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            Lest I forget, please start here:

Hola! Elect Anna Bola

Maryland Attorney General! 

A paid political announcement by

“The Friends of Anna Committee.” 

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            It’s a Thursday. A volunteer, I’m in Anna Bola’s kitchen drinking coffee. The front doorbell rings. Eric, campaign manager, answers the door. I see him talking to a young dude of indeterminate origin—Latino? Oriental? Mulatto?—whose decorative T–shirt says

SAVE THE OYSTERS! 

            God help me, I’ve been following the federally mandated oyster project, it’s been a favorite subject in The National Herald. A source of great color photos of oystermen dredging the seabed (“drudging,” they call it), it looks like they are freezing butt 365 days a year. Besides, I’ve been on some of those boats! “Don’t make me an oysterman, mama, I don’ wanna be cold and wet all my life!” we sang as schoolboys, walking home from school. When I was growing up, there were oyster bars, crab shacks and lobster joints—places in strip malls lining commercial highways that we defined by the solitary fare on the menu.

            This kid wants a contribution. The natural oyster beds have died out, overfished and hopelessly polluted, like everything else in the bay. Enthusiasts are planting and harvesting imported oysters in creeks dousing into the bay. Less polluted, these waters give young oysters a better chance of survival.

            Eric surprises me, acting genuinely simpatico and giving the kid a check. Sweet moment: “You want a contribution now?” he asks affably. (I’ve crept into the front parlor to hear better.)

            “Yes, please,” the young man says.

            “How much?”

            “Well-l-l, you can join up and pay a monthly subscription or do a one-time-only payment. I’m required by law to say that your contribution may be used for political purposes, even supporting select candidates for public office.”

            “Well, I certainly hope so!” Eric replies. “How much is a one-time-only payment?” he continues, fancy fountain pen and checkbook in hand.

            “Well,” the kid gulps, “usually we ask for, uh, $80.”

            Lon-n-ng pause. “I’ll give ya $25,” Eric drawls.

            Another lon-n-ng pause. “Okay,” says the kid.

           “You’ve done yourself a service today,” Eric assures him absent-mindedly, busy writing the check. “Linking up with the Anna Bola campaign will give your project a nice bounce. I want you to call this number and we’ll tell you when Anna’s home. Then you can come by and meet the candidate!”

            Once he’s back at work crunching numbers and making arcane phone calls, Eric catches my eye and says, “Lots of precincts to visit, Kevin. Trips to the Eastern Shore, Ocean City, all those newbie suburbs west of Balto.”

            This is supposed to be my dog whistle, he expects me to start salivating and come panting, raring to go.

             I don’t say “I work three days a week.” I don’t say “No thank you!” I don’t say anything. I shake my head sagely and go back upstairs to finish a stack of voter surveys, entering the raw data onto a spreadsheet on the Mac.

             In order to win this election, Anna has brought in this—bought this—professional, 42-year-old campaign manager named Eric Brown. The Lee Atwater of Maryland, he is a man whom everybody in politics knows. It’s not that he’s a dirty-trickster, far from it, but his thought processes are hopelessly mathematical. One time, I walk in on Eric coaching a bevy of summer interns—all women—each perched before a laptop, six of them sitting around the dining room table with its dainty tablecloth and polished oak leaves. I cannot understand a word they are saying. “Number crunching… derivatives… algorithms… applied decimals,” I can’t even quote Eric correctly, math is not my suit, I have no idea what they are talking about.

             If he gets a sampling of 2% of the registered voters in any one precinct, Eric can extrapolate the data and tell you whether the district is going to break Democratic, Republican, Tea Party or Latino. That’s his specialty, defining the electorate. “It shows you where you have to hit your ping pong balls,” he says, making me wonder whether he plays table tennis. I can never get him to admit it.

             He runs what he calls “Octo-“ campaigns. An octogeneric campaign in an octomegalopolis. Success is coined “Octopussy.” Octopus campaigns, tentacles reaching into every precinct all over the state. Eric knows the power brokers in Democratic politics and most of the players on the Republican side, as well. He doesn’t even have to brag, he’s simply on the phone morning, noon and night, his laptop and WiFi modem glowing brightly, endlessly making connections. “We run a 24/7 campaign,” I hear him explain over the phone to a potential intern. I’ve never seen him sleep or even appear tired. Of course, I arrive at 10 a.m. and leave at 6 p.m., but all I see is Eric in an endless succession of baggy pants and wrinkled designer T’s, padding non-stop around the house in tennis shoes, leading his pack of female number crunchers. All the interns are math majors, that goes without saying. “It’s happening!” he shouts at me happily one afternoon. “This campaign is starting to simmer!”

           Eric is the second campaign manager, taking over from a raven-haired, buxom beauty named Amy. Where she had heart, Eric has everything else. One morning, he marches up to me, all excited. “We got in three new submarine turnarounds,” he announces.

          “That’s impressive,” I remark. “What do we use submarines for?”

          “What? Oh. Three new summer interns. Not submarines. Three new interns.”

           “A harem.”

           “Uh, no, Kevin. We don’t use that expression anymore. That’s considered sexist. You know, not politically correct.”

           The people on the campaign find me a colorful character. They love the colloquial phrases I utter:

           “His nose was out of joint…”

           “Put another log on the fire!”

           “Nothing beats success.”

           “We’ll knock them for a loop.”

          “We’ve got the data, we’ve got the base.”

           “That and $4 will get you coffee at Starbucks.”

           “… Available in many colors as long as it’s black.”

           “I’m not questioning where he was born, I’m worried he was hatched from an egg.”

          “Hit one out of the ballpark.”

          “Forget who wrote the Book of Love, who published it?”

