Plays by Robert Bowie, Jr…

My mother was a political genius responsible for my extremely successful lower school birthday parties but, because of two completely different events, I understand her now.

After my short-lived political career and the opening of the Manor Mill in Monkton, the middle of my political district, I now understand her politics better.

To be honest, my political career wasn’t really a career. It was more like a cosmic failure and horrible awakening. My road to hell was paved with good intentions, but without much political intelligence.

My mother used to say, “At your birthday party you must give your guests something to do before the ice cream and cake and they sing to you.”

As my guests would be dropped off by their parents, my mother would meet the car and usher the child into a pre-party in our yard.

She had everything going at the same time — croquet, dunking for apples, something that had to be blown up so we could all bounce on it and something you could pin the tail on, as well as a small piñata that could be individually beaten to shreds by everybody.

Everybody got to know each other before the party started.

What increased the degree of difficulty for my mother was the times. All these birthdays happened in post-WWII Washington D.C in the late ’50s and early ’60s during the McCarthy hearings and during fears of Cold War communist conspiracy theories, with newspapers featuring articles about the contents and creation of the perfect bomb shelter for under your house.

Even worse, every race, creed, color, and national origin was represented in the fourth, fifth and sixth grades and we had all been instructed that if we ever saw a mushroom cloud during our time together, we should run indoors and put our heads under our desks.

My mother would not approve comparing my birthday parties with someone else’s but here goes:

I went to a classmate’s birthday party — back then but I was dropped off at a movie theater by the birthday boy’s family, who immediately left. We were each handed the cost of admission, popcorn money, and were told we would be picked up at the curb after the movie was over. I didn’t really know any of the other guests. I just sat there in the darken theater and went home afterwards.

The movie we were sent to was called “A Day To Remember” — and believe me, this middle-schooler will never forget.

Stop and think what may have attracted the parents of the birthday boy to this movie. I don’t think they even knew what it was about. Maybe it was the upbeat title.

It was almost two hours and all about the sinking of the Titanic. It was a meticulous, chronological tale of death and drowning delivered in 1950s black-and-white with screaming sound around endless drowning.

The whole thing from beginning to end was about the band playing as the boat went down with missing children and panicked loved ones and near-empty lifeboats.

It has never ended for me.

I got about halfway through it and went into the men’s room to hide in a stall. I would come out about every 15 minutes to peek back into the theater to see if it was over yet so I didn’t miss the pick up after it was finally over.

Only in the last week by contrast, I have come to really understand my mother’s political genius with my birthday parties.

In 2014, after I retired from my law firm and sold my controlling interest to my partners, and decided I would retire, fulfill my duty of public service, and run as a Democrat in the 7th District to turn this world around.

The 7th District, I soon discovered, was a gerrymandered Republican district where all Republicans had been corralled into a single district.

I’ve always been a little naïve and overconfident. The reason I had decided to run for office this late in life was I was committed to making sure that we as a state and country must stop being divided. I made up my mind that I would campaign hard and turn around a gerrymandered Republican district that was pissed off to be gerrymandered. I didn’t blame them. So was I. I spent all that summer knocking doors and raising money to overcome impossible odds.

I lost to a Republican who had accumulated a lot of driving violations, including alcohol, as well as dumping oil in the Chesapeake Bay and trying to run over his mother with his truck.

You lose like that and it’s the end of your political future.

What has made me realize the mistake of my campaign and my mother‘s brilliance is a recent creation in my neighborhood five years ago: the Manor Mill.

Five years ago, Angelo Otterbein bought an old Gris Mill on Monkton Road that had been sold out of bankruptcy and made it a cultural center in the 7th district, the world that I could not penetrate.

It has been a massive cleanup job, but it was Angelo’s commitment to bring it back to is pre-revolutionary luster with its water wheel nearly rebuilt, and the molding cider barrels tossed out. He made up his mind to just open it up to the arts — and all those people that I could not convince to vote for me came and destroyed my caricature of who they were.

There was no politics from the beginning. It was just the creativity of all humankind’s desire to create. I was asked to run an Open Mic Poetry Night. All of a sudden, every place in the mill was full of art from those who had slammed the door on me.

There are beautiful watercolors and oil paintings on the walls, along with stained glass windows. Then came the writer’s workshops, music of all genres in the loft: string quartets, bluegrass, the blues. Beautiful plays are performed on weekend nights.

My caricatures of my voters died when I saw their creativity and we didn’t talk politics and division – we just loved each other’s company.

Angelo somehow understood my mother’s political genius in middle-school birthday parties by trusting the guests and giving them something to do, a place to talk and share opinions, a welcoming place to form community, and eat cake.

My mother was right to let kids have time to play, to not divide everyone ahead of time.

Perhaps we are headed for more chaos with these new midterm elections, but perhaps we are also being given a new chance to wake up to the beauty of our freedom, just by talking and sharing our American lives together.