EVENTUALLY, THINGS GOT BETTER FOR THE GIRLS. They brought more and more friends around. They’d scamper off to hang out in the French Quarter. They’d settled in and become New Orleanians. I think they understand that they live in a unique place, a place unlike any other in America. They realize that they’re part of something other people view as exotic and cool.
TIME HEALS ALL. New Orleans became home for all of us. Moving to a new place turns out to be a little like marriage. You take a vow of sorts, a promise to make it work, for better or worse. (Except, sometimes, when you really miss your old home and old life, you can fly back and visit—kind of like the residential equivalent of drunk-dialing an old flame.)
How we adjusted, how we dealt with the changes, and adapted and thrived was different for each of us. James reached a state of residential happiness and pride. I was having more fun than I’d had since I was really young and irresponsible. The girls had roots, a neighborhood, a community where politics didn’t dominate their lives or overshadow them. Living with James and me is bad enough.
In time, the girls will be able to tell their own stories, and funny ones too—since, besides their love for each other and us, they seem to have two things in common, a wacky sense of humor and writing ability.
That is not just puffed-up mother-speak because, as they say, It ain’t bragging if it’s true. In her senior year at the Academy of the Sacred Heart, Matty won the alumni essay contest, which I was told afterward was awarded by a unanimous decision on the part of the judges, the first time ever.
If you are a Sacred Heart girl, and they are global, you probably saw it, as it was posted around the world—people actually stopped me in Italy, France and Ireland last summer to comment on it. (Are these women quietly taking over the Earth? I hope so.) Suffice to say, it was so good that when she read it aloud at the chapel ceremony the whole assembly laughed and cried. It was better that Cats, as they say.
Matty also wrote political pieces for PolicyMic, a respected millennial site when she was a high school sophomore, which caused some awkward moments, not because her views are annoyingly divergent from my own but because she articulates them so much better than I do my own.
As for Emerson, here is a typical random text, sent while she was on an East Coast trip with her girlfriends. It was to her sister in New Orleans:
MATTY- I am going to need all hands on deck for mission “Save Private Emma.” I can’t find my wallet and Dad only gave me 90 dollars to last me for 5 days. I have officially gone from Princess Diana to a Real Housewife. Most probably Theresa. As I am now poor, I plan on learning how to save my soap bars in little shavings in a sock like they do in prison. Please look for my wallet while I’m away. It’s scared and alone. Until I am reunited with my baby I will take on the identity “Barbra Q” like BBQ. Get it? Anyway, wish me luck and bring my wallet back to safety. Over and out—Barbra Q
LOOKING BACK, it was a damn near irresponsible gamble for us to uproot our family and move to New Orleans. The New Orleans of early 2008 was not anything like the New Orleans of today. The city still hadn’t really come back. You could see remnants of Katrina almost everywhere you looked. It was in rough shape.
We’ve turned a corner now. The city’s moving in the right direction. My family is happy. It turned out to be a good move in so many ways, but it could have gone another direction entirely.
I don’t think we realized at the time what a gamble it was. Maybe we don’t really even grasp it now. It’s like if you were to walk up to a roulette wheel and put $1,000 on black. Well, the New Orleans experience came up black for us. But it just as easily could have hit red.
WE RAISED OUR DAUGHTERS to think for themselves and make their own decisions. We wanted to teach them how to make a case—plead their case—and convince us. We trusted them to make wise decisions, until proven otherwise, and they never failed us.
In 2011, after four years of bouncing around various New Orleans schools, making good grades and friends, Emerson felt like she fit into what was a loving but somewhat insular culture, but she never stopped missing her familiar posse and former life in D.C. She never complained, but mothers don’t need words to get the drift.
One day, in a totally confident and clearly thought-out announcement, she told me that she wanted to go to boarding school.
Boarding school?
Leave us?
Aren’t you still a preteen?
Do you know how hard boarding school is?
Do you know how hard it is to get into boarding school?
Do you know how expensive boarding school is?
You do know your father will spontaneously combust?
She had a quick and irrefutable answer to all my questions, including the lucid declarations that she would be leaving someday, no matter what, that she preferred hard work, she would take an SSAS course to fulfill the rigid entrance requirements, and, finally, that she would swap out the cost of boarding school for her college fund and attend a cheaper state university. As far as Daddy went, he was never far from a meltdown no matter what and that was my problem, not hers.
