New Hampshire Is for Lovers

At this, the assembled family of Alexander Hamilton Washington all shifted a bit in their seats, and each individually thought about how they might phrase an answer.

Alexander Washington Hamilton's family, by and large, didn't understand what had happened to him, what had gone wrong, and Alexander laughed about this, and sometimes they laughed, too. They loved him though he was a Republican, they listened to him though he didn't, to them, make any kind of sense a good deal of the time. How the Birmingham-born son of a U of A professor (his mother June) and a successful painter of landscapes (his father Ben) would grow to be one of the largest developers in the state, the owner of the Birmingham Blitz, political hobnobber, occasional CNN-FN pundit and now the first black Republican presidential candidate, was a stumper for anyone and beyond the powers of reasoning of his beleaguered family, particularly his mother June, who was scared to death that her son would be shot.

"I'm scared to death he'll get shot," she said to the reporter. Every opportunity she got, she said that, hoping that at some point her son would feel guilty enough about worrying his mother so that he would give up this crackpot bid and get back to his family. "I have a very bad arrhythmia, you know," she added. She added this whenever she could.

Her son had heard her worries and took whatever precautions he could afford, though he wasn't much concerned, given he wasn't a threat to anyone. He was seen, and he had come to peace with this fact, at best as a cheerful oddity, a harmless anomaly; at worst, a smiling Uncle Tom, a sellout, the Great Appeaser of the Republican Conscience.

Alexander Hamilton Washington was a handsome man of 55, a smidge over 6 feet tall and just now starting to gain weight around the midsection. He'd been married to Charlotte Menendez, whom he'd met in law school in Ann Arbor, for twenty years now, and they had three children, all in high school. Alexander was fit, his smile was easy without being exactly cheerful, and he walked with a briskness of step that underlined his sense of purpose. There was a large framed photo of him striding across the stage of the University of Michigan, and the USA Parade reporter asked about it.

"Seems like the stride of a man with a sense of destiny," she observed. She was out of her depth. What she really wanted to do was write about teaching yoga through Head Start.

"He always walked like that," June said to the reporter. "He walked very quickly to school, very quickly home. Very quickly to tennis practice, very quickly to his summer job. Head down, legs moving quickly, short strides--"

"He walked like a kid with a load in his pants!" roared Ben, who then laughed in a pained, wheezy way, which is how he laughed. "Anywhere he went, he walked like he had a load." Ben began to rise from his chair and, realizing he was about to imitate this walk, June lunged and kept him seated.

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