Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [138]
None of this had anything to do with being a Republican or a Democrat. Maybe the best politicking doesn’t, and shouldn’t. It shouldn’t in Canton, North Carolina, or Asheville, where John and I toured after Hurricane Ivan devastated those mountain communities. It shouldn’t in Millvale, a working-class town in Pennsylvania where Ivan left some of his last markers, and where I visited in late September. The people in these places were cleaning up and helping each other out, no questions asked. I filled plates at a makeshift cafeteria in Millvale and then ate a little lunch with those who were taking a break from cleaning. The room was filled with people, with strollers and walkers. And young people, high school boys, I’d bet, wearing baggy skate-boarder pants covered in mud, were sweeping the floors, taking out the trash cans as they filled with paper plates, just doing what they could. And when their crew had finished eating, they put down the brooms and went back outside to work again, picking up their shovels at the door. I left Millvale, this devastated place, with a sense of real hope for us all, because people, even young people who were supposed to be too self-absorbed for such things, cared about their communities.
The day’s lessons weren’t over, either. That night when I got to Ohio, a group of Ananias, who had told my staff we might be related, was waiting for me at the Holiday Inn. The staff set up a little room with sodas and snacks, and I went down to meet these Ohio Ananias who might be related to my dad, a Pennsylvania Anania. Here’s what I discovered: it doesn’t matter if they are family or not—they are “family.” Pete Anania, his arms crossed as he stood against the wall, clearly the one who’d had to be convinced to come, and his wife, Betty; Vicki Anania with a collection of handsome children and grandchildren, Angela and Eric and Dominique and—how did he get in here?—Tyler; Tony Anania, more like my father than any of the others, always a smile and another story. And more cousins, pretty girls who looked like my own cousins. We spent an evening being family, and I am still on their e-mail list and suspect I always will be.
At first we traveled commercially, but after canceled flights and one incident when state troopers boarded to arrest a passenger, the campaign decided I should fly privately. The first forays into chartered flights were not happy. We had a tiny plane from Los Angeles to Reno in late August. There was no room for everyone’s luggage, except for the two pieces I carried with me—a garment bag and a duffle bag, both lime green so Ryan could find them easily—and there was not nearly enough room for the agents. Three agents sat at the rear of the plane on a bench seat on which I might have put Emma Claire and Jack. Hargrave took hear-no-evil-see-no-evil-speak-no-evil photographs of them wedged in there. As we landed, all the oxygen masks on the plane dropped down, which was alarming enough, and in addition they were nasty looking. We had to get back on that plane an hour later to go to Las Vegas, and when we boarded, the pilot was taping the oxygen mask compartment doors shut. Taping them shut! The plan was that we would fly again on this plane from Las Vegas to Washington. “I’m not doing it,” I told Ryan. No one would ask anyone else on this campaign to fly on a plane like this. “It’s not safe. I have a credit card, I can get my own commercial flight back.” The Secret Service started to get fidgety; they don’t like changes in plans. “There are no commercial flights