Her closing argument, as I remember it, was “Mother, you just don’t provide the structure I require.”
She had me. What could I say? My stalling tactic was “If you do well on the test, I will talk to your father.”
Damn, if that girl didn’t research all the boarding schools, providing the pros and cons for herself and me; she researched and found the best exam tutor; she studied the practice tests like each and every one was a career-determining LSAT; she got up early Saturday mornings and took all the simulated SSAS exams.
She was one smart cookie, but a tepid test taker, so I held out hope, as the SSAS exams were every bit as rigorous as college entrance exams.
Damn, if that girl didn’t get a near perfect score.
I was so impressed and proud of her, I became her number one advocate and was certain James would see it the same way.
What was I thinking?
Suffice to say, talking him into letting his precious baby “abandon” him was harder than any house purchase or animal acquisition. Long experience—and Godfather reruns—taught me how to deal with the “implacable” James. And it wasn’t with rational argument. You just had to make him an offer he couldn’t refuse and convince him it was his idea.
Emerson’s ace in the hole was reminding me that her daddy and I had survived her monolingual, quasihomebody sister Matty’s decision to take an Oxbridge program and study expat literature and European history in Paris, alone, when she was Emerson’s age. At least, Emerson argued, she knew the language of the country where she planned to study. Matty left home with some spotty Spanish and came back a fluent Left Banker, a top award–winning, exponentially confident and cool kid. Emerson calmly reminded me how adamantly opposed we were to that decision and how well it turned out.
But Emerson was wrong about how her daddy and I would survive. When Matty went off to France, it was hit or miss for us on the Champs-Élysées.
Anticipating I might not make it out in one piece, I begged our great New Orleans friends, the Hebees and the Fayards, and their kids to come with us when we took Matty a week early to her Oxbridge program.
Jennifer Hebee is a lay preacher and one of those special beings with the gift to heal all. Over our years here, despite having her own mothering handful—twin girls Sarah and Anna—she has walked me back from the edge too many times to count. I love that woman and knew if she was tootling around the city with me, getting the lay of the land and being there with her unusually strong hand to hold, I might be able to leave Matty thousands of miles away. Alone. Without me. For a month.
Jennifer kept a close eye on me while we ran around getting Matty more than she would ever need. Jenny never said what I am sure she was thinking: Girl, this is more stuff than Matty could use for a decade in Paris. And I have to admit that even I was not sure how useful all those stuffed animals would be.
We dragged a truck full of mostly useless stuff to the campus, which was supersafe and beautiful. The instructors were top-notch, and Matty’s fellow students were wonderful. I started breathing, or at least stopped hyperventilating. Then it was time to leave.
Matty walked into her dorm without a look back down the long tree-lined walk where I stood on the curb. Good thing, because standing quickly became not an option.
Matty called me that night and said, “You are never going to believe what happened. Right after you left, some girls got on the elevator with me and said some crazy woman had a seizure on the sidewalk in front of the dorm! She was on her hands and knees, wailing and thrashing! Were you still there? I hope you were able to help her.”
I think you know who the crazy woman was.
I ALWAYS LIKED EVERYBODY at CNN just fine. I think Mary did too. I’ve got nothing but mostly good memories of my tenure there.
But what always seemed a little odd to me—maybe because I’m just used to the tight-knit nature of campaigns—was that there didn’t seem to be much camaraderie, at least that I could see. I never really felt like I was part of a team. If one person had a show, he or she had his own little empire. Another person with another show had her little empire, and so on. There didn’t seem to be much overlap or collaboration between all the fiefdoms. It was sort of every man for himself.
At the same time, I never really understood the charge that CNN was a liberal network. They always struck me as being more corporate and structured. They seemed to have a formula for how they wanted to do the news and do their talk shows, and they stuck to it. There was no underlying ideology that I ever saw.
When Mary and I ended our contracts with CNN in early 2013, we walked away on good terms. It was a pretty simple equation: they wanted their contributors closer to Washington. They wanted us available at a moment’s notice. I totally get that. I understood. We’re not always available. And we no longer live in Washington. So we called it a day. I think it made sense for us, and it made sense for them. I wasn’t mad at anyone. I wasn’t upset by anything. If they ever needed me to help out or sit in for someone, I’d still gladly help out.
The truth of it is, I’ve been on television plenty, and I still show up on TV several times a week. Being on another show is not something to which I aspire. In a way, leaving CNN felt like one more link we severed to our old Washington lives, one more affirmation that New Orleans is now truly home.
