What follows is best described as a politics crawl, each location having its known slot on the rounds of the office-seekers. There’s breakfast at the UAW Hall, then a visit to the Crumstown Conservation Club, where beer is flowing and people are dancing the polka by about nine in the morning. It is also customary to visit the African-American Elks #235 Lodge on Western Avenue, where a “Solidarity Day” party is held that is just like Dyngus Day, but with barbecued ribs and chicken taking the place of the kielbasa and kluski. Keep moving, and eating, and by noon you’re back at the West Side Club for the largest event, complete with a blessing from a Polish priest and some short speeches. Afternoon campaigning is not for the faint of heart; it’s best to stick to churches, and more senior-oriented clubs, where the beer hasn’t flowed quite as liberally.
THIS YEAR, DYNGUS DAY FELL just one week before the primary, and by lunchtime the West Side Club was packed. As the smell of sausages and cabbage wafted to the ceiling, the candidates made our final case. I talked about the need for a fresh start for the city. Ryan Dvorak stressed his experience. Mike Hamann, through a surrogate, thanked everyone for the support for his family and made clear he was still in the race. Barrett Berry, running a distant fourth, spoke of his South Bend roots and time as a staffer in the Clinton administration; the fifth candidate on the ballot had dropped out altogether.
I voted before dawn, in a brightly lit lobby at the Notre Dame basketball stadium, the polling place for my neighborhood. Next came a ritual Election Day breakfast with my parents at Nick’s Patio, and a visit to the Grotto on campus, to light a candle. What followed was as interminable as my last Election Day, but more excruciating because I felt this one was mine to lose. Once again, I had written two speeches, a concession and a victory speech. To blow off steam I went to a park with my friend Nat, who flew in at the urging of my staff to keep me company (and keep me sane), to toss a football around. In the sunlight outside Jefferson School I did another round of interviews on how I felt confident but not complacent, and, with nothing else to do as a candidate, headed back to headquarters to make campaign calls with the others.
“Les agradezco de su voto,” said Benito Salazar into the telephone, and moved on to the next name on his list. Cordell, our volunteer coordinator, checked on walkers headed to African-American neighborhoods on the West Side, while my high school teachers Mrs. Chismar and Mrs. Lightcap sat at a folding table and called through the voter lists one last time.
There were dozens of people helping to get out the vote. With every seat taken, my sixty-six-year-old mother was sitting on the floor, a cell phone in one hand and pen in the other, marking down responses on a clipboard propped on her knees. People from every corner of my life filled the once-empty storefront. There was Jody Freid, the self-described universal Jewish mom of the campaign, next to a friend of mine from Harvard who had come in to help for the final days. There were high school kids that our intern, Tyler, had recruited, next to neighborhood leaders and sheet metal workers. An elderly homeless veteran, whom we had nicknamed “Jimmy Carter” because of his resemblance to the former president, made calls next to a Notre Dame student taking a day off from class.
“How’s it look?” I asked one staff member or another every ten minutes or so, peering over their shoulders in the boiler room at headquarters as they obsessively refreshed the spreadsheets on their laptops. Trackers at key precincts sent back reports on turnout, showing our strongest precincts coming in very strong. We wouldn’t know how people voted until six, but the places where I was most popular were voting off the charts.
I retreated to my house by the time the polls closed, wanting to be out of the team’s hair and needing a little quiet before preparing, win or lose, to face my supporters and the cameras. I climbed out through an attic window onto the small balcony overlooking the river, and was watching its mesmerizing flow when the phone rang. Dvorak was politely conceding and pledging his help in the general election; soon Hamann called to do the same.
Mike drove me back to headquarters, and Kathryn met us as we came in the back door. It felt as if everyone I had ever known was in there. It took about fifteen minutes to get to the other corner where a podium was set up for me to give a speech, working across the room in a blur of handshakes and hugs. We had won a majority in the five-way race, decisively securing the party’s nomination in our Democratic city. The Republicans had not found a strong nominee on their side; indeed, many Republicans had crossed over to vote for me in the Democratic primary, knowing that a Democrat would likely win in November and hoping that it could at least be someone with a business and military background. Almost certainly, this was the ball game.
