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I cannot overstate how much I appreciate everyone who takes the time to read my work. Today’s post is barely political and more entertaining (I hope) than informative. Tomorrow’s post will be short and contain summaries and links to other writers whose work I find valuable. I hope you have had a relaxing weekend.
It was amateur hour at our house yesterday afternoon as a group of volunteers made phone calls for a mayoral candidate ahead of an August 5th special election. They did surprisingly well for a group of people with all sorts of neuroses and very little cold-calling experience. I may have to harass a few of them into running for office. (One has already made that decision.)
When they got started, I was downstairs writing—or trying to. It was hard to concentrate with the cacophony coming through the ceiling. A toddler clunked along in pursuit of galloping cats, adults talked at a volume indicative of early-onset hearing loss, and the blender, which we use so little that I don’t know where it is stored, snapped and whirred. Then the oven timer beeped and my wife, Kelli, called out my name, because no one is allowed to skip a meal at her house.
Upstairs, call-time anxiety showed in the mounds of Kelli’s baked macaroni and cheese being consumed by even the most lactose intolerant and gluten sensitive of our volunteers. A half-empty bottle of margarita mix sat on the counter next to the blender. Beer cans poked from the recycling bin. In the living room, the toddler clutched a catnip toy in one hand and a collection of swallowable shells and rocks in the other as he circled our tortoise-shell cat. The cat lay on her back with her back legs spread lewdly and her front paws in a cute bunny pose that could flip in a flash to reveal the couch-sharpened blades of her Freddy Krueger murder mittens.
In the family room, our declawed and people-loving tabby cat sat Buddha-like in a basket and radiated calm while remaining alert for signs of a volunteer in need of one-on-one therapy-cat services. A lady from our neighborhood had found my old flak jacket and was wearing it like a weighted blanket. One volunteer said that her new favorite sound was the tone and recording that said, “This number has been disconnected or is no longer in service.” My wife said that she was disappointed so many people were answering their phones. Each call, she said, was as stressful as that time we fishtailed on an icy road while towing a 26-foot Holiday Rambler camper. She would need another drink to help her sound like a functioning adult rather than a nervous middle-schooler calling her secret crush.
I took over Kelli’s phone and made a few calls while she found something to slake her thirst and calm her nerves. I got the disconnected-phone message on the first call, a wrong number on the second, and no answer on the third. It took five calls to reach an eligible voter, but he was fishing like a normal North Dakotan on a beautiful Saturday afternoon and didn’t want to talk politics, though he did say he couldn’t stand two of the candidates, which left my preferred candidate with a 50/50 shot at his vote. Then he claimed to have a fish on the line and hung up.
As I went back to my office, the tortie cat sat on the coffee table and watched as the toddler, with the catnip mouse clenched in his teeth, clawed at the couch. The third cat, and the only one who weighed more than the toddler, was, as usual, nowhere to be seen.
Over the next hour, writing was like trying to extract my own teeth while wearing oven mitts. One sentence sounded juvenile, the next, pompous, and the third might have been written by an illiterate psychopath. I began to wish I was fishing. The scheduled end time for calling voters had passed, but the noise upstairs still had not abated, so I took a break to see what was happening.
In the kitchen, the margarita-mix bottle was stuffed neck-down in the recycling bin. In the family room, the neighbor wearing my flak vest had also found a trucker hat. The vest and hat each had “ICE” spelled out on them with white athletic tape. She was in the center of the room, and the stopwatch on a lanyard around her neck swung about wildly as she hit all of Vanilla Ice’s moves in the “Ice-Ice-Baby” video playing on the flat-screen TV and blasting from the sound bar. Women in their eighties are so full of surprises.
My wife declared that call time wasn’t so bad after your third margarita, which I found strange, since she doesn’t usually dilute her tequila like that. On the recliner, the guy who looks like the Hispanic truck that hit you in the mosh pit at a death-metal concert looked up from a hardcover edition of Modern American Poetry and said that “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michaelangelo” was stuck in his head and he was suddenly struggling to properly lace his sentences with expletives. His girlfriend, who prefers the floor to a chair, for some reason, looked up and asked if I had any Pablo Neruda poetry available (I did), because that was what her Don Juán really needed.
In the backyard, the tabby cat looked on in anticipation of possible excitement as two college professors attempted to teach the toddler how to strike a wooden match so he could light the paper and kindling they had stuffed in the firepit. An Air Force couple, who I believe to be covert Defense Intelligence Agency officers, stood nearby, ready to intervene in case the toddler’s wispy hair got too close to the flames.
(The toddler’s mother was not there, but she is a teacher, so she would not have minded those professors helping her child develop his fine motor skills. Some moms are less easygoing. They don’t even laugh when you call them from urgent care with a funny story of how their son is just fine, but he did have a tiny fishhook floating in his eye for a little while. Those kinds of moms think the story should be: Dad takes son fishing, Mama gets a relaxing day at home, no one gets a fishhook in their eye. You don’t even want to get those moms started on the time their son’s head was (barely) bonked by a (slow-turning) ceiling fan during a (delightful) game of upsy-daisy in the bedroom. Also, since the toddler’s mother is likely to read this, I should mention that her husband made more calls than anyone else and watched that boy like a hawk.)
In the end, it was a productive day with just enough fun to lure even more people to participate next time, which is great, because democracy revives with action.
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