Going Rogue: An American Life (19 page)

SARAH

PALIN

Finally, aftet too many months of
me
giving it the old college tty, in the hope that he would come around and join the team, I knew I would have to shake things up at City Hall even more. 3

One day, an elderly resident insisred on a private meeting my office. It was all very hush-hush. On the appointed day, she sat down across the desk from me. I had used a pretty marble table from my own kitchen. I’d known it was just a matter of time before the kids thrashed that table wirh Sharpie markers and Matchbox cars, so I rescued it by moving it to my office. People thought I had this big, fancy desk when it was really just a kitchen table.

I smiled at the lady who had come to see me. “Okay, what’s this about?”

Her brow furrowed with deep lines of concern, she said, “Well, I want you to know that I’m here for you if you need help. Know that I’m praying for you and am so sorry.”

I was a little confused. “Sorry for what?” She hesitated, then plunged ahead. “Your children. We understand that your daughter was caught smoking pot.” I opened my eyes wide and creased my face into a worried look to equal her own. “She got caught?” I asked incredulously. “Dang!

Which daughter? My toddler or my kindergarrner?” Momentarily flustered, the lady pressed on. “Well, this is what’s been going around on our prayer chain. We’ve been praying for the mayor’s daughter. I’m sure it was the mayor’s daughter.”

Yeah, well, wrong mayor. Another mayor nearby did have a teenage daughter who may have been smoking weed. Still, I was thinking,
Are you kidding me? I appreciate the prayer support, but .
..

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Going Rogue

going to believe unsubstantiated rumors and then
them to

other people?

It would be a few mote years before I learned rhat some people make a living and even earn prestigious awards for doing exactly that.

Every Friday morning, I drove down to a local

caIled the

Country Kitchen to have breakfast with the regulars. It was the kind of smalltown joint where waitresses who could have been named Flo and Ruby poured your coffee into thick off-white ceramic cups and asked after your kids. My kids still remember going there with me for an occasional treat before school. They’d have pancakes and I’d drink coffee, sitting with all these lovable old dudes who owned the plumbing store and the construction company and the septic pumpers, and younger blue-collar workers who were acrually building the town. I would just listen to what they had to say about how the town’s business was being handled.

They loved to gtipe about this and that and tell me how to do my job. I loved listening to their ideas and showing them that I cared. I usually agreed with their take on the world. I learned a lot from them, mostly that

wasn’t off base in my thinking

about what the people expected from their government. They just wanted it on their side.

I finally slowed down on that Friday-morning routine when I was pregnant with Piper. Neatly every pregnant woman has something that can make her instantly ill,

the cigarette

smoke inside the

kind of nauseated me. Instead of supporting

a much-talked-about citywide smoking ban at the time, though, I just stopped going to that restaurant. It eventually went smokefree on its own, which is the way things like that should work. My friends and I still did a lot of things together, including clay shooting, and I continued to visit the range while I was preg• 7 5

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SARAH

PALIN

nant. So in a nod to our Second Amendment, my friends Kristan Cole and Judy Patrick threw me a baby shower at the Gtouse Ridge shooting range-complete with a cake in the shape of a Piper airplane.

Piper Indi Grace was born March 19, a Monday. Todd flies a Piper plane, but I just liked the name. “Indi” for “Independence” (though the Indy 500 is pretty cool too) and “Grace” for Grace.” The next day, I rook her by work when I checked in on City Hall. She was a fun and accommodating kid from the start, even arriving exactly on her due date.

I hadn’t been mayor long when a certain Wasilla resident established herself as the town critic. She showed up for nearly every council meeting on Mondays and a lot of planning commission meetings on Tuesdays. A Birkenstock-and-granola Berkeley grad who wore her gray hair long and flowing and with a flower behind one ear, she always had something to say, usually about her clogged culvert. She demanded to come to cabinet meetings to make sure my door was literally open-to which the cabinet answered, in unison with me, not just “No,” but “Hell no!” This town crier would later become an “expert” on all things Palin when I ran for vice president.

She was a big supporter of the small city library, where the librarian wasn’t exactly on board with my administration. I was already mixing it up with the librarian’s good friend, the police chief, and maybe that wasn’t sitting well with her. As I had with every department head, I asked the librarian for a meeting to let her know that I was there to help. We talked about library. policies, the budget, maintenance issues, and operating hours. Then I brought up an issue that was all over the news at the time. That week in Anchorage, everyone was talking about book banning, and I was curious what her selection policy was.

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