In my speech I thanked each staff member, down to the interns, and the campaign volunteers. I reminded them the real work was ahead, then insisted as we had at the campaign’s outset that South Bend had everything we needed to succeed and grow. But I knew now that the challenge ahead would be different in nature. It was one thing to pull together a coalition for a campaign; another to keep a community unified through momentous changes. After the speech, as the applause grew to a roar, I turned to Mike: “Let’s be sure to enjoy this. Pretty soon we’ll have to start making decisions, so tonight may be the most popular we’ll ever be.”
WITH MOST COMPETITIONS, YOU SLEEP in after the big day and begin to recover your energies. But for political candidates, the day after a win at the polls usually starts even earlier than Election Day itself, making the rounds of the morning TV shows. Determined to cover all the local stations in the morning-show window, I raced through the green rooms and studios of all four, in one case going on right after the puppies from the animal shelter. On television, you typically get two or three minutes to boil down whatever you have to say—and in my case, the hardest part was doing so while seeming lucid before dawn. It felt like one last challenge to cap off the months of phone calls, debates, and fundraisers. But I knew as I faced the studio lights and camera lenses that this was going to be the comparatively easy part. Going from campaigning to governing meant there would be plenty of interest in what I had to say, but far more attention on what I was actually going to do.
7
Monday Morning: A Tour
Waking up comes hard. I’ve never been a morning person, and nothing can take the edge off a 5:30 cell phone alarm tunneling into the sweet haze of sleep. Strategically placed, the phone sits in the next room so that I can’t snooze or silence it without first getting out of bed. That four-second-long walk will bring just enough alertness to remember my promises. I must stay in motion, and not slide back into the warmth of my dreams.
I try not to wake Chasten as I slip out from under the covers and walk to the small table where the phone sits. Truman is indifferent, curled up into a brown fur oval on a bench two feet from the bed. I lumber across the floorboards of the landing toward the bathroom to brush my teeth. The one-inch white hexagonal tile, cold on my feet, is the same kind as in the foursquare house where I grew up, some five hundred feet away. In the mirror, I make eye contact with an unshaven, bleary-eyed man in his mid-thirties, looking harmless but not thrilled to see me at this hour. I’ll just never be a morning person.
If it were a Tuesday, I would have about half an hour to create the impression of being a morning person, for the benefit of a local TV or radio audience. Though I’m hours away from my best level of functioning, coffee and professional necessity can make me just lucid enough to coherently answer the questions of the hosts on my near-weekly round of morning news appearances. It’s one of my best opportunities to make the case for a new idea or make the public aware of a new development in the accelerating growth of our city.
But this is Monday; no media today, and no early event, which means it’s a run day. It’s cold out, but there is no ice on the ground. Ice will deter us, and sometimes rain gets us down, but if it’s more than zero degrees out and not slippery, then Joe and Tim and I can do our morning run. I pull on track pants over long underwear, a U.S
. Navy hoodie over a long-sleeve T-shirt, and think about the saying I heard once during a delegation to Scandinavia: there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. (It rhymes in Danish: ikke dårlig vær, bare dårlig klær.) In other words, put on enough layers and you’ll be fine.
Even the stairs are grouchy; they creak no matter how softly I tread. Everything in this 1905 house moves a bit, breathes a bit, especially in the wintertime. When I step out onto the porch to fetch the South Bend Tribune, I can see my breath, just as I could see it indoors when the real estate agent showed me the house in 2008. It had been vacant for nearly two years; most of the pipes had burst, and an irregular chorus of low-battery beeps came from a half dozen smoke detectors upstairs. The porch was in near-collapse; some of the small columns holding up the second-floor veranda were split in two, yet somehow still in place. Two big columns held up a small balcony outside the attic, one with a hole in its base so big you could put your hand through it. Carpenter ants and termites had undermined the pillars. Inside, every room had either cracked plaster or strange and peeling wallpaper, or both.
