The reporter feels right at home with these people.
A 'Blue' Life In the City By the Bay
By David Finkel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 27, 2004; Page A01
Last of three articles
SAN FRANCISCO -- This is the home of the Harrison family, who describe Bill Clinton as "intelligent," "charismatic" and "a good representation of America," and George W. Bush as "frightening," "a total imbecile" and "monkey boy."
A family of four, the Harrisons live in a house decorated with crucifixes in the bedrooms and a hot-pink feather boa in the foyer. Tom Harrison, 62, is a union official. Maryanne Harrison, 60, runs an after-school program. Heather Harrison, 29, is a teacher. Matthew Harrison, 28, is an electrician. They are fourth- and fifth-generation San Franciscans whose home was built for the family in 1917. Their neighborhood is filled with restaurants that are cafes, and stores that are boutiques, and their neighbors include straight people, gay people, rich people, homeless people, married people, single people, and the House minority leader, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D), who says of this place: "I think it is more American than most places in the country."
Pollsters and political consultants call it Blue America, shorthand for the roughly half of the U.S. population that tends toward liberal values, the Democratic Party and what one consultant calls "morality writ small." It is where abortion is ultimately seen as a personal choice, faith is more often an individual expression than a collective one, and marriage is less a union of two genders than of two people, which is one of the reasons San Francisco is considered the bluest place of all.
Twenty-seven weeks from today, those values will be at the center of a presidential election in which, for many voters, the political choice of Bush vs. Sen. John F. Kerry is a surrogate for a broader referendum. "On lifestyle issues -- marriage, church, sexuality, gay rights, guns. And cultural preferences," says John Kenneth White, a professor of politics at Catholic University. "And the war, too, in the sense that on things like the Patriot Act, how important is security? Another issue is the Ten Commandments."
Is the United States to be guided by the rigid morality of the Ten Commandments, or by something more elastic? By the desire for national security or civil liberties? By the feeling that leaders are authoritative or authoritarian? What is the proper definition of marriage? Of family? Of the true American life?
That's what White and others say the November election will help decide, an election in which four of the voters will be the Harrisons of San Francisco, who know that their version of America, the Blue version, some days can feel as bright as a pink feather boa and other days as dark as a bruise.
Defining 'Blue'
The Harrisons, who regard themselves in many ways as stereotypically Blue, are also in many ways the timeless American family. Matthew is the one planning his proposal to his girlfriend. Heather is the one going over the guest list for her upcoming wedding. Maryanne is the one cooking pasta. And Tom is the one who can often be found in a recliner -- the very place one might find Britton Stein of Sugar Land, Tex., who was profiled in yesterday's Washington Post as an example of someone living a Red life.
The similarities between Stein and Tom Harrison go deeper than that: Stein drives a pickup truck; so does Harrison. Stein is a landscaper; Harrison was a longtime gardener for the city of San Francisco before recently going to work as assistant business manager of his union local. They even sound alike when talking about, in Stein's case, Blues, and in Harrison's case, Reds.
Stein: "They're whiners."
Harrison: "They've got the same dreams and hopes and desires and needs that everybody does. They're people. They're human beings. Except they've got one gear that goes backwards."
So much for common ground.
"They're eating well," Harrison continues. "They've got a roof over their heads. They're feeding their kids. They've got everything. There are no luckier people. How can they complain? About anything?" And yet they do, he says, griping about taxes, about the size of government and about politicians as though every last one of them were a one-dimensional cartoon.
He, on the other hand, thinks that "politicians tend to be good people" and that government isn't too big, and even though a third of his paycheck goes to taxes, he pays them gladly and would willingly pay more because of what he sees around him every day. Such as the homeless man he once saw under the freeway: "He goes to step off the curb, and he stumbled, but he kept his balance -- and he blessed himself. It just killed me. It was Jesus Christ. In front of me. The poor guy. Somebody's child," he says.
So he gave somebody's child a dollar. He intended it as a quiet act of charity. Now, however, he has come to think of it as an act of futility, or, worse, vanity, because beyond that one man were dozens of homeless people in the neighborhood, thousands in the city, millions in the country. This is why he believes in what others might contemptuously call Big Government, he says, because some problems are too vast to be solved by churches, charities, faith-based initiatives or individual dollars fluttering out of car windows.