           In an interesting case of symbiosis, I wouldn’t be laying these eggs of wisdom if they weren’t my audience. They bring out the weird in me; I find myself cracking wise in ways I never do at any other location. My normal modus operandi is mucho differente: Shy, angry and discreet, I go my own way, spouting platitudes and “being nice” to people by expressing concern for their welfare. “How are you?!” I ask. That deflects the question of how I am, which, usually, is pretty unhappy with life.

            If I’m a time-waster, it’s because Eric is so easy to talk to. That’s one of his gifts, his seeming interest. “Big issue, Kevin, the environment,” he’ll say. “Gotta fight industrial pollution.  Anna’s big on fighting industrial pollution. She may not know it yet, but she is!”

            And I’m off and running, babbling away about the wildlife you once encountered in Maryland, beavers, opossum, skunks, enormous horned turtles, foxes, frogs of every description, newts, lizards, praying mantises and butterflies, stingrays and skate in the bay, eels…

            My God, the eels we used to catch! We’d be fishing for “spot,” a local delicacy, with a fiberglass rod and light tackle. Suddenly, the rod is bent double and the monofilament blue line is singing off the reel, the reel lock grinding like an old tractor. “It’s an eel,” our dad would announce lugubriously from astride the heavy wooden rowboat. We boys would whoop and holler as whoever had it on his line eventually reeled it in and brought it, long, black and squirming, over the side and into the boat. “Watch the teeth,” our dad would warn nervously. “They are razor sharp!”

            Born in the Sargasso Sea, they migrate to the Chesapeake Bay and only return home to mate.

            I think they always swallowed the hook. I remember cutting the monofilament with a fish knife, but can’t remember ever pulling a hook from the mouth of an eel. Rockfish, trout and spot, you could rescue your hook. Skate didn’t nibble earthworms, so the rare occasion you brought one into the boat, your hook had simply, accidentally, snagged him. My mom wouldn’t cook skate, she complained it stunk up the entire cabin.

            Eric listens to, like, 180 seconds of this trip down memory lane, sighs in disbelief, and gets back to work. He never says so, but I castigate myself for being a chatterbox. There’s a wealth of information I bring to the campaign, a lifetime of deep understanding of Maryland issues. “Maryland tobacco? Tell me about it! I began smoking at age 9!” All this connectedness delights Anna. It bores poor Eric to distraction. What does he care how many whelps get sired by foxes to make up a litter? “I’m trying to get Anna elected,” he grunts, and I shut up. Forget hunting rifles, fishing tackle, tobacco sheds and backroom politics, in this campaign, I am surrounded by mathematical nerd bots.

            “The suburbs around Washington, D.C. have nothing to do with the Great State of Maryland,” Eric instructs me. “They are elitist, parochial and Washingtonian. Sitting here in Oxburg is worse than a backwater. It’s a contrivance. You don’t have one half of one percent of the vote! This township is irrelevant!”

            It occurs to me I’ve never explained the history of Oxburg. Built by developer Julius Lapidus in 1927, he felt he couldn’t very well name it Lapidusville. Originally, he wanted to, but his wife said “no.” Julius’ vision was a bedroom community for people working in Rockville, Chevy Chase and Bethesda, but also a location with direct access to Washington, D.C. The Blue Line ran local buses to and from the city, giant Studebakers with 6 cylinder,   40-horsepower engines and plate glass windshields. They provided a 1½ hour commute each way. Rockville Pike at the time was what its name implies, a thoroughfare linking several separate areas of habitation. A visionary, as I say, Julius left substantial lawns around each dwelling. “How I’d like to live,” was his favorite expression. Black and white photos of the area show his first billboards advertising “Cottage living in a rural paradise, accessible by car with urban centers.” Pure Julius.

            When we ask contractors to do brickwork in the development, they laugh incredulously. “Nine inch brick! No kiln in America manufactures nine inch brick. These houses must have been built in the 1920’s,” they guffaw. “Today, the industry standard is 7½ inches.”

            Hailing from Philadelphia, Julius named the place for Maryland historical figure John Ox (1617 – 1671) who was said to have owned property in the area. A developer, not a scholar, it never dawned on Julius to check out the bona fides of the man for whom the development was being named. A trip to the Library of Congress would have unearthed the trenchant facts: A Puritan from Boston, John Ox was at constant loggerheads with his Anglican Episcopalian neighbors. Basically a pain in the butt, after a few years, John Ox got run out of Maryland. No matter. Julius named it “Oxburg,” and Oxburg it remains.

            The town became incorporated in 1931, at the height of the Depression, for tax purposes. As a rural community, there simply wasn’t sufficient revenue to provide roads, parks and, above all, schools! That was the big issue, the one-room clapboard schoolhouse would not do for a rising bedroom community. The cinder roads weren’t much fun either, I’m told.

            “No good will come of this day!” announced the first mayor, Mr. Baldur Dash, at the incorporation ceremony. His words have stuck. The town motto resounds:

No good will come of this! 

           Poor Julius never found out, busy building military housing in Panama. Those moss-covered abodes are still standing, also, despite the humid climate.

            By the time my parents bought our place in 1951, my mom could write her folks that they’d left their apartment downtown and bought “a 24-year-old, $18,000 mansion with no closet space.”

            It was the same intrepid Mayor Dash who named the greenery abutting Riverdale Creek after his favorite daughter. “Natalie Woods” stands as testament to his obtuseness. However, it is not his fault that the official name of the sunken road leading into town is “The 1812 HWY.” The county decided that one. 

             Eric’s vehement dislike of my hometown always cracks me up. We still campaign locally, but Eric treats my neighbors as an afterthought.

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