The Way Things Really Are

I remember the very first political question I ever asked my father.  It was 1980 and I was all of 5 years old.  Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter were running for President and I innocently asked my dad, "how is the President picked?"  Without a seconds hesitation he coolly responded "the one who gets the most money wins." 

I tried hard to imagine how that must work.  Of course I didn't know anything about fund raising or costly political campaigns back then.  In my mind I envisioned the two candidates dressed in their nicest suits and squaring off on a big stage, each one with a large bin of pennies in front of him.  Someone would fire the starting pistol and they would madly reach into the bins, pull out handfuls of coins and stuff them into their pockets.  In fact, as I watched the news footage of Ronald Reagan when he got shot, I mistakenly assumed that it was already election time again.

I hate to admit how old I was when I finally realized that this is not really the way the President is chosen.   Although it may be more meaningful than the circus that we actually have to endure.   I still have a vivid picture in my imagination of Ronald Reagan dancing in celebration on a penny covered stage with Jimmy Carter looking on in disappointment.  You'd think, for that sort of work, that a peanut farmer would have better hands than an old actor.  Go figure!

It's funny how our first impression of something stays with us even after we've learned that it's false.  I remember thinking that California was a row of three houses near the high school that I attended just outside of Blackfoot, Idaho.  Of course I wasn't in high school at the time.  Even now that I live in California, at least for a little longer anyway, whenever I go back to visit and pass that row of houses, I still picture redwoods and smell the ocean.  Well, to be more accurate, I picture gang tags and smell the smog.  I know very well that California is not a trio of houses in Idaho but for some reason it was deeply ingrained in my mind at a tender age and that impression stuck.

We just passed Memorial Day and I remember as a child preparing flowers and taking them to the cemetery to place on the graves of loved ones.  To this day I will do everything I can to avoid walking directly on top of a grave site.  I always try to walk as close in front of the headstone as possible in order to stay on the narrow strip between graves.  I'd like to say that I do this wholly out of respect, however, that's not the only reason.  You see, when you're a child, at that age where understanding and innocence are still sort of muddled together, a cemetery is just another park with lots of ornately carved playground equipment.  So in order to keep me from disrespecting the dearly departed by leaping from headstone to headstone my parents told me that if I climbed on the headstones, or even stepped on a grave, then that person would raise their foot up out of the dirt and kick me. As I pondered this phenomenon, I looked at the neatly cut grass covering the grave sites and the riding lawnmower parked near the caretaker's shed and thought to myself "that must be one bumpy ride."  I've never had a curious nature about creepy things and this was one thing that, whether true or not, I wasn't going to mess with.  If all I have to do to avoid the remote possibility of a dead person's foot rising out of the ground and kicking me is to not step on a grave, then I'm happy to oblige.

I could go on but I fear that I may be revealing a bit too much about how I perceive the world around me.  I would hate for anyone to get the wrong idea about the strength of my grasp on reality.  Although it does strike me as odd that our current President went about his entire election campaign desperately looking for change.