All characters belong to Aaron Sorkin, John Wells Productions, Warner Bros., & NBC. Standard disclaimers apply. The title's from Emily Dickinson, #341. Please send feedback.
As Freezing Persons Recollect The Snow
Violet
Sam thinks it's funny to say these little things sometimes, but I was not born at the age of forty-five.
The earliest thing I can remember clearly: I'm with my grandmother, waiting for an elevated train. She holds my hand too tight. I try to tug away, turning on my toes.
Snow is melting, and there are puddles that splatter delightfully under a small boy's boots. My grandmother starts to sneeze, and her hand flies reflexively to her nose. A few yards away, sunshine flashes on a puddle and I can't resist. I run. I jump. I splash. I skid. The rough concrete edge is under my heels, and I can see water glistening on the rails below.
She grabs the back of my coat, yanks me back hard, pulls me fiercely close to her side. She scolds me in rapid Yiddish, which I barely hear. There is no fear, only surprise and the rush of wind in my ears.
I suppose I was about two and a half years old.
It doesn't matter how long I live in Washington. I will always think of New York as home. It's a good place to live; it was a good place to be a child. There is something to be said for being small in a huge city. You learn so much from the skyscrapers and the playgrounds, the parks and the schools, the museums and the streets, and the people. You have to learn to speak, to use the right words, to be a politician when you're surrounded by people.
You start young. Maybe you discover that some of the kids on your street are Italians and Catholics, big general words that mean, simply, difference. You learn that their fathers wear nicer suits and drive bigger cars than your father, that nevertheless your mother clacks her tongue when she passes them on the street and mutters words like "criminal." You learn that sometimes you have to shout to be heard over the ordinary sounds of people living. You learn that someone killed someone else's God; you learn about wars, holy and otherwise. Even outside the classroom, even in the schoolyard, you learn that history and difference matter.
Sometimes lessons leave marks. And maybe you don't learn them so quickly growing up in Connecticut or California.
It was around the age of two and a half that I learned to read. I don't remember it. I don't remember ever staring at marks on a page and not understanding how they made words. My mother always said I taught myself, that I set my mind to it and they couldn't stop me. She used to say they'd find me spreading out a newspaper almost as big as I was, holding it down with hands and knees and leaning down an inch away to read the print. Which sounds like me, I suppose. I do not remember climbing, at the age of four or five, up my sisters' bookcase and toppling it over. My mother always punctuated this story by tutting to adult relatives that I was always more trouble than the girls, more trouble than my baby brother, more trouble than I was worth.
It occurs to me, writing this on an envelope by fluorescent light -- this subway car is emptier than the office ever is -- that it's been more than ten years since I've spoken to her. And this is not a wound, just a lesson learned. And now it occurs to me that you may already know this. I don't have your security clearance; I haven't read the Secret Service files. It occurs to me that I may be wasting my time.
Millions of children grew up in America in the 60s. We were sent home from elementary school when a President was shot. We went on dates and drank Coca-Cola; we listened to the Beatles; we watched Walter Cronkite do the news the way it ought to be done. We discovered death and money and sex, in order of ascending interest. We protested wars, and we fought them.
These are things you know about me, like you know that marriages fail. Like you know that history matters, that everyone lies. Like you know better than to take a drink; like you know that I wouldn't jump ship if you pushed me out of the crow's nest.
I was not born at the age of forty-five. I came from a specific place and a specific time, and I have a history like everyone else, but it's been my experience that sharing that with people will only cause you pain. You do not know everything about me because I volunteered it. Everyone should keep secrets, everyone should keep a percentage of themselves private. Full disclosure is only painful.
I suppose that applies to elected officials as much as anyone else. I still shout to be heard, and I suppose I'm still more trouble than I'm worth, sometimes.
The next stop is mine, or, more accurately, hers. I know this may be the biggest mistake I've made yet, and I know what it costs. But I also know that this mistake, with her, is as private and as necessary as faith in a higher power. I think you'd understand that. Maybe right now she's holding a fistful of my coat and keeping me from going over.
A side note: They sent us home from school on a late autumn day in 1963. I took the train home with my oldest sister, and she asked if I understood what had happened that day. To this day, she claims that I told her it meant we had to deal with Johnson. Some things begin when you are young and never change.
This is not an apology. This is not even a letter, unless a trash can is a mailbox, and I'm not that interested in the metaphor. This is just to say that there was a child once who ran into puddles, who believed in language and possibility, who thought that individual truths mattered. I've grown up since then, but there is still a man behind you who does at least one of these things.
In recent days she's been saying how sometimes there are risks you have no choice but to take, how sometimes they pay off and sometimes they don't. She thinks it's funny to call Josh and Sam Butch and Sundance, and she has said that sometimes the fall kills you. I'm not young anymore. And I am not afraid right now.
But I remember, Leo, and I've learned this much. If you survive the fall, you have to watch for the oncoming train.
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