I went to Philadelphia in a year of hurricanes, wildfires and peak temperatures to make the proverbial difference, or at least know I had done all I could do to stave off a second Trump term. The organization I worked through, Seed the Vote, founded by progressives in 2019, is active in most swing states; I chose Philadelphia because it is a relatively short drive from Brooklyn, where I have lived, by and large, since 2001.

This was not my first rodeo. In 2000, I canvassed on behalf of Bill Bradley’s Democratic primary campaign against Al Gore, and in 2003, I briefly returned to Missouri, where I grew up, to knock on doors on behalf of the Democratic governor, and subsequently barnstorm the state as the first staffer for the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor. Faced with the harsh realities of the diet of a full-time campaign staffer (think McDonalds and tubs of soda, three meals a day, every day), I chose, after a few months, to return to Brooklyn, my precious food co-op, and the continued nursing of my writerly ambitions . In 2016, concerned in the final days of October, I went to door-knock in a Philly suburb on behalf of the Clinton-Kaine campaign and discovered, close up, that her candidacy was probably in a lot of trouble. Given the task of reminding registered Democrats to vote, I found a giant Trump banner on the home of one; at another door, a woman who told me that she couldn’t vote for Hillary with “all that she’s done!”; and finally a working class Bernie-or-buster who said that, although he wouldn’t be voting for her given how she had treated his preferred candidate, Hillary was bound to win the presidency and that I ought to tell her that there were a lot of pissed-off people out there.

This time, we were knocking on doors in a variety of Philadelphia neighborhoods—some mostly white working class, others mostly Black working class, still others well-to-do suburban—and presenting ourselves as hospitality union members, or in solidarity with the national hospitality union Unite Here. This was a kind of fiction, but not one completely divorced from the truth, at least in most cases; most if not all of us volunteers had worked in hospitality of one variety or another.

The script we were to follow encouraged us, after our union self-identification, to ask about political issues that might be top of mind in the household, and, eventually, to share the reasons for our endorsement of the Harris-Walz ticket. On my first day out in the field, and for six of the seven days that I was out there, we met in Burholme Park. Scoping out who would be there with me, I found mainly retirees, mostly women, a few in their twenties and early thirties and the rest over sixty. The Seed the Vote volunteer leadership was comprised of two young men, Philadelphians, and a tech wizard who each morning divvied us up into canvassing groups with the aid of her all-knowing spreadsheet. My hope was that committing a full week to this effort would, in addition to boosting my preferred ticket, help me get a read on the political landscape outside social media and to begin to untangle the snarled logics of anger found online. Part of what drives me as both a citizen and as a writer is the way in which people, including at times myself, can now seem more bound to their platforms and siloed identities than to their status as citizens in a democracy, ultimately the only baseline for our rights as Americans. My two young nieces were on my mind, and a nephew, too, the future they will live in.

●

No matter how perfectly you can champion a political platform on social media, it all goes right out the window when you encounter your first actual voter. These people have lives—they are in a hurry, on a lunch break, maybe kind of annoyed. They have opinions of their own. You are not Moses descended from Mt. Sinai to deliver your commandments; you are standing at a stranger’s doorstep and obliged, if you want to get anywhere at all, to listen to what they have to say.

That first day, I hadn’t yet memorized the script, and so I read it from my phone in a way that I hoped made my stumbles charming. People were mostly nice, mostly heard me out. My canvassing partner, Rachel, a married woman maybe five years older than me, had already been out there for a stretch of days and agreed that we ought to take the first several doors together. I was still adjusting to the abrupt fact of being at work before noon (see: the habitual working hours of a writer and editor). The homes we visited were solidly maintained if humble. Tidy structures, neatly decorated, small tracts of grass, plenty of sidewalk, nothing reaching very high skyward. When somebody opened up, Rachel introduced first herself, then me, as if we were longtime colleagues.

Directing our path was the phone app MiniVAN, which listed, house by house, the voters we were to attempt to reach, with that voter’s age, most recent party affiliation and a place to take notes about each conversation or lack thereof. Most people do not answer the door, or are not home; the modern ubiquity of Ring cameras makes it easier for those inside to decide not to engage. Will the wonders of technology never cease? Pets, though, stared unselfconsciously out windows at us. Two black-and-white cats vogued in witchy fashion, one positioned behind the other from a window to the right, when a door we were in the process of marking as “Not Home” opened, and a soft-spoken young man greeted us. He was wearing a white button-down flared open at the neck, his black hair combed neatly in place. He said that while his wife would be voting for Harris, he was—long pause—“different” (The Graduate’s Benjamin Braddock flashed through my mind) and wouldn’t be voting. It was just that, he said, as an author of fiction he existed on a different plane than normal people; whatever might happen, he felt somehow far away from it.

