. . . And His Lovely Wife (12 page)

Sherrod nodded. “I'm glad you're here.”

“Well, don't be too glad yet,” he said. “I'm going to look you in the eye when you speak here. I'm going to see if you mean what you say.”

Sherrod nodded again. “Thank you for that chance,” he said.

There were a lot of working-class people there, so Sherrod talked about how selfless so many of them were when it came to caring about their communities. We'd seen this time and again on the trail. Often, the more educated and privileged the audience, the more their questions and concerns reflected their own self-interest. Wealthy businessmen complained about the estate tax, which affected fewer than one percent of the most affluent Americans, and railed against raising the minimum wage, which was still only $5.15 in Ohio. Private sector doctors wanted Sherrod to raise their reimbursement payments for treating Medicare and Medicaid patients. One physician wanted to know what Sherrod was going to do to ease the restrictions on work visas for doctors from foreign countries visiting his hospital. I'm not saying these weren't important issues, but they didn't address the concerns of most working men and women in Ohio.

Meetings in working-class communities, however, were full of people asking what could be done to help their neighbors. They grieved when the town's only public pool or bowling alley closed, because the children—everyone's children—had nowhere to play. They worried about Medicare Part D because they had stood behind senior citizens and watched them negotiate with pharmacists over which doses they could skip, which pills they could cut in half. Their hearts ached for people in Appalachia who had to choose between bathing their children and watering their cattle because they couldn't afford the high cost of private water lines into their homes. These Americans weren't as educated as those doctors and businessmen, but they sure knew what was wrong with their country.

Sherrod talked about why it mattered that so many of them were willing to take time off on a sunny Saturday afternoon to show up at Hog Heaven to hear him speak. He started with the story about the canary pin, and then cast a wide net across the room.

“We need change in this country, and you can make that happen,” he told them. “I know we don't all agree on some of those ‘social issues,' but do you really care who lives together down the street, or are you more worried about keeping your pension, sending your kids to decent schools and affordable college, and having decent health care?” Heads slowly nodded all around the room.

It was a short talk, and as soon as Sherrod finished, Spradling walked up to me. “I have something for the congressman in my car,” he said. “Could you come with me to the parking lot?”

Our ever-hovering driver, Walter O'Malley, walked out with me. Spradling leaned into his car and pulled out a dusty metal cylinder about seven inches long and full of dents. Holding it up by its thick S-hook at the top, Spradling gave a quick smile as I narrowed my eyes and tried to figure out what on earth he had in his hand.

“It's called a bug light,” he said. “It replaced the canary in the coal mine. If its flame went out, you knew you had to get out of there. This is the one I carried down in the coal mines. I used it until I left the mines in 1985.”

Immediately, I thought of my father's lunch pail, the one he tossed as soon as he left the factory. “You kept it,” I said. “It must matter an awful lot to you.”

He nodded, then handed it to me.

“I want the congressman to have it,” he said.

“Oh, Jeff,” I said, resting my free hand on his shoulder. “Are you sure?”

“Hey!” Sherrod yelled as he bolted out the front door. I motioned him over and passed the bug light to him. He listened wide-eyed as Spradling explained what it was, holding it high in the air to get a better look.

“I want you to have this,” Spradling told him. “I want you to keep it as a reminder of who you're fighting for.”

Sherrod thanked him, and made a promise. “I'm going to hang this in my Senate office in Washington.”

“Let's get you elected first,” Spradling said, flashing another quick smile.

For the rest of the campaign, the bug light held a place of honor in the center hallway of our home. A few times, I took it with me on the campaign trail and held it up as I told the story of a coal miner named Jeff who hoped that change was on the way.

eight

An Early Loss

I
USED TO HATE TO FLY.
A
S SOON AS THE PLANE PUSHED AWAY FROM
the gate, the hairs on the back of my neck snapped to attention and saluted until we landed.

