Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [109]
After the Baltimore debate, I went up to Chuck Todd and Craig Crawford in the spin room, a large hall where journalists could talk to the candidates or their surrogates about how the debate had gone. But Chuck and Craig were off to one side, alone. “Don’t you all need to be talking to someone other than each other?” I asked. Craig smiled. “How are we going to know what Conventional Wisdom is unless we talk to one another?” I doubt I could have gotten them to sing.
Aaron Pickrell, who ran the Iowa staff, and the entire Iowa staff, whenever they were on the bus, would sing. They were great sports about everything. Aaron would sing while bouncing Jack on his foot. Only Brad and Patrick, also from the Iowa staff, could also manage that feat. Rob, who’ll bounce his own baby when he returns from Iraq, was the most reticient. Johnny, who drove—and owned—the bus, was the music man, whether he sang or not. As we approached the site of a speech or a town hall, Johnny would turn on the music on the bus’s exterior loudspeakers, which drew in everyone age seven through thirteen in the surrounding blocks—none of them, of course, voters. When he moved from bus driver to disc jockey, he would take off his driving hat and put on a cap with a long ponytail attached.
Brenda, his wife, was just as polite as he was mischievous. It says something when the best-dressed woman on the bus is the driver’s wife. I could sometimes get Brenda to join in the singing. She had a prettier voice than she would allow, but whenever she would catch me pulling out the songbooks, she would start preparing something in the bus’s tiny kitchen to get out of singing. Brenda would feed us and feed us. She reminded me of the Cher character Rachel Flax in the movie Mermaids who, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, served her daughters hors d’oeuvres. We ate sausages wrapped in just about everything. We had pizza shaped in every way except like pizza. We had stacks of cheeses and meats and crackers cut into quarter-size circles, so we could make the smallest Dagwood sandwiches imaginable. And I don’t want to suggest we put our noses up. We ate it all. There were times when Randy Galvin, who watched the children, or Jennifer or Cate would beg Brenda to get some apples or something green, and she always would, but left to her own devices, it was pigs in a blanket. The only times her food was snubbed were when Sam Myers brought fresh corn aboard from a spot called Camp David in Iowa Falls and when we stopped at the Iowa State Fair. As John was giving a speech in the Iowa Falls restaurant, I was talking to the waitresses—since the customers were listening to John and no one at their tables was ordering anything. “That corn looks great,” I said. “Came in about noon,” one said. “Picked this morning,” said another. She saw the look on my face, a look born of two straight days of appetizers-as-meals, and she said, “We can cook you up some.” Without hesitation, I motioned to Sam. We still talk about that Camp David corn. And Brenda—and her tiny bus kitchen, it wasn’t a fair fight—was also outdone by the Iowa State Fair pork-on-a-stick. It’s called pork-on-a-stick, even though the stick is really the bone, but no one was quibbling. It was the best meat of any kind we’d ever had.
After Cate—who knew not to bother complaining, just join in the singing—Jennifer Palmieri was my most reliable singing companion. She would sing anything. She would sing anytime. Jennifer is also a child of a military family, but she is more like my father than me, jumping with both feet into every experience. She had moved enough to know the part of The Great Santini that is absolutely accurate for nearly every family: traveling in the wee hours and singing all the way. There are people who are so full of life that being around them either makes every moment delicious or exhausts you. Sometimes, admittedly, Jennifer would exhaust John. Sometimes, frankly, I would exhaust John.