“I understand,” I said, “about wanting to strike an apolitical stance as an artist. That’s something I’d never disagree with. But the consequences of a second Trump term are real, and will be serious and devastating.” I listed the potential of a far-right Supreme Court locked in for decades, of the military turned on Americans, of voting machines seized in the next election. Harris and Walz offer saner leadership, I said, a steadier hand.

“I don’t disagree with anything you’re saying,” the young man said. “You’re probably correct about all of that.” But he seemed to consider himself a nonparticipant, or had sworn himself to such a stance. It seemed clear, too, that he was enjoying the conversation, to which Rachel was contributing as well. This, that rarest phenomenon in our new media age: a spontaneous, fluid, in-person conversation between strangers.

Fantasy novels, it turned out, were what he writes.

“Voting,” I said, “does not need to be a public performance. Imagine Trump as a Chaos Lord bound to spread darkness across the land. I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say that’s what we’re facing down. With Elon Musk at his side as some sort of demented wizard and Robert Kennedy Jr., a lost, wayward knight. Tulsi Gabbard, a master of disguise”—I wanted to categorize her for some reason, in fantasy terms, as a thief—“and the MyPillow guy, a deranged orc… These people may be on some level entertaining. But you don’t want them in charge of anything.”

Maybe I didn’t say all of that. But however much I did, the would-be voter’s imagination was engaged. “You are noble,” he told Rachel and me. Maybe, he said, he’d let his wife drag him to the polling place.

Rachel and I continued down the block only, at the next house, to look back and see that the young man was following us, barefooted along the sidewalk.

“I know that you have your ground to cover. But if you have more time at the end of your day, I welcome you to come back for further conversation.”

●

That first day was very evenly split between Trump and Harris, or else people who didn’t want to talk.

An old man who looked like he could have been knocked over by a will-o’-the-wisp stumbled through Fox News talking points. “Pro-life,” he said, his tone pleading, was what mattered to him the most.

A woman in her early fifties came to the screen door in her nursing uniform. She had time-tested confidence in her voice and short blond hair, kind of spiky. The canvassing app identified her as a Republican. I could see that her family, grown sons I imagined, were down the hallway behind her, with some sort of gathering in progress. She said she did not want to talk about the election.

“I understand,” I said. “And do you know how you’re voting?”

She said that she did.

“So if I do a little dance here for Harris-Walz, that won’t change anything?”

No, she smiled, it would not.

“Well, is there anything I can say to dissuade you from voting for Trump?”

“I’m a Republican,” she said from behind the screen door, a step above where I stood, looking up at her. “But I’m not crazy. I’ll never vote for him again.”

An elderly but still vital man emerged from a duplex with a faint spaghetti sauce stain down one side of his mouth and stared at me as if daring me to show squeamishness. We were men, weren’t we, and don’t men have a trail of food sometimes dribbling from their mouths? “You know what a president needs?” he asked me.

“A toilet plated in gold?”

“A personality,” he said.

“Kamala has personality in spades. Trump is a hollow man. Like an actor who plays a doctor on TV. And you want him to operate on you?”

He pushed me in the shoulder, not with an intent to harm, but conversationally, for emphasis. “She’s a disaster,” he said. “Global leaders will never respect her.”

“I disagree. They definitely do not respect Trump. They laugh at him.”

“No,” he said and pushed me again in the shoulder. “He’s unpredictable. No one knows what he’ll do. They all fear him!”

The man’s son appeared at the top of the stairs from the door opposite his father’s within the duplex. “Oh,” he laughed. “You’re trying to convince him? Good luck with that.”

I asked the son who he’d be voting for.

“I’m an independent,” he said. “I vote for both Republicans and Democrats. But this time, for president? I’m 1000 percent for Trump.”

Why, I asked.

