio Republican, she thought Sarah Palin a “cute thing” and muttered under her breath as we chortled and gloated about Obama’s victory.  No one has a right to be happy, I have learned, but today I am happy.

 

Saturday, Nov. 8^th

 

Dave and I headed for Mount Vernon, approximately fifty miles north of Columbus, to see our brother George.  Variously named “Lembob,” “Lem,” “Grumps,” the “Grumpy Bachelor,” etc., he is the oldest of four brothers and the reigning patriarch since the death of our father, his namesake, George Lemert Breithaupt, in 1994.  I’ll stick to the matter at hand, namely our visit, and save our hometown and coming of age for some other time.  I will say, however, that our father and mother were Roosevelt Democrats who raised four sons in Nixon country.

 

After living in New York City for more than two decades as a professional photographer, working primarily for New York University, Lem finally packed up and returned to Ohio.  He’d finally had enough of the big city with its rising subway fares, dog shit, steaming pavement, and street crazies.  He and a friend of my brother Dave’s attempted a startup ISP in Knox County, advertising everything from their technical services as webmasters to authentic Amish buggies.  The competition was too stiff, however, and Lem ended up working for the local daily newspaper, the Mount Vernon News, a newspaper our father peppered with Letters to the Editor, castigating the owners for every word they printed, from their support of the Viet Nam war to their endorsements of the then ultra-conservative Congressman John Ashbrook.  Lem has done well at the News, one of the few remaining independent daily newspapers albeit he works long hours for slave wages.  What he misses in a paycheck, however, he makes up for in stories about local farmers, naturalists, and politicians and of course, the county fair.

 

Lem lives in Gambier, home to the over-priced Kenyon College, five miles east of Mount Vernon on Route 229.  Dave and I knocked on the metal storm door.  

 

 

Kenyon College

 

No one answered except for a few outdoor cats keeping a safe distance.  We finally had to call Lem on his cell phone and drag him out of bed.  He had lost weight and had grown back his beard and mustache.   Rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, he told us he had been fighting a cold and was trying to catch up on sleep after being worked to death by the News.  The paper was downsizing mainly through attrition, meaning more work was left for fewer people.  I have argued this point with fellow corporate factory workers before, whether those who aren’t laid off are really better off than those who are.

 

 

 

Lem’s forte is not housekeeping and he’s not set up for entertaining.  We convinced him to bundle up and join us in town for lunch.  He trundled upstairs and returned wearing Russian-issue winter wear. 

 

Brother George

 

 

The temperature outside had dropped a little, somewhere in the upper forties, but he was prepared for the first winter blizzard.  Before driving into Mount Vernon, however, we drove down Quarry Chapel Road towards the cemetery where both our parents were buried.  Along the way, we spotted what Lem said was a juvenile bald eagle based on his size and feathering.  We took a short detour down Kilduff Road to see a bald eagle nest built into a treetop across a harvested corn field.  Even from such a distance, the nest was easy to spot, a large dark smudge about one third of the way down from the treetop.  The bald eagle has been making a comeback since the use of toxic pesticides has been banned, and it’s not unusual any more to see one flying overhead as we just did.

 

We pulled up to Quarry Chapel, a place too pretty to waste on the dead.  Officially known as “Christ Church at the Quarry,” the chapel was dedicated in 1863.  English architect William Tinsley designed the chapel (as well as Kenyon’s Ascension Hall) that was built by the community, Kenyon workers, and stonemasons using stone donated by William Fisk’s nearby quarry.

 

 

A View Wasted on the Dead -- Quarry Chapel

 Our parents hadn’t moved on us.  When our mother died in 1986, our father chose as her memorial a brass plate mounted on a marble slab that was placed in-ground rather than the more traditional tombstones above ground.  We chose the same for our father when he died in 1994.  This kind of plaque makes our parents’ gravestones tougher to vandalize, but they gradually disappear under layers of leaves, twigs, and moss.  Dave and I performed some basic maintenance, scraping off mud with twigs, wiping off the remaining dirt with a pine branch.  We didn’t have much more to do except say our hellos and goodbyes and wish them well.  Before we left, Dave placed an Obama button on our father’s grave, hoping that he would somehow get the message.  Sometimes when he used to live in the area, Dave would visit the cemetery alone.  He’d light a cigarette for our mother and stick the filter into her grave and empty a bottle of beer on the grass.   Our father gave up smoking long before he died and was a teetotaler to the very end.  He didn’t leave us as many options.