• • •
I’m staring at seventy, and a number like that makes you think about how many years you have left. You find yourself thinking about your kids growing up and moving away, how you’ll miss them. You find yourself studying all the stairs in your house and thinking we’ll probably have to sell it at some point, maybe move into a flat in the French Quarter.
I’m certainly not exempt from nature. This body has some miles on it. Right now I’m a healthy sixty-nine. I still run every day. I eat healthy. I travel hundreds of thousands of miles a year. But no matter what your lifestyle is, your bones grow old and brittle; you fall down. Until that time, my strategy is to go full speed ahead. I’m not young anymore, but I still can’t stand sitting around.
When my health starts to deteriorate, I know I’ll have to adjust. Like anybody else, I’d prefer to live as long as I can and be healthy, but you don’t have any choice in the matter. You don’t get to pick. But living to ninety-two is not something I lie awake dreaming about. I know I’m going to die one day.
But here’s what’s important to me: I don’t want to grow old among strangers.
Washington, it always struck me, is a city all about power. That’s why it exists. And if you live there, the fact that at one time you had power or influence doesn’t really help you much. You don’t even have to get old. Just lose an election, and people trample right over you to get on to the next thing. That’s the way it is. Time marches on. New players arrive on the scene. Your moment passes. I get that.
I think it would be miserable to be holed up in some luxury apartment building in northwest Washington, sitting around all day while a caretaker wipes your drool and hoping that your kids come by to tell you hello or somebody remembers who you once were.
Down here, people have such a different attitude toward the elderly. They are more respectful. Maybe that’s the French culture. Maybe it’s a Southern thing. But older people are revered here in a way that they never would be in Washington. When you grow old here, you don’t have to exit the culture. You can still be a part of the fabric.
You see all these old guys around here, still going to all the events. The Mardi Gras parades. The jazz clubs. The Saints games. I can just see somebody wheeling me into a bar in my wheelchair. “Oh, there’s old man Carville! What’s going on, man? How you doin’? How about that LSU game? Remember the Super Bowl?”
And there’s this: when I’m somewhere else, people know who I am. They’ve seen me on TV plenty of times. They know the Clinton story. But when I’m in Louisiana, people know what I am. We have a shared history.
I’ll never be among strangers here.
THE DAY ARRIVED FOR Matty to leave for college. Since her birth, I had dreaded this moment, but by the time she was actually going, we both were ready. This was partly due to her departure being preceded by a six-month descent into a hell that made Dante’s look like Sunday school, and mostly because she had worked with such diligence on her journey to maturity—academically, emotionally and every other way—I was more proud than sad about my little bird leaving.
Speaking of which, I have never liked the term empty nest for the transition to independence and a new parent-child relationship. But Tim Burns, the headmaster of Sacred Heart, did give me a great companion phrase for that overused and abused term, which completely captures the vicious twenty-faces-of-Eve phase girls go through during their final months at home: soiling the nest. They have to make one big hot mess of their home base and everyone in it, which thereby forces them to jump out or be kicked out.
Anticipating it and understanding it didn’t make it any easier to go through. There is way more pain to teenage leaving than baby birthing. But you will have to read Matty’s Great American Novel in a couple of years to get her version of it. I’ll just say, for me, there was no epidural to ease the pain of having your heart ripped out, sliced and diced, stomped on, lit on fire, doused with acid and returned with the faintest of beats to your pulverized chest.
Thinking back to the summer before she left, it was the kind of experience for which the phrase “Someday we will laugh about this” was coined. I hope.
And she couldn’t help this behavior. She did what she was supposed to do. And although it does seem like an unbearably nasty bit of merciless and undeserved punishment for all parties involved, it is actually indicative of a healthy kid and healthy relationship.
On our way to upstate New York, where she was going to college, she and I made a final trip to the farm in the Shenandoah Valley where she grew up. We shared all our favorite music—a lot of Josh Ritter and about a thousand different versions of “Galway Girl.”
We barely spoke as we traversed yet another amazingly scenic view through the mountains and across the rivers of the east, while Matty cued up one perfect tune after another, and when I started to flag on the final leg, she said simply and with authority, “This always works,” and cranked up Ke$ha.
Sometimes—and this was one of them—words are neither an option nor memorable. The other time was when she came into this world.
