When I was in high school I was invited to participate in a press conference for then-Vice President Walter Mondale, who was on the road campaigning for Jimmy Carter. I was student council president of our school and was joining other high school seniors from the Red River Valley area. It was thrilling. We students needed to pass security (which I failed on the first round. Something to do with my dad having been in the Air Force for twenty years and a Vietnam vet). It was the late seventies, a time of inflation and gas crunches and rumblings from the Middle East. (That next fall we all watched the U.S. hostages bound in Iran.) I loved the sparkling of it all; the letters about KSTP-TV with date and time and what to wear, the drafts of questions we submitted to our school principals.
At the same time, my family was adjusting to life with Grandma and Papa in the house. Mom had brought her parents to live with us after Papa's stroke in California. Papa remains one of the favorite men in my life, even after his death. Blonde and blue-eyed Irishman, a storyteller, a bartender, WWII vet, champion of the anonymous folks in this world. Grandma was the one with Winnebago Fox in her, and French and German, too. Feisty, relentless, stubborn. She'd lean over the rail the minute any one of us came home from work or school to hound us with urgent booming questions, "What's for dinner?" or "Why hasn't the mail come?"
When she heard I was going to have a chance to question the Vice President of the United States she drilled me. "You ask Mr. Mondale why I can't get my social security check. You tell him I've been waiting eight months to get this cleared up." There'd been some mix-up what with the move and Papa's disability now. "You tell him we fought wars for this country and now we can't get our own money when we need it. He needs to know what it's like out here."
So when the day of the conference came and the news reporters and school administrators and students all gathered with Mondale's entourage in that spare band room at East Grand Forks Senior High School I was all a-jitter. There was much more conflict and tension in that room than I ever thought would surface. The reporters from the Cities were edgy with the home-grown Mondale. The news wasn't good; the people weren't satisfied; no one could make ends meet. His staff person finally nudged aside Mondale when even the local writers showed no mercy and said, "We've invited these young representatives here to participate today. Let's give them a chance to ask their questions, shall we?" It took awhile to calm down the professionals and finally the cameras and lights and beat reporters all turned their attention to our small group of teenagers. The White House staffer pointed right to me and then said to Mondale, "Let's hear what this fine young woman wants to know."
I was so prepared to be part of this. I looked good. I had practiced. I felt comfortable in a crowd. But I knew my grandmother would be watching and though I should have known she was mostly just spouting off around the kitchen table I felt bound to her. I felt caught in the middle. I represented two worlds at that moment. I couldn't speak. I couldn't say one word, and then the staffer quickly pointed to some guy next to me. My part was over.
It became a bit of our family lore, the day I couldn't speak to Mondale, and my mom even made a birthday card for me with a cut-out picture of me on one side and one of Mondale on the other.
I've been thinking about this middle thing quite a bit lately. The Metaphor of Middle. Caught in the middle, like the tender middle-graders in their parents' divorce. Middle of the road, like those conservative Democrats or those liberal Republicans. Not too fast, not too slow. Straddling the middle, with feet in both worlds.
I am a middle girl, not in the sense of family birth order, though I hear all about THAT from my sensitive friends. But middle prairie and plains girl. I was born in Texas and my family moved up through the middle of this country state by state, from El Paso to near the Canadian border. The plains and prairies are beautiful and they define me but for the longest time I felt my middling to be bland and without edge. I used to run with both crowds in high school: the jocks and preps and the dopeheads. I was safe because I was understanding and fairly non-judgmental but was I my own truth? Was I just shadowing everyone else's opinion?
Here's a story: I used to hang out with a family with six sons and sometimes it was hard to be smack in the middle of all that chaos. When I first went out fishing with them all, expert anglers they were, they would get mad at me because my line would invariably get snagged in the bottom muck. I always let out too much line. They'd reel in their own lines and swear for having to give up a nibbler so I could yank out my hook trapped on seawood or in-between a few rocks. After just a few days of that I decided to let out only enough line to prangle about 4 inches below the surface of the water. I would cross my ankles over the side of the boat and bring along a book and cruise along with them, never snagging but never catching anything. They'd look over and say, "no bites huh?" "You think you've got out enough line?" It became a nagging metaphor for me as I came of age.
But I'm coming around to thinking differently about the middle. According to all the marketers I'm just beginning middle age. I live in middle America. I'm between the generations of women in my family, between my college-aged daughter and my elderly mother. I'm a book editor, a middlewoman of sorts who keeps the needs of the "front of the house" (authors and readers) balanced with the needs of the back of the house (directors and managers).
Middle need not be in the middle of nowhere, dangling just four inches below the surface of everything. It can be in the midst of all things. Rather than picture yourself as the one in the middle lane with all the Ford Probes and Saturn Ions, your middle can put you smack dab in the middle of the mosh pit. In the middle of the story, with all the action around and all the plot lines yet to be developed. Middle can be the receptor, the satellite, the storyteller. I'm fascinated with edges, especially those that blur the lines between the wild and the tamed, but I'm not afraid of the middle anymore, I'm not worried about the core.
*top photograph, "Angus, Sioux County, NE" by Drake Hokanson, photographer and writer who teaches at Winona State University. See www.drakehokanson.com for more photographs from his Great Plains project and other works.
*bottom painting by Candice Eisenfeld; see http://www.circagallery.org/eisenfeld.html
{This entry is dedicated to my friend Judy on her birthday.)
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