"A responsibility to the citizens," he says, defining a government's obligation. That means not only militias and border protection, he says, but also compassion. "They're not responsible for a person once he gets back on his feet. But if he can't, a government has to have some type of plan to help them. They deserve it. They're human beings, and they're citizens of this country," he says, and then he goes on to explain how one person can develop beliefs so utterly different from another: "I guess it has to be life experiences."
His include a father who worked two soul-stripping jobs and died the sad death of an alcoholic, a wedding to Maryanne ("Oh, man, she was a knockout"), and a day 13 years later when he told Maryanne he needed help.
He was, it turned out, his father's son, in terms of both work ethics and alcohol. He had been drinking, heavily and secretly. Now, after a day of abstinence because of a flu, spiders were crawling out of the flowered curtains and cats were coming up the side of the bed. "Vicious black cats," he says 24 years later, seeing them clearly, sounding still amazed at what he had become. Maryanne took him to a hospital with an alcohol detox unit, and when he came home after 30 days of listening to people of all types describing their own spirals, it was as someone more sensitive to what can happen in even a very good life.
"See, you can't have one hard-and-fast rule for everybody. There are grays. Each person has his own bottom," he says. This is the philosophy he has come to, one result of which is an attempt at tolerance toward whatever a person wants to do, even if he wouldn't necessarily do it himself.
Such as Heather's choice for her wedding, to have a day so exquisite it will cost $30,000. "Pretty fancy," he says.
Or what Matthew is telling him now about his plans for a dinner in three days, when he will present his girlfriend, Ruby, with a 2-carat diamond engagement ring he has been saving for over the past year. "What I'm thinking," Matthew says, "is I'll order some sparkling cider and drop it in the glass."
"I just hope she doesn't choke on it," Tom says.
A Wide World
The next day, when hundreds of gay couples are lined up a few miles away at City Hall, hoping to be married, Maryanne is considering what she would do if Matthew were giving the ring to a man.
"Gay people, they don't pick an easy road. They have a hard life," she says. "But if that was his calling, I wouldn't stand in the way."
She is in the kitchen as she says this, where so much of her family's life has taken place. In the Harrison house, nothing is just there. Everything has a story. The oak table, in the family for generations, is where every marriage proposal has been announced and dissected, including hers. The counter is where Tom was standing last summer, making coffee, when Heather's boyfriend, Carlo, told him that he would like to marry Heather -- "if it's okay with you." The spot near the stove is where Tom hugged Carlo and said "Of course," and it's also where Maryanne's mother was bending down to light the pilot light when a little explosion burned off her eyebrows. "Both of them," Maryanne says. "And her eyelashes."
"And her mustache," says Heather, who is at the table, looking over her wedding planner.
Even the stairway that leads down to the front door has a story: Maryanne's mother was standing on the top step when she learned that her husband, whom she had asked to leave in a fit of anger, decided that he was never coming back. Down she went, tumbling to the bottom in a dead drop, and a panicked Maryanne called her father, who rushed over, picked up his wife, carried her to their bed, laid her down, tucked her in and left. And "they never talked again," Maryanne says. "They hated each other."
She was 4 when that happened. Now she is a person who laughs often and loudly. Now she is bright clothing and gold nail polish and hair colored to match by a gay man named Frank, so close to the family that he was the first person she asked Tom to call after Heather's birth. But back then she was beginning a childhood she describes as "guilt personified."
It was a small, safe, shy, insulated, very Catholic, stay-in-the-neighborhood life. Up the hill to St. Vincent de Paul school in the morning, down the hill in the afternoons to a mother who began loathing Christmas and an older brother who became increasingly melancholy. Up the hill on Sundays to Mass, down the hill to the stairs, the kitchen, the oven, the counter, the table.
This is the way it was until high school, when she suddenly found herself in a new school in a different part of town, sitting to next to Cinderella Washington, the first dark-skinned person she ever befriended, who seemed paralyzed one day when someone in the class said that when black people move into a neighborhood, home prices immediately drop.
"I remember looking at her and seeing this look on her face," Maryanne says. "She didn't say anything. So I did. I said, 'I disagree with that.' " Four words -- and rather passive ones at that, especially compared with how Maryanne speaks her mind now -- but they were the beginning of her transition, she says, "the seed." Her learning moved away from just school books. She remembers telling her very Republican father what she had dared to say, and his response: "Don't be a flag waver." And so she learned to temper a father's advice. She remembers class trips to orphanages and the roughest parts of the Tenderloin district, and so she learned about varieties of sadness different from her own. She met Tom and learned about love, got married and learned about intimacy, worked in the AIDS-devastated Castro district and learned to disagree with her church.
