Years from now honey I will be blamed for everything you do!
You would do well to have a Maxine Christy Kimball as President.
She raised four boys alone. By rough calculation she had changed almost 5000 diapers, prepared 65,700 meals, swept, vacuumed, and scrubbed 10,200 rooms and laundered a pile of clothes, that if neatly folded and stacked (not always the case), would have roughly equaled the cruising altitude of a 747. The number of motherly events she shepherd, Sunday masses, birthdays, holidays, PTAs, Cub Scouts, football, baseball, basketball, swimming, science fairs, school shows, doctors’ visits, teacher conferences, summer camps, picnics, vacations, and at least one enema on yours truly, were more numerous than my memories can reasonably be expected to calculate. Not to mention the budgeting, taxes, investments, house maintenance, debts and such other adult fare we never knew about. (excerpt from my Autobiography of a Nobody).
As for the four boys she pushed into college: Well, with them there was alcoholism, thievery, drug use and smuggling, which got one a bit of prison time.
Not a real word yet, but used enough, and it will be. Comes from a Mensa Lexophile competition and perfectly describes the impenetrable mucous protecting Trump supporters from thought.
Carole and I moved to Phoenix, where she studied for the Arizona Bar while I tried to do anything I could to help pay some bills. When she passed her Bar exam, I knew I was in trouble. My talents were miniscule, my education little better than that of a performing monkey, fortunately the one profession left to me needed no training and most monkeys could do it and actually do, do it — politics.
It was Christmas 1979, I was sitting in the living room with Carole, now a lawyer, and Steve, her former boyfriend, a talented artist, teacher, and good friend to us both. What should I do with my life was the question and run for office became the answer.
We knew a bit about politics, or at least enough to know that voters would elect just about anyone. None of us knew anything about local Phoenix politics or had any money. In fact, Carole and I had just moved to Phoenix, where her family lived, had no idea who the State Legislative incumbents were, let alone whether they were doing a good job or not. That not knowing, made us no different than you, or close to 100% of you who wouldn’t recognize your state representatives if they dropped in for dinner. Despite these impediments, we made 2 decisions that evening that 11 months later would remove a nice guy and pretty fair legislator from office.
First, was a catchy slogan. Every new, first-time, unknown candidate should have a good slogan I thought, some message that helps people remember the name. A very big deal when running for those little offices that few citizens ever go to the polls for. As with all local candidates we would largely be dependent upon the spillage from those on the top of the ticket, the Presidential, Gubernatorial or Congressional candidates who get the ink, resources, and attention necessary to be known and stimulate the electorate. All of which is completely backwards. The top of the ticket gets all the glamor while it is the bottom, those little candidates, the state legislators, city councils and school boards that have the power to impact you, and your family’s everyday life. Constitutionally the president may decide what to do with the people of Iraq, but he can’t do much about your neighborhood and most of us spend a lot more time there.
Anyway, after much discussion, I decided on, “Richard Kimball is Running.” An absurd slogan for sure, but political success is often built on the absurd. In this case, my name happened to be the same as a popular Hollywood TV series and later movie called the Fugitive, where an innocent man named Dr. Richard Kimble, is forced into running from the law. It was perfect. We even put a little running man logo on our signs so the point wouldn’t be missed.
It was an instant hit. And arguably, the only popular thing I ever did in my 7 years as a politician. The second important decision we made that night was that I would run for the State Senate against a popular Republican incumbent who also happened to be a local television personality. It would clearly be an uphill slog but a person who has a lot of energy and nothing else to do, can do a lot as a political candidate.
I would spend the next 11 months going door to door, thousands of doors, speaking to an amazing assortment of beings living in anything from dumps to palaces, but all with two things in common — They all lived in my district, and none knew who the Hell I was.
I distinctly remember the four doors I knocked on early that first morning. The first two, I was a little nervous and to my relief, no one was home, so I wrote out a note that as it turned out, I would write thousands of times on my campaign brochure. It said, “Sorry, I missed you. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to call me at my home.” Signed Richard with my number.
She was home at door number three, and the image is forever etched in my memory. She wasn’t more than 22 or 23, with tangles of long blond hair sweeping over her shoulder and sleep still dozing in her beautiful round blue eyes. She stood barefoot, dressed only in a bathrobe that was gloriously snagged on the doorknob. This vision launched my desire to knock on door number four and the thousands to come over the next eleven months.
Door number 4 was different, a whole lot different, and a revelation that would steel me for all the doors to come that would close in my face, beginning and ending with me in mid-sentence about my running for office.
My mind still smothered in the delights of door number 3, I knocked. “Who is it?” the voice barked. Shocked out of my dreamy fantasies, “Sorry to bother you Mame,” I stammered. ”My name is Richard Kimball, I’m running for the State Senate. I just wanted…” Suddenly the door swung open. Her hand grabbed to secure the lock on the screen. “I just have one question for you,” she huffed. “Great, what is it?” I said. Glaring at me, she jammed her words into my ears, “If elected, will you promise to support a law requiring the castration of all men accused of rape?”
Now I had given a great deal of thought to many issues, but castration of the accused had not been one of them. We talked for quite a while. I was pleasant, sympathetic but never told her that I could support mutilation before conviction as a proper punishment. None the less my concern convinced her that I was a sympathetic friend, and as I imagined what horror this woman must have suffered, she became my first vote.
