What Do We Want?

As the dust settles from Super Tuesday 2020, I’ve been stringing names together like pearls, starting with Washington veterans Beta, Kamala, Tim (from Ohio!), John, Seth, Eric, Kirsten, Amy, Corey, Michael B. from Colorado and Mike G., a spry eighty-nine, as they’ve departed from the race for the White House. Governors Hickenlooper, Patrick, Inslee, and Bullock, and Mayors Julian, Pete, Wayne and Bill are on that necklace too. With little political experience, Marianne (author), Andrew (entrepreneur), and Tom (billionaire activist) gave it a shot, and while their candidacies were intriguing, they too saw the writing on the wall and dropped out. Now another Michael B. is gone, saving us (hopefully) from incessant commercials. What a whirlwind!

One name that surfaced early on here in Ohio was Sherrod. Senator Brown and his lovely wife Connie Schultz undertook a listening tour, but ultimately Brown decided his answer was “no.” As he told Time Magazine in January, “If you’re a sentient human being and you’re fairly high ranked in office, House or Senate, and you don’t drool when you speak, someone will come up and say, ‘you should be President.’ I’ve heard that all my life . . . But I never really thought, ‘I want to run for President.’”

Me neither, Senator Brown. A common question during our growing up years was: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I never put POTUS – or FLOTUS – on my list, even though I was enamored with Jackie Kennedy. Yet it does bear asking: what do we do about ambition?

My son Dan and I chatted about the differences between the sweet Emma Belle, already nine months old, and the charming Henry Kyle, Emma’s eleven-month old cousin. Henry is following in his dad’s baby footsteps, loving to push the envelope. I remember when the year-old Greg piled up stuffed animals and climbed from his crib onto the adjacent tall dresser. Just this week, Henry climbed out of his walker and onto the coffee table to get his Mickey Mouse book. Like father, like son.

In contrast, Dan described his daughter perfectly. “She just enjoys being a baby.” While she’s perfectly capable of holding her own bottle, she’s content to let us hold the bottle for her, because she’s getting the extra cuddling she loves. She can get up on her hands and knees and rock, but if she were to crawl, she might get too far away from her beloved Nana (smile emoji). She would much rather smile, gurgle and flirt than explore the unknown, at least for now. She enjoys being a baby.

She didn’t get the contentment genes from the childhood me. At three, I wanted to sit with my dad in the sanctuary rather than stay in the church nursery. Reading Dear Abby in second grade, pushing to join the senior choir in middle school, and wanting to hang with my teen cousins instead of my brother and sister all symbolized my desire to be older than I was. I finagled my way into getting my driving permit months before my parents wanted me to. And so it continued. Ambition. Sounds like a “Fiddler on the Roof” song.

Now, as I dive deeper into my golden years, what’s left of my ambition has changed course. Maya Angelou explains it for me: “The desire to reach for the stars is ambitious. The desire to reach hearts is wise.” 

Kazuo Ishiguro’s book, “When We Were Orphans,” gives me pause. “All I know is that I’ve wasted all these years looking for something, a sort of trophy I’d get only if I really, really did enough to deserve it. But I don’t want it anymore, I want something else now, something warm and sheltering, something I can turn to, regardless of what I do, regardless of who I become. Something that will just be there, always, like tomorrow’s sky.” Wasted? No, not exactly, but warm and sheltering beckons for sure.

Long before social media, Ronald Reagan believed that “all great change in America begins at the dinner table.” Is it time for us to talk face to face about what we do want for our country and our souls?