How to Run for President on $10 a Day Chapter Two by Dean Adams Curtis
copyright 1999
Chapter One
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
goddesses
How to Run for President on $10 a Day Chapter Two by Dean Adams Curtis
copyright 1999
Chapter One
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
goddesses
Mom and I leave for Dayton, Ohio to see her father Gene Adams, former vp of the bank that became Citibank, who one day 40 years ago, walked into the New York headquarters of the Presbyterian church and volunteered for international good deeds, to which he has dedicated himself for five decades.
Grandad's wife is Dr. Ruth Harris, a specialist in children's liver diseases and obesity. Ruth is my grandfather's second wife. My mom's mother, grandad's first wife, died of cancer when mom was 16.
During the trip, mom and I focus our discussion on education reform and renaissance. We agree twice as many teachers are needed in classrooms and that defense cuts should pay for them. We stop at a McDonalds for a break.
As we eat our meal deals she warns me that grandad looks like Gandhi. She is ready to let him go. She doesn't think grandma is there yet. Being a doctor, Grandma Ruth is there to give her husband the best medical care possible, at every moment. He made his decision two years ago, when he decided not to have heart surgery, not to take up a hospital bed to artificially prolong his already full life.
We get down to Dayton without incident. Mom's warning that gdad looks like Gandhi isn't overstated. He calls Gramma by the name of his ex-wife, my mother's mother. Not too long after arriving I help Gramma lift Grandad onto the rollup potty, then help him back into bed after mom changes his linens and Gramma cleans his bottom.
This is the end of the line for a truely great man, one of my heroes and role models. He is someone I always wanted to talk with far more than I was ever able to articulate. Now that I finally had the words, he was unable to comprehend them.
Gramma and I head out for a walk while Mom stays with gdad. We fill two birdfeeders that she had put up outside the dining room, then walk around the lovely grounds of the condo-style nursing home to which she and gdad had recently moved.
She asks about how my film "Pastel Party" is coming. I tell her about the new addition of the ultimate fantasy of becoming president. This opens the door for our discussion of it, the real reason for our walk.
"You know you'll be running against Jay Rockefeller," she says, opening as I had anticipated she would, with her prime horror, her unqualified grandson running against her former governor the current Senator from West Virginia.
As I lay reading, prior to sleeping on the living room couch in the nursing home condo that night, Gramma comes into the room to tell me she'll be voting for Rockefeller. After she turns in, I read a New York Times article on West Virginia's roads. Apparently Jay promised to improve them, but they're still mighty rocky.
I tell her I applied for doctoral work at Harvard's JFK School of Government and to Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of International Relations, but was turned down by both.
She asks how much world traveling I've done. I tell her Canada and Mexico, but that I've been obsessed by the study of foreign policy for twenty years.
"What papers do you read?" she asks.
"The LA Times and New York Times mostly," I tell her. "Ask me any question about any country in the world and I'll tell you my policy about it."
"Sri Lanka?" she asks. Gramma sometimes reminds me of former U.N. Ambassador Jean Kirkpatrick.
"Tamal rebels in the north of the island are fighting for independence with help from Tamals on India's mainland," I answer. "I favor negotiation toward their autonomy, as long as human rights and democracy are guaranteed."
"Anyone who reads the New York Times would know what you just said," Gmom replies.
I borrow the car and cruise just east of the city to Yellow Springs, home town and center of the now geographically distributed Antioch University. I go straight to the President's office. He's on vacation but I have a wonderful chance to talk to his assistant, who knows my advisors from Antioch LA, and to his secretary who is taking classes at the school while she works.
She's from Kentucky. Her father was a miner before he died of black lung inspired diseases. I tell her my dad died a couple years back from his own version of black lung, from cigarette smoking. As I wait to talk with the VP, the president's secretary lets me copy an important Warren Bennis article from the "Antioch Review." Its on the difference between managers and leaders.
The VPs secretary and I discuss the pains and rewards of the transition she is making from IBM-based Wordperfect 5.1 with its function keys, to Mac-based word processing and its mouse. I show her the flier I've created using the Mac and the Pagemaker program. She's just beginning to experiment with it.
Mom and I drive home from Dayton to Detroit. We take turns driving and reading "The Kitchen God's Wife" to each other. Gmom knew Mom had placed the book on reserve at the library, so while I was at Antioch she went to the bookstore and purchased a hardcover copy of it.
Reading to each other makes the time rush by like the Ohio scenery. We stop at McDonald's for a drink and bathroom break.
I go over and put the bullet-proof vest on the windshield in front of the driver's side. Jimmy Hoffa and companions arrive at the car parked next to Newton's. I head away from the scene, overhearing the chauffeur in sunglasses tell Hoffa he'd best be leaving. I realize there's a bomb in Wayne Newton's car and resolve to warn him. I wake before I can.
For the first time in my travels, I don't know where I am. The room's totally dark. I'm in a bed, but not in my own bed. Someone's snoring lightly. Now I remember...
I'm home. I'm on a bed pulled out from the couch that mom has in her bedroom. The grandfather clock in the hall strikes once on the half of an unknown primary hour.
In the paranoid dark moments that follow waking from the Wayne dream, I think about checking my bug for a bomb. I claim I am willing to die to bring employee democracy and the other platform planks into reality. Easy to say, hard to wake up to. Almost as hard to wake up to as the realization I've been dreaming about Wayne Newton and Jimmy Hoffa.
Is there a killer in the condo? I know there isn't, yet my mind seems to want to play the hero of it's worst-case-scenario games. Is a killer silently moving through the hall now on his way back to mom's bedroom? I mentally prepare myself to fight the intruder.
Later, Mom and I eat with her "Breakfast Club," six women who gather twice each week at 7:30A in local coffee shops for adult versions of show and tell.
"Do you think the BCCI mess is linked to the hostage delay?" Gene Boyd askes me. She and her husband have been friends of my parents for decades, as have the other ladies at the table. These ladies are the last of a vibrant "family church" my parents were a part of as I was growing up. We were rebels from the local Presbyterian church who decided to meet in each other's living rooms rather than bow to the conservatives in the local church's congregation.
I respond to Gene Boyd's question, saying I'm concerned its all connected and wonder if Congress will ever get around to holding hearings.
Merle asks about my travels, where I stay, where I find showers. None of the women offer any discouraging words.
Pat shows us pictures of the new tudor condo she and her husband Bob, our former minister, are buying down in Ohio. He's found another ministerial position following his years as a parole officer. Pat worked for the Alzheimer's Foundation of Michigan ever since her mother died from the disease. Now she runs an art gallery in an Ohio cornfield.
Donna and I talk about her experiences as a night shift nurse in a teen psychiatric hospital. She has just come from the job to join us for breakfast. She lost her teenage son Alan to suicide and gives a dismal report on the worsening state of teen mental health. She's depressed, seeing no light at the end of the tunnel.
After breakfast, mom and I go "back to school shopping" at Summit Mall in Pontiac. She buys me a much needed pair of lowtop Puma tennis shoes to replace my old Nike hightops with the big hole above each big toe. I look for a long moment at a pair of Levis jeans on sale and she graciously purchases a pair for me.
Before leaving Detroit I put in a call to the "Daily Tribune," the local newspaper. I'm promptly interviewed at length and a photographer is assigned. He and I go to the Royal Oak library. I look through the library's microfilm as the photographer shoots pictures of me. I'm trying to find a series of full-page anti-gun ads my dad placed in the Tribune when I was a kid, but I don't find them.
I confess that I am also.