For a pitiful few, it is a most valuable lesson. It isn’t so much what you stand for as it is what you feel, the language you use and manner with which any normal human would instinctively respond. All of this came very naturally to me, I did not need to pretend, be bombastic or solicitous in any way. I needed to follow Franklin Roosevelt’s advice, “Be short, be sincere and be seated (or in this case quiet).”
Never liking to draw attention or talk, I was a gifted listener and empathizer with almost anyone’s view no matter what it was. It was where it came from that was of interest to me.
Going door-to-door suddenly became fun, often stimulating and endlessly educational. In fact, it would occur to me some years later that I may have been the only candidate ever who truly enjoyed campaigning but hated serving. When serving, I would learn, real people were part of your past.
In the months ahead, door after door, with my passion and interest clear to all I slowly gained support. I walked the streets of central Phoenix seven days a week, every week, from 8 in the morning to 8 in the evening for those 11 months. At some point a few people started to welcome me, they had heard I was coming from friends or relatives in neighborhoods I had been through weeks before. Sometimes they would offer me a soda or a sandwich and actually seemed to enjoy talking to me. One day a photographer showed up and wanted to take a picture of all the shoes I had worn out. I was having a good time. Most of the people were kind, thoughtful and full of all kinds of notions, and it was clear that no one had ever shown any interest in what they thought.
NEWSPAPER PHOTO OF MY WORN OUT SHOES
My little running man went up in yards and on street corners. On Election Day, State Senator Tim Hayes, a popular television personality, a good and decent man and fair Senator was gone. I don’t think he ever knew what hit him. For me, winning was one of those precious moments in life never to be repeated. The experience was pure joy.
Thousands of Arizonians took time out of their day to go to the polls, grab a ballot find my name and say, “Ya! You’re our guy!” That is the nonsensical notion that germinates the “BIG HEAD” all politicians grow. It is a complete dumpster load of the smelly stuff, as I said, people are drawn to the polls by the top of the ticket and just blindly vote for one party or the other on down the ballot. My funny little running man nudged me over the top in what had been thought a Republican district.
The experience of winning with family, friends, and supporters all about, was the purest joy but had sobered by morning.
“Hey, things are just great, we are doing just fine,” not even incumbents. Fear is what sells in politics. In politics the world is always about to end. Complain about your current circumstance to any survivor of the Revolution, the Civil War, The World War, Great Depression, World War II or a dozen other trials they somehow bested to give you the life you have, and you’ll know regret.
“No generation of Americans have had it easier, yet every successful politician knows that fear works, it’s what drives people to the polls to vote for the very savior making them fearful. Politicians are the very definition of the expression “Drama Queens.” They can sensationalize anything, it is what gets attention, creates audience sells product and GOD DAME IT, advances the very world they harp against.
Once a researcher noted, “You are four times more likely to die drowning in a bathtub than you are from a terrorist attack.” Bathtubs have been knocking Americans off for a very long time now, but no one suggests we commit the nations treasure and tens of thousands of lives in an all-out attack against porcelain producers and plumbers. Even though it could scarcely be a lesser undertaking than what we did in Iraq, Afghanistan, or any American war in my lifetime.
The most minor issues are blown enormous when enormous issues are not apparent…”
(Excerpt from my The Miracle of Me — Biography of a Nobody)
What if there was nothing that molded you, nothing that pulled you this way or that, inclined you to like or dislike, you existed in an eventless void without the thinnest tinsel of influence? What would you think, would you even know to think?
That world once existed for each of us, at that split second our consciousness began. From that instant on, each of us has been led, guided to our thoughts, ushered to our judgements of all that surrounds us.
Each of us is the product of incalculable variations in experience. It is those variations that make me so different than you.
Those profound differences that developed, could once make mouths water at the thought of a nice slab of whale blubber in Alaska or a pile of fried or nicely aged maggots in Italy.
Starting slowly and now accelerating to starship speed, our world is homogenizing into manageable clusters of conformity where one can easily forecast what the members of one cluster or another do, want, think, and believe.
The deletions in experiences and the bundlings of commonalities are increasing in most every aspect of our lives, whether it be in how we live, what we do, where we buy, what we see and listen to. One can now easily forecast what the members of one cluster or another do, want, think and believe.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in politics, where we are captured in clusters of like view, all pulled and inclined to identical judgements, shaped by today’s unscrupulous sources.
With the loss of trusted sources of information and the growing inability to know what is so and what is not, there is no escape. And now with A.I.’s foot on the first step of the human ladder the end of unmanaged thought or what we think of as free will is near.
All that is left is the uncontrolled molding of billions of malleable minds.
No one seems certain what WOKE means. All words have a life, like people, they change with age and never more so than a newly born one.
It is how a word is used that defines its meaning. Right now the use of WOKE seems most like a synonym for political correctness particularly as it applies to any class of disadvantaged.
If it stays on that track I hope that one day it will get its due: That is to say, every single one of us owes a debt to WOKE. If there were not enough WOKE, no one would have the vote, certainly not women, we would still have slavery, ovens for Jews would still be in operation and Christians could find themselves lion food in the Colosseum.