Yet the house drew me in. There was a fireplace, not working but salvageable. No one had painted most of the wood inside, including paneling in the hall. Its beauty was faded but not destroyed, and even the textures of its decay were appealing, like the irregular painted flooring of the small back porch. Every few days I’d check the asking price online, and watch it dip by a few thousand dollars each month as the bank that had foreclosed on it grew more realistic. Half a year after I first noticed it being advertised, it finally fell to where I could afford it. The mortgage, insurance, and taxes all together would be about eight hundred bucks a month, about half of the rent for my Chicago place and considerably less than I used to pay in Washington for a basement studio apartment accessible by a door facing an alley behind U Street.
This house had good bones, as they say, and just needed a little work. Specifically, rebuilding the porch, tuck-pointing the chimneys, and replacing the broken pipes and collapsed floor in the bathroom. And then there was the rotted wooden framework holding up the third-floor balcony, and the small columns, and the bases of the big columns, and the wiring, and everything in the basement, which had flooded at some point during its vacant period, and the termite-ridden baseboards, and the unmoored light fixture dangling only by an electrical cord. . . . Friends kept asking me if I had seen the film The Money Pit.
It will never truly be finished, but we’ve got it looking good now. It’s home. From the porch I can see the lights of Memorial Hospital and the Chase Tower downtown, across the swift and steady river embanked alongside our street. The Tribune now in hand, I step back off the porch into the hall, stuff the paper into my briefcase, fold a suit over one arm, sling a gym bag over my shoulder, and try not to close the back door too loudly. I pull the back gate shut, step onto the concrete slab in the alley, and begin scraping the windshield of the Jeep. At 5:50, it is totally dark. But by now both Joe and Tim have taken leave of their wives and children and are also headed toward the gym. They’ll be ready to go at 6:00 sharp, and so will I.
The Jeep warms up quickly. It’s more car than I need, but the brutal winter of 2013, along with a transmission problem, motivated me to part ways with the old light green Taurus I’d bought when I moved home, known to interns and staff members as “the Chick Magnet.” The Jeep is better for transporting a bike, a visiting reporter, or a small contingent of staff. Its interior enjoyed fifteen minutes of fame when Mark Zuckerberg visited South Bend for a mayoral tour and decided to go live from an iPhone mounted by suction cup to the dashboard, inviting in hundreds of thousands of viewers. And, crucially, it has seat warmers.
The Jeep and I are nearly alone on the small bridge over the St. Joseph River, pulling up to a roundabout with WELCOME TO SOUTH BEND spread across it in big, illuminated white letters. This roundabout, and a second one afterward, are not the most popular thing I’ve done, but they’ve improved traffic flow and the look and feel of our entrance to downtown. Through the second one and down Main Street, I turn onto the cross street and pull into a parking garage. I drop my suit and car keys off in the locker and put on a hat and gloves. Tim will be waiting in the lobby of the gym, a carpeted area with a big-screen TV where retirees sip coffee before or after their lengthy morning fitness routines, while young professionals and working mothers stride purposefully across the carpeted floor toward the aerobics classroom or the weight and treadmill area upstairs.
Tim is a lawyer, formerly an accountant, taller and slightly older than me. Raised in Argos, about forty-five minutes south of here in Marshall County, he is judicious and conservative both politically and personally. The day I came out, via an op-ed that hit early in the morning, he was one of the first to text me something encouraging. Partly this was because he is a good friend and the kind of person to make sure to reach out. But it was also partly because his farm family upbringing never left him, which means he gets up ridiculously early, and so was among the first to read the paper that day.
