It's Already December Here: A Report From An Ohio Embed

Granted, the circumstances of my little election-year report on Ohio are extreme.

My 85-year-old father has been diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas, and for the last two weeks I've been here in Middletown, shepherding him through tests and oncology appointments. "Palliative" is the operative word, although I keep hoping that he's got some good, cheerful, peaceful, philosophical time left. But Dad's awfully depressed right now, and I'm trying hard not to "swallow his depression whole," as my sister warns me against.

I've played golf a couple times and though I'm not really a jogger, I go for a daily run to escape the quiet of Dad's condo, to throw off the constant downward pressure of decline. But outside, in this once great southern-Ohio steel community south of Dayton and north of Cincinnati, it's just more of the same.

I realize the timing of my visit is bad. The first week I was here a windstorm inspired by Hurricane Ike blew out power all around the Cincinnati area. Power stayed off for most of Middletown's 50,000 residents for half a week. The storm blew our mailbox away and shut down our phone for a while, but Dad and I never lost power, so we were able to listen to pundits argue about whether or not the U.S. financial system would collapse.

The Reds are 20 games out of first and the Bengals are the laughing stock of the NFL. "They've got so much talent, but they just can't get it together," lamented a bewildered golfer at Middletown's Weatherwax golf course, the day before we watched them lose their third straight game to open the season.

I jogged around downtown Middletown, stomping grounds of my dad's dad, who died before I was born. (And before people jogged. I'm always ready to explain to his ghost what I'm doing.) He was a community pillar in the 1920s and '30s and '40s and '50s, as head of public relations and employment at the American Rolling Mill Co. It was said--and it still is said by the dwindling old guys who attend "Wednesday lunch" at Mike's restaurant out by the mill--that if you wanted to get anything done in this company town, Charlie Murray was one of the people you needed to see.

But the steel industry went to hell in the 1980s, and downtown Middletown was bled dry decades ago by a mall that was built on the outskirts of town. What storefronts aren't vacant are grim taverns, tattoo and piercing parlors and pawn shops like the one by the old train station, where I pranced past a scabby-faced man standing by the locked door, waiting to sell something he'd been clinging to.

The Middletown Cemetery is overgrown, most of the paper mills are shut down, the Armco general offices are empty. The Middletown Journal has moved out of its headquarters and into the first floor of a mostly abandoned office building, and there are streets that I've been scared to run down.

"Why did you run on Columbia Street?" my dad asked with alarm.

And now even the new mall is half-empty, its anchor store Dillard's having ceased to stock new items months ago. Walking through the mall, what you notice is the hollow whoosh of the air conditioning. Is it blowing air in, or sucking it out?

The only thing new in Middletown is a sparkling hospital, out by the highway. It looks like a hotel. Dad might as well have checked in, for all the time he's spent there lately.

"It feels like December," Dad said one morning. He was referring to the amount of time he has spent taking tests, waiting for results, waiting to begin waiting to die.

"I'm so not interested in politics right now," he said in response to a pro-Obama e-mail someone forwarded him.

Before all this, I had been lobbying him to vote for Obama this year. I joked to my Chicago friends that I was doing my part to deliver Ohio. He'll be around in November, but he's got enough to worry about. And you know what? I've got enough to worry about.

Ah, but McCain is leading here in the polls, and Ohio is such an important state, and I'll probably spend more time here between now and November 4. The Obama campaign has a regional campaign office on Main Street, and maybe I'll jog in and ask about doing some canvassing.

First Street is just as raggedy as Columbia, but it somehow seems less desperate. Still, how exactly would I introduce myself to that old guy, on oxygen, asleep in his chair on his front porch in the middle of the morning?

"Hi, I'm Charlie Murray's grandson, and I'm supporting Barack Obama for president ... "

Comments

[StephenFox]

SO do the math! the $85 billion for AIG, which is I believe a done deal, slipped in before the Big Bailout Fraud Discussions took shape in earnest, divided by say 200 million people comes to $425 each, for one bloody corporation. It is all disgusting, part of the preplanned power and fiscal grab of the Neocons in the last four months of Neocons/Bush/Cheney/Halliburton/Blackwater. These guys have almost destroyed the US over the past 8 years. I fear for the kind of future faced by the elderly, the infirmed, the unemployed and the unemployable, especially if all of this Bailout comes through.
The folks who should really be evaluating this "crisis" seem asleep at the wheel or else already bought off. European Economists are saying it is a crock; most European Finance Ministers will have no part of it. Which Senators really care about our public, the folks who have no voice in Congress, like the infirmed elderly, facing a most frightening and perilous future.

[Scipio]

I sympathize, as I have cancer, too: leukemia. There is a story floating around that Rove talked Bush into curtailing stem cell research. It was payback for the support of the loony religious right. If we are ever going to defeat cancer, we will have to have all scientific experimentation on the table, not just those permitted by the evangelical minority. I cannot imagine a humanist like Obama taking anything *off* the table. Like you, I am voting for change.

[mabell75]

Dave,
Be sure to take care of yourself. That person on oxygen just might be trying to hold on longer enough to vote for Barack as is Ed, a 96 year old friend with mutliple health issues that hears in Barack a dream he has always hoped for.

[Mariel]

I'm an old woman, caring for my 91 year old husband who is in a wheelchair, but has all his marbles. We don't know who to vote for. We can't see either one as meeting OUR needs. Obama we don't trust partly because he wants to "level" everything into a socialized medicine type of coverage. We both worked hard for GOOD medical coverage; why should ours be leveled? Everything else in our life has been leveled: we have no clothing budget except for maybe a couple of t-shirts a year and some sox, no enertainment or travel budget, can't even more to lower altitude to save me from having a stroke (I have TWO rare blood diseases).

Obama will not help ME financially. Neither will McCain. I may vote for Chuck Baldwin of the Constitution Party. He believes in all of Ron Paul's ideals. We won't win, but at our age--does it matter?

Maybe the man who knew Charlie Murray has some other ideals than Obama's too. Or McCain's. Maybe he dreams about a time when his ideals were possible, even tangible.

[DragonMama]

He doesn't want to level your insurance - he has stated repeatedly that if you like your insurance, then keep it. Basically he's trying to offer an open-enrollment period in the congressional health plan for people who either don't have, or don't like their current insurance. This could encourage your insurance company to lower their premiums to compete - I'm sure that kind of "leveling" would be good as long as the coverage didn't change?

My young family (I'm nearly 32) had a stint of needing to pay for our own coverage out of our pockets or go uncovered when we moved after our first child was born. The monthly deductable for 2 reasonably healthy 27 year olds and a new baby was over $1000/mo and every medical practicioner would have been out of network (we moved from Virginia to Ohio and it was Mid-Atlantic Medical Insurance or something like that - the insurance provided by my husband's public school district, he's a teacher). McCain not only think s that $5000 would have been enough for our family to pay for our premium out-of-pocket (it wouldn't have even covered HALF of the yearly premium if we'd had to go that long!), he wants to have the premium amount employers pay included as part of our taxable income, bumping many of us into a higher tax bracket and INCREASING the taxes on the middle class.

[Mildmannered]

"maybe I'll jog in and ask about doing some canvassing"

I hope that you do -- you actually may end up being responsible for electing Obama/Biden

[champlain]

I feel for you. I was a caregiver for both my aunt and my mother when they were dying.. You mentioned a sister. I hope that you both have lots of support, and that your writing will be a solace.

[boophus]

Sorry about your dad.