To preserve a modicum of sanity and friendly relations if I take a walk when someone talks politics. I have found there is comfort in not knowing another person’s views.
However, this week as so many liberal friends celebrate Trump’s indictment drawn from a sexual affair, I just want on the highest hill to scream how dangerously desperate that inditement will be made to appear.
Is paying off a prostitute really the important issue?
When the conservatives wanted to impeach Clinton for Whitewater, found nothing but Monica Lewinski and so impeached him for that, was the world made right. Does anyone really think men in power won’t follow the urge to pollinate the flowers that gather about them. Hell, even Jimmy Carter “lusted in his heart.”
Be careful what you wish for? You better.
This celebration will play the key role in turning what is an imbecile into a martyr with his millions of nymphlepts. He had sex. He tried to hide it. Ya, that’s unusual, let’s get him for that and engorge his line, “The liberals are on a witch hunt and will do anything,” with real value.
This indictment helps build him a silken cushion to fall upon when it comes to the serious issues that truly matter, like insurrection, election interference and tax fraud.
Sanctions will not succeed and rarely, if ever, have been the deciding factor in conflicts.
American media continues to push narratives that suggest the sanctions have real teeth and suggest the Russian people will rebel as the bodies return home.
The reality is that the Russian economy continues to expand, even out pacing Britain and Germany and will continue to do so as their trade with powerful economies such as China, India and Turkey explode, none of which support sanctions.
The Russian people’s support for the war does not faulter as had been hoped, but grows in patriotic fervor as their sources of information pitch the West as working toward Russian destruction.
The end game we hope for and need:
The West recognizes roughly 7% of Ukraine as Russian, including Crimea and the Russian-speaking areas of Donetsk and Luhansk — roughly the territory Russia claimed in 2014.
Ukraine, whose economy has crashed, gets to retain all of the territory they had prior to the 2022 invasion, gets peace, and the funds to rebuild, substantially but not solely provided by Russia.
Neither Russia nor the West can lose in this conflict. Anything much less or much more than such a compromise will put world disaster on the table.
Now we, as the LUCKIEST GENERATION, choose to live unearned lives on the gains made by our fathers and their fathers before them. Lives that all previous generations in human history could never have imagined.
Yes, we spent much of what was earned and saved in the past and much of what has yet to be earned in the future, all to enjoy today.
Mention rational adjustments to our spending on Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid or defense and we will butcher you.
______
Richard Kimball, Vote Smart Founder
Sign up on my blog at RichardKimball.org
or Medium.com at: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016
Brandon and Saudia would have been in jail instead of on a plane headed for home if my wife and I hadn’t been there. Two brilliant students just finishing internships working for us. One was headed back to work for the governor of Indiana and the other into health care in her native Georgia.
With an early pre-dawn flight, we decided to give them a lift on the two hour drive up to the Portland airport.
Now this gets a little tricky to explain, it is a “you had to be there” kind of thing. But here is my best effort: I was driving and Adelaide, my wife, was sitting in the back seat directly behind me, while Brandon was sitting shotgun and Saudia directly behind him. In the dark of the night, we came up to a stop sign before turning left on to a main but poorly lit street leading out of town and to the Interstate. Off in the distance, parked under a tree, I noticed what I thought was a parked police car. I turned left, drove five or six blocks as the police car slowly approached from the rear and then suddenly hit its lights and siren at the same instant that another police car came screeching around the corner in front of us, hitting its siren. I pulled over.
I was completely fuddled and asked Brandon what I had done. I knew I hadn’t been speeding. He shrugged his shoulders and Adelaide said, “Maybe one of our brake lights is out.” Two police cars for that?
I didn’t think so. I watched as the policemen that pulled up behind us quickly jumped out of his car and put his hand on his holster, while the other car put on its brights and blocked the road in front. “Wow! What the Hell is this?”
The officer with his hand on the gun quickly approached me from behind, then seeing me, slowed as his hand dropped to his side. Now it was he who looked fuddled.
Nervously I asked him what I had done. In an odd, suddenly cautious and disappointed voice he said, “Never mind, you can go,” and blurted out an inaudible something to the other police car and briskly walked back to his. Both cars pulled out and disappeared into the night.
Brandon, Saudia, my wife and I just sat silent for a minute or so. I glanced over at Bradon and then back at Saudia. Neither would look at me and then I got it.
I just exploded. When we had turned left onto the main street the police car down the block only saw Brandon and Saudia in the windows. with two others in the dark shadows next to them. They saw a car full of black people.
Apoplectic would be the word to describe my reaction. I had never seen it up close and personal, but now that I had there was blood in my eyes. I wanted floggings or at least a couple of badges.
I ranted about how I was going to some friends in the local press and city council. When I finally came up for breath Brandon and Saudia just looked up and stared at me, and then as if in tag-team manner asked that I not do that.
I was now the student and to be taught by two who had clearly earned their PhDs.
They told me that if I did those things, it would only make it worse for other blacks. Their suggestion was simply this: “If you really want to do some good, if you want to be helpful, Richard, sponsor some community discussions on racism and tolerance. It will bring it out into the open and maybe strike a note with a few who will make such things less likely.”
The effect those two had on me came in level parts of shame and awe. Of course they would know, this was no first time for them.
