I’m fairly certain the story I’m about to relate happened when I was in sixth grade (1986 to 1987), but it’s possible it happened when I was in seventh grade (1987 to 1988). That means that I was either eleven or twelve, an age at which I was old enough to appreciate what was happening, but now sufficiently eroded away in my memory to preclude a perfect recall of the event.
In other words: I remember this happening, but it’s not like I can produce any sort of evidentiary proof. Believe me, or don’t. All caveats established, let’s proceed. The assignment was a grade school perennial: Write to our local Congressperson or Senator. If he wrote back? Extra credit. So I took my number two pencil in my chubby fingers and applied it with an unmistakably adolescent scrawl to a sheet of wide-ruled, three-hole punched notebook paper.
“Dear Senator McCain,” I began, I probably picked McCain because he had recently been “promoted” from the House to the Senate, and his name was in the news. I wasn’t, at eleven or twelve, what you could call “politically engaged.” I don’t think I knew what the ideological differences between the parties were. I mean, to be honest, I didn’t know much of anything. I just wanted to finish my homework before Spenser: For Hire started.
So I filled the rest of the two “body” paragraphs of the letter with whatever semi-coherent content my pre-teen mind could generate. I don’t remember the line by line specifics, but a few words and phrases stand out in my memory from the time—words and phrases I was particularly pleased with being able to use at the time, as I was fairly certain they made me sound more grown-up and politically aware than I actually was at the time:
“Constituencies”
“Partisan gridlock”
“Reach across the aisle”
String these three items together and you get the picture: I exhorted him (although I didn’t know that word at the time) to “reach across the aisle” and fight against “partisan gridlock” on behalf of his “constituencies” at home in the great state of Arizona.
As I said: No great indication of a developing political mind—but what could one honestly expect from someone who was saving up his allowance to buy Serpentor?
I mailed my letter and all but forgot about it.
Several weeks later, during dinner, the phone rang. I remember that I answered the call. I don’t remember the name of the youngish-sounding guy on the other end of the phone (in the tall-tale version of this story it would be Mark Salter), but I remember where he worked.
“This is ___ from Senator McCain’s office. Can I talk to Jeffrey, please?
“This is he.”
What follows is, as best as I can reconstruct from my memory, the remainder of the call in its entirety. Once he started speaking, I didn’t say a word.
“Well, Jeffrey, I received your letter to Senator McCain, and I wanted to respond to you. First of all, the Senator has one constituency, the residents of the State of Arizona—not multiple constituencies, as you wrote.”
“Also, since the Senator just arrived in the Senate, he has not been a part of the problem of ‘partisan gridlock’ you write about. What’s more, if you had done your research, you would see that while he was in the House of Representatives, Senator McCain made it a point to ‘reach across the aisle’ on multiple occasions, just as your letter would have him do.”
“I can tell you’re a kid and everything, but if you ever want to be taken seriously you should you get your facts straight, especially before you write a letter like this.”
I think I said, “Okay, thanks,” before he hung up on me. That was it.