 

Our Father's Graveyard Vote

 

 

 

“SIPS” is Mount Vernon’s answer to the uptown bistro and coffee shop.  The restaurant sits on the corner of South Main and Vine streets in the same building as the recently renovated Opera House.  The décor is exposed brick, wooden floors, and walls covered with the work of local photographers.  I think I’ve seen this all somewhere else before, but at least we’re not sitting in a Wendy’s.  After we had our sandwiches and coffee, Lem, Dave, and I stood outside on the corner and tried to recall the old storefronts that are no longer:  Brinning’s News, John’s Hobby Shop, LeMasters, Rudins, RingWalts, Gelsinliters, Zinks Market, businesses carrying the names of local residents, now all long, long gone.  We stood beneath the windows where our father had his first law office.  His partner committed suicide after he was discovered to have been embezzling.  Shortly after, my father went into private practice and stayed there until he retired.

 

Unravelling the Past

 

The weather had turned sour and didn’t allow for an afternoon hike.  Dave and I drove Lem home where Dave rummaged through Lem’s garage for the remaining boxes of books he had left at Lem’s previous apartment.  Webster should redefine “garage” as “a place where homeowners pile up odds and ends that otherwise have no place in the home.”  I found a box of LP’s that we used to play as kids, Christmas albums from Goodyear Tire, Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass, The Buttoned Down Mind of Bob Newhart, Beethoven Symphonies, demo sound effect records.  “That’s where they went,” Lem exclaimed.  I heard a mouse or two scurrying somewhere in the rubble.  Dave extracted several boxes of musty books, books he had half-forgotten but now remembered.

 

Before returning to Columbus, Dave and I drove down Pleasant Valley Road, a ribbon-straight township road where we had grown up that looked much the same as it had forty years ago.  We rattled off the names of the neighbors most of whom lived at least a mile apart, mostly farmers, a social deviant or two such as Shorty the Window-Peep, a short bald man who was harmless even though he had a penchant for peeking through his neighbors’ windows. 

 

I almost passed our driveway.

Our Driveway

It was always easy to miss, hidden by a pine tree farm our father had planted in the fifties through a program with the U.S. Forestry Department.  The dimensions of the landscape had shrunk with age: the driveway shorter, the pond smaller, and the house, the one our Aunt Paula designed, looked naked and forlorn.  At the top of the drive, I noticed another car had followed us, always an event when we were kids.  It either meant someone had gone out of their way to visit or were lost.  Occasionally, the Jehovah’s Witnesses would drive up, afraid to leave their cars because of the horde of dogs barking at their doors.  Good dogs.  This time, Dave and I were the interlopers.  The other driver was the current owner of the house, Jim Bridges, I learned, after I got out and walked over to introduce myself.  Bridges was happy to learn who I was.  “I understand that a George Breithaupt was the original owner and that people driving down the road once used to think a rich man lived here because the house was made of brick.”  Yes, I answered, George was my father.  Even though Bridges appeared to be in his forties, he was making me feel antique.  He asked if the house originally had a coal furnace.  Yes, my brothers and I used to shovel and haul clinkers in a wheelbarrow.  Was the original roof flat?  Yes, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s, it was flat and leaked horribly.  And the basement: did someone live in the basement?  Yes, my two older brothers, hermits of sorts, in particular my second oldest brother who came upstairs only to eat and occasionally to watch Cronkite, but rarely that.

 

 

Where the Brothers Rumbled

 

 

My turn for a question: Was the living room still paneled in wild cherry?  I should have known better, never ask a question unless you are prepared for the answer.  Yes, the living room was still paneled, but Bridges had painted it because the room was too gloomy.

 

 

The Family Pond

 

 

I had no more questions, and didn’t feel like fielding any more of his.  Dave never got out of the car; he knew better, for once.  You can’t go home again, especially once a stranger has taken possession and painted your cherry paneling. 