Yes, some community discussion, it was the thing to do, the smart, effective, helpful, proper thing to do. But I was none of those things, and by noon I could be found in the mayor’s office unrolling an obscenity-laced review of the night’s events.
She, of course, promised to have a stern discussion with the Chief of Police who would make sure everyone was properly chewed out and made all the more hateful.
There were more important pressing things to do with my time than sponsor forums on race. Besides I had stirred up a nice angry pot and could now, like most of the self-righteous, point my countenance skyward and arrogantly walk on, confident that I had busted some ass and created peace on earth.
Score one for me on the Mutant’s team.
The other side of the coin is this — a defense that will upset some who read this. Not a defense of those policemen in my story, but one that knows they are not the norm. I could give you equally vivid emotional descriptions of the hundreds of ethical, honorable police officers slaughtered on America’s streets each year, putting their bodies between you and real evil.
It isn’t a desire to hurt others that generates generations of police cadets. It is a desire to do good, to serve, to be of value to their community, friends, and family and to feel value in themselves.
It isn’t unusual, it is normal for some in any profession to turn to the dark side, particularly in a profession that finds a few hundred of its number murdered on the streets every year.
Could it be that showing more value and far better screening might be a more fruitful response?
You do not want to give up the protection of those willing to protect you, but we might fork over bigger salaries and a lot more training to avoid those on the dark side.
— –
(Excerpt from Kimball’s Autobiography of a Nobody — The Miracle of Me)
Deny elections, deny vaccines, deny climate change, deny wages, deny all abortions and health care for the poor. Defund social programs and public education. Support assault weapons, a paralyzing defense budget, and a Christian nation.
Eisenhower, Nixon, Goldwater, Ford, Reagan, the Bush’s, and every other Republican leader in history weren’t!
Walking through your day you step past the most undervalued, precious assets we have: those few still willing to be our children’s teachers.
As parents, we no longer pay them, encourage, or respect them as our parents and their parents once did. Worse yet, since parents don’t, the children don’t either.
The temporary shell was needed to relieve the school’s overcrowding, a lonely cube of a portable classroom deposited out on the back lot. Students sat on their desk-tops, happily laughing and tossing whatever was at hand at each other across the room. They were celebrating that happy event when their teacher was out sick, and a substitute was needed. Then I walked in.
I had been substituting for about a month at some of Tucson’s tougher schools. All of them had serious problems due to funding requirements that reduced the number of teachers while retaining each student no matter how disinterested, disruptive, and abusive they were.
As I began taking the roll, I asked the students to settle down and please take a seat. Most did, with a few I had to repeat myself and one, a 13-year-old named Tommy — well he was different. Tommy remained seated on his desktop with his back to me. “Very funny,” I joked, “but I need you to take your seat so we can get started.” His response commanded the clear vocal projection of a seasoned actor on the Broadway stage, “Fuck You,” along with a crowd-pleasing hand gesture on a limb streaking toward the ceiling, announcing to all that I was his number one.
Now I was an imposing presence, 6’ 4” and 245 pounds of mostly muscle at the time. I instantly wondered how Mrs. Shenfield, my third-grade teacher at 5’ 2”, would have handled this. I had no idea, so I simply towered over him and with a stern voice ordered him to take his seat or he would be sent to the principal’s office. Tommy redelivered his line and gesture, adding that they didn’t have to do anything some dumb substitute said.
I wrote out a pink slip and told him to get out and go to the principal’s office. He sneered, snatched it from my hand and stomped out. For what remained of the 50-minute class the portable was rocked, first by him launching his body against its sides and then by rocks and bricks, until just before the bell rang when I had to unplug the air-conditioner because it started to spit out dirt and then smoke.
As soon as the bell rang, I was out the door chasing Tommy around the building where he entered the class from the opposite door. Pushing over all the desks and chairs he could, he ran out the opposite side.
I did not catch up to Tommy until the last bell of the day. He was trying to sneak out through the one gate students could get to their school bus. The march through the school’s halls to the principal’s office was a long one and for the ages. Every disgusting, vile thing he could think of, and I dare say you too, was disgorged in an endless tirade of colorful descriptions regarding my privates and how I used them. I was amused, silent and just made sure he stayed on track directly to the principal’s office.
When we got to the office, the principal was on her way out, and as I quickly explained about the destruction of property, she blurted, “I don’t have time to deal with this now,” and walked away.
Arriving the next morning there was a note on my desk saying, “Report to the principal’s office immediately.” It was there that I found the principal, Tommy and his two angry parents. The principal immediately announced that I was being dismissed. As my jaw went slack and I dumbly responded with a ”Huh?” there was a knock on the door. It was another teacher who said she had something to say. As she closed the door and began to speak there was another knock on the door, then another. Within less than a minute the room was filled with strangers, all teachers, none of whom I knew.
It appears that Tommy caused such an uproar in our walk down the halls to the office the previous day that teachers had streamed out of their classes to watch the scene as we passed. I had never seen them, nor do I remember what each one had to say that morning in the principal’s office, but it was pretty much along the lines of what that first one said who claimed she had never seen anyone suffer through such outrageous abuse and yet remain so perfectly calm.
Turns out neither Tommy nor I got released that day. With Tommy the school needed to continue counting him as a student because funding depended upon student retention. With me, well that was because if I had been fired a dozen or so other teachers were about to take a walk.
