MOBILE — History gets written from documents. Every so often the documents are e-mails from somebody’s mother.
A collection of notes sent by a Mobile woman to her grown son in the months surrounding the November 2004 presidential election has been published, and the result is a small, funny, unsparing record of how a national contest was actually experienced inside one Southern household — between a wedding that had to be planned, a kitchen floor that had to be refinished, and a television set that would not change channels.
The Political Weather
She is, by her own description, a lifelong political junkie, and her early verdict is grim. The Democrats, she writes, have no chance. She regards the election as lost and is trying to dismiss it from her mind, which she concedes is not easy for someone of her disposition.
Her preferred metaphor is football. One team runs out and is fast and smart and scores at will. The other stands around in bewilderment, drops the ball, runs into one another, and reduces its grandmothers to needing smelling salts and bourbon. We have all seen games like that, she writes, and though we hate the other side for the sneaky things they do and curse the officials for letting them get away with it, we have to admit we were outplayed.
Her running commentary is merciless and evenhanded in its way. She faults the Democratic ticket’s vice-presidential choice, arguing the nominee needed a junkyard dog and got a pretty face instead, and that the party would have been better served by one of Florida’s two popular senators, either of whom might have delivered a state decided by a whisker. She declines an invitation to the movies because she avoids depressing things on principle. She predicts, in a moment of pure dread, that the incumbent will jettison his vice president for a more popular replacement and cruise to re-election.
Then, briefly, she flips. Citing a polling curiosity — a survey of cell-phone-only voters, then a genuinely novel exercise, since pollsters at the time reached households by landline — along with the wave of newly registered voters not being sampled at all, she declares the challenger will win, and win before eleven o’clock. Happy days are here again, she writes.
They were not. Her later notes settle into a sardonic peace, taking small pleasures where she can find them — among them the news that a nominee for Homeland Security secretary claimed not to have known he employed a nanny. Are nannies like termites, she asks, silent and invisible? When we had domestic help, she notes, they made their presence known and were impossible to ignore, sometimes seizing family members and dragging them, kicking and screaming, to the bathtub.
The Wedding
Threaded through the politics is a wedding, and the wedding is where the piece becomes a portrait of Mobile.
A granddaughter wants to be married in Mobile — a small family wedding, in a church if possible, not Catholic, or in some sweet little chapel. The grandmother runs the options like a quartermaster. All Saints would be the first choice, but the family are not members. Christ Church, again, no connection. Bellingrath or Stewartfield would do, but it seems pointless to spend that kind of money for two dozen people. The chapel at Spring Hill College is admired and immediately ruled out.
Failing all of that, she suggests, the couple could go down to the courthouse, and afterward everyone could adjourn to the Dew Drop Inn — easy on everybody and inexpensive. She floats the idea of hiring a hot dog cart for the reception and wonders whether it is overkill for twenty guests. Perhaps they should simply order fifty hot dogs, five dozen stuffed jalapeño peppers, and twelve bottles of champagne, which works out to half a bottle each. The wedding at four o’clock. The happy couple riding off into the sunset — though, she notes drily, probably not in any fit state to ride anywhere, so a hotel room had better be arranged.
Her promised wedding gift: the plane tickets, and a cake with two little red-haired people on top.
Everything Else
Between the ballots and the bridal logistics, the notes catalogue a life. She reports triumphantly that after two or three months she has figured out how to change the channel on her television, by an act of pure trial and error she compares to the monkey typing Hamlet. She reads a book on punctuation and finds it a delight. She reads a book on the Bush family and the Saudis and calls it a bucket of worms. She thanks her son for an article extolling the health benefits of alcohol and reports that she immediately made herself a drink; it is nice, she says, to find something good for you that is also pleasurable, as it beats liver and yogurt.
She worries about falling asleep at the wheel on the drive to Citronelle. She corrects her own arithmetic on a poll. She reconstructs, for her son’s benefit, the history of a German physician who came to Mobile after the First World War, and the house in Montrose his widow eventually had to sell.
And she reflects on scripture, on visions, on the transfiguration, concluding with a shrug that is very nearly a theology: an event certainly occurred which deeply impressed the witnesses. Who knows?
“Pass the wine,” she signs off, in the middle of having her kitchen floor sanded. “It is like a hurricane without the wind and rain.”