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The Last Campaign November 1998 I’m not proud to admit this, but I’ve never been much inclined to try to overcome my fears. I’ve always regarded fear less as a trial and more as another essential compound in the periodic table of spiritual elements. Rather than stare down the demons, I tend to make room for them and then go on about my business. Roller coasters inspire terror, so I don’t go to amusement parks. A dog bit me in the face when I was eleven, so I’ve given dogs a wide berth ever since. When a waterbug finds its way from a sewer drain into my apartment , I promptly leave and call a neighbor to come attend to it. I can’t bring myself to look at the thing again, let alone step in close enough to whack it with a broom or give it a good spritz of Raid. True, fear can exact a certain price of inconvenience, but in my mind that seems a small price to pay, compared with alternate courses of action—for instance, picking up the bug by the antennae and flicking it out the window. I am proud to admit that recently I have pushed through some measure of the fear, through the inconvenience and all, because my father needed me to. My father was a member of a local school board for ten years, and when reelection time rolled around early this year, he enlisted me and my other siblings to help him campaign. Campaigning involves a good deal of walking precincts and phone banking—political euphemisms for knocking on strange doors and cold-­ calling strange, potentially hostile people. I have a dread of approaching people I don’t know; maybe it’s fear of rejection, of appearing stupid, of reactivating a childhood stutter that, in my weakest moments, threatened to rear its ugly head, like a virus or a volcano, even after I’d outgrown it. But my father, though he could be gruff to the point of intolerance, was self-­ contained and asked for very little, particularly from his children; and these bids to stay in office were expressions of his lifelong commitment to furthering community good. I could hardly say no. 200 Mothers and Fathers My fear of confrontation was odd in light of the fact that I’d always loved to perform and had gone so far as to earn a master’s degree in acting; then again, it was not so odd given that I craved only the applause and was really too thin-­ skinned, uncompetitive, and horrified at the prospect of repeated rejection and lack of interest to ever consider acting as a career. Yet as a pitchwoman for my father’s last campaign I invoked every bit of actor I could. Ten years had passed since his first election battle; I still harbored dread, but it was tempered somewhat by experience and by the fact that my father was really struggling to hold his seat this time out. Often a lone voice of reason on a hotly contentious school board, my father had grown unpopular lately for opposing the hire of a superintendent whose employment history was eminently questionable but who had many friends on the board eager to bring him in. To shore up their voting bloc, these board members figured they had to oust my father, and so they began circulating all manner of lies about him in election mailers—he was against progress, against children, etc. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Unlike his nakedly ambitious colleagues, my father had never during his ten years sought higher office precisely because he had never been interested in anything but education reform. I was incensed , and moral indignation proved to be just the fuel I needed. The assault on my father’s character, on my regard of him as a man of inviolate integrity even in his worst moments, was a bigger enemy than fear. I walked neighborhoods like a missionary, wielding our modest fliers like copies of the Constitution. I exhorted people to vote for ongoing truth and justice, even when I got nothing more than baleful looks or wary appraisals through peepholes, mail slots, and porch windows—or when I got more than I bargained for, with middle-­ aged men looking no higher than my bust line as I delivered my spiel. I gave them fliers anyway and figured I didn’t care what made...

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