Spoilers: no wave. Four of the candidates didn’t make it out of the primaries and a fifth was running as an independent in a long-shot candidacy. The one candidate to win major-party primary was the awesome Shawna Roberts¹ of Barnesville, Ohio. Shawna’s one of the most down-to-earth, real, people I know and it was a lot of fun to follow her campaign. Her twitter feed has been a hoot:

Last night, at the BPW forum, my opponent’s statement said his childhood home “didn’t even have indoor plumbing.”

Oh, Bill. Indoor plumbing’s still pending at our old farm house.
You can’t out-hillbilly me. Unless you eat squirrel brains. I draw the line at squirrel brains. pic.twitter.com/hGMJvQ8Yhq

— Shawna Roberts (@RobertsOhioD6) October 20, 2018

Unfortunately Shawna only got about 30 percent of the vote yesterday. This election was not kind to Democrats in rural districts like southeast Ohio’s 6 and she was running against an incumbent. From my vantage point 30 percent seems pretty good, though as my seventh grade math teacher used to intone in his weary baritone, close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. ² Still, the prospect of a Mrs Roberts Goes to Washington win had me hoping against the odds. I’d love to see her continue to be involved: 2020 is only two years away.

Stats on everyone’s results are at the updated Quakers in Politics page. For anyone wondering about Quaker politicians, Paul Buckley had a nice overview of our complicated relationship to voting a few years ago.

Just a moment…

www.friendsjournal.org

But a big gateway is genealogy. Over the years I’ve gotten countless emails and phone calls from excited newcomers who start off the conversation with details of their family tree (when I used to answer the Quakerbooks phone, I would let these folks go for about two minutes before gently interjecting “wow that’s fascinating!, do you wanna buy a book?!?”)

One fascinating factoid in this week’s QuakerSpeak video comes from Thomas Hamm:

If your family arrived in the United States before 1860, there’s probably a 50–50 chance that you have a Quaker ancestor somewhere.

Quaker Meetings shouldn’t try to be the gathering spots for prodigal family reunions. The early Quakers were strangers to one another, joining together because of the fire of their convictions. Ours is a living, breathing, ever evolving spiritual practice. Still: we are also a grouping of people. We look for belonging.

The longer I’m with Friends, the more I think ours is a religious community that draws strength from the tension of paradoxes. I have a soft spot for the old Quaker families. If Jesus brings some of the new people in through Beliefnet quizzes or Ancestry.com search results, well, maybe that’s okay.

http://quakerspeak.com/how-to-research-your-quaker-ancestry/

One of the most famous scenes in the AMC show Mad Men comes near the end of season one. Kodak has asked the advertising firm to create a campaign around a new slide projector that has a circular tray. Don Draper presents the Carousel and gives a nostalgia-steeped presentation that use his personal photographs to move both the Kodak execs and the viewers at home, who know that these semi-focused pictures will soon be all that left of his disintegrating family.

No falling apart family for me, but I find myself already feeling nostalgic for a family vacation to Disney World that doesn’t start for another six days. I’ve recently been looking through our Flickr archive of past trips (four for me) and realize that they are our Carousel. The start with my fiancee taking a cynical me on my first trip. Later visits bring kids to the photographic lineup: newly-found legs to run, the joys of messy ice cream, the scare of not-very-scary rides and the big eyes of parades all run through the sets.

In less than a week we’ll start a new set. There will be two new children in this one. “The babies” are both walking and toddling and are at their peak of baby photogenic cuteness. The older two are real kids now and the eldest is starting to show early glimpses of teenage-hood: eye-rolling, exhalation of air (“uh!”) to show disapproval of inconvenient parental instructions.

Iconic family pictures will happen. Since our last visit five years ago, my wife’s lost her father to cancer and my mother’s been slipping into the forgetfulness of Alzheimer’s. As the wheel of life turns it somehow becomes more possible to see ourselves as part of the turning Carousel. Some decades from now I can imagine myself going through these pictures surrounded by indulging children and antsy grandchildren, exclaiming “look how young everyone looks!”

