• • •
I’m staring at seventy, and a number like that makes you think about how many years you have left. You find yourself thinking about your kids growing up and moving away, how you’ll miss them. You find yourself studying all the stairs in your house and thinking we’ll probably have to sell it at some point, maybe move into a flat in the French Quarter.
I’m certainly not exempt from nature. This body has some miles on it. Right now I’m a healthy sixty-nine. I still run every day. I eat healthy. I travel hundreds of thousands of miles a year. But no matter what your lifestyle is, your bones grow old and brittle; you fall down. Until that time, my strategy is to go full speed ahead. I’m not young anymore, but I still can’t stand sitting around.
When my health starts to deteriorate, I know I’ll have to adjust. Like anybody else, I’d prefer to live as long as I can and be healthy, but you don’t have any choice in the matter. You don’t get to pick. But living to ninety-two is not something I lie awake dreaming about. I know I’m going to die one day.
But here’s what’s important to me: I don’t want to grow old among strangers.
Washington, it always struck me, is a city all about power. That’s why it exists. And if you live there, the fact that at one time you had power or influence doesn’t really help you much. You don’t even have to get old. Just lose an election, and people trample right over you to get on to the next thing. That’s the way it is. Time marches on. New players arrive on the scene. Your moment passes. I get that.
I think it would be miserable to be holed up in some luxury apartment building in northwest Washington, sitting around all day while a caretaker wipes your drool and hoping that your kids come by to tell you hello or somebody remembers who you once were.
Down here, people have such a different attitude toward the elderly. They are more respectful. Maybe that’s the French culture. Maybe it’s a Southern thing. But older people are revered here in a way that they never would be in Washington. When you grow old here, you don’t have to exit the culture. You can still be a part of the fabric.
You see all these old guys around here, still going to all the events. The Mardi Gras parades. The jazz clubs. The Saints games. I can just see somebody wheeling me into a bar in my wheelchair. “Oh, there’s old man Carville! What’s going on, man? How you doin’? How about that LSU game? Remember the Super Bowl?”
And there’s this: when I’m somewhere else, people know who I am. They’ve seen me on TV plenty of times. They know the Clinton story. But when I’m in Louisiana, people know what I am. We have a shared history.
I’ll never be among strangers here.
MARY
THE DAY ARRIVED FOR Matty to leave for college. Since her birth, I had dreaded this moment, but by the time she was actually going, we both were ready. This was partly due to her departure being preceded by a six-month descent into a hell that made Dante’s look like Sunday school, and mostly because she had worked with such diligence on her journey to maturity—academically, emotionally and every other way—I was more proud than sad about my little bird leaving.
Speaking of which, I have never liked the term empty nest for the transition to independence and a new parent-child relationship. But Tim Burns, the headmaster of Sacred Heart, did give me a great companion phrase for that overused and abused term, which completely captures the vicious twenty-faces-of-Eve phase girls go through during their final months at home: soiling the nest. They have to make one big hot mess of their home base and everyone in it, which thereby forces them to jump out or be kicked out.
Anticipating it and understanding it didn’t make it any easier to go through. There is way more pain to teenage leaving than baby birthing. But you will have to read Matty’s Great American Novel in a couple of years to get her version of it. I’ll just say, for me, there was no epidural to ease the pain of having your heart ripped out, sliced and diced, stomped on, lit on fire, doused with acid and returned with the faintest of beats to your pulverized chest.
Thinking back to the summer before she left, it was the kind of experience for which the phrase “Someday we will laugh about this” was coined. I hope.
And she couldn’t help this behavior. She did what she was supposed to do. And although it does seem like an unbearably nasty bit of merciless and undeserved punishment for all parties involved, it is actually indicative of a healthy kid and healthy relationship.
On our way to upstate New York, where she was going to college, she and I made a final trip to the farm in the Shenandoah Valley where she grew up. We shared all our favorite music—a lot of Josh Ritter and about a thousand different versions of “Galway Girl.”
We barely spoke as we traversed yet another amazingly scenic view through the mountains and across the rivers of the east, while Matty cued up one perfect tune after another, and when I started to flag on the final leg, she said simply and with authority, “This always works,” and cranked up Ke$ha.
Sometimes—and this was one of them—words are neither an option nor memorable. The other time was when she came into this world.
I can remember, but only vaguely, how my own folks dropped me off in front of my dorm and then took off. A quick getaway wasn’t a remote possibility for James and me. We were relieved to see we weren’t the only hovering parents. Everywhere, on every dorm floor, dads mingled in the halls, trying to act all macho, and moms unpacked, trying to act all grown-up.
Everyone should have won an Oscar; we were all so good with our performances.
We weren’t half unpacked when Matty kicked me out. She wanted to check out an orientation event with her new and already beloved roomie, Lindsey. Okay. Of course.
A small good-bye, a don’t-embarrass-me hug, and she was off without a look back.