I can remember, but only vaguely, how my own folks dropped me off in front of my dorm and then took off. A quick getaway wasn’t a remote possibility for James and me. We were relieved to see we weren’t the only hovering parents. Everywhere, on every dorm floor, dads mingled in the halls, trying to act all macho, and moms unpacked, trying to act all grown-up.
Everyone should have won an Oscar; we were all so good with our performances.
We weren’t half unpacked when Matty kicked me out. She wanted to check out an orientation event with her new and already beloved roomie, Lindsey. Okay. Of course.
A small good-bye, a don’t-embarrass-me hug, and she was off without a look back.
I returned to my rental car, closed the windows, revved up and replayed “Tik Tok” over and over at the loudest volume, and I got all the way out of town before I realized Ke$ha doesn’t always work. I was crying so hard, I had to pull over. I am still not sure how I made the seven-hour drive back, but I am pretty sure I won’t be able to hear Ke$ha again without returning to that feeling.
Matty’s new life begins.
BEFORE WE KNOW IT, Mary and I will be alone together. Matty’s already gone up to college one thousand miles away in upstate New York. It won’t be long until Emerson packs up and heads off for good too.
We’ve hardly ever known life together without them. Mary and I got married at the end of 1993, and Matty came along in 1995. So we’ve rarely lived alone, just the two of us. We’ve got this big house off St. Charles Avenue, and we’re not getting any younger. I believe we’ll probably end up in the French Quarter at some point—single-floor living, walking distance to everything, but a hell of a lot less boring than an old folks’ home.
Every parent thinks about what life will be like after the kids move out. I don’t expect it to be miserable or anything. But I know it will change.
I talked to my daughter before she headed off to college, planning out when she was coming home for Thanksgiving and the holidays, talking about when we might go there to visit. It dawned on me that she wouldn’t really live here anymore. But it’s not entirely bad. They get long breaks. She’ll come back home. And considering she’s at school in the tundra of upstate New York, I’m guessing New Orleans will be a popular destination. She’s going to have plenty of friends eager to come with her down South.
Besides, Mary and I will still be on the road a lot. I’ll have my foreign campaign work. We both will do our share of public speaking and TV appearances. Life goes on. We’ll evolve.
It’s also happening at the right time, I think. Mary and I have gotten along better than ever these past few years. Maybe that’s New Orleans. Maybe it’s just the passage of time. Maybe both. Whatever the case, if we’d have had an empty nest seven years into our marriage, it might not have been a pretty sight. We were both more focused on building careers back then; we were both more intense than perhaps we are now. We’ve mellowed a little, if only a little.
Thank God we always had the kids in the picture back then. They were a great mitigating force. Even when Mary and I could barely stand to look at each other, they united us in a way nothing else could. They got us through. I have far less trepidation about living alone with Mary now. We enjoy each other’s company. We know each other inside and out. We have fun.
Mary and I will be fine. It’s the absence of our girls, the silence they’ll leave behind, that will take the most getting used to.
MY MOTHER HAD LOTS OF TRITE SAYINGS. They dropped from her lips all day, beginning with her first cup of coffee in the morning to our last kiss of the night. When I was growing up, I didn’t remotely appreciate them—or give them much thought. Later on, I found myself living by her little quips. They floated into my mind regularly, like clouds. Life is what happens when you are making other plans.
That particular saying was a talismanic watchword for me, which for brevity’s sake was converted to Life is a bitch and then you die. Now, as I enter my sixth decade of life and my senior years, the rushed exuberance of youth has given way to the wisdom of experience. I don’t think about plans as much, or complaining that life is a bitch. I go by something different: Life is a magic carpet ride. Buckle up!
As far as I can tell, predictability has less to do with life than being totally surprised. If I were a betting woman, I wouldn’t have to put a nickel on the prospect of a hand that held loving a husband or making babies, leaving Washington or finding faith, or making great new friends in the last part of life. And . . . oh yeah, pulling for any team other than the Bears, let alone the Tigers. Magical surprises all.
You can aim your magic carpet for a destination. And if you have responsibilities, like kids, it would be irresponsible not to. But aiming—and arriving punctually at your precise destination—kind of takes the magic out of the ride, doesn’t it? And assuming that you are in control of the carpet in the first place, and where it’s going, seems foolhardy to me. You can’t know about the crosscurrents in the wind that will blow you off course. And what if the carpet has a hole?