Update post-trip:

There are 104 pictures from this trip in our public Flickr set, with one of our four kids holding hands as they walk to the pool a standout iconic shot of their childhood together:

We’ve spent a lot of time here since then. It’s a 24 hour vigil and has been and will continue to be. In Boston there are vigils that have been going seven years. I try to imagine Gregory as a seven year old, having spent his childhood growing up here in this little church. It’s not an impossible scenario.

I also spend a lot of time talking with the faithful Catholics who have come here to protect the church. It’s a cacophony of voices right now–conversations about the church, sure, but that’s only one of the many topics that come up. People are sharing their lives–stories about growing up, about people that are know, about current events… It’s a real community. We’ve been attending this church for years but it’s now that I’m really getting to know everyone.

I sometimes ponder how I, the self-dubbed “Quaker Ranter,” got involved in all of this. Through my wife, of course–she grew up Catholic, became a Friend for eleven years and then “returned to the Church” a few years after our marriage. But there’s more than that, reasons why I spend my own time here. Part is my love of the small and quirky. St Mary’s parishioners are standing up for the kind of churches where people know each other. In an era where menial tasks are hired out, the actual members of St. Marys tend the church’s rosary garden and clean its basement and toilets. They spend time in the church beyond the hour of mass, doing things like praying the rosary or adoration.

The powers-that-be that want St Mary’s closed so badly want a large inpersonal church with lots of professionalized services and a least-common-denominator faith where people come, go and donate their money to a diocese that’s run like a business. But that’s not St. Mary’s. There’s history here. This is a hub of a town, an ancient crossroads, but the bishop wants big churches in the splurge of suburban sprawl. Even we Friends need places like St Mary’s in the world.

Father went to college (he was secretive about past, he might have done a semester at St Joe’s)
Father finished college
Mother went to college (two year secretarial program)
Mother finished college
Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.
Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers
Had more than 50 books in your childhood home
Had more than 500 books in your childhood home
Were read children’s books by a parent
Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18
Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively (because we’re good assimilationists)
Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
Had to take out less than $5000 in student loans in order to go to college
Didn’t need student loans to go to college out of high school
Went to a private high school
Went to summer camp (day camp at the Y for a few summers)
Had a private tutor before you turned 18
Family vacations involved staying at hotels
Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18 (pride kept us out of second-hand stores until we later crossed that class boundary where thrifting is cool precisely because its not a necessity)
Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
There was original art in your house when you were a child
Had a phone in your room before you turned 18
You and your family lived in a single family house
Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home
You had your own room as a child (I was the only child at home after age 7)
Participated in an SAT/ACT prep course (my mom thought they were cheating)
Had your own TV in your room in High School (mostly as monitor for Radio Shack Color Computer she bought me junior year of high school)
Owned a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College
Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16
Went on a cruise with your family
Went on more than one cruise with your family
Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up (we were more zoo/county fair/Independence Hall tour types (hey, they’re all free/low-cost!))
You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family (n/a: included in apt rent, besides my mom would never let on that things were tight)

A list like this can never be all inclusive but it seems there are some big omissions. Where’s anything about family structure and finances, like “You had two parental figures living in your house” and “Both parents contributed to family income” or “One parent stayed home or worked part-time”? In my own instance, my father had a secret other family and never paid for anything other than the occasional trip to Roy Rogers (secret family to “Little Marty” at least, the women and older children presumably noitced he was only around half the time and constructed some mental run-around to explain it away).

The other omission is social networks. I have no memory of family friends. I cannot name one friend of my father and my mother’s friends were limited to a handful of “girls” at the office. By the time I got to high school I started to see how certain classmates were able to work the system to get the best teachers and classes and this was mostly accomplished by parents swapping notes after Hewbrew class or at church or at hockey practice. Friends are rightly noted for the strength of their social networks and I suspect these provide a social privilege that is far more valuable than parental salary.

Jeanne promises to write a part two to her post explaining what this all means to Friends. I’m looking forward to it though I’m unsure just what easy generalization can be made if we’re looking at origins. One of the few surveys trying to be comprehensive found Philadelphia-area Friends don’t reflect American averages yet for many convinced Friends our participation has mirrored (and perhaps been unconsciously motivated by) an upward class mobility. Keep an eye on Social Class & Quakers for more!