I returned to my rental car, closed the windows, revved up and replayed “Tik Tok” over and over at the loudest volume, and I got all the way out of town before I realized Ke$ha doesn’t always work. I was crying so hard, I had to pull over. I am still not sure how I made the seven-hour drive back, but I am pretty sure I won’t be able to hear Ke$ha again without returning to that feeling.
Matty’s new life begins.
JAMES
BEFORE WE KNOW IT, Mary and I will be alone together. Matty’s already gone up to college one thousand miles away in upstate New York. It won’t be long until Emerson packs up and heads off for good too.
We’ve hardly ever known life together without them. Mary and I got married at the end of 1993, and Matty came along in 1995. So we’ve rarely lived alone, just the two of us. We’ve got this big house off St. Charles Avenue, and we’re not getting any younger. I believe we’ll probably end up in the French Quarter at some point—single-floor living, walking distance to everything, but a hell of a lot less boring than an old folks’ home.
Every parent thinks about what life will be like after the kids move out. I don’t expect it to be miserable or anything. But I know it will change.
I talked to my daughter before she headed off to college, planning out when she was coming home for Thanksgiving and the holidays, talking about when we might go there to visit. It dawned on me that she wouldn’t really live here anymore. But it’s not entirely bad. They get long breaks. She’ll come back home. And considering she’s at school in the tundra of upstate New York, I’m guessing New Orleans will be a popular destination. She’s going to have plenty of friends eager to come with her down South.
Besides, Mary and I will still be on the road a lot. I’ll have my foreign campaign work. We both will do our share of public speaking and TV appearances. Life goes on. We’ll evolve.
It’s also happening at the right time, I think. Mary and I have gotten along better than ever these past few years. Maybe that’s New Orleans. Maybe it’s just the passage of time. Maybe both. Whatever the case, if we’d have had an empty nest seven years into our marriage, it might not ha
ve been a pretty sight. We were both more focused on building careers back then; we were both more intense than perhaps we are now. We’ve mellowed a little, if only a little.
Thank God we always had the kids in the picture back then. They were a great mitigating force. Even when Mary and I could barely stand to look at each other, they united us in a way nothing else could. They got us through. I have far less trepidation about living alone with Mary now. We enjoy each other’s company. We know each other inside and out. We have fun.
Mary and I will be fine. It’s the absence of our girls, the silence they’ll leave behind, that will take the most getting used to.
MARY
MY MOTHER HAD LOTS OF TRITE SAYINGS. They dropped from her lips all day, beginning with her first cup of coffee in the morning to our last kiss of the night. When I was growing up, I didn’t remotely appreciate them—or give them much thought. Later on, I found myself living by her little quips. They floated into my mind regularly, like clouds. Life is what happens when you are making other plans.
That particular saying was a talismanic watchword for me, which for brevity’s sake was converted to Life is a bitch and then you die. Now, as I enter my sixth decade of life and my senior years, the rushed exuberance of youth has given way to the wisdom of experience. I don’t think about plans as much, or complaining that life is a bitch. I go by something different: Life is a magic carpet ride. Buckle up!
As far as I can tell, predictability has less to do with life than being totally surprised. If I were a betting woman, I wouldn’t have to put a nickel on the prospect of a hand that held loving a husband or making babies, leaving Washington or finding faith, or making great new friends in the last part of life. And . . . oh yeah, pulling for any team other than the Bears, let alone the Tigers. Magical surprises all.
You can aim your magic carpet for a destination. And if you have responsibilities, like kids, it would be irresponsible not to. But aiming—and arriving punctually at your precise destination—kind of takes the magic out of the ride, doesn’t it? And assuming that you are in control of the carpet in the first place, and where it’s going, seems foolhardy to me. You can’t know about the crosscurrents in the wind that will blow you off course. And what if the carpet has a hole?
Play a meditative game with yourself and think back to five years ago, or ten years ago, and try to remember what you thought would happen. Take my girls, for example. Even as their mother, I didn’t expect at ages ten and thirteen they would be the remarkable human beings they are now at fifteen and eighteen. On this trajectory, in five or ten more years, who knows where they will be, what they will be doing, how many lives they will have impacted. I only hope—pray every day—I am here to see it.
Now play this game while thinking of New Orleans.
Seven years ago we were fifteen feet underwater. Today we are the fastest-growing city in America, a tech mecca, foodie mecca and music mecca that’s also luring academics, bankers, doctors, entertainers, young professionals at the start of their careers and old politicos like James and me. The Crescent City has weathered Katrina, the BP oil spill and the recession—and is now leading the country in economic recovery.
As Mitch Landrieu said, “There’s no other place, there is no other city in America that has been called upon to re-create the intricate fabric of their lives like we’re doing here in New Orleans.
“And, while we’ve still got a long way to go, we’re not only back—in many ways we’re even stronger than we were before.
