For years, I had a hard line when it came to old friends who had gone full MAGA.
I do not mean I merely disagreed with them. Disagreement I can handle. I have had disagreements all my life, within my family, among friends, in business, in politics, in religion, and in just about every human enterprise where two people manage to stand upright long enough to form an opinion.
This felt different.
To me, MAGA was not just a political preference. It was a moral climate. It seemed mean. It seemed punitive. It seemed to take satisfaction in other people’s suffering. It seemed to have contempt for the vulnerable, the foreigner, the poor, the wounded, the different, the unlucky. It seemed to turn cruelty into a kind of tribal entertainment. And because I saw the politics that way, I found it almost impossible not to see the person that way too.
I was, and remain, a bleeding-heart liberal.
I have never been ashamed of that phrase. In fact, I have always thought it was one of the strangest insults ever invented. A bleeding heart sounds to me like a heart that is still working. A heart that has not sealed itself off. A heart that has not gone dry. If my heart bleeds for other people, including people I will never meet, people from countries I will never visit, people who do not look like me, vote like me, worship like me, or live like me, then I am willing to plead guilty.
But being right, or believing oneself to be right, does not always make one generous.
That is the part I have had to sit with.
One of the old friends caught in the crossfire of my indignation was John, a boyhood friend from Grand Marais. Years earlier, we had made contact again after a long absence. There had been the ordinary pleasure of hearing from someone who had known the same street, the same families, the same lake, the same childhood weather. But the reconnection could not get very far. The politics stood there like a barricade.
John was, in my mind at least, Mega MAGA.
That was enough for me to pull back.
I did not want to fight with him. I did not want to debate him. I did not want to hear the talking points. I did not want to watch an old childhood friend become, in my imagination, one more foot soldier in the national army of resentment. So I stepped away. Not dramatically. Not with some final declaration. I just could not go further.
Then Grand Marais intervened.
In the process of writing this book, I began working on a chapter called “Grand Marais: A Love Letter.” The chapter was not written as a political document. It was not written as an olive branch. It was not written to heal old divisions or reopen old friendships. It was written because that little two-block street between Jefferson and Lake St. Clair still lives in me with a force I can hardly explain.
Grand Marais was not just where I grew up. It was a geography of safety. It was the elm tunnel over the street. It was the long lawns and the old houses. It was the sound of freighters moving through the lake. It was the seawall at the foot of the street and the open sky beyond it. It was the giant cottonwoods, the winter rinks, the games in the street, the solemn importance of nothing much happening on a summer afternoon.
It was Whittier to the east and Three Mile Road to the west. It was the kids who wandered between those streets as if there were no borders at all. It was hockey on one rink and free skating on the other. It was “Crack the Whip” under winter lights. It was the open space near Essex. It was the Patterson estate. It was Lake St. Clair, always there, always blue or gray or silver, always at the end of the street like a promise.
It was the world before we knew what the world could do to us.
Some of the chapter involved John and his family. Because of that, I sent it to him. I did not make a production of it. I did not attach any larger meaning to the act. I simply thought he might enjoy seeing that part of our shared past remembered and preserved.
A couple of days later, I heard from him.
He was delighted.
Not polite. Not merely appreciative. Delighted.
He wanted to talk. He had suggestions. He had additions. He had memories of his own that he thought would make the chapter better. And because the book has become something more communal than I ever expected, I wanted to hear them.
So we talked on the phone.
And something happened during that conversation that I did not see coming.
For the length of that call, John was not Mega MAGA and I was not the bleeding-heart liberal standing in judgment. We were not combatants in the American civil war of opinion. We were not symbols. We were not cable-news categories. We were not two old men standing on opposite sides of a national wreckage, shouting across the ruins.
We were two boys from Grand Marais.
That was the miracle of it.
We talked about the street. We talked about the families. We talked about the houses. We talked about things I had forgotten and things he had remembered. We unearthed sweet fragments that had been sleeping for decades. One memory led to another, and then another, and suddenly the past was not a museum. It was alive again.
There is a certain kind of childhood memory that does not belong to one person. It belongs to everyone who was there. You may carry your version of it for sixty years, thinking it is yours alone, and then someone else mentions one missing detail and the whole thing changes shape. The scene widens. The light improves. A voice returns. A name comes back. A house that had become vague in the mind suddenly has a porch, a driveway, a hedge, a dog, a father, a mother, a screen door, a bicycle in the grass.
That was what John gave me.
He did not just read the chapter. He entered it.
He walked back onto Grand Marais with me and began pointing things out.
“Don’t forget this.”
“Do you remember that?”
“What about so-and-so?”
“And there was the time…”
These are among the most beautiful words old friends can exchange. They are not grand words. They do not announce themselves as sacred. But they are. They mean: I was there too. I saw it too. You are not making this up. The world you remember existed.
That is no small gift when so much of one’s life has been defined by vanishing.
The Grosse Pointe of my childhood has already lost so much. Houses came down. Estates were carved up. Old names disappeared from mailboxes. Grand interiors were emptied. Lawns became lots. Lots became subdivisions. What once seemed permanent turned out to be as vulnerable as everything else. Even memory becomes unstable if no one else is there to hold the other end of it.
John held the other end.
And because he did, I found myself feeling something I had not expected to feel: relief.
Not political relief. Not agreement. Not conversion. Not some sentimental fantasy that all division had melted away because two old friends talked about a street.
It was more modest than that, and probably more honest.
I felt relieved that I could still find the boy inside the man.
I felt relieved that my indignation, however justified I may believe it to be, had not completely sealed the door.
I felt relieved that affection could still find a crack in the wall.
For years, I have feared that the political divide in America had become not merely a disagreement over policy, but a machine for destroying the ability to see one another whole. I have watched people become reduced to positions. I have done it myself. I have taken a person’s politics and allowed those politics to stand in for the whole person. I have said, in effect: If you believe this, then I know who you are.
