Since college graduation, the Alumni Weekly appeared in my mailbox with surprising regularity given the number of times I moved from apartment to apartment. Sometimes I’d flip through the magazine and read about a famous alumnus or a winning sports team. And I’d always look at the “Class Notes” section for my year. When I first graduated, I’d read about students enrolled in law school, medical school. I’d read about weddings. So many weddings. Sometimes there’d be a photograph of the happy couple surrounded by fifteen or twenty other alumni in their suits and dresses.
Soon after came the babies, and with them the clichés—“bundles of joy,” “prayers answered,” “little miracles”—along with interchangeable, fat-cheeked photos.
And then, life’s housekeeping apparently over with, my classmates got down to the serious business of achieving. They became partners at law firms, consulting firms, investment firms. They became venture capitalists. They traveled to countries I’d never heard of to stamp out diseases. They climbed unclimbable summits, swam unswimmable rivers. They produced Hollywood movies and published novels and, like Nolan, created important organizations.
The article about Nolan focused on the nonprofit organization he’d founded. It summed up what I already knew. The year after graduation, he interned for a Missouri congressman in Washington, DC. While there, he started up Students for Peace.
The organization pays for children aged ten to eighteen to attend weekend-long events centered on the idea of peace—among individuals and among nations. Students attend workshops, debate ethical issues, and interact with politicians, ethicists, and other leaders, culminating in a hands-on project promoting peace. In its first year, guests included author Kurt Vonnegut, former president Jimmy Carter, and the director of Princeton University’s Center for Human Values, Janet Vogel.
When asked about his organization, Albright stated, “We tend to think of children as insular and self-centered. But I’m always amazed, talking with them, how concerned they are with their community, their world. Our organization is designed to empower these kids, to let them know that they have every right to care about peace even though they aren’t of voting age.”
Albright founded Students for Peace in 1995 while working as a congressional intern in Washington, DC. The organization is currently based in Albright’s hometown of Stokesville, Missouri. Tax-deductible donations can be sent to …
I set down the magazine and scrolled the document titled Albright on the Issues. It ran sixty-four single-spaced pages. World peace wasn’t on the agenda. This was a state election, and the concerns were domestic: economic development, education, infrastructure, health care.
I was willing to help sell the product of Nolan Albright to whoever wanted to buy it, but I’d never written a press release in my life. I began to fantasize about Cynthia, the real PR pro, trading in her pumps for cowboy boots and coming out here to work with me on the campaign. Our romance blooming under the wide Missouri sky.
And then I began to read.
Those yard signs were becoming the bane of the campaign, and their continued absence made them seem all the more critical. None of us knew for certain whether or not Nolan was going to win. The incumbent was retiring at the end of the term, and our opponent, like Nolan, had never run for office before. Ed Cassidy was twice Nolan’s age. He owned several mammoth car dealerships across the state, and back in September he was running a couple of percentage points ahead of Nolan in the polls. But polling wasn’t especially precise in a district-wide election. Our real barometers were our guts and our ears.
We believed we had a shot, but Cassidy’s smiling face seemed to be everywhere—his signs were in storefronts and at major intersections, and of course large banners stood in the parking lots of his dealerships. Driving around the district, it would’ve been easy to conclude that Nolan simply didn’t exist.
And so when one cool morning a dusty diesel truck bearing the name “Show-Me Sign Company” finally clanked into the Albrights’ driveway, Molly’s approving bark spoke for all of us. Over the next couple of days, I learned the roads of northwest Missouri. For me these were the best days of the campaign, driving alone under deep blue skies into small towns, along rivers, and through field after field of spent corn. Sometimes I’d drive into a neighborhood to deliver a half-dozen signs. Other times I’d travel fifteen or twenty miles on remote roads to drop off a single sign that hardly anyone would ever see.
If nobody was home, I’d leave the sign on the front stoop. But as often as not, somebody would be there to thank me, maybe offer a glass of water or cup of coffee. We might chat for a minute. And talking with them in their front yards and their kitchens, catching a glimpse of their landlocked lives, for the first time I found myself believing that there were other places to live out one’s life besides a city.
I wouldn’t act on that belief for several more years—not until the shooting that drove me out of New York. But rural Missouri gave me the first inkling that there were ways to be content without having to become the white hot center of everything.
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