“We’re not rebuilding the city we were, we’re creating the city we want to become. We are proving that out of tragedy can come triumph.”
On this trajectory, I am confident, if Mitch and reform leaders like him can continue to commit their talents and time and passion to the amazing city, seven years from now we will be a city previously unimaginable in all the world.
JAMES
I DO THINK WE’VE MADE A DIFFERENCE. Maybe not as much as some people think, maybe more than others think, but a difference just the same. We promoted the hell out of New Orleans as cochairs for the Super Bowl. We’ve flung open our home to dozens of fund-raisers for dozens of causes, from Teach for America to local small-business initiatives to the Women of the Storm, a nonpartisan group of Louisianans who have really helped draw attention toward rebuilding the city. In fact, Mary and I decided when we moved that we’d do very little personal entertaining at home. Instead, we try to do “purpose-driven” entertaining. After all, we moved here for a purpose.
Neither of us ever has cared much about honors or accolades. But we were both touched when we were named New Orleanians of the Year in 2012 by the local alt-weekly, the Gambit, which since Katrina hit has been giving that title each year to people who have helped lead the city’s rebound. It’s gone to first responders and local activists. It went to the Saints the year they won the Super Bowl. In the article that accompanied that announcement, Mitch Landrieu called us “wonderful ambassadors and great friends for the city.” A columnist for the paper wrote, “In ways large and small, public and not so public, they generously and passionately embody the simple criterion that Gambit has used to select New Orleanians of the Year since 1983: They make a positive difference for New Orleans.”
I certainly hope that’s true. No doubt there’s an element of correlation and causation. It’s like the rooster that crows at four o’clock in the morning and then the sun comes up. That rooster didn’t have a hell of a lot to do with the sunrise. New Orleans has really gotten back on its feet since we arrived in 2008, but it’s hard to know how big a role we’ve played in making that happen. Rebuilding this city has been the very definition of a team effort, with hundreds and thousands of dedicated people pouring their hearts into it. I just hope we’ve played some small, meaningful part.
It’s fun, at my age, to be in a fight that matters.
MARY
AND SO IT GOES. My magic carpet ride winds down, but is far from over. My daughters are just buckling up. The most awe-inspiring, astounding, breathtaking leg of my own journey began with their entrance and is pivotally punctuated by their departure. Equally humbling, exhilarating and enchanting is marking twenty years of a never boring, always loving—if not always blissful—monogamous relationship.
As for my lifelong and ongoing passion—politics—we are about to wend our way through the 2014 midterm and 2016 presidential election that I’ve been involved in, and I do plan to be involved in the upcoming ones, aged though I may be. I have lived through big and little, dynamic and imperceptible, political shifts in the last three decades, and the America my ancestors came to, loved and fought for without reservation has largely stood the test of time. But only because each generation has kept vigilant.
My parents, as did their own, shared a passion for generational vigilance. We were raised in a moment of hypersensitivity about the future; just like the times we all find ourselves now raising this generation. There’s a reason they call it wisdom of the ages: change is certain, progress is not. All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
From the Ten Commandments to the Constitution, despite detours, debacles and disasters, humankind keeps on trucking. And on the whole, no one can say the good didn’t—and won’t—outweigh the bad. We keep heading in the right direction.
God bless you, your ancestors and your progeny. See you in another twenty years. If anyone out there has any better thoughts for today or tomorrow, tweet me.
FAQ OF THE FUTURE
WE HOPE MOST OF YOUR WILDEST QUESTIONS ABOUT US HAVE BEEN ANSWERED IN THIS BOOK, ALONG WITH THE ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS YOU DIDN’T EVEN KNOW YOU HAD. WE TRIED HARD TO MAKE YOU HAPPY. We always try hard. We are different in two million ways and don’t agree on furniture and real estate and animals in the house, but we got all the way through the book-writing process, which is no small marital feat (secret to getting through it: nobody says you have to carefully re
ad and consider every sentence your spouse writes; a quick cursory skimming of their ravings might be enough), and told lots of stories, or the ones our publisher would let us put in print.
As for the next twenty years, or even the next four, here are a few questions we don’t know the answer to yet:
What is the chance you’d ever run for office?
What is the chance you’ll get matching tattoos on your thirtieth wedding anniversary?
How many new pets are on the horizon?
Would you consider marrying each other another time?
Would you consider divorcing and then remarrying each other?
Would you wonder if divorcing and then dying single and alone might be better than another day with him/her?
What do your daughters really think?
Can you imagine ever agreeing with each other on a presidential candidate?
What if Hillary runs?
How about Mitch Landrieu?
Does make-up sex get better with age?
Will you ever move again?
We’ll check back in another two decades.
James and Mary, as cochairs of the Super Bowl XLVII host committee.
Mary in the White House with two generations of President Bushes.
Anxiously watching election results trickle in with Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush, 2004.
Celebrating winning a second term with Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s secretary of defense.
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