He mentioned Operation Choke Point, an Obama-era initiative that had apparently cost the son his moneylending business passed down to him by the immigrant father who was pushing me in the shoulder. Although Kamala Harris had nothing to do with it, this was perhaps the only specific story I heard in all seven days of canvassing that gave a personal reason for disliking what the Democrats had to offer outside the boilerplate of “the economy” and “immigration.”

In the last house of the day, Rachel and I reconvened in search of a middle-aged woman registered Dem only to encounter her husband, a former Marine, who said he’d supported Biden but this time would be voting Trump, who he admitted is “an asshole.” He asked if I’d seen the latest, about how FEMA was out of money because of how much Biden had spent on immigrants. I told him this was BS, and he lifted both arms and shrugged: “It’s what I heard.” I showed him a video on my phone of Kaitlan Collins of CNN rebutting Trump’s propaganda about FEMA, a clip that began with a series of recent instances where Trump had attempted to tie Harris to FEMA’s supposedly migration-driven bankruptcy.

“Wow,” he said, chuckling and apparently enjoying Trump’s blame game, “I hadn’t even seen all these.”

“Wait for the kicker,” I said.

Collins concludes the statement by pointing out that it is President Donald Trump, not Biden, who requisitioned money from FEMA in order to pay for his border project.

His talking point torn down, the man pivoted to Lebanon. “Well, now they’re sending all this money to Lebanon,” he said, growing more agitated.

“That’s… humanitarian aid?” I said, smiling to keep him relatively calm.

“My sons,” he said, “are in the Marines now. Their lives are on the line over there, and I don’t want my tax dollars going to support terrorists.”

“These aren’t terrorists,” I said. “The money’s for people fleeing Israel’s bombing.”

“Are you old enough to remember what happened in the Marine barracks in 1983?”

“I was a kid, but yeah.”

“I’m not going to support that.”

“I don’t support that either. But the Lebanese are the ones being bombed.”

The sun was low in the sky. We could have gone on past nightfall. I delivered a short speech generated on the spot about how I can respect Republican principle, have Republican voters in my extended family, but that Donald Trump is uniquely destructive and how I hoped he’d consider at least leaving the top of the ballot blank. “Just keep this conversation in mind,” I said. “I’m glad we are able to talk across political boundaries like this.”

It is draining to throw yourself to the randomness of who will and who will not open a door, of who will and who will not choose to engage, and how, and in what manner. Of having to do a minor self-reinvention at each door, perform the sort of public-minded fiction than can lead, however roundaboutly, to concrete change. The Affordable Care Act. The investment in green energy represented by the Inflation Reduction Act. The end of the war in Afghanistan, however botched the exit was in the offing. But the changes, it seems—in our social media-driven age of instant satisfaction and exigency—can never come fast enough.

●

In the same neighborhood, the next morning, a bulldog punched out a hole in the bay window to the right of the stoop when I was placing a Kamala flier on the door handle of a Democrat-registered woman who was not home.

“Chill out,” I said, “Chill,” as the barking dog, gone quiet, stared out at me, shocked by the hole he had made.

I tended to think of door-knocking as foot-soldiering for a cause, but also an essential democratic practice. In contrast to the privately owned, billionaire-slanted and virtual so-called town squares that now predominate, we were working to restore the feeling of a town square on the front step of every potential voter who answered our knocks. And what if each voter we persuaded went on to persuade other members of a community in turn? Insofar as “community” still applies to houses lined up side by side along a block and in walkable proximity, and not only to identity groups abstracted online from any one geographic setting? The people we convinced in the moment presumably held more sway in their own communities than we ever could, and even for those we didn’t, we were still seeding a point of view that could change their mind, with potential reinforcement after the fact by the cavalcade of headlines.

On the third day, in an upscale neighborhood—full lawns, hilly, winding streets—I encountered many Harris supporters. A father overseeing work on his house who took a break to say that of course he was voting for Harris and nobody ought to fear expressing as much. A Black family man who said they were all voting Kamala and believed for sure that she would run away with it. A crew-cut, seventy-year-old ex-military man mowing his lawn who disrupted my private attempt at profiling when he said he was a strong Harris supporter, and so was his husband; we talked for about ten minutes and agreed on point after point. “They say all this crazy stuff, can’t help themselves,” he said before mentioning that his next-door neighbor, who’d been a nice guy when they moved to the neighborhood over a decade ago, had gone off the deep with QAnon in recent years.

