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By Root 1052 0

and I would speak to young people wherever I went. The politically astute nine-year-old on the flight back to Washington who recognized me and talked politics the whole way. The Florida boy outside the fruit market wearing a Bush T-shirt. (Tell me why you support George Bush. I like war. Now that’s a conversation stopper.) The round-faced boy with a Mohawk haircut at the Dickinson County Fair on the Michigan Upper Peninsula showing me the goldfish he had won. I refrained from reminding him, as I would have reminded my own children, that all balloons pop and all goldfish die. In September I read one of my favorite children’s books, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, to Connie Chouinard’s second-grade class at Lincoln Center Elementary in St. Paul, and that afternoon, after being introduced by the student body president, Marcus Mason, I spoke to incredibly well-informed high school students at John Marshall High School in Rochester, Minnesota. Mostly they were worried about the rising cost of college, although I did get an interesting existential question, which I couldn’t have repeated immediately after she asked and I cannot repeat now, from a beautiful girl dressed entirely in Gothic gear. The daily schedule for that visit warned, “There is no air-conditioning in John Marshall High School.” They were warning me, from North Carolina, that there was no air-conditioning in a Minnesota school in mid-September? Hargrave and I had a good laugh.

In August and September, I visited people’s houses to hear the stories of their neighbors and friends and answer a few questions from the press. The campaign hoped that the event would get enough press coverage to justify the expense of putting the whole thing together. Long before in the primaries, I had abandoned attempts to manipulate press coverage, and that left me to what I enjoyed most, having conversations, with the homeowners, their neighbors, the participants, and yes, with the reporters. Whatever happened happened. Some of what happened was funny. At the Gonzalez home in Burbank, I sat next to a man who was in all the press photographs of me and bore an uncanny resemblance to Dick Cheney. It must have confused more than one newspaper reader.

In a hilly Little Rock neighborhood I sat in the home of George Word, who had been in the military but was having trouble getting the military to continue health care coverage for his wife, who was in a coma. I remember his neat home. I waited before the event in the bedroom shared by his two daughters—decorated sweetly, carefully, by a man with much too much on his plate. In Green Bay, I sat next to Donna for a midday house party she hosted. It was midday because the Packers game was at 4:15, and she was not going to miss it. Donna, her husband, her children and her house were all dressed and decorated for the game. The picture over the sofa was of Lambeau Field. When she opened her home to me, she told me the story of buying it. She and her husband and two boys had been living in a mobile home, but they worked two and three jobs each to save for a house. Finally they were able to buy this immaculate, well-loved house, and she told the story of when she told their sons they were moving to a house. A house, she said, with a sidewalk. A sidewalk. And they didn’t believe her. No, she told them, choking away the tears, we really do have a sidewalk. I fell in love with these people.

When I think about campaigning, I don’t think about the anxiety of speaking to strangers, of the hesitation in eating unfamiliar food, or of the fear of being trapped in some obligatory and excruciating event. I am certain that because I grew up in so many places, surrounded by the faces of so many ever-changing people, I long ago quit worrying about that and started enjoying the ride. And let me tell you what letting go of all that anxiety, hesitation, and fear gets you: you get to enjoy, completely enjoy, an experience like I had on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I had spent the morning in Lansing with the incredible Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, and