Sherrod, who flew back and forth to Washington virtually every week, was less than understanding about all this. In fact, he thought it was hilarious, as if my fear of plummeting thousands of feet to an incendiary death made for one hoot of a punch line. In 2004, Bill Moyers stood right behind us as we boarded a flight from Madison, Wisconsin, to Cleveland. We were big fans of Moyers, and talking to him actually took my mind off the cylinder of steel and plastic we were about to trust with our lives. Once we were strapped in and the plane's engines began their usual roar, Sherrod turned to me, motioned toward Moyers three rows back, and said, “Well, baby, if this plane goes down, we ain't the headline.”

The combination of a book tour and a Senate race cured me of just about all flight anxiety. Not right away, of course. In April, I was still Continental Airlines' frequent fretter. I was on my way to Norfolk to speak at a journalism seminar when our plane started jiggling like loose change in a dryer. Immediately, I pulled out one of my notebooks and started scribbling away, as if putting pen to paper would somehow distract God enough to keep us in the air.

“Dear God,” I wrote, “are we not on the same page this year? Do you not understand that I must stay alive until Election Night?”

Hearing no response, I decided to bargain, but only after the pilot made the incredibly obvious if somewhat garbled announcement that we had “encountered some turbulence” and the seat-belt light would remain on for the duration of the flight. Far more alarming, he said the flight attendant had suspended her rounds with the refreshment cart, which I always interpret to mean we're all going to die but at least it won't be from flying cans of Pepsi.

“If I land safely,” I wrote to God, “I will not utter so much as a peep of complaint about having to clean the house before our Friday fundraiser, and
—and—
I will appreciate the cramped quarters of the campaign car's backseat, which I only now realized is always safely on the ground.”

The flight didn't smooth out until we landed forty-five minutes later. Immediately, my cell phone started beeping. Six new voice mail messages called for my attention. Three were speaking requests, two wanted my prompt attention to proposed changes to Sherrod's schedule, and the last one was from our Ohio fundraising director, Kimberly Wood.

“We'd like to put your leather sofas in your garage for the fundraiser. Do you have any problem with that?”

Why, I wondered, was I always in such a hurry to land?

Campaign fatigue, I soon discovered, is a wonderful sedative. A few weeks later on the trail, and short of someone screaming “We're all going to die!” I just couldn't work up any adrenaline over a few bumps in the sky. During one very long week in May, I was on my eighth flight in seven days when our plane hit the kind of wind power that drove little Dorothy to shriek “Auntie Em! Auntie Em!” Even the attendants strapped themselves into their seats, and the man sitting next to me suddenly said to no one in particular, “Sure wish I'd called my wife before we took off.”

I leaned my head against the window with a thud, closed my eyes, and had a whole different conversation with God. “Oh, fine,” I said with a sigh. “Go ahead. Take me down. At least I'll get some rest.”

A few weeks later, one of my friends who hated to fly called me in the hope that I would support her decision to stay home from a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Europe. Instead of commiserating, I assured her that she was more likely to die in the embrace of a boa constrictor than to crash in a plane. “It's the rare human being who dies that way,” I told her, “and you're not that special.”

She sounded rather horrified, but I think my psychology worked. She went to Europe and had a wonderful time.

         

A
PRIL WAS FULL OF OPPORTUNITIES FOR ME TO FEEL LIKE THE
journalist I was, rather than the political prop old-time party chairs wanted me to be. On the fifteenth, I went to Ohio University's journalism school for a panel discussion about opinion writing with my former colleague Tom Suddes, who was now a graduate student, and Leonard Pitts, a Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist for
The Miami Herald
and visiting faculty member who had become a friend over time.

During the Q-and-A, one of the professors in attendance asked what we thought about Jon Stewart's
Daily Show,
whose political satire was such a favorite among young viewers.

I said I had a lot of respect for Stewart's wit and pithy insights into what masquerades as the “real world” of politics, but I worried about a recent poll showing that many young people identified it as their only source of “news.”

