Kennedy's special connection
EDITOR'S NOTE: This story about how Ted Kennedy touched a local family's life was posted to a Boston.com message board by a user named Mattyhorn.
My wife and I hosted my grandmother this past weekend for dinner at our new (first) home. She is in her mid-80's, slight but still rather spry and lucid with a wonderfully bent sense of humor. She still drives herself around town, and still enjoys an occasional glass of Canadian whiskey and ginger ale after the occasional nine holes of golf. She emigrated to Massachusetts from Canada in the 1950's with my grandfather, a welder/machinist (and Canadian WWII veteran), and proceeded to work diligently in tailoring and retail up until several years ago. They worked hard but lived comfortably, emblematic of immigrant blue-collar success and the so-called American Dream.
Last weekend, she came into our home for the first time, but she looked sadder than usual. As I bent down to kiss her cheek, she took both my hands in hers and squeezed tightly. Her experienced sewing hands still have strength. She looked me dead straight and said somberly, "You know, the news said Teddy Kennedy is sick. I think it may be serious." I said I had heard the news and gave her the stock grandson's look of empathy when hearing that a friend of hers whom I had never met had died. She narrowed her eyes at me a bit and said, "He looked out for us, you know, for a long time."
I paused for a moment, just looking into her eyes -- now slightly watery -- and realized that for her, politics is not a game or an event. She sees Kennedy as a leader in whom she could rely and as a person who held her own best interests higher than his own. That he has represented her as a naturalized citizen of the US for a majority of her life and larger majority of her American life, is no small thing. That she has somehow linked her own mortality with that of a US senator whom she has never known (though met on a few occasions) is a sense of loyalty that I find hard to describe. He was 'her' senator ... 'her' leader ... inasmuch as he could have been her favorite butcher or hairdresser who had been similarly diagnosed.
After maybe a minute of her feeling sad and me feeling sad for her, her eyes refocused as if snapped out of a trance. I asked if she would like a drink, and she said, "Yes," and paused thoughtfully. "You know, it would be nice to offer a toast for Teddy to get better soon."
And so it was -- whiskey and ginger ale.
