Me and My Vote - vii

It's hard for me to imagine that my high school students held strong political beliefs. I honestly don't remember talking about politics at all. Even though I left college with an English major; even though I remembered telling myself one day on a sidewalk outside the classroom building that I could spend my life reading and discussing literature--be an English teacher; even though I began to think more and more seriously about doing what I'm doing right now, this morning, at 5:30, tapping out letters to become words and sentences, creating all sorts of things with words; even though all of that is true, I was, that first year, falling in love with literature.

When I think about that time now, I think I can say that I was so deeply set in what happened, day to day, in my classroom, I'd become less political than I'd been. In a sense, everyone knew the war in Vietnam was rolling down--there were fewer body bags. One of the candidates for Pres was a bona fide liberal peacenik, Senator George McGovern, a boy from the prairies who'd graduated from a small, liberal arts college and had done some religious studies. McGovern was firmly anti-war, and in class, I was analyzing lyrics from Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. No fights really. 

Somewhere along the line, even before I took the job at Blackhawk High School, I had determined I wanted to teach in college someday, which meant, sometime soon, graduate school. I was happy, even thrilled to sign the Blackhawk contract, but I knew I'd be there for no more than two years. I mentioned that once to the principal, and he told me he was glad I hadn't said that when I signed because he wouldn't have hired me. 

After a year and a half at Blackhawk, that career plan had not changed. I loved teaching, but it was killing me. I'd begun applying to graduate schools I chose simply on the basis of their being in exotic places--Florida, Arizona--places I'd never been. My two-year sojourn in that little drafty trailer in beautiful southwestern Wisconsin was going to end. That was sure.

My loneliness vanished gloriously when my sister, in a south Chicago suburb, insisted that I come down for a visit and take out this cute single teacher named Barb Van Gelder, the woman--if you're following all of this--who'd spent Ref Doc class (at least in my mind) writing letters to her sweetheart in Vietnam. "Don't be ridiculous," I told her. "She went with my roommate--she went with two of my roommates. You just 'don't have a thing' for your roommates' ex-sweeties. It's just not done."

"Don't be an idiot," my sister told me. 

I went, I saw, and Barbara, unknowingly, conquered, even though I spotted her all the way across a the gym floor. She was wearing a thin orange sweater, clingy. I've never forgotten. 

Less than six months later, the two of us, who'd spent too much time alone, were married--that was 50 years ago.

My students were thrilled. I think I became even more beloved. 

June 27, 1972. First CRC, Orange City, Iowa

That summer, the summer the two us went off to Arizona, newlyweds, I'd visited her home here in northwest Iowa, and attended a family picnic in an Orange City park. I don't remember why I stuck my neck out--whether it was purposely to get into a fight or to simply and honestly tell the family what I felt--but I made it clear to the men--we were segregated, the women in a circle elsewhere--that people who would vote for Tricky Dick that year were only fooling themselves. I was for McGovern. I couldn't understand how people wouldn't be. Nixon was a liar and a thief, and worse, a warmonger. 

I wasn't thinking straight. I should have known that kind of platitude was not a firm foundation for future family life together. Barbara's parents were soft-spoken, not determined Republicans. Both of them had what I would call a Democratic heart, a soul that kept them distanced from power-hungry pols and firmly planted on the side of the hurting, the disenfranchised, those altogether too easily run over. I don't think they minded the politics of their new and liberal son-in-law. 

But I got clobbered right there in the Orange City park. It was a massacre. I got killed. 

Later, two of her relatives I knew to be McGovernites, couldn't help but giggle. They kept their silence, they said, because the only smart thing to do was keep your mouth shut here when it came to politics. I didn't.

I'd been in rural Wisconsin for two years, an hour away from Madison. I hadn't been in northwest Iowa since college graduation. Maybe I'd just plain forgotten--I don't know. Maybe I told those old uncles of hers what I thought about Tricky Dick because I'd simply assumed I was doing nothing more than contributing to a good, hearty political discussion. 

It was hearty all right. I got burned at the stake. 

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If you're still with me in this long-winded tale, thanks. I should be able to wrap it up tomorrow. The project is a single chapter in a book some great-great grandchild someday could stumble on when she wonders about her ancestors--who they were and how they lived and why they lived the strange way they did.