Leonard took a totally different tack, focusing on Stewart's wonderful sense of humor. As he offered examples of Stewart's trademark wit, I realized how much the campaign trail had already changed me. A year earlier, I had thought Stewart was hilarious—and harmless. Now, I worried that he was stoking a particularly potent brand of cynicism that gave too many Americans a ready excuse to write off politics altogether. If all we had were buffoons running the country, why bother participating in this thing we call democracy? Why even vote?

After Leonard spoke, I described some of the people I had met so far while campaigning. I talked about the woman with two jobs and no health insurance, whose breast cancer was diagnosed and treated only because a friend sent her to a community clinic lucky enough to have grant money. I told them about the man in his fifties I met at the same clinic who lost his pension and almost “threw in the towel” and resigned himself to an eventual death from diabetes because he couldn't afford insulin. When I asked him why he decided to seek help, his blue eyes teared up and he said, “My daughter. I have a daughter, and she wanted me to live.”

“Lucky daughter,” I said to him, grabbing his hand. He nodded, unable to speak.

And then I told the audience about meeting rooms full of people just as nearsighted as I but without my money that allowed me to pay for contact lenses and thinner glasses. They had to buy the cheaper glasses, and so their eyes looked bigger than clamshells behind the thick lenses as they filled labor halls and banquet rooms in local restaurants for the chance to talk to Sherrod.

“I'm afraid I'm losing my sense of humor,” I told the silent room. “I'm seeing the real-life problems of so many decent people in this state, and it's turning me into one somber woman. I can't laugh about those eyeglasses, or that man who almost let himself die because he was so ashamed he had no health care. I can't find the humor in that woman's breast cancer.”

Leonard turned to me, put his hand on my back, and smiled. “Wow. That's a column. You just wrote yourself a column.”

On the drive home that day, I realized I was starting to feel more certain about my decision to take a leave from writing my column to work in the campaign, in part because I was still doing what I did best: listening to other people's stories, and then sharing them with the world at large. Instead of writing about them, I was giving speeches, but the goal was the same. I wanted to reach that place in people that makes them shake their head and say, “This has got to change.”

I had meant it when I said Sherrod and I had gotten into this race because we wanted to have the right answer for our grandchildren who hadn't been born yet when they asked, “What did you do to help?” Doing this meant I had to sacrifice my column, perhaps, but not my writing. Every day, I wrote down pages of observations and conversations, so many of them with people used to being ignored and looking to Sherrod for hope. I'm a writer, and writing is the way I make sense of what's happening to me.

Two days later, I had a humorous reminder never to get too full of my writerly self. Sherrod and I drove to a labor event in southwest Ohio, where I was supposed to introduce him to a roomful of mill-wrights and their wives. I'm sure that, hours earlier, it sounded like a fine idea to have this daughter of a union activist introduce her husband, but by the time we got there we were competing with hours of revelry. The only thing missing was hurled tomatoes splattering against chicken wire when I took the stage and tried to compete with too many men who'd had too many beers.

The man who introduced me gave it his best. “Folks, listen up. This is Sherrod Brown's wife, and she won the Pulitzer Prize. I don't know what that is, but it sure sounds important.”

I looked at Sherrod and we broke up laughing. I can't remember a word I said, only that I kept shouting into the microphone and at one point I was standing with my hands on my hips. Sherrod tried talking but ended fast after one of the guys yelled for him to sing.

I will never forget, though, the conversation that took place after Sherrod left the stage. A millwright in his forties came up to Sherrod and said, “You're a congressman, right?”

“Yes.”

The man shoved up his shirtsleeves and pointed to more than a dozen scars on his arm. “These are the burns I get from the job. I've got them on both my arms. I've got them here on my head, too.” He leaned over to give us a view of his scalded scalp. Then he smiled at Sherrod.

