A deeply personal reflection about the latest Jury verdict
...and a plea
My best friend’s home when we were growing up was my go-to place just about every weekend from fifth grade until adulthood when they sold the house. Her dad’s name was Bob, and her mom was Pat. They lived in a Tudor-style house, in a wooded neighborhood, where the earth in spring would be covered with Scilla, little blue flowers, and musty oak leaves covering the grounds of the Salisbury House.
I envied so much about this family. Her mom loved purple, and she had a style all her own. The carpet throughout the house was the color of Welch’s Grape Juice, and she papered walls in the small guest bathroom on the main floor with New Yorker magazine covers. Both seemed to me to be bold moves by a confident woman in the early 1960s.
My friendship with their daughter began when we were about 12, deepened in middle school and high school over a shared obsession with the Beatles, and solidified when the love of my friend’s life, who was born on the same day and year I was, died in a car crash on his way home from visiting her in Mankato, MN, during her freshman year of college. The three of us were just 18.
That tragedy, and there would be more to come, is not what I am teeing up here in this column.
I think of this family during times of political turmoil
Bob Arnold was a ‘Barry Goldwater Republican,’ at the time I was coming of age. I disparaged a lot of what he stood for politically. I shudder to think how obnoxious, 16, and 17-year-old me must have been to this man, who would sit with me in the living room, smoking Tarreyton cigarettes, in his frayed, bathrobe, and Brooks Brothers pajamas, while both his wife and daughter, my pal, had long gone to bed, disgusted by the topic of politics.
Bob and I tried to change one another. It didn’t work. But we were still ‘family.’ We lived through his daughter’s diagnosis of a malignant brain tumor when she and I were just 20 years old, her two surgeries performed at Mayo, and her funeral at the age of 27, in 1978.
On a January night in Rochester, as their daughter and my friend’s life was coming to an end, I headed out into the blizzard to warm their burgundy-colored sedan, and circle back to pick them up, Pat muttered absently: “Don’t get lost.”
Through the following years, that would be our parting farewell. We were family and their daughter’s death didn’t change that. Each time I came back to Des Moines, I’d show up at their back door around the cocktail hour, and when it was time to leave, either Bob or Pat would say:
“Don’t get lost.”
The tradition carried on when they were both in assisted living after Pat had a debilitating stroke.
This Week
On the day after Donald Trump was found guilty on 34 counts, I opened Facebook and saw a post by someone I know with a picture and the heading: More MAGA than Ever.
I chill went through me. I started to respond, but I held back, knowing there would be nothing constructive that could come from engaging with her.
I think of Bob.
Although I doubt he would be MAGA today, there is no way of really knowing. And my point here is that we can love one another even when holding very different views.
What I do know is that there are a whole lot of folks who simply aren’t tuned into the news the way some of us are. Richard and I watched every minute of the insurrection on January 6, live, and in terror. The doors of the United States Capitol were battered, the surge of insurrectionists screaming for members of Congress, and at that moment in real-time, we did not know if they would be found, shot, and killed. Or if Vice President Mike Pence would be hanged.
We watched every minute of the congressional hearings on impeachment, and the investigation led by GOP Rep. Liz Cheney into the January 6 insurrection. One by one, the testimony from members of the Republican party who worked in the Trump administration, told of the events that led to that awful day. We are voracious consumers of news and information to the exclusion of all kinds of things most people do daily.
This is our frame of reference. However, it is not a universal set of information.
The Jury
The jury in this most recent trial of Donald Trump was selected by both the defense lawyers and the prosecution. Some said they got their information from ‘Truth Social,’ Trump’s answer to Twitter, and some had voted for the former president. Some might have been like Bob.
When presented with hours and hours of testimony by witnesses from both the prosecution and defense, and reviewing related evidence, they came to a swift and unanimous conclusion:
Guilty on all 34 counts.
I hold on to the idea that if we are presented with facts, not lies, spin, innuendo, and political agendas fueled by greed, more lies, and power, we do have a chance of finding common ground and living in a democracy.
I hope we don’t get lost.
Okoboji
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This is a really beautiful column Julie. I also hope we all don’t get lost in vilifying each other (yes, even those who support him have hearts, minds and souls). Thanks for sharing this touching piece about how we can love even those we don’t agree with (or at least act civil).
Poignant memories Julie. Much appreciated by many here.