I am sitting at a dining room table in a “vintage” house in suburban Chicago. It is not a big house but it is sturdy and tidy and has a huge elm tree in the front yard. It represents the middle of middle class living in the middle of Middle America.  We may have a few more books than the neighbors and museum posters brought from Tokyo, but we share the status of target audience, the kind of family-values-family that pundits survey, analyze and try to entice. I want to be more than a statistic with two Hondas/children and x income but it is hard to deny the demographic appearance of median. On paper, we are the masses.  

The radio is on and voices from the convention are rising and falling with emphasis. History is being remembered and made. My candidate is being nominated. I had Obama’s picture on the refrigerator four years ago when he was just a concept. Tonight he will be one of two possibilities, a chance for, if not sweeping transformation, then at least the beginning of a coherent conversation. I should be riveted; attention span alone would make me slightly more unique in the political drama of the election. A person who follows the issues, even votes, is in the minority. Just listening is an act of activism.

I also have the opportunity to rise beyond the norm in writing this post. I could link the convention celebration to the last book I read, Octavia Butler’s, The Kindred, an inventive story about the complexity of race and relationships. I could remind us that many of MLK’s speeches on YouTube and make apt comparisons in what will be one of the most talked about acceptance speeches in decades. I could ask important Barber-like questions and inspire a flurry of comments continuing the discussion from yesterday. I could break out of not only my pollster profile but my usual interior posting style as well. I could cast ideas wide and topical. 

But after wadding up the virtual equivalent of a waste basket full of drafts. I find I have nothing important to say or ask about politics. Or Obama. Or MLK. Or the human condition. I am distracted. 

I woke up one day last week sad and angry. I looked at my calendar. No hormonal explanation. I went about my business and alienated everyone I knew within three hours. Then in a rush of sloppy, blubbering emotion I realized that I was reacting to my son’s impending departure to college. All of my intellectual posturing, all of my mocking of other tender mothers, all of my resolve to be stoic and focused on his needs – gone in a scatter of Kleenex and vile, hissing bitchiness. I am the same as any other farewell waving parent after all. Just delayed. Even the trigger was boring. He left for a last weekend trip with his friends, out of the house for two days and two nights, a kind a dress rehearsal for the big move. Naming the cause of my mood hasn’t helped, it has made it worse. Scenes of parental incompetence flash before my eyes fixed open as if from A Clockwork Orange. I think: that time he asked me to play that one game when he was little and I said no, I was tired, I should have played with him. I shouldn’t have worked so much. I should have spent every second of the last eighteen years with him. The spiral continues as I realize I should have been better at organizing the family photo albums and should have reinforced flossing.   

This is how it has been. I can’t think or talk about much else. I am trying to be brave around my family so I channel by over-sharing with vague aquaintances and strangers. Imagine those invaders of personal space, the old lady at the grocer who prattles on about her grandchildren or the woman at the hair salon who confesses that her husband just left her for a younger woman. I am now that person. “You know my son is going to college in two weeks. I am crocheting him a scarf. He is going to Carleton, it is cold there. I am going to miss him. We get along really well. What is your name again?” Democratic convention? Ask me the length of an extra-long twin dorm bed, I can tell you where to buy the appropriate sheets at a great price and in so many fashion colors.

The odd thing about history is that it happens at the same time as everything else. It is mixed up and sometimes difficult to tease apart what events will define a society from the unfolding of individual lives. People get married and go to school and break up with boyfriends and buy houses and car pool and make dinner as Presidents are elected and earthquakes flatten a country on the other side of the earth. It is hard to focus beyond our street, beyond our own daily concerns. We gravitate toward change within our reach, the satisfying immediacy of comfort and touch. Someday we read about what is now considered a monumental shift in the universe and ask each other, “What were you doing when . . .” and marvel at how mundane our actions seemed. At the time, they were so vital. My twenty-year-old father was getting his tonsils out on the day Kennedy was shot. He remembers eating a Popsicle and watching the news in the hospital. World events were background noise to a sore throat and a baby daughter. We are either there to witness history or we are somewhere just as busy, living in myopic present tense.

In this I am as hopelessly average as the census claims, barely able to pull myself away from such a small reality to participate in a far greater one. The radio, the television, the web, the newspaper, for our all media awareness, we are always distracted by the live action sequence taking place in front of us. For better or for worse, it is normal. What average people do. Why whole demographics often drift into measured apathy.

The speech is over and I am still here, contained in my house: a vase of mums and carnations on the table next to me, the pug snoring near my feet, my son’s half packed room sorted into stacks and boxes across the hallway.