I think the world of schoolteachers (unlike college professors, who are unfortunately better paid, often full of themselves and get to teach people who pay to be there). Schoolteachers are never full of themselves and are given our youngest minds, at their most vulnerable, absorbing, educable time in life, yet we strip them of authority, money and our respect, yet still expect our children to excel in reading, math and have some knowledge of civics — all of which plummeted in recent years.
THE GOOD
Next to my 3rd grade teacher, Mrs. Scheinfeld, Mr. Evans became the greatest teacher ever with nothing more than a moment out of his day. He was the school’s track coach with a sideline as the remedial math teacher. Or maybe it was the other way around, I really didn’t know.
I was working on some simplistic bit of math designed for pinheads in the school’s remedial math class. He walked up behind me, stood there a second checking my work. Then he did something no other teacher had ever done, would do, think to do, or have any cause to do: He put his hand on my shoulder, smiled, and said, “You’re good, too good to be here.”
With that moment from an adult I admired, I took off like a rocket into the unknown. I devoured math, excelled at math, and suddenly became better than anyone I knew at math. Within two weeks I had been taken from Mr. Evan’s remedial class and dumped into Mr. Karloff’s advanced trigonometry class. I had begun having dreams of being a great architect or astronomer.
That moment of encouragement would live on in my recreations of it for other children to this present day, whom I have strived to have that same effect upon.
THE BAD
Well, I did not become an architect, and my astrophysicist dreams ended abruptly with Mr. Karloff’s trigonometry class.
On my first day in his class. Mr. Karloff a mean, craggy 300 pounder with a scowl cemented to his face, caught my best buddy Stevie Bogard, who had been in the advanced class for some time, chewing gum. Mr. Karloff explain to the class that “Stevie must not have been on his mommy’s tit long enough,” as he picked him up by his heels and shook him until the gum fell out.
Unseen, in the back row I swallowed my split of Stevie’s gum and slunk deep into my seat, invisible again, my glory days with digits over.
THE ODIOUS
Now Mrs. Upham, the history teacher, was the school’s oldest, with long gray-white hair pulled back so tight it must have hurt. A joyless woman and devoted sleuth, searching for any and every fault a child might have.
Now back in the 1960s, and maybe even with some teachers today, being unappreciated as they are, what they taught in history class was tested something like this:
Event #1, who was involved and on what date?
Event #2, who was involved and on what date?
And so on.
Little effort, at least in my experience, was made to make history exciting and relevant. Tests were simply exercises in memorizing names and dates, apparently with the purpose that you can still remember them to this day.
But one Friday, Mrs. Upham really hit a homer with me. She said, your homework assignment is to do a report on Arizona’s gubernatorial history.
Wow, now that is relevant, that is the office my dad ran for, and I was all in. Screw the neighborhood games and TV. I didn’t work on it all weekend, I reveled in it all weekend.
When Monday morning came around and the other students put in their one and two-page papers I handed in a 30-something page manuscript of each governor’s accomplishments, records, and dates, complete with what pretty pictures I could find of governors visiting historic sites cut from Dad’s stack of old Arizona Highways magazines. I gave Mrs. Upham a big smile as I set my masterpiece in front of her, knowing my work would be as unexpected as it was treasured.
Mrs. Upham picked it up, quickly leafed through it and then wasted no time on her evaluation. “You didn’t do this,” she scowled, then ordered me back to my seat.
I got a D.
NURTURING TO A FAULT
Almost all teachers, in my experience, were on the student’s side. My French teacher was named Mr. Gauntlet. How perfect is that? It was my sophomore year, and I am pretty sure that I chose French because I thought it would impress girls. In fact, one day it did impress one. She was very cute, a new student who came to school wearing a blouse with La Fleur de Jardin printed on it. A remarkable streak of luck, since those happened to be the only four words of French I knew and would provide me with the only truly impressive opener I ever had.
She did not know what the words meant. “Why you are the flower of the garden,” I said. She turned beet red and gave me a smile to die for.
It made me want to follow up with, “Would you like to go out, fall in love, make babies and spend the rest of our lives together?”
At the end of that sophomore year a remarkable event was brought to my attention. It looked like I was going to make the Honor Roll. The Honor Roll! Me, the invisible idiot? The Honor Roll? All I had to do was somehow not flunk French. Not possible I thought, I had flunked every French test, quiz and question Mr. Gauntlet had given me. It had become so hopeless that I had stopped handing in homework assignments weeks earlier simply because I no longer understood what the assignments, now given in French, were. Mr. Gauntlet, who seemed to like me despite the grinding wreckage I made of his native tongue had mercifully stopped calling upon me in class.
But with the Honor Roll there was the chance I could announce to the world that I was not as stupid as I thought and was sure everyone else knew me to be. I went to see Mr. Gauntlet, told him about my Honor Roll dream, “if only I could somehow pass French.” A kind, gentle fellow, he wanted to protect me from myself, and told me that if I could get just enough questions right on the final exam to get a D he wouldn’t flunk me.
