Once, during one of these morning hellos, he signaled that he was going to share the secret to his ribs with me. For days, maybe weeks, he strung me along. It turned into a game. “I’m going to tell you the secret, but not yet.” What was it? I’d ask. Molasses? Beer? Some kind of pepper in the dry rub? I enjoyed the game but was also genuinely curious, because his ribs were just right—tender, sweet, and juicy. “I’ll tell you one day.”
I assumed the game would go on forever, but the day really did come. “You want to know what the secret to my ribs is?” Smiling, mostly with his eyes, he disclosed the secret ingredient: “Patience.”
AT THIS HOUR, THE ELEVATOR will be crowded, and usually I’ll know where someone is headed the moment they step in.
Homeowner with a tax bill in hand: treasurer’s office on two.
Slightly angrier-looking homeowner with a letter in hand: assessor’s office on three.
Sweatpants plus neck tattoos plus nervousness equals a trip to the fourth floor for adult probation.
A gentler anxiety, mixed with resignation, in the expression of a low-income male in his twenties usually signals a visit to child support on the sixth floor.
A mom with a toddler is probably headed for immunizations at the county health department on nine—or, if she looks like she’s in the middle of a divorce, vital records on eight.
Sherriff’s deputy with a red folder, probably a subpoena, is headed to the prosecutor’s office on ten.
Those are the county floors. The top three floors are ours, the city’s—legal, admin and finance, public works. Code enforcement on thirteen has a soda fridge worth visiting from time to time; it’s also notable because it used to be impossible to see across the room because of the stacked files, before we maneuvered the department and its masses of paperwork into the digital age.
I STEP OUT FROM THE ELEVATOR on fourteen and look to the right, where my name appears in black letters on the glass door to the Office of the Mayor. In this corner of the floor are six full-time staff and as many interns as we have room for, guiding an administration of up to thirteen hundred employees, serving a community of a hundred thousand.
A narrow corridor leads me to the desk of Yesenia, my scheduler and the first one in today. After greeting her, I step into my own office, walk across the carpet, and take a seat behind the big desk angled to look out through the windows onto the west and north sides of the city.
At eye-level out the window, a peregrine falcon swoops into view, angles toward my corner of the building, spreads its wings, and slows to alight on the roof, like a fighter landing on an aircraft carrier. Part of a mating pair living in a box right above my office, she patrols the downtown constantly, sometimes pausing to survey the realm from a nearby radio tower or a building across the street. A dive-bombing falcon is the fastest-moving animal on earth, capable of moving at two hundred miles per hour. Occasionally she gets a pigeon, making it difficult for me to concentrate as I look past an unsuspecting visitor, over their shoulder, at the shower of pigeon feathers drifting past the window.
In Egypt, falcons were considered to be symbols of the rising sun. Now, at last, the sun is up, shining on the American flag flying over the Tower Building across the way. I take a breath, pick up the phone, and begin to learn what kind of day this will be.
2 For the purposes of this chapter, I have created a sort of composite Monday morning. Some of these features of my mornings change from month to month or year to year. The Jeep has given way to a Chevy, for example, and at one point over a year passed without us managing nine miles. Still, this is as representative and honest an account of our long runs as I can offer. This would be closest to a typical run in February or March of 2016.
8
The Celebrant and the Mourner
Civic ceremony, to put it mildly, was not my forte at first. Shaped by my consulting background, I arrived in office wanting to get concrete, measurable things done. My intentions focused on erasing inefficiencies and producing results. I took office eager to redesign the organization of local government and guide the course of our local economy, to see collapsing houses removed and urban infill built. The more concrete and countable my work product, the better. As for what you might call the symbolic functions of a mayor—sitting on a dais at a charity lunch or standing smiling next to a congressman or governor amid an endless sequence of speeches prior to a ribbon-cutting—to me this was a cost of doing business, an irritation to be dealt with as quickly as possible so I could get back to work.
A college classmate, elected to local office in another state, once surprised me with the comment, “Sometimes I wish we still had a royal family in America.” I asked what he was talking about, and he explained: it would be nice if a royal family were available to handle things like cutting ribbons and waving to people in parades, so that elected policymakers like us could focus on the real work of legislation and administration. I thought of him often while standing alongside other officials at some event where I had no substantive role but to be present, and imagined what it would be like to just outsource that part of the job to some municipal prince or princess, or perhaps a “lord mayor” in the English tradition, so I could stay at the office and work on a way to improve trash pickup or eliminate some duplicative paperwork from our tax abatement applications. It seemed like standing there blinking in my suit, which required no real skill or intention, was a waste of time. Plus, the mental picture of a local official consumed with photo ops evoked the image of mayoring that I liked least—that cartoon concept of the sash-wearing, cigar-chomping petty official, with a puffed-out chest and a shit-eating grin, like Mayor Quimby from The Simpsons.
BY THE TIME I STOOD at an outdoor podium one warm May evening in 2015 and raised a glass to the city of South Bend in honor of her 150th birthday, I had gone through a full transformation in my regard for ceremony. By then, my old attitude seemed narrow. Growing into the job of mayor entailed grasping that the symbolic role given to me was no less substantive than the power of policy—if deployed wisely. It was a gradual conversion that began, like most important growth, in a moment of pain: the aftermath of a murder.
My first year in office, 2012, was our city’s deadliest year of gun violence in a decade. By the end of 2012, there would be eighteen homicides, double the previous year. In 2013, I would assemble community leaders, engage experts, and initiate a new evidence-based strategy for dealing with the gang-related violence that had been driving this spike in crime. But in my first weeks and months of office we didn’t have a clear sense of how to deal with the increase, and each violent incident made me feel powerless. Every time my phone vibrated with a new alert, I asked myself how we had failed to prevent the latest shooting.