Every Day, Each of Us Answers the Same Question

Almost daily, people ask how Sherrod and I are holding up through the pressures of this campaign season. I know they’re concerned about us, but I also hear their unspoken worries for themselves.

Most people who care about the future of our country are fighting a daily onslaught of fear and anxiety. So much is at stake, and we are steeped in uncertainty. How do we keep going when the climb is so steep and we can’t know what we’ll find at the edge of that cliff?

This is what I tell myself, and others when they ask. Every morning each of us wakes up and answers the same question: Is this the day we give up, or is this the day we show up? Every day that we don’t give up on ourselves is a day we’re working to save our democracy. Some days, just knowing that hope is still alive in us has to be enough. No one is built to run at full throttle all the time.

This is the toughest and most expensive race of Sherrod’s Senate career. Throughout this campaign, one of the ways I have coped with all the ugliness is to keep my heart open to those seemingly small moments that become awakenings when we pause to notice them, to breathe them in. This isn’t always easy. As I wrote in my first essay here on Substack, hope is hard work. It is also the worthiest of endeavors.

This is a story about one such moment last week.

I was on the road far from Cleveland when the campaign team traveling with me announced the unthinkable: We had a whole forty-five minutes to spare before driving to our next event.

Would I like to stop at a coffee shop?

I felt as if I’d been handed a scrolled piece of parchment that, when slowly unfurled, revealed a message from the universe: Welcome home. This may strike you as overly dramatic. For me, it’s the upside of campaign exhaustion. Magical things happen. Maybe one day I’ll tell you about the leprechauns I met in Dublin, Ohio.

Kidding, I’m kidding.

Or am I?

Coffee shops have been a refuge for most of my life, especially during my decade as a single mother. Most weekend mornings, my daughter Cait and I would wake up and pack our necessities for the 7 a.m. trek to the shop around the corner. I brought notebooks, fresh pens and morning papers. Cait packed her pink plastic case with arts supplies and Polly Pockets. Off we’d go to our favorite place in the world, the Arabica coffeeshop on Shaker Square in Cleveland.

At such an early hour, we usually managed to grab one of the tables by the front windows. We’d greet fellow regulars by name as we spread out our supplies and ordered our favorite pastries and hot drinks.

I can’t think of that place without conjuring memories of its many kindnesses. Memories like this one: Cait was seven; I was thirty-seven and just months into my first year as a single mother. I was so worried about our reconfigured family, and how it would affect both my grown son and my little girl. One morning in early December, we were sitting in the coffeeshop when one of our favorite baristas walked over to our table and handed Cait a wrapped bundle of children’s books for Christmas. When he saw that I was tearing up, he leaned in and whispered, “She’s going to be okay, because you are Caitlin’s mommy.”

Cait and Mommy in their Arabica coffeehouse days. Artist: Caitlin Schultz Molina, age 8.

Perhaps you can understand why one of my favorite soundscapes on the Calm app is called Coffee Shop. I hear it and I’m back at that table by the window, immersed in the communal hum of our home away from home that exists only in our memories now. (I especially love the sound of the cup sliding back into its saucer.)

Back to that other coffeeshop, many miles from home. The five of us walked through the doorway and immediately noticed the wall of books, captured in the photo at the top of this essay.

Except the books were not real, I quickly learned. Oh, well. I shrugged and waited for my iced coffee.

After we were seated with our drinks, three of us pivoted from discussing logistics for the rest of the day to talking about poetry. There’s no explaining this shift in conversation except to say that campaign life often throws you together with strangers who, over time, become some of your closest companions. Life stories bloom in those long hours together.

One person admitted to being intimidated by poetry. “I worry that I’m never getting it,” he said. “That I don’t understand what the poet is trying to say.”

We rushed to reassure him. I described one of my favorite poems, Digging by Seamus Heaney, and how it always made me think of how my father’s life of hard labor helped me become a writer.

That’s the beauty of poetry, I told him. It means whatever we understand it to mean. Each of us feels the words differently. I pointed to the painting of books. “Like art. Each of us looks at this and sees something different.”

He sat up a bit. “What do you see?”

“I wish the books were real. Discards found at Goodwill, maybe.”

“Or Salvation Army,” he said, nodding.

The third person in our conversation spoke up. “I see an artist who painstakingly created a painting that looks so real that when we walked in, we thought we were seeing a wall of books.”

Just like that, our perspective shifted, and I felt embarrassed by my limited vision. Then, this same person told us a story about a poem he wrote in high school that won an award.

We both stared at him. We had no idea.

I had to know more. “What was it about?”

“Love,” he said softly. “I wrote about love.” He looked down at the table and shrugged his shoulders. “I was young,” he said, but he was smiling.

Days earlier, I had told a friend I felt like a walking white knuckle, always tense. In that moment, every inch of me relaxed. We were three friends discovering a new and wonderful thing about who we are, together. Two of us had been hanging out with a poet and he had finally felt comfortable enough to let us know. We were beaming.

(He has promised to find that poem of love and send it to us. I’m still waiting, sir.)

When it was time to leave, the three of us stood side by side for a moment and stared at the wall until the man who had sworn that poetry wasn’t for him took a deep breath and pointed to the painting.

“I figured it out,” he said. “When I look at this painting, I see a reason to try reading poetry again.”

Twelve more days until Election Day. Feet forward, hearts wide open.