I went home and crammed for a full 20, maybe even 30 minutes. It was too painful, just too hopeless. When the following week’s exam was scored Mr. Gauntlet pulled me aside and told me that I did not do well, that I had not only gotten the worst grade in class but that I had the second worst grade in the entire school. “Second” I thought, well that’s something. Then to my excellent surprise and what I would later see as symptomatic of the lax educational system’s “keep students happy” horror spreading across the land, Mr. Gauntlet gave me my D.
For that D, he wanted a deal, as he put it. “I’ll give you a D on one condition.” “Yes, anything,” I said. “That you promise me you will never take French again as long as you live.”
No winning lottery ticket ever felt so good. I made the Honor Roll, dubious as it was, and Mr. Gauntlet would not have to worry that I would enter some colleague’s French class claiming to have passed his.
So much politics to write about and suddenly struck dumb, unable to hold a solitary thought for more than a blink of my red puffy eye. A strobe blinks out endless distractions, a sneeze, an aching jaw, hip, shoulder, an uncontrolled “toot” of the troubles below to come, a throat wincing at the endless hacking release of gluey phlegm so indigestible by the bathroom sink my wife begs me to spit into the trash instead.
Three years after the “Shit Show” started in Wuhan, after getting every vaccine and booster, and a few cases of N95s, I have the Covid.
And yet, I feel lucky. I live in a country that saved and is saving millions of lives all over the world, including mine. We Americans did that. As I come out of my misery, I toast us!
His burial ended with what seemed every police officer in town, off their motorcycles and out of their cars, in a long line of helmets in hand and in salute as the hearse rolled passed. It surprised me to see that, but I instantly understood. Even at just 13 years I quite naturally got it. The greatest person ever born was passing.
He had come to Arizona from Massachusetts in 1927 as a sick 17-year-old. He had fought ill health much of his life and when his father died his mother brought him out, hoping the dry desert air would do him good. It worked! By the end of his first year, starting as a junior at Tucson High School, he was elected Student Body President, starred in the school play, was President of both the Junior and Senior Clubs, led the Latin Forum, became the state’s debate champion, and captained the school’s tennis team. That last one, the tennis team thing, didn’t seem like a big deal until I found out the school didn’t have a tennis court at the time. In fact, I doubt there was a tennis court anywhere in town. Somehow, he got 50 of his classmates wanting to play tennis and thus convincing the town to build its first tennis courts at his high school.
He had been president of his high school, the University of Arizona’s lawyer, Tucson’s Chief Magistrate, the State Senate’s Majority Leader, and the target of a long-distance javelin thrower who stuck it in his back (or that at least is the tale he liked to tell about that long scar down his right shoulder). He had come from a family that landed in Boston in 1632, the first being a fellow by the name of Richard Kimball (my name sake), a wheelwright. By the 1880s they had created the Kimball Opera House in Atlanta (where they convinced the governor to move the capitol), and had factories and hotels from Boston to Waikiki. All of it anchored in that carriage business Richard had started and where Thomas Edison would one day display his new-fangled lights, not long before Henry Ford heard of the carriage assembly line they developed and converted it to some newfangled put puts. I knew none of this until long after his death. He just never talked about himself or his family.
Dad and Me
All that he had been to others was insignificant to me. When you are 13 years old and the greatest influence in your life becomes seriously ill, and the seriousness is kept protectively secret from you, and when he is suddenly announced dead at your kitchen door, the devastation is an indescribable torment that you never fully recover from.
The 13 years I spent with him pointed the way to every important career decision I ever made.
I was maybe six when we had our first political discussion. It was simple and to the point. As we pulled out of the St. Ambrose School parking lot, he noticed that I was staring up at the Stars and Stripes fluttering at the top of a pole in the school yard. He asked me if I knew what that was. I shrugged and said it’s a flag. He turned around, looked at me, “Do you know what it means?” I had no idea; it was just a flag. “Kimmy, that’s our flag,” he said. “For a great many years thousands have fought for that flag and many have died defending it. You should be very proud of our flag.” That was all he said, but the impact was colossal. To say that I was then proud is a whopping understatement. As we drove along, I started to notice the flag over the bank, over the post office, over the tallest office buildings in town. With each sighting I became more excited, and my sense of pride swelled. In that short drive I had become bigger, taller, and more full of myself than I ever would be again. When we finally reached home and pulled into the driveway, I saw my best buddies, Butchy Becker and Stevie Bogard, sitting under a tree across the street. I didn’t wait for the Packard to come to a complete stop, I jumped.
After Dad scolded me and disappeared into the house, I sauntered over to where Stevie and Butchy were sitting. Slowing to a shuffling swagger as they noticed me, I said, “You know that red and white flag that’s over just about every building in town?” “Yeah,” they said, glancing at each other. “Well, that’s our flag,” I triumphantly announced. Butchy and Stevie were unimpressed and gave a puzzled condescending response to the enormity of my revelation. “So what?” they said.
“Well that is our flag! It is everywhere, people have died defending OUR flag. Where is your flag?”
Everybody knew my Dad, no matter where we went folks seemed to know who he was. As a kid I didn’t know why but traveling around was just different with my dad than it was with anyone else. With him I wasn’t invisible, couldn’t be invisible but did not care, because I was very popular and didn’t have to do anything or say anything to earn people’s affection.
