XN - (D)

Age 6:

I sat with my father on the floor of our green carpeted living room. He sat facing our small television, his back up against our slouching, beige and brown striped couch, relaxing drinking a bottle of beer. I sat crossed-legged, facing my dad, looking intently at the Scrabble board, the only board game my dad enjoyed playing. From the static-stained television set news coverage of the 1988 presidential race gurgled into our living room. Although I don’t recall clearly, I think that we were watching one of the party conventions. The men on tv were talking about a lot of topics which my six year old mind could not grasp, but I deciphered two keys words they kept using again and again: Republican and Democrat. From the inflections in their voices, it seemed to me that the Republicans and Democrats did not get along.
After I played my word, I asked my dad, a bricklayer who spent his days laboring in the cold winds of Colorado’s Front Range, “What’s the difference between Democrats and Republicans?”
My father set his beer down, brushed his thick calloused hand through his thinning hair and pushed a sigh out from bearded lips.
“Well,” he said calmly, “Republicans have money and Democrats don’t.”
Again, I looked at the men on our small tv, propped on a makeshift entertainment center. I looked past my father’s large frame at my mother ironing in our kitchen. We had a washing machine, but no dryer, so we would hang our clothes out on the line in the backyard. Those same winds in which my father spent his days mixing concrete and building houses dried our clothes. We lived on five acres of prairie land in a yellow single-wide trailer my parents moved into shortly before I was born. The trailer had just enough room for the three of us, and by just enough, I mean barely any room at all. The kitchen, dining and living rooms, were essentially all one area, the kitchen and living room separated by a small peninsula of counter top next to the front door. My parents installed a wood-burning stove and my father built a hearth with bricks he retrieved from various job sites. Down the hall from where my mother was ironing was my bedroom, which was barely large enough to hold my bed. Past that was the bathroom, where our washing machine was and a space heater ran through the night. The master bedroom, which took up the last section of the trailer, was small enough that an eight foot by ten foot Navajo rug covered most of the wall behind my parents’ bed.
I looked back at my father, absorbing the definition he had just provided, describing the two great political parties of the United States of America.
“So, then, we’re Democrats, right?”