Looking back, it’s now apparent that Melanie awoke to political awareness when she was almost seven, and went back to sleep about it when she was seventeen. And it’s not like she was noticeably political during that decade: just more so than before and after.

It all began for her in Spring Valley, New York, one Sunday evening in October of 1956. She was in the back seat of Betsy the Buick. Her family had spent the afternoon at her paternal grandparents’ apartment. They were idling in that moment between descending the concrete stairs to the ground-floor parking area and pulling away from the building. Melanie knew the next step: after her dad backed the car out into the street he was going to turn the radio knobs so they could listen to “Gunsmoke.” But first a final goodbye.

Her grandmother had stayed upstairs of course. Melanie’s father’s mother didn’t move unless she had to. But her grandfather escorted them all to the car as usual. She’d collected her last hug from him and she was sitting behind her dad when her grandfather leaned in the driver side window and asked, “So who you going to vote for?”

“Now, Pop,” replied Melanie’s dad, “have I ever voted Republican?”

Melanie was six. She was in the first grade. She gasped at what she heard. “But Dad. You mean you’re not going to vote for the President?”

The President was Ike. Dwight David Eisenhower. They’d learned how to spell his last name in school. He was a war hero. He was the President. He was being challenged by some guy named Adlai Stevenson. As odd as the name “Dwight” seemed, “Adlai” was even weirder.

Melanie hadn’t encountered elections yet. She hadn’t wondered how one got to be President. She just assumed that supporting the President was like saying the Pledge of Allegiance or singing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad:” an act of fundamental Americanism.

Her father postponed “Gunsmoke” while introducing Melanie to the concept of voting. He didn’t go into the electoral college; instead he analogized it to the process of choosing team members for the neighborhood softball games.

She got it. Melanie hated those games, because she was such a poor athlete that she was always chosen last. In fact the neighbor kids assigned her the job of steady catcher when she played; they didn’t trust her in an important position, and in their dead-end games even a baby could have caught and returned the balls that weren’t hit.

Melanie despised softball and came to look upon baseball as boring too, but she understood team choosing. She had a sense for consensus. She comprehended the edge of the American voting system.

And as she grew so did her political awareness. Not as far and widely as her literary, math, and science awareness, because Melanie didn’t take to history or the other social studies, but she of course acquired familiarity with campaigns and elections and petitions and referenda. Her family relocated to southern California and she went to elementary school there during the Cold War: learning to duck-and-cover during a drill, to spell the name Khrushchev, to distinguish between socialism and Communism. Then she experienced the assassination of JFK and the passage of the Civil Rights Act; it was impossible even for a news-shunning voracious reader of fiction to be untouched by those current events.

Situations that would lead to the Vietnam conflict occurred and Melanie didn’t notice them, but she did walk into the American Opinion Library and that earned her a talk with her father about the John Birch Society. She read the works of Ayn Rand and she was captivated by The Fountainhead (she liked Atlas Shrugged too, but later and more like a cult – she always thought Anthem was too in-your-face).

Her family moved from Chula Vista to Marin County in late 1965. Melanie was starting her junior year in high school, but she didn’t much mind leaving her friends and the suburban landscape for what she considered real life in the Bay Area. She was charmed by the mature trees and the small sidewalk squares in their new neighborhood. She felt her good fortune when she realized her dad commuted to work across the Golden Gate Bridge. She got into the music and arts&crafts and even absorbed some of the politics of that time and place.