I knew so little about him when he was alive. My discovery of who he was, what he was, and where he came from happened long after his death. Most important to me in those early years is that he never thought I was slow or stupid. If anything, he seemed to think I was special and took me everywhere.
I loved it! Particularly the track meets, baseball games, basketball games and the U of A’s football games, where he would introduce me to the players and even got the U of A football coach to be my confirmation father (a big deal in the Catholic Church). At games, which Mom rarely went to, Dad would sometimes get us a room in the press box, where he would announce the games — something he had volunteered to do back when he was a law student in the early 1930’s because the university would not pay anyone to do it. The university changed its mind after Dad’s first game, when they heard him occasionally interject announcements about the latest sale down at the Ford dealership or the after-the-game hamburger specials at Burger Boy.
He got us one of the press box rooms hoping to keep an eye on us and keep us out of trouble. It didn’t work. Inevitably by the second half, the school would be down by a dozen points or so and Dad’s idiot children would fill the time by doing the kinds of things idiots do. If we had nothing of value to destroy, we could always toss airplanes made from the program pages or bits of popcorn down on the crowd below.
By the time he died I was old enough to know that he was a pretty big deal to a lot of people. Everyone knew him, respected him, liked him but no one more than me. My world simply cycled around his presence and anything we might do together.
The only political campaign he was ever in that I felt old enough to help with was in 1956. I was 7 and it was a race for something called Governor. I didn’t understand much about it, but I noticed one afternoon as we pulled into the neighborhood drug store a stack of colorful stickers on the back seat next to me that said, “Kimball for Governor.”
As we pulled into the drug store parking lot, I asked him what they were for. “Oh, people put those on their bumpers to show their support,” he replied, then hopped out of the car saying, “I’ll be back in a minute.”
Now it is a parent’s lot in life to provide for their kids, always helping you, encouraging you and such, but it is a rare event when a child thinks of returning the favor.
As he entered the drug store, I was instantly on the job and a few minutes later Dad came out just as I was gluing the last bumper at the far end of the parking lot.
Dropping your jaw and having it slap against your chest is, I believe, a unique ability, and I feel certain no one but my father had it. Just as surprising was his ability to run, something I had never seen him do as he grabbed and slung me into the car. Sadly, the only thanks I got was from the super-exciting squeal the tires made as we headed for home.
Dad was always suffering from some ailment that stole his breath. A few weeks after the “bumper sticker incident,” he got sick again, which was a part of our family life from time to time. He kept up his unsuccessful campaign for Governor from a hospital bed.
Giving Dad my tough look for a campaign picture
When he was healthy, I would sometimes feel trapped into listening to him talk with his friends. I cannot recall much of the adult subject matter discussed but I did notice that everyone seemed to care what he had to say and on occasion he would notice me and dumb down the conversation in efforts to include me. And that was the thing about Dad, sometimes he would treat me like I was an adult, or at least I felt like he did. The day that he spoke to me about his being the Majority Leader was to become a memory of considerable significance to me. I can’t remember his exact words, but I do remember his exact meaning. He said, “If you are interested in doing good in life, public service allows you to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people.” Twenty years later, I would sit as the youngest member of the Arizona State Senate where he sat and wonder what the Hell had happened to that idea.
Serious floor debate did not exist because outcomes were known in advance, the outcomes pre-arranged either in the majority party caucus or, if absolutely necessary, in concert with the minority leader, who might be able to corral a few cross over votes. On my first depressing day, after all the senate members filed out, I sat silently in what might have been my father’s seat thinking, “My God, was my father one of these people?”
He wasn’t, and I think I can prove it, prove that it is honor, ethics and public good that has deteriorated before I am ended with this book.
At 13, you are just old enough to know what death means, but you’re not old enough to cope. As I came home from school on a perfectly good day Mom met me at the back screen door. Her manner was matter of fact, no nonsense, just get the painful truth of it out. “Kimmy, your father passed away this morning.” In an instant, what had been ordinary, his struggling up stadium steps to his press box, the wheezing for breath, his never used old tennis racquet and golf clubs, and that odd look he gave me during my last visit to the hospital blasted into an unbearable reality. He would never talk or walk, never see, smell, touch, laugh or breathe. I would never see him again, forever, forever and ever.
To this young boy the effect instantly crushed every bone from my body. The wailing went on for hours and would re-emerge for days.
Mom, unable to console me, started sending in seconds, my older brothers, and friends of the family. They would enter my room in futile efforts to calm me down. It wasn’t until late that first night when I saw how worried she was about me that I bit into my tongue to relieve the pain that was the most excruciating I had ever known. To say I wanted to die and join him wherever he was, would be spot on the mark.
Adults are forever casting a child’s traumas as less significant than their own.
A mother’s death can be as devastating and life altering as any event can be. I assume it is the same with all adults who lose their last parent, you suddenly have some itty-bitty sense of the loneliness that an orphan feels. You have lost the crutches you didn’t know you had leaned on for a lifetime, and suddenly must walk on alone.
There were plenty of private tears when Mom passed but there was also an intense pride that was palpable to everyone in the church as the four brothers sat alone, ram rod, shoulder to shoulder, in the first pew facing what remained of her.