 

We returned to Columbus and Dave’s apartment under a heavy cloud cover    His trusty dog Shade was ready for a walk around Dave’s hood, a section of High Street that had not yet been visited by the gentrification of the Short North.  What I admire about Columbus is its unwillingness to submit at least in part to the march of time.  Cinder block neighborhood taverns could still be found, duplexes whose front porches were cluttered with broken down couches, Methodist churches blackened with soot and grime.  The only concession I found were the Indians running the neighborhood package store, and even they had taken on the shoddy passiveness of a town that sees more clouds than sunshine.

 

Sunday, Nov. 9th

I had a late afternoon flight to Phoenix with a change of planes in Memphis, the price I paid for flying on the cheap.  On the way to airport, Mike, Lana, Irene, and I stopped at the Wexner Center on the Ohio State Campus to see an Andy Warhol exhibit.   The better part of the exhibit was a showing of black and white films shot at Warhol’s studio, “The Factory.”  He pioneered reality TV and for that I wish he had stuck to soup cans and Monroe.  Most impressive was a grainy film of a sleeping man.  The abstraction of a non-event.  O.K., time to head home.

 

 

Quit When You're Ahead

 

But not so fast.

 

My plane, an Embraer 175, holds 78 people.  I couldn’t stand upright in the center aisle.  A computer failure in Memphis forced us to sit at the gate in Columbus for over an hour; we needed some kind of code before our plane could take off, a computer-generated code.  Why someone couldn’t make one up and let us take off, I never understood, just as I don’t always recognize the speed and convenience of computerized registers in grocery stores.  A missing bar code, for example, always sends the checker into a panic as the line continues to grow. 

 

 

To make matters worse, the lone steward on the flight was a standup comedian manqué, but the pilot had eased our pain by offering free booze.  I grabbed a handful of little bottles as the cart bumped by.  The steward was too busy trying out his bad jokes on a captive audience to know or care.  By the time our plane reached Memphis, my connecting flight had already left for Phoenix even though we were told our connecting flights would wait for us.  Not much was happening at Memphis International at nine PM.  The Elvis and Sun Records stores were closed, as were the bars and barbeque shacks.  Fortunately, the airline had agreed to put us up at a Holiday Inn about fifteen miles from the airport.  The van driver was lively and funnier than the steward.  She offered to drop me off at Beale Street but I was too knackered to sightsee.  I was supposed to be in my own bed that night with my wife and dog.

  

Monday, Nov. 10^th

Obama has been the President-elect for almost a week.  The Republicans have yet to find a way to strip the title from him.  Obama did not cork his bat, nor is he on steroids.  He appears to be the real deal.  As I waited for my 9AM flight home to Phoenix, I was stunned by an exhibit of Ernest Withers photography.  Withers was a self-employed photographer who participated in the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties.  He produced a book on the murder of Emmett Till, a book responsible in part for spurring the movement on.  Withers also photographed baseball players of the Diamond League, and blues and jazz performers in his hometown of Memphis.  Unfortunately, many of Withers photographs have disappeared over the years as he sold them for nothing to keep himself going.  Today, one of his original photographs could put your kid through four years at an Ivy League college.

 

This was fitting and meant to be, I thought, spending the night at the locus of so many hopeful and tragic civil rights events after riding the wave of Obama’s victory in Ohio.  Predictions of the demise of the politics of the Old South were beginning to make the papers.  Barack was called the herald of a new age of pragmatic, not ideological politics.  He kept the old guard such as Jesse Jackson at arm’s length at the expense of their wrath during his campaign.  Obama didn’t have the civil right’s stripes, they seethed.  But still, Barack is the first African-American president in the history of this battered and bruised country.  Before I boarded my plane, I took in one last look at a photograph of Martin Luther King stretched out in his bed, holding up a newspaper.  I can’t read the headline, but I’m guessing it is related to the Sanitation Workers strike in Memphis.  King died a martyr for the cause.  Hopefully, we will have no more.  I was homeward bound.

 

 

Finally, the Drugs Kicked In...