“Take care of us, okay?”

Sherrod nodded slowly. “I'll do my best.”

Watching him walk away, we were silenced by the weight of it all.

         

J
UST AS
S
HERROD'S CAMPAIGN WAS REALLY GAINING MOMENTUM,
I had a book to sell. Even a local blogger's snarky suggestion that my jacket photo was retouched—“I guess a Pulitzer gets you a new face, too”—could not diminish my excitement.

We launched the book tour on April 19 at Joseph-Beth Booksellers on Cleveland's east side. Two months had already passed since my last column had run in
The Plain Dealer,
so I wasn't sure the turnout would number beyond family members and close friends who had promised to show up. By the time I walked onto the main floor, though, several hundred people were crowded into the store. I knew only about a fourth of them, which I could interpret in two ways: I didn't have nearly as many friends as I thought, or I had far more readers than I dared hope.

There was a third explanation for at least some of the turnout, but that didn't occur to me until after I gave my talk and started signing books. I had been signing for only ten minutes or so when I spotted the first bumper sticker. I shrugged it off as an ardent supporter hoping to meet my husband.

A few minutes later, though, it seemed that everywhere I looked I saw hands clutching shiny “Sherrod Brown for Senate” bumper stickers. I looked around the room and spotted several campaign staffers handing them out.

It was an awful feeling to realize the campaign had shifted into gear at my book signing; it felt even worse to realize how much it bothered me. I didn't write a book to promote my husband's candidacy. Worse, I could immediately imagine the newspaper headline on the six-inch snipe of a blurb:

         

Brown Profits in More Ways Than One from Wife's Book Debut in Ohio

         

I wanted to get up from the table, march the staff into a corner, and say, “Look, I don't hand out my books at Sherrod's events, and I don't want you handing out his bumper stickers at mine.” Talk about a bad headline. Instead, I asked them to stop immediately, even after one of the staff members insisted he only brought them into the store after several people asked for them, including a bookstore employee who requested fifty.

I lost count of how many people told me, as I wrote in their books, that they hoped Sherrod won. That was nice. The ones who told me I needed to start stumping on the campaign trail as soon as possible? Not so nice. Clearly, in the eyes of many Ohioans, I had already morphed from a newspaper columnist into a political wife.

During the Q-and-A after my talk, someone had asked me what it was like to be on the campaign trail. I responded the way I would countless times in the months ahead: This is such an important race, to Ohio and to the country, and I believe in Sherrod. We share so many of the same values. It's time for change.

What I wanted to say was “You don't know the half of it.” Just as I didn't want to be reduced to the stand-by-her-man spouse, I didn't want Sherrod downgraded to just a candidate. There was so much more to the man, and to the marriage we had forged in such a short period of time. I wanted to tell them my stomach starts somersaulting every time I know he's on his way home, and how his face lights up whenever he first sees me walk in. I wanted to talk about how the energy swirls around a room as soon as he crosses the threshold, and how his default button is set to joy. I wanted them to know that every so often he leaves on my pillow love notes he writes on recycled stationery from his secretary of state days, and that sometimes he wakes me up in the middle of the night just to whisper, “I love my wife.”

That's what I wanted to say, but I could imagine that headline, too:

         

Brown's Wife Loses It at Book Event; “She's in Our Prayers,” Says DeWine

         

I kept my mouth shut. Surely, I told myself, an entire book tour couldn't be about Sherrod's race.

Just as surely, I was wrong.

         

L
ESS THAN A WEEK LATER, ON A
M
ONDAY EVENING, MY FRIEND
Jackie and I were on the road to Dayton. This would be the only time during the book tour that I didn't have a professional driver provided by the publisher. Instead, I had jumped at Jackie's offer to spend some rare time together before I headed to New York and California. I was scheduled the following morning for an interview with a local TV station, followed by lunch with the
Dayton Daily News
columnist Mary McCarty and then a book signing that evening.