The Open Thread for Friday, July 19, 2013

GQ’s profile of Delaware’s own Vice President Joe Biden is a must read. The interview in the profile took place as Biden is taking the columnist through all his childhood haunts in Brandywine Hundred and Wilmington. Here are a couple of the most touching parts:

“Keep going straight here,” Joe Biden says. We’ve been at this for hours, climbing in and out of the SUV to look at stuff, a water tower, a stone wall, the house where the most beautiful girl in the world lived, hoagies, Herman the German’s gas station, Meyers-eats-tires tire shop, the house where another most beautiful girl in the world lived, and he’s holding up better than the rest of us. He never winces, has no achy knees, no lower-back anything, neck, joints; for the guy rockin’ the Ray-Ban aviators, 70 is the new 60. “Wait, there’s Little Italy down there,” he says, peering out the window. “A lot of great Italian restaurants. If there’s anybody down there who doesn’t vote for me, I haven’t found them yet. But I will. I will.

“Okay, in the interest of time, we’ll stop here. Let’s get out here.”

It’s his old street. His house. Small white brick. Black shutters. Cement path. A perfectly average 1950s American neighborhood in Wilmington, Delaware, now with a motorcade parked along Wilson Road and Secret Service guys swarming and the vice president of the United States wandering, leading fast. “Hi there,” he says to a guy with a leaf blower. “I lived here for twenty years. Mack? Hey, Mack. I’m Joe. You’re living in a house a guy named Kenny Horn used to live in. Kenny Horn.

“Okay, the driveway, watch yourself. So this is the house. That was my bedroom. I lived there with my brothers Jimmy, Frankie, and my Uncle Ed. One bureau, four drawers, everybody got a drawer. My sister, the princess Valerie, had her own room. Which was ten by twelve. But she deserved it. And my dad took great pride in having that barbecue pit.” He circles the house, heads to the back door. “I wish I knew who lived here, because I would show you my room.”

Can you imagine coming home and seeing the Vice President peering through your windows? Or how about if you are a neighbor? I love it. You might lampoon him for stuff like this, but I think it is stuff like this that makes him so real, so genuine.

Two cars lead the motorcade, and two trail it. We’re in the center, in the silver SUV with bulletproof doors. Shailagh has graciously climbed into the way-back. The guy murmuring into the air up front is John, Biden’s senior Secret Service guy. Spider, left, pull up to the stop sign. Biden calls him Johnny, considers him a pal. John pulls me aside. “So,” he asks, “is this what you expected of the vice president of the United States?” Guys in this unit used to guard Cheney. “Night and day,” is all one will say of it. “Night and day.”

“A hundred yards, take another right,” Biden says. His voice now in the car is low, a kind of purr. “My mom and my dad and my wife and my daughter are buried in this cemetery. Just stop at that stairwell here, okay? And we’re going to get out here for just a second.”

The rhododendrons are in bloom. It’s a perfect May day. His house in Wilmington, where he and Jill and the kids spend weekends, is about ten minutes from here, down a long, wooded lane. “It says ‘Tribute to the Irish powderman,’ ” he says, reading a stone carving. “All those Irish powdermen worked for DuPont, Shailagh. That’s how the du Ponts made their money.”

“Wow,” Shailagh says.

“Powdermen,” he says. There’s a small church at the center of the graveyard. His church. All the kids’ communions and confirmations. He loves the part about the Irish immigrants. He’s an old-school devout Catholic, private. He’s a dressed-up man who always wears a collar, does not understand T-shirts or sloppiness generally.

He steps confidently through the graveyard, bending over, reading tombstones. “Okay, 1882. Here’s 1842! Wait, I know there’s some ‘Born 1789’ kinda thing.”

It gets to where he’s made the point enough times that the tombstones in this section are old, really, really old; there are only so many ways of saying it.

“My mother, my father, my wife, and my daughter are buried there,” he says again, pointing across the road to a completely different section of the cemetery. “That section. New section. Right there. You see where that truck is?”

We stand and look. It’s maybe a football field away.

“Right there.”

It’s too far away. We can’t see anything.

“Should we walk over?” I ask.

“It looks like there’s a funeral about to come in. I don’t want to disturb…”

But there is no funeral coming in. There is no activity over there whatsoever.

“We shouldn’t,” he says. His mother, his father, his wife, and his daughter. This is close enough. Close enough.

We stand for a moment longer, craning our necks, like civilians who can hear the bombs, see the smoke.

“The red maple? Just below the red maple. Everybody’s there. Okay, let’s get back in. Let’s get back in.”

Wow.