Her world got wider and wider until she became the person she says she is now: someone who thrives on, rather than insulates herself from, diversity. She has been to a Chinese wedding. She has been to a Buddhist wedding. She has been to a Buddhist funeral. She has Passover Seder every year with the neighbors next door. "See, I love that," she says. "I love that. People interest me. They fascinate me."
Another story:
"Who is Maryanne?" she remembers someone once asking her, when Tom was in the hospital and she introduced herself at an Al-Anon meeting.
"I was stumped," she says. "I didn't know."
And though she's still figuring it out, she says, some of the answer came when Tom was released and she found herself suddenly feeling married to a stranger. Several times over the next year, she says, she thought seriously of leaving and getting a divorce, but each time found herself weighing the desire for instant relief against a belief that marriage is a "sacrament."
She knows plenty of people who have divorced, and good for them, she says, but her choice each time was to stay.
"And thank God I did," she says.
Shaping Views
"The church. The priest. My dress," Heather is saying of what she has done so far to plan for her July wedding. At City Hall, the notion of marriage this day has turned into a frenzied rush before some court puts a stop to the whole thing, but in the heterosexual world of marriage there's plenty of time.
"What else? We had to discuss the budget, the size, the feel of the wedding. Do we want traditional? Small? Formal? Casual? Indoor? Outdoor?
"I got the person to do our hair, the photographer, the cake, the videographer.
"We had to do church stuff. We had to take a Foccus test, 150 questions, like 'Does your future spouse's drug use bother you?' 'Are you afraid to be naked in front of your future spouse?' I wanted to say, 'I'm afraid to be naked in front of me.' " Needless to say, there's a little anxiety in the life of Heather Harrison.
"What else?" she continues. "Shoes. Jewelry. Bridesmaid dresses. Bridesmaid gifts. Favors for the guests. Invitations. Seating assignments. Table names, because we don't want numbers. What else? Oh, wedding bands. We had to plan the Mass. The honeymoon. The guest book. A pen. Flowers. Limousines. A band. Registering.
"What's left?"
"Do you guys have a song?" asks Matthew, just back from picking up his ring, which he got from a Cantonese-speaking jewelry designer who bowed in gratitude when Matthew got his first look and said, "My God. Perfect."
"We're going to do 'Unforgettable' by Nat King Cole," Heather says.
"The old one or the new one?" asks Matthew, who gave the jeweler $8,500 and then gave the ring to his parents for safekeeping.
"Well, I like the old one. He likes the new one."
Palpable anxiety -- though nothing could match Tom and Maryanne's wedding day, when they ran in circles accommodating Maryanne's parents and taking care of Tom's father, who the night before had fallen drunk in a bathtub. "It was embarrassing," says Tom. "I was exhausted," says Maryanne.
So go weddings, but Heather, like her parents, believes in the importance of weddings, ceremony, marriage, all of it. "It's a sacrament," she says the next day, using her mother's same word with the same sense of gravity.
Heather is in her classroom when she says this, the place where her version of Blue has evolved from an upbringing into a philosophy since she began teaching five years ago. Unlike at St. Vincent de Paul, which she attended with the children of doctors and architects, this school, St. James, has a tough reputation. She teaches 20 students in fourth grade, the majority of them children of immigrants who work as maids and construction workers and live for the most part in single-parent households:
There is a squinting boy in the front row in need of glasses, which Heather first mentioned to his mother 31/2 months ago. Finally he's getting them; now Heather is telling his mother about the need for a toothbrush.
"And the kid: 'Oh, my dad's gonna pick me up today,' and I have yet to see him. Imagine the disappointment. 'It's going to be so cool. You're going to see my dad.' It's never happened."
And the boy in need of help with his multiplication tables. "I said to his mother, 'You've got to practice with him.' 'Well, I work three jobs to be able to put food on the table. I don't have time for love and hugs and homework.' What do you say to that in response?"
She imagines what some would say, that these are the effects of a liberal immigration policy, or examples of government coddling, or the consequences of a loosening moral code, and on her most frustrating days she wants to agree. "There are days I hate my job," she says. "I'm sick of the parents. I'm sick of the complaints. It's a thankless job. I could count on one hand the number of genuine thank-yous I've gotten."
But on most days, she says, she feels differently.
"No one asks to be poor," she says. "No one wants to work three jobs. No one wants to be a bad parent."
