Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [135]
Everything has a name, whether or not the name makes sense, and the handshaking that takes place after panel discussions, town halls, and speeches is called “working the rope line,” although there was rarely a rope between my stages and the audience and although the “line” was three and four deep and, like a basket of puppies, constantly in motion. And it was dear to me, for that was the place where I could really touch those who had come. Women would reach to hug me and, as they did, they would pull me close and whisper in my ear: I lost my son, too. Every day. Debbie, the waitress in Sioux City, who cried as she asked for my autograph; things were so bad for her, and it was so emotional to be with someone trying to change things. Or they would come to me, as a pretty young woman had once, crying, saying I don’t even know why I am crying. Or they would know. Her son’s National Guard unit was headed to Iraq. The county couldn’t pay for her eight-year-old’s glasses anymore and she couldn’t afford to pay for them. Her husband’s employer was closing his factory. My parents…my daughter…my brother. It was almost never about themselves, which just added to their sense of impotence and hopelessness. There was anger, too, and optimism often, but there was always sadness. They had been stripped of health care, jobs, eyeglasses, and hope, and most importantly of the dignity of feeling that they were self-sufficient and could weather whatever was handed to them. Now they couldn’t. It didn’t used to be like this, they’d say. And all I could say was I know. And then work as hard as I could.
Just as in some respects each rope line was the same, each was unique. In late August at the University of Nevada in Reno, we had a great town hall on education issues with the Wolfpack students and the public. I had practiced saying the state name all morning so I wouldn’t embarrass myself as I had during my previous visit. Apparently the rest of the country mispronounces Nevada. We all say “Ne-vah-dah,” when we should be saying—as I now say—“Nevadd-ah.” After the town hall, a woman in the rope line reached to hug me, and I reached back as I always did, but she grabbed my neck. You look tired, she said, and I am a massage therapist. Right there, she started to give me a massage. The Secret Service stood behind me in each rope line, one hand on my back in case they needed to pull me away. They hadn’t ever needed to before, but this time an enormous agent from Miami, pulled her fingers, one by one, from my neck.
Ryan Montoya, who managed the entire trip—from making sure my luggage was with us to queuing the music for my entrances—was almost always unflappable. He must have been thrown off balance once, though, when, at a Sioux City senior center, a woman tapped his shoulder and said, “José? José?” “Why,” asked Ryan, “do you think my name is José?” Completely unintimidated she just repeated it, “José, do you teach Spanish lessons?” He came back to the hold room and complained to Karen, Hargrave, and me, so, sympathetically, we called him José for the rest of the week. It was Ryan who pointed out the road signs for an upcoming Dairy Queen on a long drive to Tucson. In forty miles. In thirty. In ten. Bob Rolin, the unbelievably agreeable Secret Service agent from South Carolina, allowed that we could stop if I wanted. So we did, and we bought Blizzards for the agents who had never been in a Dairy Queen, and we generally upset the entire place for the twenty minutes it took to feed all of us.
I talked to the families in Dairy Queen,