Because he’s my nephew and I’ve swapped farm work with him ever since he was big enough to do work, I can speak freely around my nephew, Mark, despite him being an utter Trumpublican. A few days ago, while working the morning half of the day in his tobacco stripping room and listening to hits from the 70s and 80s, something must have been mentioned about Elizabeth Warren on the hourly 5 minute news summary. Soon afterward, Mark stated categorically that he was completely opposed to any woman ever being President. And furthermore, according to his recollection of history, the founding fathers thought the same way and never intended for a woman to be President.
My first reply to that musing was that the founding fathers also thought it would be a good idea to count a black person as 3/5 of a human being.
“Huh?” Mark replied. “I never heard that. What are you talking about?”
I said they did that as a compromise with slave states. The slave state crowd thought slaves should be counted when penciling up proportional representation in Congress. The free state crowd thought they should not be included in figuring out proportional representation because they couldn’t vote. As a compromise, they counted each slave as 3/5 of a person. Mark had never heard that and wasn’t sure he believed it. I wouldn’t guarantee I remembered it exactly right, but Mark will never bother to fact check me.
We sorted silently through a couple of tunes, maybe West End Girls and Yellow Brick Road. Then I posed a quandary for him. “What would you do if Republicans nominated a woman? Huh? Huh?”
Mark first tried to weasel out of the question by saying he wouldn’t vote at all if that ever happened. I kept pressing it until he finally allowed that he would vote for a woman before he would vote for a Democrat. I granted him points for saying he might vote for a woman under some circumstances and we moved on.
Today he got stuck with watching after his 3 year old granddaughter, who I had never seen before. His other 3 grand children are already in school, including one who I had mentioned in another diary that wanted me to make her a wooden shark. He wasn’t sure we would be able to work a full morning today because he expected her to quickly start whining to go back to the house. That didn’t happen. She was fascinated with being in new surroundings and knew how to entertain herself. As we got an additional pile of tobacco to put on the table, I noticed her standing close to a crack in the wall, grasping over and over at the narrow sunbeam that was shining through. She had brought along a few building blocks and played with them while we stripped another table, chattering amicably with a likely imaginary friend.
My first comment about her was that if my father was alive and could see her, he would say that she was as cute as a speckled pup under a painted wagon.
As the morning wore on and she continued to occupy herself with zero whining or any interference with what we were doing, a thought popped into my head, which I immediately shared with Mark. “What would you think if she grows up and decides she wants to be President?”
Mark’s first dodge was that he would be dead before that could ever happen. After figuring in my head how old he would be by the time she was eligible to run, I said, “You would be 92 by the time she could run. You might live that long.”
He shook his head and said that would never happen, but I pressed it. “I know Presidential material when I see it. That little girl looks Presidential to me.”
I never could get him to say he would back her Presidential bid, but he’s proud of his grand daughter and couldn’t get sore at high praise of her. He might even repeat what I said to her mother. Then when her mother asks how such a thing came up he might accidentally mention what he had said earlier about not thinking a woman should ever be President. That ought to make him catch some flak.
Update Saturday — This morning the ten year old sister was there instead of the three year old. She’s the one I wrote about not believing I could make wood carvings in another diary. I hadn’t been there ten minutes when she asked if we were going to quit after we stripped what was already on the table. We brought in 3 more tables full after that. I told her how her little sister had entertained herself all morning yesterday without whining to quit and that I had decided her little sister was going to grow up to be President. Her reply was that her little sister wasn’t demanding enough. She thought she should grow up to be President instead of her little sister because a President needs to be demanding. I wonder where she got that idea?