This is the philosophy she has come to -- "Love thy neighbor," is how she distills it -- and she tries to carry everywhere she goes. When St. Vincent de Paul recently offered her a comfortable teaching position, she turned it down because "I find it more rewarding here." When she and her fiance went house-hunting over the bridge in 83.9 percent white Walnut Creek, she couldn't wait to get back to San Francisco. "I don't like just white people," she says.
The lessons are with her in church, too, where, on Sunday now, the day Matthew is to propose, she is in her usual spot, left side, sixth row, next to the center aisle, when the priest uses his sermon to attack what's happening at City Hall as "the whims and the grandstanding of some politicians and judges." For the moment she says nothing, and when the priest says, "For church, for marriage, for families, let us pray to the Lord," she endorses the sentiment with prayer. So do Tom, who is an usher, and Maryanne, a Eucharistic minister.
But later, after church, out for breakfast, the three of them talk about how deeply they disagree, not only with what the priest said but with what Pope John Paul II said the day before, that same-sex unions "degrade" what marriage is supposed to be.
"I don't believe he would have said that," Maryanne says, referring not to the priest or the pope but to Jesus.
"They were 12 men hanging around together," Heather says, thinking of the disciples and a statistic she saw as she prepared to be a teacher. "Hmm. It's 10 percent of any class. Do the math."
Two blocks away, meanwhile, at home, Matthew is finalizing his plans for tonight. He has abandoned the idea of the ring in the glass. Instead, he is writing a poem, to be inserted into a card, to be presented during dinner, the last line of which will be "Ruby, my love, will you marry me?" That's the plan. He will hand her the card, and when she gets to the last line of the poem she will look up and see Matthew in front of her, down on one knee, holding out the ring.
The ring, he now thinks. Where is the ring?
Back at the cafe:
"If they started marrying gay people in our church, men and men, women and women, I wouldn't care," Heather says.
"I agree," Maryanne says.
"I'm not going to condemn it," Tom says, and he is about to say something else when he is interrupted by his cell phone.
"Hello?
"Go in my closet.
"Turn to the left.
"With your right hand, push my slacks apart and look down where my shoes are.
"Okay.
"Goodbye."
The ring has been found.
'We're a Great Family'
And now, half a day later, it has presumably been delivered.
Well into the evening, Tom, Maryanne and Heather are waiting to find out what happened. They know that Matthew planned to take Ruby downtown to the Tonga Room, where the tables surround a pool of water and a band plays on a floating barge. They know that he dressed up in a new black shirt because Maryanne ironed it for him.
Maryanne passes some time fiddling around in the kitchen. Tom celebrates an anniversary, 24 years to the day without alcohol, with a Dr Pepper. Heather checks a wedding list of 200 people ranging from a just-married gay couple to the most non-Blue person they know, an old family friend who can seem so sour about gays and immigrants that they imagine when he goes to a restaurant, the maitre d' announces, "Bitterman, party of one."
At last, toward 10, they hear the front door open.
"Well?" Maryanne calls out as the sound of footsteps comes up the stairs. "Did she say yes?"
Here's Matthew.
Followed by Ruby, who's holding out her left hand.
"She said yes," Matthew says, and with that everyone takes turns hugging Ruby, whose last name is Gomez, whose parents don't speak English, whose father gave his blessing to Matthew through an interpreter, whose mother dressed her children in dresses and ties the day they crossed the border from Mexico, who keeps looking at her ring and saying, "I love it. I love it."
"They are truly the American dream," Maryanne will say later of Ruby's family, but for now she listens to Matthew fill in the details: that he did it after the egg rolls were served and before he could be drowned out by the band on the barge.
"I must have had 20 glasses of water," he says.
"The best part is when you get up in the morning," Heather says to Ruby, looking at her own ring.
"Well, well, well," Tom says. "How nice is this?"
"I think we're a great family," Maryanne says.
"So do I," Ruby says, and so it goes into the late hours.
A Blue life, then, that in November will translate into five votes for John F. Kerry and five votes against George W. Bush:
Ruby leans against a stove where a woman once lost her eyelashes.
Heather excuses herself after a while to call her fiance.
Tom excuses himself as well and heads off to a bedroom where he hasn't seen spiders in 24 years.
Matthew and Ruby make their way down a stairway where a marriage once tumbled to its end.
And Maryanne sits at a table where one more marriage proposal has been celebrated, thinking about how many versions there are of love, families and lives. Maybe hers does fit what others would call the Blue version, she says, but on this very nice night she has a more personal way to describe it.
"Oh, I love my life," she says.
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