Eighty Feet Apart

Two houses’ front doors are eighty feet apart, the width of a lot line. They are two-story vernacular frame houses, with generous front steps leading up to lit porticos. Azalea bushes run under first floor windows. Laurel oaks, the leaves of which provide good mulch for the azaleas, grow on the front lawns. Up through November 4, a sign was staked out in front of each. The sign on the house to the right had the name of the Elephant Party candidate for President; the other, the name of the Donkey Party candidate.

As I drove by the houses many times a week up to the 2024 election, I pondered about the families who lived there. I created a back story for them. Both couples are in their mid-40s, college educated. They have 1.7 kids under eighteen, a number not sufficient to sustain America’s population growth. The “mow and go” man who services the lawns of both houses, a Guatemalan immigrant, has five kids. He does his bit to support population growth.

Each family has a teenager with braces who has started receiving brochures and Instagram videos from Southwest State University. A 529 plan may cover the first year at Southwest … maybe.

Both families use Softsoap, the best-selling liquid hand soap and Angel Soft, the best-selling toilet paper. One drives a Toyota RAV4, the other, a Honda CRV.

One mother manages an insurance broker’s office, the other sells real estate. One mother is a runner, the other plays pickleball. The husbands are 20-handicap golfers. They both have wicked  slices they can’t get rid of.

Saturdays the Wall Street Journal lies on the walk of the right side house, the New York Times on the walk of the left side house. When the husbands went to fetch the newspaper in the months leading up to November 4, they peeked out the front door to see if the other was there, before stepping out in his pajamas. If they saw each other they said, “Good morning!” and then thought, “What did he mean by that?” Each returned to the breakfast table with a coffee and a bowl of cereal in front of him, laid the newspaper down and turned on the television, one to Fox News, the other to MSNBC.

Before the 2016 election, the families had barbeques together, grilling in each other’s backyards. The kids tossed footballs while the dads exchanged views on bourbon whiskeys and the moms shared book club titles. One mom watched the other’s kids when a youngster fell off a swing at school and the nurse called.

No more.  A virtual Grand Canyon has split them.

There were divisions in my childhood. You were either an Oreo cookies fan or a Hydrox fan. Hydrox did not get as soggy when dipped in milk. Oreos were sweeter. You were either a Jif peanut butter guy or a Skippy’s guy, crunchy peanut butter vs creamy peanut butter being even a greater issue. The deepest cultural cleavage was Yankees vs Rebels. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were my North Stars. Their pictures hung on my bedroom wall. I was Episcopalian and had Catholic friends who served as acolytes in church like me but would recite things in Latin. Differences were like cultural wallpaper. “Otherness” was hardly explored.

As an army brat, I was inoculated from politics by the protective cover of the Hatch Act. There was no canvassing for election within the bounds of the army base. No one I knew ran for office. For public consumption, my father was not a Republican or a Democrat. He was ferociously conservative when it came to assuring the army had sufficient weaponry. Drew Pearson, a muck-raking syndicated columnist fond of skewering army brass, made him apoplectic. He rattled the breakfast crockery, slamming down a fist about “that son of a bitch!” Conservatives lived on both sides of the aisle.  Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a Democrat, was as much a war hawk as Barry Goldwater.

The only President I was aware of who had caused angry citizen groups to shake fists at each other was Franklin Roosevelt. My Life’s Editor’s parents dismissed him as a socialist, calling him “that man!”  Eleanor was a closet communist or at least a “fellow traveler.” The winds blew that way at my home as well.

I was at the gym last week, engaging in my version of pumping iron, when I overheard a conversation that gave me pause. There was a toned guy in matching shoes, shorts, shirt and ball cap, a fit blonde woman in spandex with icy blue eyes, and a short, wiry, aquiline-featured man with a dew rag around his head. The blonde and the wiry one are regulars. She lifts easily three times the cast iron I do. Ditto for him, but he also dances around the gym throwing grunts and punches. They agreed that boxing, which they all practiced, helped with pent-up angst. They moved on to consider shooting as a stress reliever, as all had pistols. She allowed that at her outdoor range back home, she imagined the target was her presidential choice’s political opponent and emptied the clip at him.

Ouch.

I started my political hegira as a conservative, subscribed to the American Spectator and the American Rifleman. I read the National Review, thought Bill Buckley’s weirdness was cool. Along the way I switched sides. Today, my political teammates are called “scum,” “vermin,” “animals,” and “enemies of the people” by my former team. How do you break bread with someone who thinks that of you?  As I get ready to serve at a tennis game, is the fellow receiving my serve thinking, “Marshall has a weak serve, I’m going to hammer it” or “Marshall is vermin.”? It is exhausting looking for the “tells” in acquaintances to determine which side of the bed they favor. Do they say “sanctuary city” with a snarl?

I’m going to go to “Monograms by Barbara,” a seamstress downtown. I’ll have her stich a big “D” on my shirts, a la Hester Prynne. That should resolve the whole issue.