Just the simple fact of conversing in person with a series of strangers could feel, in the moment, like a humanistic rebellion against the dominant, technological paradigm… even if we canvassers were never without our data-notation tools. If a voter had asked me not to mark their info, I’d have gladly complied. I gladly, too, engaged people who were not on my list, but who happened to cross my path.

After having talked a Trump-inclined, recently widowed grandmother up the block out of that vote—when she cited global stability I shared how the generals Mark Milley, James Mattis and John Kelly, who had each worked to preserve global stability during Trump’s term, now said he was dangerous and ought never to be allowed back in the Oval Office—I stopped to speak with a tall, brown-skinned, bearded man who was unloading groceries from his car. His address was not on my list.

I asked if he was voting.

Yes.

I asked him if he knew how he was inclined?

Trump, he said.

He’d voted for Democrats in the past, he said. But Democrats can never get anything done. At least Trump does what he says. And Trump, he said, speaks from the heart. He may not say it right, but his heart, he said, is in the right place.

“I’m not voting even for my economic interest, I’m voting for morality.” He put his hand over his heart as he stood outside the open rear cab of his car in the driveway near his garage. I was about fifteen feet away, on the sidewalk.

I couldn’t conceal my disbelief. “For morality?”

“I took my kids to some Democrat stuff. We went to see Hillary in 2016. But all they do now is push their homosexual agenda in schools!”

“C’mon,” I said, channeling, perhaps, my inner Biden.

“Do you have kids?” he asked. “My son is an honor student. He’s a bright kid. You should see the kind of stuff they put in front of him.”

I told him that if he voted for Trump—

“I’m definitely voting for Trump,” he said.

I told him that if he voted that way, he would probably live to regret it should Trump win.

“You might be right,” he said, hanging his head for a moment. Then, he looked back up and extended his arms to gesture from where he stood to where I was standing. “The truth is probably somewhere between us.”

“I’m glad we can have a conversation like this,” I said.

He said that he was glad too. Then, under his breath, as I turned to walk away: “White boy.” I realized that, off-script when I struck up the conversation, I’d never shared my name or heard his either. And so, “white boy” I was.

●

Have I mentioned the weather? It was mid-October in Philadelphia, the fall season well underway, and yet every single day I walked the temperature seemed to touch a minimum of seventy degrees Fahrenheit. One day got real windy, but most of the time I was comfortably in short sleeves. If the global climate was cooking to a degree unsafe for humanity and more or less all other living species, well, at least campaign season had found the embrace of pleasing forecasts. The sun browned my skin to such an extent that almost every day at lunch, one of my fellow canvassers would offer sunblock, which I reluctantly began to accept. I was feeling good, engaged, like I was doing what I was uniquely well-suited to be doing at this moment in time: the freedom to make and rearrange my own schedule as a freelancer translated adroitly to Johnny Appleseeding around town and talking to people about our shared political future. Might even say there was passion in it. I didn’t have to take notes on what I heard. All of it felt written on my soul. My mind was open, beatific in a way, to receive the words of my interlocutors. Goddamn if I wasn’t an American.

I did finally encounter, in that upscale neighborhood, my first Gaza voters. A Muslim man, who I took to be the father of the family listed on my phone, emerged from his house and shut the door behind him. I could hear the voices inside: his wife, children, parents. They were speaking cheerfully enough, but the subject we were going to address needed to be walled off from their hearing to protect that cheer.

“It is very hard,” he said. “It is very, very hard.”

For his household, they would either vote Harris, or not at all.

What is happening in Gaza, and in the West Bank, and in Lebanon, is a barbarity, I said. It is devastating to see, and must end.

I shared what I qualified as my candid opinion, which has since been backed up by mainstream reporting: that Benjamin Netanyahu wanted Trump as president. That he thought he could provoke the U.S. electorate into abetting him in achieving that desire. That Trump, powered by right-wing Israeli donors, would permit even graver travesties yet, including the full annexation of Gaza and the West Bank. Jared Kushner’s wished-for beachfront property.

Biden has let Netanyahu walk all over him while signaling impotent disapproval, I said, but there is hope that a Harris administration will stand up for what is right. She has said “how Israel defends itself matters.” That, the man said, was the only thing that could get him and his family to cast votes for her. He took the mailer from me with the ballot information and relevant dates and we said goodbye in somber tones.