Joe, by contrast, is nearly ten years younger than I am, a college track team miler who had interned in my office during my first summer as mayor. He was one of a handful who had humored me by joining the early Wednesday morning outdoor workouts that I organized that summer for staff and interns, during a particularly zealous and short-lived CrossFit phase. We’d go up to the track by the former Saint Joe High School and flip two-hundred-pound tractor tires that had been left there in the grass by the football team, do sets of push-ups between laps around the track, heave bags of water softener salt, and swing sledgehammers, that sort of thing. The interns called it CrossPete. That regimen didn’t outlast the summer. But Joe and I kept in touch, and he took up running with Tim and me after he finished college in Fort Wayne and moved home.
One reason we get along so well is the three of us don’t talk too much. Chatting is optional, depending on collective mood and energy level. A companionable silence governs the first few minutes as our trio gathers by the mouth of the parking garage in our sweats and hoodies and we trot, still in darkness, east on Jefferson across the two lanes (formerly four lanes) of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard (formerly Saint Joseph Street) and across the parking lot of the Century Center toward the sweep of the river.
From the Jefferson Boulevard Bridge, you can see the man-made rapids in the river and the River Lights, a permanent legacy of our 2015 anniversary celebrations. We raised over $700,000 to have an artist install a dynamic light feature to illuminate the cascades of the river in sweeping and shifting colors. Rob Shakespeare and his wife, Marie, moved to South Bend and spent three months in town perfecting the design. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 153 volunteered the labor to set up the lights, some of which had to be mounted under the arches of the bridge. Like all good public art, the “Bean” in Chicago being the best example nearby, it has a charismatic quality that invites people to come up close to it, and to mix with others not like them. On summer evenings you will see clusters of people, clearly from different neighborhoods and lifestyles, walking in the park overlooking the cascades among lighted towers that respond to motion with patterns matching the lights on the water below. The colors of the light sculpture make up a universal language; very different faces light up in the same way, responding to its hues, when it surprises them with a burst of gold or pink. At this hour, no one is in the park to take in its kaleidoscopic glow, but we are treated to the red, then blue, lights striking the mist from the cascade and the fog from the comparatively warm river in the cold air, as we continue east toward Howard Park.
Careful not to slip on some remaining clumps of snow, we run on tiptoe down the concrete stairs connecting Jefferson above to the park below. The stairs bring us to a river walk, leading to a path originally built by the WPA during the Great Depression. Farther downstream the river roils with eddies and whirlpools, but here above the cascade it is wide and slow, almost glassy in the morning dark.
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Monday is for long slow runs. The ideal running week (not that I claim that this happens often, but you have to work from an ideal) involves a long slow run on Monday, an interval workout at the track Wednesday, and a fast-tempo run on Thursday or Friday. Depending on the month, and the year, and things like whether one of us has a new baby or a pressing deadline these days, the Monday run is five, seven, or nine miles. To show you more glimpses of the city, we’ll say that today’s run will be all nine, a full figure eight.2
TWILIGHT TECHNICALLY HAS THREE PHASES, each brighter than the last: astronomical, nautical, and civil. The vague and doubtful suggestion of blue now must be somewhere between astronomical and nautical, as we round a succession of curves on the riverbank beginning with the path by the boathouse, where squads of lean rowers from Notre Dame will appear in a few months when it gets warmer, walking from the building down to the dock holding the sleek boat over their heads.
The twilight will unfold, unhurried, across the St. Joseph Valley. There is soon just enough to make out the heron, if we are lucky, stalking cautiously on the opposite bank. To some he is a villain, guilty of helping himself to fresh protein from neighbors’ koi ponds, but to me he is an elegant bird.
Down past the campus of IU South Bend and on across the bridge, we are for a few seconds outside the city limits of South Bend and instead in Mishawaka, our smaller twinned city to the east. But turning right, heading back west with the dawn’s early light at our backs, we almost immediately come back onto South Bend territory. Along the way, geese hiss and rearrange themselves while we proceed on a wide, well-lit sidewalk, perfect for running except for the minefield of goose shit.
Shortest Way Home Page 13