I was in my late forties, adjusting my posture to sit straight and proud, when the youngest brother, Johnny, stood up to give the eulogy, a selection mother had requested should she die. Billy, Bobby and I shifted nervously in the pew. Johnny, the youngest, had never given a speech before, and was intensely close to Mother. John wept at her passing as if he had lost the most loyal friend he had ever known and that was so.
We were certain he wouldn’t be able to talk about Mom in front of the crowd and hold it together. But Mommy knew best. He stood up and walked with resolve to the pulpit, turned and faced the crowd . . . then hesitated, just stood there. After an anxious moment, he did a strange thing. He reached into his pocket with his right hand, pulling something out, then crossed his hand over his body, placing it over the bicep of his other arm. The brothers were ready to stand, go up and let him off the hook, but he began to speak, a wonderful eulogy, only pausing a few times. His pauses were a bit lengthy as he seemed to hug himself and then went on warm and touching in a way that was exquisitely personal to the three of us looking up at him.
He concluded his eulogy talking about Colonia Solana, the old neighborhood where we were all raised and learned most everything valuable that we ever would. He told stories about the neighborhood, said there were a lot of other families and a lot of other kids, and then finished with, “But it belonged to us, the Kimball brothers, it was our neighborhood, we knew it, everyone knew it, we owned it.”
When it was over, I told him how wonderful it was, how proud and enormously impressed I was with what he said, and how he had managed to hold it together and get through it.
“I knew I couldn’t do it,” he said. “What are you talking about, you were just terrific,” I argued. He then looked at me strangely, unsure of something, then went on, “I knew I would lose it, so I had this thing.” He reached into his pocket and pulled it out. “Every time I started to lose it,” he said, “I crossed my arms and dug this in.” He had pulled out a long bloody needle.
There were still some people around and I had to quickly excuse myself, I hadn’t yet cried that day. It was so typical of my brothers, an intensely secret, protective, passion that I would only know in childhood through my brothers.
Colonia Solana had been one of the nicest neighborhoods in town, with maybe 100 old well-to-do homes. My mother had sold our home 15 years before and the four of us had never gone back there together, but we did that day with the box of Mom’s ashes. We told outrageous stories of things we remembered and had done at each house as we slowly passed them until we got to our own. As we approached our old house and Billy, Johnny and I were debating a befitting placement for mom’s ashes, Bobby suddenly hopped out of the car with that box of Mom, marched up the driveway to the front door, and started casting her all over the grounds and the memories of what she and we had done at that glorious place.
I doubt she would have approved; her memories could not have been our memories. By rough calculation she had changed almost 5000 diapers, prepared 65,700 meals, swept, vacuumed and scrubbed 8,000 rooms and laundered a pile of clothes, that if neatly folded and stacked (not always the case), would have roughly equaled the cruising altitude of a 747. The number of motherly-sponsored or -ushered events, Sunday masses, birthdays, holidays, PTAs, Cub Scouts, football, baseball, basketball, swimming, school shows, doctors’ visits, teacher conferences, summer camps, picnics, vacations, and at least one enema on yours truly, were more numerous than my memories can reasonably be expected to calculate.
Perhaps she was like your mother if you were of shockingly good fortune.
All that she had done in our teenage years, she did alone. Her husband dead, leaving her with nowhere near the money the house would suggest and four boys with the total accumulated good sense of mice tickling the whiskers of sleeping cats.
The four brothers had been unrelenting in their mischief. It never really occurred to us that she was human. She was tough and although she would often laugh, I never saw her cry but for that one occasion with the pharmacist. As the four of us aged and mellowed, which took a forever, we slowly came to realize that Mom could have had a life, she had wanted things, once had ambitions that had nothing to do with us at all.
MOM
As I said, she had knockout good looks and brains. She also had her own radio show, did some television, had chances to work in the theater, even had an offer to kick off her career in Hollywood from some comedian she once wowed named Bob Hope. She dumped on it all for the mountains of laundry, dishes, meals, schools, sicknesses, and endless trouble and trauma brought by four thoughtless jackass children. She did her duty, but it was clear that part of her longed for that other life she could have had. So, on occasion she would dabble with her dream, doing comedic monologues at conventions, or a few bits in movies or commercials if they were filmed in our hometown.
She worked at it when she could, kept her dreams alive and kept herself in shape well into her 70s, doing things I could never do and doubt you could either.
Decades ago, my congressman boss would joke: You know what the difference is between a cactus and a congress? With a cactus all the pricks are on the outside.
HUH?
Give me a switch and it would be tough to choose who to smack first: The Republicans who cower at the feet of their lowliest, or those Democrats acting joyous at the spectacle.
This is what happens when the mindless self-obsessed of our number, once only seen in the crassest of local politics, are elevated to the highest offices in the land.
This is the opportunity, for what is left of reason, to come together from both sides and put our nation back on track. Not Republican vs. Democrat, but the rational/thoughtful vs. the galactically stupid.
Losing weight. The most popular New Year’s resolution. Started with dogged determination and ending with that first tempting French fry, potato chip or cream puff.
Hard to imagine a resolution more made and less kept.
Maybe this year try something new, less narcissistic and a little more egalitarian, something that helps us all.
Something that gives an option to the easily digested partisan news and provides us with the nutrition we all so desperately need: Supporting a source of accurate, abundant, dependable facts on those that govern or wish to replace those who do: VoteSmart.org