My final days canvassing were in a primarily Black working-class neighborhood. We were coached ahead of time that, on Sunday, the Eagles would be playing, and to expect anyone who answered their doors to be half-distracted during the hours of 1 to 4 p.m. Most who responded were Harris supporters, entire households full. A young man in a sports jersey laughed and said he didn’t do voting, nobody cared about his neighborhood except at election time. I seemed to talk a man in his late thirties into voting by adjusting his perception that Harris was not, in fact, running away with the race and yes, every vote mattered, especially in Pennsylvania. I stopped a grandmother on the sidewalk who appeared to be dressed for church. She said that she was a registered Republican, but that she’d be voting for Harris because “that man only cares about himself.” An older man said he and his wife were not concerned with worldly matters: “Witnesses,” he explained.

My canvassing partner that morning was a woman from San Francisco named Roslyn. Roslyn was in, I suppose, her early eighties, but had been out walking the blocks same as me every day that I’d been out there. I found Roslyn standing at the bottom of a stoop. The Black man at the top was speaking with anger about the Democrats, about Gaza. He’d voted for the Democrats in every previous election but what good had any of it done? Roslyn responded in a tone of quiet compassion, and the man raised his voice louder. “I’m voting for Trump,” he said. “Democrats start wars and Republicans end them.”

I moved in. Roslyn introduced me as her colleague. I began speaking back at the man in a tone loud enough to match his own—angry, not at him, but at Netanyahu’s merciless slaughter and Biden’s guilt by association. Republicans, I said, had started every full-bore war involving American boots on the ground of the 21st century and only the other day Trump had fantasized about bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities—a right-wing Israeli fixation for years now—which would of course set off a broader war in the region.

Afghanistan, I said.

Iraq, I said, and the pointless search for WMDs, the alternative facts presented as justification for that invasion.

In Liberia, he said, where he was from, with a Black father and white mother like Barack Obama, the U.S. had helped spark a war too.

“When was that?” I asked. “What year?”

1991.

And guess which party held the American presidency?

He sank to his knees, and put his head in his hands. “I lost my sister in that war,” he said. “I can’t stand to see it. I can’t stand to see these wars and all the suffering.”

Roslyn offered her compassion. We spoke for a while more. I said I understood his frustration with the present state of affairs. But to play off a quote by the boxer Joe Louis, “Lots of things wrong with America. But Trump ain’t gonna fix them.”

Roslyn and I wondered aloud afterwards about whether we’d swayed the man to vote for Harris. We didn’t know. At least he’d taken the fliers from our hands.

Toward the end of a long day, my final canvassing partner, Morgana (a young woman from Maine who’d heard about Seed the Vote while on a social justice retreat), and I caught up with a middle-aged white man named Brian, with semi-wild hair and an honest, direct manner, as he exited a cab in front of his home.

“I haven’t been paying a whole lot of attention,” he said. “You don’t know who to believe. One side says the other is lying. And the other side says the same thing. One side says voting for the other will be the end of democracy. And the other says the same thing. You should see all the mailers. All the phone messages. It’s just piling up.”

He recognized that almost everybody “around here” would be voting Kamala, but he wasn’t sure yet. Economically, he said, he probably leaned Trump. I reprised the little speech about Republican principle, the catastrophic cost of a mass deportation program, and the party being better off if they lost the presidency this year. Brian nodded along. I said Trump represented a unique danger, had spoken of using the military against American citizens.

“They both say it will be the end of the world if you vote for the other one. I just don’t know.”

“Are there any politicians who you really trust?” Morgana asked.

“Josh Shapiro,” Brian said. “He’s the fucking man.”

“Josh Shapiro,” I said, “has endorsed Kamala Harris.”

I hardly encountered any committed Trump voters in that neighborhood. One of the few I did was an Eastern European woman who remained stationed behind her screen door, annoyed with my knocking. “Why did you knock like that?” she asked. I could hear a TV playing in the background. I apologized, said I hadn’t seen her standing there in the dark. She told me who she planned to vote for. I asked her why. Because of the border, she said. Because of inflation, she said. All of it “her” doing. “She’s the border czar,” the woman said.

“I think it’s a tragedy that we live in these internet bubbles where we don’t even know which facts are real facts,” I said to her. “You have yours from Fox News, but they’re distorting everything. Trump is lying to you. You’re projecting your best self onto him but he doesn’t deserve that.”

