Listen in MP3
I knew the first thing he was going to say.
"Never threaten to resign, dear, unless you really want to leave."
I told him that it wasn't a threat; it was simply a contingency plan as to how I would respond if the board decided to act in certain ways, and that the future behavior of the board was far from a foregone conclusion.
Did he smile when I said that? Did he acknowledge, even for an instant, that his wacko tree-hugger daughter could hold her own in his world—"the world," as he called it, "of practical affairs"—or as I call it, of diplomatic double talk?
The pause on the phone was long enough to permit a smile—but also long enough for a scowl, or an exasperated shake of the head.
"Are you asking me to attempt to influence the future behavior of the board?" he said at last.
"You have one vote," I said.
"And you know I must recuse myself from all personnel matters, due to my close family relationship with the executive director."
That's when I exploded. I think I started off with something like "It isn't a personnel matter, it's a fucking policy matter—"
And then it was as if the calendar had shifted back twenty-five years, and I was standing in the rain at a truck stop at the edge of some swamp that I refused to call a swamp, screaming into a payphone at the Neanderthal who lived just beneath the surface of the suave corporate attorney who was trying to send me money, pedantically explaining to this imbecile how insane it was to stay in school and study environmental science when the battle was raging right now, right here, in this precarious habitat, these fragile wetlands, where the only thing protecting the delicate balance of the ecosystem from the developer's bulldozer was my tent, my sleeping bag, my body. I screamed at him as if I had never learned to work within the system, never written a grant proposal, never sweet-talked my conservative father, discreet counselor to the status quo, into serving on the board of an urban nature center set on the banks of a polluted tributary of an industrial sewer in a crime-ridden park surrounded by ghetto.
I lectured him; I berated him; I insulted him—I reverted completely back to the self-righteousness of the girl who really believed that it was her own courage that stopped those bulldozers, not her privileged status as the telegenic daughter of the white upper-middle-class.
He must have held the phone away from his ear—the way I remember him holding it when the Mayor called—bemused, patient, the tinny speaker just far enough away, so that the words remained intelligible but the anger was reduced to a comic effect—and he would catch my eye, watching him from the door of his study in my pajamas, and he would smile at me, and explain to me the next morning that our Mayor had a terrible temper, but that it was a great honor to receive a call like that, to be entrusted with the delivery of an important message.
