Going Rogue: An American Life (121 page)

yearsfrom nowyou will

more disappointed

the

you didn’t do than

Onesyou did do. So throw offthe

Sail away

the

Catch the trade winds inyour sails.

Explore. Dream. Discover.

TWAIN

I t isoneyeatago this weekthatIgotthecaIlfromJohn

McCain at the Alaska State Fair. So this week, ir’s cotton candy and roller-coaster rides again.

As I wrire this, I put Piper on speakerphone and listen to the sounds of comforting chaos behind her at home in Wasilla. It’s very quiet in the little apartment I’m in for a couple of weeks as I work on this book, and the curtains ate open to invite in the California sunshine. Piper explains that she’s trying to comb her hair but it’s sticking on one side.

“Yeah, and it was picture day on Wednesday and Bristol wouldn’r fix my hair and I had to go to school soaking wet and I couldn’t even find a comb!” Piper says.

“Well, right now just put water on it,” I tell her from a few thousand miles away. “Or wear a hat.”

“Oh yeah, a hat. I’m wearing a hat!” I figure she grabbed one of

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SARAH

PALIN

Todd’s baseball caps and is comfortable wearing it ovetsized and lopsided because she’s not too worried about impressing anyone. She interrupts me to holler for her sisters to lend her some money. “I’m broke! I had to pay for Mom’s mocha again when we were down in California, and now I don’t have any quarters!” Our kids had been with Meg and at the beginning of the

trip. Then Todd and Meg’s husband, Eric, flew home wirh the flock in time for the first day of schoo!. Now Piper’s mad because I’m not there to help. She knows if she doesn’t get going soon she’ll have to stand in long lines to ride the rides at rhe fair. I listen to her take-charge commands and then tell her she needs to go help get the babies ready. “Pack Trig’s stroller,” I say.

“He likes his Elmo thing, and bring a diaper bag-the big one, and make sure there’s two of everything in there for Tripp, roo, okay?”

I hear her offer to get the boys bundled up before they head out. I can picture what she’d choose for them to wear. She’d look for their matching fleece jackets, and I can count on her topping off the task wirh a lick of the palm and a slick of Trig’s hair. I’ll be home soon and can’t wait to be smack in the middle of the comforting chaos of family life.

, Before Piper hustles away from the phone, Todd gets on to tell me Trig slept through the night, so it was a good night.

”And it’s close, Sarah! He’s going to take his first step any day.” I bite ‘my lip. “You better hurry home. He’s going to walk!” Piper jumps back on to announce that she’s found some change in a mason jar in the laundry room and she needs it desperately.

“I love you, Piper. Give everyone a kiss. See you in a couple of days.”

“Bye, Mom, love you too. Gotta go.”

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Going Rogue

Earlier I rook a break and accepted the sun’s irresistible invitation to get outside and run. I ran slowly, but my mind raced. After a couple of miles, I had to slow down to a walk.
It
was the first time I’d had to do that in years. Thinking about the past year with some emotion, I felt my throat tighten, and I thought I was going to hyperventilate, which hasn’t happened since my high school cross-country days. I was thankful to be incognito on a bike path in a city where no one recognized me with salty sweat dripping under my sunglasses.

I thought ofTrack’s call that morning. He’d be home soon. His brigade unit’s replacement had arrived, and they were making the transition from a war zone to the States. His return would be a few weeks later than he’d thought, which wasn’t great news for me, but he said that was fine-he knew his old truck with a new lift kit would stilI be there waiting for him. Dh, and the family was waiting, too. (A lot of these guys have to act like it’s all about the truck.) A long year fot him. For every soldier. For all of us. As I walked, my mind drifted from Track to Trig and everything in between. That included the politics of the past year. Dh, the politics.

I had’ to stop walking for a second. I tarely stop. I sat ‘down on the grass and prayed, “God, thank You. Thank You for Your faithfulness … always seeing us through … I don’t know if this chapter is ending or just beginning, but You do, so I hand it all over to You again. Thanks for letting me do that.” Then I thanked our Lord fur every single thing we’d been through that year. I believed there was purpose in it all.

Meg and I were staying in a quiet litrle apartment in Califurnia as I worked on my book fur an early deadline and she ran my “office in exile;’ fielding phone calls from the media and

out crazy

rumors (every week I was reportedly moving to a new state).

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Someone asked her the other day, “Where exactly is the governor’s office located now?” Meg looked up at me, both of us sitting at the kitchen table, typing away on our laptops, cable news blaring in the background, BlackBerrys buzzing nonstop

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from incoming e-mails, and she said, “I guess you could say it’s
virtual.”

It was a bit surreal to go from a big state office and all the trappings of power to just a kitchen table. But being out of power can be very liberating.

Take an example: from this tiny apartment, I watched debates unfold in Washington, and I used my Facebook page to call things like I saw them.

These posts had an impact, and it made me think,
Isn’t Facebook a terrific illustration ofthe power of American ingenuity?

Facebook was created in a Harvard dorm room in 2004. No one gave its young creator a government grant-he just did it on his own, like generations of other American entrepreneurs. And here we have the president and his party telling us that the American system is broken and it’s

government’s job to fix it.

What better tefutation of the argument could there be than an innovation like Facebook, which sprang up out of nowhere and virtually overnight became a powerful tool for communication,
commerce, and political action.

As I write this, Commonsense Conservatives are out of power in D.C. But that does not discourage me. I think of Reagan in 1976, when his conservative politics and his political future were declared all but dead. How did he turn things around in four years? By speaking to ordinary Americans about the ideas that bind us together.

These ideas resonate just as strongly today. Encourage the free market. Lowet taxes. Get government out of the way. Put the people’s money back into their hands so that they can reinvest.

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Empower them to be generous. Respect honest work. Strengthen families. But because these are common sense ideas, they will be ignored by politicians until their employers-the American people-make them listen,

The green grass smelled so ,good, I couldn’t believe, all of California wasn’t outside for a walk on an afternoon like this. looked