This got her attention and she returned the salvo: “You are projecting your best onto her? Why? What has she ever done?”

Next door to this woman, a woman of approximately the same age was out front smoking. Morgana had attempted to speak with her and been brushed away. But she began to speak to me between puffs on her cigarette as I turned from her neighbor’s front door. I opened the gate to her home and walked up the stairs. She had been listening to my conversation with her neighbor.

“Inflation happened all over the world. Biden didn’t do it,” she said.

“Will you be voting for Harris, ma’am?”

She took another drag from her cigarette and without looking up at me said, “Yes. My husband and I, yes.”

Her Eastern European next-door neighbor now emerged from her home, sat on a bench out front, and without looking over at us, lit a cigarette of her own. For a moment, all three of us gazed across the street at an indistinct future, or just the block of homes across the way, abiding.

“It’s going to be real close,” I said.

●

My first voting election was Gore versus Bush. A canard that went around during that time among leftie friends was that both candidates were essentially corporate shills and that ultimately it didn’t matter who won. The results of that election came in notoriously close and we continue to live downstream of the consequences: the Iraq War, whose false premises helped sow the cynicism and reaction that gave us Trump in 2016, Citizens United, wilder and wilder gerrymandering, the composition of the Supreme Court in the balance.

Yes, we are invited to project our own best selves onto the candidates we choose to support, to imagine they have qualities and hold views they may not in truth possess, and yes, we must remain vigilant about how our hopes are realized or undercut by those at the levers of power in this country. We are not ushering in a messiah. No single American president will get everything right. And no matter who wins the race, it’s true, the sun will continue to shine. The American flag will still sway in the breeze on people’s front porches, evoking the worst and the best of what we have to offer the world, of what is within our power to change.

Two voters in particular stay with me.

One, from my days in the upscale suburbs, was a well-kept older man out in his driveway sending a legion of leaves skittering with a blower. The house he was standing in front of was large, but by no means the largest in the neighborhood. When I called out to him from the top of his driveway, he shut the blower down and took a few steps in my direction, smiling.

I identified myself as representing a union for hospitality workers in Philadelphia and across the country.

“Do you know who I am?” he called out.

“I do not,” I said.

He proclaimed himself the owner of a hotel in downtown Philly.

“Ah, so you know something about hospitality unions,” I said.

His smile sharpened.

“Do you know which way you’re leaning in this election?”

“Trump!” he said. “All the way.”

“You’re happy with him?”

He swung the large leaf blower around in front of him so that it was now pointed at me. “Everything about him. The tweets. Everything! He’s a junkyard dog, and that’s what we need to go after the radicals on the other side.”

This was, in a real sense, the most honest assessment of Donald Trump I’d heard from an enthusiast.

I thanked him for his time and turned to leave. He then called after me, “Tell me if you find any Harris-Walz supporters in this neighborhood and I’ll burn their houses down.”

I gave a short, strained laugh. There were, in fact, Harris-Walz households in the neighborhood, unmarked, and had the hotel owner learned of them would he really have burned their houses down? Of course not, I know he would say. It was only a joke. No coincidence that this is the same menacing game the Trump-Vance ticket seems eager to play.

The countervailing Philadelphia voter? Outside a middle-class home on a block of similar buildings, up a flight of stairs to a landing, I rang a doorbell that a woman in her forties answered. She directed me to go around to a different doorway and so I did, and when I arrived a barrel-chested man was standing there. Tan skin, taller than I am. Measuring me with direct eye contact. I matched that gaze, identified myself with Unite Here, asked if there were any issues in the household that were top of mind. I could see, from the app on my phone, that the man of the house, presumably the one in front of me, was a registered Republican, while his wife was registered as a Democrat.

“Crime,” he said. “Inflation,” he said. He mentioned a series of local concerns.

Well, I thought, here we go again. The moment of truth fast arriving: Would he be supporting Donald Trump for president?

“The man’s a criminal,” he said. “I’m voting for the prosecutor.”

I laughed. He laughed.

I told him I’d been out knocking on doors for seven days and that it was going to be close.

“Seven days? I thought you were Puerto Rican,” he said, “but that’s just the sun, huh?”

“Just Philadelphia in the sun,” I said. “I’m glad that we can have this conversation.”

Image credit: Dan Keck.