It was timed perfectly the thunder and lightning that shook the house and lit up the living room. I was on the couch watching the speeches from the Republican National Convention. They were lacking passion and drama, so I appreciated the storm outside, providing special effects.
And after Mitt Romney spoke, accepting his party’s nomination, and the red, white and blue balloons dropped, I drifted in a time warp to another Republican convention where I stood on the floor, looking up at hundreds of those balloons being held in nets on the ceiling. I was five years old and, though I knew little about politics, I was pretty much an expert on balloons. The place was the Cow Palace in San Francisco in 1956 and my mother would be attending the ceremonies later that night. She had brought my older sister and me into the convention hall as a quick surprise before we were taken home.
An hour before, we had been on the tarmac with Pat Nixon and Mamie Eisenhower, giving them roses. My mother was proudly sporting her campaign button that read, “Ike and Dick are sure to click.” I was wearing a tiny straw hat and a red, white and blue polka-dot dress and a bit of attitude. My mother later had me pose in that dress and took a black-and-white photo and had those dots hand-tinted along with some strange rosiness on my cheeks.
I remember asking if we could stay until they released the balloons and my mother said no, the balloons were for the adults. I remember this because we talked it about years later. What kind of unfair party saved the balloons for adults, anyway?
Mother was a delegate from California to the conventions most of her life. It took her to places she’d never been New Orleans, Dallas, Boston, maybe I don’t remember them all, and now in her “memory care facility” in California, at almost 89, she is longer speaking, so I will have to go elsewhere to learn those answers if I want them.
To fully appreciate the storm outside, I decided to turn off all the lights in the house except the light of the television. In the dining room, as I turned off the light, I picked up the little shadow box of treasures I have from my father’s side of my bifurcated family.
My father and his people I was an adult before I knew them were Catholics who lived in Sacramento all my life, but they came from Utah and the treasures I have are from this state. Someone, either my great-grandfather, a circuit judge here, or his wife, or his daughter, one of the first women to graduate from the University of Utah, went as an alternate to the Republican Convention in 1920 in Chicago. Since that was the year women got the vote, I wonder if Utah was enlightened enough to send a woman there. It would be lovely to think that. Since the box also includes a ribbon from the Utah State Fair and a heavy metal badge proclaiming Mrs. J.D. Davis a director of the fair, I have to assume my great-grandmother found her own ways to be involved in giving of her time and talents.
Though I voted for Nixon twice and Clinton twice, I have never aspired to become involved in working for either party. I have never wanted to run for office or to help shape policy in a partisan sort of way. But I am a bit of political junkie, along with a news junkie, and I have no shortage of political views of my own.
I have been privileged to meet high-ranking politicians in my adult life, mostly because of my years working in journalism. However, the time my mother wanted to introduce me to former Ambassador Shirley Temple Black at a Republican luncheon, I went just out of curiosity to see the former child actress.
My mother was clearly uncomfortable with the gracious woman who represented my mother’s district in Congress. I asked her later, “Why the cold shoulder?” She reminded me, again, that she and Shirley had gone to the same acting school in Hollywood in the 1920s. Mother still resented the fact that the other girl with the ringlet curls was chosen for film and she was not. Politics, I was reminded, are sometimes weirdly personal.
Mother proudly always voted the party ticket. Later in life, when I would challenge that practice, she would become frustrated and shout, “You just don’t understand politics!” And that might be the only thing we agreed upon. I still don’t understand all the posturing and convoluted explanations to real problems that shouldn’t wait to be fixed because a particular party is in office. I can’t imagine we have ended up with the country our free-thinking, rebellious founding fathers wanted to see.
Back in my living room, the balloons on the screen were falling in gay profusion, an expression that had no double meaning when I learned it as a child. And though, for a variety of reasons, I will be voting for the reelection of President Obama, I identified at that moment with one of Mitt Romney’s grandchildren, who ran down the stage steps and starting gathering up an armful of the falling balloons.
The five year old inside me was applauding her bold move. “You go girl,” I whispered to five year olds that spanned a hundred years. And I know with time, I will explore all those ghost girls of my family when I do some research about us all, perhaps starting this Sunday in the Park …
Teri Orr is a former editor of The Park Record. She is the director of the organization that provides programming for the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Center for the Performing Arts.