The Lion is Dead. Long Live the Lion

When I was born in Atlanta in 1964 it was a place on the edge of civil rights movement, yet still holding its grace and non-violence in place well. Not quite as hard as New York or defined as Boston. Not nearly as cosmopolitan as Washington and yet more than the more dowdy Southern sisters of Charlotte, Birmingham and Nashville. Yes, racism ran rampant in my life - I grew up in a neighborhood of Atlanta that had become home to mostly African-American families. My best girlfriends were "colored" girls (my grandmother used that term... and my friends actually liked it!). We played jump-rope together, Barbies were a daily treat every summer afternoon and life felt good until my father died when I was 5. How could I wake up, breathe, brush my teeth and move forward in the day without him?

As the years passed, the pain of the loss of my father lessened and I listened more ane more to my mother. Reading the books that she read, listening to her take on everything from Joe Torey catching for the Braves to what those "misguided morons" were doing in Washington. She described herself as a Jeffersonian Democrat...it would be years before I would learn what that meant. By then, I had proffered the moniker "Yellow Dog Democrat" on myself, which she later adopted, too.

My plan was big - go to university in Georgia, major in political science and journalism, get a job with some hot-shot, cutting-edge senator's office, move to Washington, law school at Georgetown and then settle into the Democratic Elite inner circle and work my ass off changing the world.

I went to work for Sen. San Nunn in Atlanta, hoping to make my way to Washington... and maybe get the chance to find THE job with THE Senator or Congressman...My supervisor told me that if I wanted to get on the fastest, best track to entrenchment, get on Senator Kennedy's team. I was just foolish enough to think that armed with my neatly typed resume in my new black (bonded) leather attache, my hair in a knot and my grandmother's pearls looping my neck that I could do anything. So many of the Senators and Congressmen were always looking to add to their staffs, and while I was no sex kitten, at 22 years old, a 4.0 average with a double major in polisci and j-school, high scores on the LSATS, IQ marked at 170....5'9" tall weighing about 110 with blonde hair falling down to the middle of my back... I thought I had a chance. To at least talk to the aides of the Senator I admired most!

When I approached one of his staffers all confident, and proud of my little bits of accomplishment, he kindly glanced at my writing samples, my school records, a couple of research bits I had done for Sen Nunn, or for a charity polo match sponsored by my then-boyfriend's father's company.... he turned and looked at me and said, "It's gotta be better than this, Miss. You have to have lived more, experienced more and feel passionate about something other than self-preservation to succeed here! Come back in one year. We'll talk again...." And I started the countdown. Because everyone KNEW that if you could get on Senator Kennedy's staff, you were On Your Way. And I felt so passionate about the things that mattered to him

By the time the year had passed, so much had changed in Washington and my life. Mike Dukakis was swept from the headlines by GHW Bush... then GHW Bush swept away by the First Gulf War. I met a boy - no, a man - who loved me in spite of all of my faults and fractures and whom I loved more deeply than anything I had ever felt.

So the year passed, and another... until my career had taken a different path into international group travel planning. No, not politics. Maybe not changing the world in the more traditional, pedestrian sense, but every time I take a group somewhere new, I try to help them understand the culture, the differences and the "sames" that make us who we are.

While it's not sitting in Washington with my thumb on the pulse of the world, I try to make my difference every day - by teaching my children that the world is a big place, but the people in it share some common bonds - the right to eat, the right to shelter, the right to earn a living, the right to be cared for when sick and the right to dignity at their death.

I carry this with me everywhere I go. I learned it from my dad. And from Uncle Teddy. Rest in Peace, Bob Evans and Teddy Kennedy. And have one on me.