Wednesday, November 10, 2004
A Hug Goodbye
A rainy day here today, and I’m off work for mysterious personal reasons. A contempletive mood has crept up on me. So here’s a recollection of what was, for me, the culmination of my trip to Cleveland last week:
Tuesday Night, November 2: by 9:30 or so there were only about twenty of us left at the community center down in the dark alley that served Election Protection as volunteer headquarters. We were physically and emotionally drained, hoarse, barely dry from the day’s incessant rain, drooping, naievely blissful. One of the locals suggested that we all dine together at an irish bar nearby; I was happy to be included in the dozen or so of us who caravanned over to eat and drink and watch results come in. I had a Harp and a Newcastle and a lovely portobello gyro; I sat between a woman from New Jersey and one from DC. The group of us together presented a disparate cross-section of liberal America, representing a broad reach geographically and philosophically, but all vibrating with election-day afterglow and the lingering burn of a hard job well done and the sheer pleasure of doing nothing at all for a few minutes.
As returns petered in and our naievete seeped out the puncheons of the floor like so much guiness foam spilled by celebrating republicans, our group of 12 began to shrink. The law student improbably claimed to have to do some reading for some sort of class; some folk had to go back to work the next day. Soon it was me, the woman from DC (born in Cleveland and in her heart still there), and the local woman who’d first suggested that we go out. We paid out tabs (that reflected a “you voted” discount of 10%) and were gathering ourselves for a final dispersion into the wet autumn night when the local began to tear up.
She was a solid, responsible-seeming woman in her middle years, clearly intelligent and practical and down-to-earth. And maybe she was just a little tipsy from the long day and the excitement and the two glasses of wine she’d just consumed. But anyways she became a bit emotional and her voice broke and her eyes glistened with tears as she told us, as we took our leave of her, how deepy she’d been touched by our having come to help with the election. She’s a lifelong Clevelander, one who loves her town and who loves to show it off, to show outlanders that Cleveland is beautiful, cultured, full of good design and good food and great people, that it is a great city and not properly the butt of ignorant jokes ... and to have strangers come from gleaming cities, coast to coast, to help and contribute to her city, to her Cleveland, for no reason but their dedication to a principle in practice… she ran out of words, and so do I.
It really just felt like something I had to do, so I did it. It’s hard to describe, but inside, it doesn’t feel like a big world event. It feels very personal. And at that one moment early in the morning of November 3, with those two tired friends I’d met just hours earlier, on the corner outside of the Old Angle Inn, in moonlight that lit the puddles that filled the empty street after the rain, hugging each other a goodbye all of us expect will last forever, the rest of the world didn’t really matter much anyway.
More from Cleveland, in retrospect, tomorrow.