Oh . . ., So You Think You're Perfect?

Election day, 2004.

Grace called this morning a few minutes before I was to pick Ike and her up, to take them to school. Mackenzie had slept fitfully, and had thrown up. Grace wanted to rest a bit. It was agreed that I would get Pook at the appointed time, then take Grace down later.

I went to their mother's house, intending to read the paper out front, while I awaited Ike's arrival. After a couple of minutes, Grace came out with the baby. I held her; she looked fine. I suppose it was only a tender stomach that caused her to blow chow.

• "Toss Her Cookies"
• "Barf"
• "Call New York"
• "Drive the Porcelain Bus"
• "Hurl"
• Experience reverse peristalsis
• Get "sick to her stomach" ("Sick on her stomach" in Janice's vernacular.)
• "Spew the Technicolor Rainbow" ( - although in Mackenzie's case, the vomit was formula-only, and hence not multi-colored.) "Albino Rainbo"?
• "Upchuck"
• "Call O'Rourke"
• "Spit Up" - (so delicate!)
• Vomit
• "Puke"

My polling station - housed in a Sunday School classroom building at a Methodist church - is virtually across the street from Janice's house. I noted that the parking lot was full at 7:30.

I got to thinking about Jimmy Carter . . ., and a woman I adore.

Carter came out of nowhere to win the 1976 election. He didn't even call himself James! And that drawl! Plus, he was from the deepest of the Deep South. An American president from the Deep South? Lyndon Johnson of Texas had ascended to - and held - the office, but Texas - as most Texans will eagerly tell you - is a nation unto itself. "Don't mess with Texas!" Johnson's election came less than a year after the assassination of President Kennedy, and the country was still circling the wagons.

I remember hitchhiking to Terre Haute - where I was attending graduate school - from Columbus, in the Fall of '76. I was 24, and I intended to vote in the upcoming election. My leaning was to vote for the incumbent, Gerald Ford. I had - like many others - seen through Richard Nixon from the start. I felt that the United States had sent an appropriate message to the sorts of leaders that his ilk embodied. For me, it was not a "Republican-Democrat" issue, but a matter of civility - of basic decency. The party of business sometimes gets aligned with control-freaks who threaten the bedrock of the American political system. This does not disavow the importance of business, nor the legitimacy of the Republican Party. It only is to remind that sometimes we have to repudiate evil when it rises to the highest levels of power. Be sure to vote tomorrow.

I thought of Mr. Ford as a very decent fellow - caught up in an inflationary spiral, and lots of bad press associated with the remnants of the Nixon Era. It seemed to me that continuity was important. And Jimmy Carter went by "Jimmy", had that accent, and was from the Deep South!

Some super-bright theology student - I do not remember his name - picked me up between Dayton and the Indiana line. When I got out of his car in western Indiana three hours later, I was a convert. Even today, I am at a loss to explain how a cynical young man changed so quickly, but it happened. Further, my vote in November still feels like the most-informed one I have cast in a national election.

Carter's presidency was damned by many of the same forces that were bedeviling Ford's. Plus, it seems to me that his team was composed of so many outsiders that the Inside-the-Beltway crowd made them political sausage. Inflation was rampant, and at the end of his term, the Iran hostage crisis seemed to highlight his inefficacy as leader of the Free World.

Why did I think of him this morning?

Even though some now paint him as a naive meddler in world affairs - a Baptist Sunday School teacher, way over his head with some truly dishonest people - most all Americans with an opinion acknowledge that Jimmy Carter is our best ex-president in memory. He has continued to be active in worthy pursuits into his 80s. He has not gone the route of men who left office, who afterwards sat on boards of corporations. (A worthwhile thing to do, but seemingly not a significant undertaking for a person who once had the biggest job on the planet.) I admire Jimmy Carter. I admire TR, Lincoln, and Jefferson, Adams, Washington, Madison, and Monroe. I like Ike. I "dis-admire" Reagan, Nixon, Harding. Former-president Clinton vexes, because his political acumen and vision are largely offset by his inabilities in the personal truth-telling department. He's like Nixon, but weak instead of dark.

Sitting in Sarah's idling Jeep across the street from the polling station, seeming to hold the paper I intended to read, I found in one hand the presence of Jimmy Carter, and in the other feelings for a woman who I adore.

At night, and at dawn, I often lie awake, reviewing my day, or charting my upcoming morning. Failures I might not repeat, and small improvements that might be grown; nuts-and-bolts of real estate transactions, and maintenance requirements of daily life; omnipresent impulses associated with the rearing of the new offspring. Included in this routine is the recollection of a magnificent woman.

