November's Decision

---

At long last, the day has arrived. The summer is a memory, and autumn’s blaze of colors has faded to brown. The inevitably of the raw blanched winter is perceptible in the wind, the trees, and the fields. In a small town in Middle America, the candidate sits alone at a kitchen table, gazing out the window at the sheltering sky. Patiently, she awaits the day’s end.

Since early summer, she has driven winding county roads, sat in farmers’ diners, and footslogged down every Main Street in the adjoining counties -- a lifetime of Apple Blossom Parades, Harvest Jubilees, Rotary Club Shrimpfests, high school homecomings, motorcycle rallies, and firefighter pancake dinners. She’ s spent nearly six months shaking hands, waving, throwing candy, and eating homemade pies. Sipping her coffee, she smiles in her remembering.

But she also hears the whispering. Such a nice woman and a beautiful family, but . . . it’s too bad really. She wears a scarlet letter-- a Democrat in an off-season election cycle in rural middle America. Undeterred, she has traveled from one end of nowhere to the other, and back again. Driving the counties’ rural routes, she has watched the corn grow tall under the big summer sky in the place she calls home. Often branded as ‘real’ America, the Rockwellian vestiges of a ‘golden’ past are still discernible in scout troops, bowling leagues, and church attendance. It is a place where integrity, values, and hard work matter and get you elected, except they don’t. Real America is really only a dream. The world is bigger now. It’s bigger than the candidate, her community, or her county. Labels matter, and television histrionics stoke fear of a changing world. But today, finally, it is election day. The race, the show, the pretense - It is all over now. She sighs wearily, “The polls close in a couple hours. Win or lose, I’ll survive either way.” I almost believe her.

Months earlier, the candidate drives beyond town, passing through the signifiers of Everywhere, USA -- the McDonalds, Home Depots, Walmarts, and Indian owned hotels -- until she reaches the state highway. Here at the intersection of the local and the bigger world looms the John Deere dealership, the county’s great agricultural citadel. Monstrous verdant and maize colored machinery with long snouts, corkscrewed blades, and strange fan-like spoked discus gleam in the late afternoon sun - their purposes mysterious to the uninitiated. Beyond is the heartland - a massive Rothko of golden-tasseled green stretching to the horizon to meet the uniform blue vastness of the Midwest sky. Little islands of weathered farm houses, silos, and barns sit insignificantly within the gently undulating sea of corn and soybeans that extends for a thousand miles or more in all directions. After a few miles, the candidate reaches the ‘suburbs’, a smattering of squat ranch houses and modified trailers strewn out along rural route E. At the freshly painted mailbox blazoned 7546, she turns down the long gravel drive, following the slight swell of the land up and then down to a little house by a pond. Two bounding black Labradors eager to sniff newcomers meet us and escort us to the end of the drive. There, the county clerk awaits the candidate.

Out in the yard, talk turns slowly from the weather to court house gossip to the election and the candidate’s opposition - an ethically flexible assistant district court judge reviled by those who know the law and/or the candidates, but supported by those who know only labels. He is the incumbent, and more importantly, the Republican. Rural populist Democrats have been dying for a hundred years, and local candidates often drown in the national narrative. Still, the race cannot by won if never run, so the candidate has carried her campaign signs to the county’s crossroads and met the people on their terms. “God forgive me,” the county clerk says, “but he’s a son of a bitch.” The candidate nods and murmurs something about going to church and praying for guidance and strength. There is mutual agreement that whatever a man sows, so shall he reap. Luckily, no one in the driveway is looking for my opinion of God’s plan. As an east coast liberal with little belief in God and certainly no faith in an anthropomorphized deity being interested in politics, I am the visitor from Sodom and Gomorra. I am what the TV warns about.

Summer passes and on November 5th, I wake far away from middle America. New York City is beginning to stir, rousing itself for the new day. The rumbling discordant clamor of commuter traffic, garbage trucks, trains, and people slowly coalescing into the full throated roar of the awoken city. Though the day sounds like any other, the morning news proclaims it is the dawn of a brave new world: ‘Republicans win in a national landslide! So begins a new era of Republican values: the end of the Nanny State, the death of Obamacare, the rebirth of self reliance, individualism, personal responsibility, the Protestant work ethic and the spirit of Capitalism!” Reagan, if rumors are to be believed, has risen from the dead to lead America back to the shining city on the hill! It seems like a good day to go back to bed.

A few hours later, the candidate wakes to the same new day in middle America. The morning here is much like the one before, except now it is over-- the parades, the smiling, the hand shaking, the whispering, the worry, the campaign -- the world within the world. The candidate sits down at her kitchen table. The wintery sky beyond the black barren branches of front yard maples is dull and pallid; the silence of the rural dawn, enveloping. She thinks about 48.9%, the disappointment of not quite enough. Now, the past. God’s plan? She picks up a pen and begins the onerous task: ninety-six ways to say, I am sorry I couldn’t make it happen.

Proud of you Hank.

---

Comments

[Lisa]

Lovely writing per your usual
God Colin- you are amazing!!!!! and such a tribute to your friend- who didn't win.

[Michael]

I think that's the absolute best aesthetic rendering of the electoral tide's ebb and flow I've ever encountered. Thank you for sharing.