Sometimes that may be true enough.
But not always.
And maybe that is where the danger lies.
The danger is not only in excusing cruelty. The danger is also in letting cruelty, or what we perceive as cruelty, rob us of all other knowledge. There are people whose politics I still find morally appalling. There are movements I still believe have done real harm. I am not interested in pretending otherwise. I do not think reconciliation requires moral amnesia. I do not think kindness requires surrender.
But I am beginning to wonder if my anger became too efficient.
It sorted too quickly.
It filed people away too neatly.
It forgot that a person may be wrong about public life and still have been kind to his mother, loyal to his brother, funny on a winter rink, brave in a schoolyard, generous to an old friend, and capable of remembering the exact thing you had forgotten.
This is not a small complication. It is the human complication.
And it may be one of the reasons this book has mattered to me more than I ever anticipated.
I thought I was writing a memoir. I thought I was setting down the story of a family, a street, a city, a childhood, a series of losses, betrayals, astonishments, adventures, and improbable survivals. I thought I was preserving what would otherwise disappear.
But the book has started doing something else.
It has become a summons.
I write something down, and people come forward. They bring a missing fact. They bring a correction. They bring an old photograph. They bring a name. They bring a small scene I had lost. Sometimes they bring pain. Sometimes they bring laughter. Sometimes they bring back a version of myself I had not visited in years.
And now, in John’s case, the book brought back a friend I had almost left stranded on the other side of politics.
That is not what I expected from a chapter about Grand Marais.
But maybe I should have.
Because Grand Marais was never just a street. It was a shared origin. It was the place before the sorting began. Before liberal and conservative, before MAGA and anti-MAGA, before cable television, before social media, before algorithms learned how to feed outrage to lonely people by the spoonful.
On Grand Marais, we were not yet hardened into our adult certainties. We were not yet carrying flags into ideological battle. We were not yet suspicious of one another’s motives. We were children measuring the world by bicycles, snowbanks, lake wind, games after dinner, and whether someone’s mother would let you stay a little longer.
That does not make childhood innocent in every way. Childhood has its cruelties too. Children can wound each other with astonishing precision. Families have secrets. Houses have sorrows. Even the prettiest streets contain grief.
But childhood does have one advantage over adulthood. It usually precedes the stories we later tell ourselves about who belongs and who does not.
That may be why the conversation with John moved me.
It reached underneath the later stories.
For a little while, we were back at the source.
I could hear in his voice the pleasure of being remembered. I could hear the pleasure of contributing. I could hear that my chapter had not merely flattered him or mentioned his family; it had opened a door he was glad to walk through. And once he walked through it, he brought gifts.
That is what memory does when it is shared properly. It becomes less lonely.
A private memory can be beautiful, but a shared memory is almost a form of resurrection. The person you were is confirmed by someone else who was standing nearby. The street rises again. The winter air returns. The houses put themselves back together. The parents are young again. The children are still running.
The lake is still at the end of the street.
The cottonwoods are still there.
The rinks are still frozen.
The whole vanished world says, for a moment: yes, I was real.
That may be the deepest reason I am writing this book. Not revenge, though God knows revenge has occasionally walked through these pages wearing a decent suit. Not vindication, though vindication has had its place. Not even explanation, though I have spent a lifetime trying to explain the inexplicable.
Maybe, underneath all of that, I am trying to keep the vanished world from being vanished entirely.
And if that is true, then I cannot be too selective about who is allowed to help me remember it.
Even a MAGA friend may hold a key.
Even someone whose politics have angered me may remember the sound of skates on the rink.
Even someone I had judged too harshly may be able to hand back a piece of my own childhood.
That is humbling.
It is also hopeful.
Not in a grand, national, let-us-all-join-hands way. I have no patience for cheap unity. Too much damage has been done. Too many people have been hurt by policies, rhetoric, contempt, and indifference. I am not interested in pretending that love of country or love of neighbor means looking away from cruelty.
But I am interested in any honest bridge that can still hold weight.
The bridge back to Grand Marais held.
At least for one phone call, it held.
Maybe that is enough for now.
Maybe that is how reconciliation begins when the larger world is too broken for speeches. Not with a manifesto. Not with a debate. Not with one person persuading the other to change teams. Maybe it begins with one old friend sending another old friend a chapter about a street they both loved.
Maybe it begins when the other friend writes back with delight.
Maybe it begins when the phone rings.
Maybe it begins when two men, both carrying seventy years of life, suddenly hear the voices of the boys they used to be.
I do not know where this leaves John and me. I do not know whether we will ever talk politics. Perhaps we should not. Perhaps the friendship can live, at least for now, in the safer country of memory. Perhaps that is cowardice. Perhaps it is wisdom. At this point in life, I am less certain than I used to be about the difference.
What I do know is that I felt something soften.
I felt my judgment loosen its grip.
I felt the possibility that an old friend could be politically wrong in ways that still trouble me and also personally dear in ways that still matter.
That may sound obvious to some people. It was not obvious to me.
Anger can become a room with no windows. Indignation can begin as moral clarity and end as solitary confinement. You can be right and still become trapped inside your rightness.
I do not want to live there.
I want my heart to remain porous enough for memory to get through.
I want to be able to oppose cruelty without becoming cruel in return.
I want to be able to name what I believe is wrong without losing the ability to recognize what is still human.
Most of all, I want to honor the truth that Grand Marais gave me: that before we became divided, before we became certain, before we became angry old men in a furious country, we were children together on a little street by the lake.
That does not erase the present.
But it does rescue something from it.
And maybe, after all these years, that is one more gift from Grand Marais.
It gave me my childhood once.
Now it may have given me back an old friend.