When a person comes into one's life who causes romantic stirrings, when those stirrings prove to be mutual, when those mutual stirrings lead to joint exploration of the prospects which those stirrings awakened, when those explorations lead to the shared conclusion that the stirrings alone - while undeniably mutual - do not merit any further exploration, there is left a hole in one's spirit. I experience this hole as a good thing - a sort of merit badge for having interacted wholly-as-possible with another. When I was younger, the hole caused me to pine. The hole caused an ache for the person with whom I thought I had been interacting. I longed for her to assume her rightful position at the core of my spirit. As an older man - with children the age I was when I began to experience this pining - I look to understand the meanings in what transpired within the exploration.

One observation consistently proves to be the single-most obvious explanation of the meanings. The observation is that the person who expressed to me the stirrings that I elicited in her was not actually the person to whom I expressed the stirrings that she caused in me. My expectations about the person were hopeful and best-intentioned (see: "loving"), but were not accurate enough to sustain the exploration indefinitely. Her experience of the exploration was likely not dissimilar.

There on Troupe Street, in front of Janice's, before Grace and Mackenzie came to say "hey", and instead of reading the newspaper, I put the car in park, leaned back into the seat, closed my eyes and communed with the spirit of James Earl Carter . . ..

You are a bright young man. You grow up in an agricultural community - a gifted child in a loving family. You progress through the public educational system, and matriculate at the United States Naval Academy. You train to work in "nucular" (sic, Carter) submarines. You return afterward to work the family agricultural business. You enter politics. You succeed. You rise to governor of your state. You make a run for your party's nomination for president. You gain it. You win the national election. You are President of the United States of America. You are the Commander-in-Chief of the most-powerful army ever assembled. Pretty heady stuff, even for a bright boy - no matter where he was born, or what his Deddy did.

But, your term as president is a rocky one. Ignominy of ignominies: after you are trounced in your bid for re-election, the leader of a dangerous government (formerly propped up by your predecessors) releases the American hostages his government had held for over a year. You are mocked for your toothy smile, for your be-sweatered willingness to heat the White House to 58 degrees during the energy crisis, for your naive interaction with the Washington power elite, for 22-percent interest rates. Your life sucks, dude.

You retire and rebuild the life of character that had defined you before the "presidential experience". Over time, friend and foe alike acknowledge your efforts and your decency. You even publish a book of your poems. Life is pretty darned good 25 years later.

And yet . . ..

You lie abed some nights and dawns, reviewing your day, and charting your upcoming morning. There - among the thoughts of Habitat for Humanity, the Carter Library, election overseeing, your Sunday School class, your grandkids, your kids, your wife, and the minutiae of your daily life - is Your Presidency. You allow yourself an "If only . . .".

You have played it over in your mind for 28 years. You have dissected individual decisions, rearranged timing of events, and rued happenstance.

In time, you have come to regard those four years of quite long ago as a period when you did your best, accomplished some good, and departed having kept to the core of your belief structure. You know that you served a noble cause with integrity, energy, and your best effort. You were the most-powerful man in the world for four years, and now you are busy with other things. You believe that your successor did the best that he could. You are troubled by the spiritual vacuity of some of his present-day supporters, but accept it as the whim of history, a wisp in the breeze of time. Your theological and family training cause within you feelings of sadness for him. You allow as how your model - which does not account for reincarnation, with its accompanying infinite chances to evolve spiritually within the world - may not be adequate for the eternal and restful repose of his soul. You pray in "quiet waiting" to your God that He allow you to turn these matters to Him, that you stay out of His way, that you continue in the service to His will that is your moral and ethical responsibility. You love your country as always.

I regard the time of my exploration of those stirrings as my failed presidency. I was voted out of office, and I regard my defeat as the legitimate will of the electorate. In the grander scheme of things, the ego-driven needs of any person will be met or denied - to varying degrees - by forces over which he has varying degrees of control. It was not "my time". The momentum of the culture ran over me, but the road kill I have become is an important part of the natural order of things. (Or could it be that my karma was "totaled" when it collided with the culture's dogma?) In my reveries before sleep tonight, and tomorrow morning before my rising, I will find unlimited Sunday School classes awaiting, perfumed by the acceptance of a failed - yet noble - presidency.

"See that relationship over there? My friend and I built that. It's my best work, to-date. For one term, I was the most-powerful man in the world."