Play a meditative game with yourself and think back to five years ago, or ten years ago, and try to remember what you thought would happen. Take my girls, for example. Even as their mother, I didn’t expect at ages ten and thirteen they would be the remarkable human beings they are now at fifteen and eighteen. On this trajectory, in five or ten more years, who knows where they will be, what they will be doing, how many lives they will have impacted. I only hope—pray every day—I am here to see it.
Now play this game while thinking of New Orleans.
Seven years ago we were fifteen feet underwater. Today we are the fastest-growing city in America, a tech mecca, foodie mecca and music mecca that’s also luring academics, bankers, doctors, entertainers, young professionals at the start of their careers and old politicos like James and me. The Crescent City has weathered Katrina, the BP oil spill and the recession—and is now leading the country in economic recovery.
As Mitch Landrieu said, “There’s no other place, there is no other city in America that has been called upon to re-create the intricate fabric of their lives like we’re doing here in New Orleans.
“And, while we’ve still got a long way to go, we’re not only back—in many ways we’re even stronger than we were before.
“We’re not rebuilding the city we were, we’re creating the city we want to become. We are proving that out of tragedy can come triumph.”
On this trajectory, I am confident, if Mitch and reform leaders like him can continue to commit their talents and time and passion to the amazing city, seven years from now we will be a city previously unimaginable in all the world.
I DO THINK WE’VE MADE A DIFFERENCE. Maybe not as much as some people think, maybe more than others think, but a difference just the same. We promoted the hell out of New Orleans as cochairs for the Super Bowl. We’ve flung open our home to dozens of fund-raisers for dozens of causes, from Teach for America to local small-business initiatives to the Women of the Storm, a nonpartisan group of Louisianans who have really helped draw attention toward rebuilding the city. In fact, Mary and I decided when we moved that we’d do very little personal entertaining at home. Instead, we try to do “purpose-driven” entertaining. After all, we moved here for a purpose.
Neither of us ever has cared much about honors or accolades. But we were both touched when we were named New Orleanians of the Year in 2012 by the local alt-weekly, the Gambit, which since Katrina hit has been giving that title each year to people who have helped lead the city’s rebound. It’s gone to first responders and local activists. It went to the Saints the year they won the Super Bowl. In the article that accompanied that announcement, Mitch Landrieu called us “wonderful ambassadors and great friends for the city.” A columnist for the paper wrote, “In ways large and small, public and not so public, they generously and passionately embody the simple criterion that Gambit has used to select New Orleanians of the Year since 1983: They make a positive difference for New Orleans.”
I certainly hope that’s true. No doubt there’s an element of correlation and causation. It’s like the rooster that crows at four o’clock in the morning and then the sun comes up. That rooster didn’t have a hell of a lot to do with the sunrise. New Orleans has really gotten back on its feet since we arrived in 2008, but it’s hard to know how big a role we’ve played in making that happen. Rebuilding this city has been the very definition of a team effort, with hundreds and thousands of dedicated people pouring their hearts into it. I just hope we’ve played some small, meaningful part.
It’s fun, at my age, to be in a fight that matters.
AND SO IT GOES. My magic carpet ride winds down, but is far from over. My daughters are just buckling up. The most awe-inspiring, astounding, breathtaking leg of my own journey began with their entrance and is pivotally punctuated by their departure. Equally humbling, exhilarating and enchanting is marking twenty years of a never boring, always loving—if not always blissful—monogamous relationship.
As for my lifelong and ongoing passion—politics—we are about to wend our way through the 2014 midterm and 2016 presidential election that I’ve been involved in, and I do plan to be involved in the upcoming ones, aged though I may be. I have lived through big and little, dynamic and imperceptible, political shifts in the last three decades, and the America my ancestors came to, loved and fought for without reservation has largely stood the test of time. But only because each generation has kept vigilant.
My parents, as did their own, shared a passion for generational vigilance. We were raised in a moment of hypersensitivity about the future; just like the times we all find ourselves now raising this generation. There’s a reason they call it wisdom of the ages: change is certain, progress is not. All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
From the Ten Commandments to the Constitution, despite detours, debacles and disasters, humankind keeps on trucking. And on the whole, no one can say the good didn’t—and won’t—outweigh the bad. We keep heading in the right direction.
God bless you, your ancestors and your progeny. See you in another twenty years. If anyone out there has any better thoughts for today or tomorrow, tweet me.