Campaign Season

Maybe Governor Pawlenty’s idea of reinstating the death penalty in Minnesota will spur young people into some political interest, if not action. My stepdaughter was certainly disturbed when her research on the issue turned up the facts of the last Minnesotan execution in 1906, which didn’t go well. The hangman miscalculated the necessary calibration between the length of rope and the height of the scaffold, and William Williams’s feet struck the floor. Deputy sheriffs grabbed the rope and hoisted Williams up for almost fifteen minutes until the convicted murderer died by strangulation.

We all have our mile markers along the path of political ignition, some stranger than others. Do you remember the night Bill Clinton trounced George Bush? God knows, I do. That was the same night my fourteen-year-old foster daughter Erica snapped the braces off her teeth with pliers. But I didn’t discover that until the next morning.

On the night of the election, I was twenty-four years old. I had a colicky newborn in arm and a toddler at my feet. My chic, academic sister called from her cramped apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side as soon as victory was assured. She said something triumphant about how this election was really going to show the old boys club where they could go, now that old Georgie was a paltry single-term weenie. I stood barefoot in my nineteenth-century farm kitchen and let myself inflate like a balloon with hope like I hadn’t known since my own political awakening at the age of sixteen.

It was 1984, and I was an avid supporter of the Mondale-Ferraro ticket. I couldn’t vote yet, but I could stay up late into the night poring over my mother’s assigned college reading on the horrors of the nuclear world and systemic poverty. I could leaflet the neighborhood for my candidates and watch every televised debate. Ferraro was tough and smart and even pretty, with her arched brows and wide smile. It enraged me how the other side made fun of her. Mondale was sage and fatherly and good and honest. Of course they would win.

I was overly righteous and awkward as an adolescent politico, but I deserved some credit for my sincerity, which was so intense that it frequently ignited the wick afloat in my vast reservoir of ignorance and naiveté.

Not much had changed by 1992, when my team finally won for the first time. I crept into our foster daughter’s bedroom to herald the news. Except Erica wasn’t in her bed, or her room. She wasn’t anywhere in the house. She had climbed out her window and run off down some rural road to hang out in a friend’s basement plucking off her orthodontia, one tooth at a time.

That wasn’t the last disturbing episode from Erica, who remained a part of our family for years even as her primary residence kept changing as she transferred from one intensive therapeutic setting to the next, while she stayed with us on weekends. Eventually she ended up in my hometown of Duluth, where we continued to visit her until she emancipated herself from the system to become an exotic dancer, or at least that’s what she told me during one of our last conversations. I was not surprised, based on all that I knew about the abuses Erica had racked up at the hands of her toothless father, her disinterested mother, and a string of others who had swung through her life.

I think of Erica often, especially during election years. That girl really had something. She was smart, talented, and profoundly wounded. She had every reason to be consumed by rage, but she wasn’t. She was self-destructive, yes, but also unabashedly enthusiastic. She was resilient. She walked with grace and operated out of kindness and intuition an astonishing amount of the time. Sometimes I see someone in a car or standing in line at a store and I think it’s Erica, but then I realize she’s not sixteen anymore. She’d be closer to the age I was when I stood in as her mother. Chances are, I wouldn’t even recognize her, even though I can still picture the shape of her small white teeth that stayed straight even after she pried her braces off herself. Truth is, I saw something admirable in Erica’s do-it-yourself dentistry, violent though it was. Erica didn’t waste a lot of time feeling sorry for herself and she had the brains and the guts to make her own solutions when necessary. No doubt she’d have had a knack for politics, and I sure do hope she’s out there somewhere, getting by just fine, and raising a little hell in all the right places.