reagan

The New York Times > Obituaries > Reagan Had Long Struggle With Alzheimer's Disease

sort of sad. i was in elementary school when he was president, at least that's how i remember it. i suppose i could look up those dates right now, but i don't feel like it. what i remember most is that i didn't like him. not because i was, even then, a democrat. i didn't like that he had defeated jimmy carter.

jimmy carter was my favorite president ever, when i was a kid. (though not as handsome as pierce.) i had a dream once that he and i were having tea together. i laughed in my sleep, delighted that the president and i were so simpatico. my mother found me in bed laughing, holding my hand with my pinky crooked, as if holding a teacup.

and when reagan defeated him, i felt as if the universe had been destroyed. reagan was the man with weird black hair and a clown's face who had made a gentle-voiced man, who farmed a peanut (who can hate a peanut??), lose. and so, to me, based on a dream of tea with a president, reagan's two terms were hell.

irrational, but there you are.
it was the 80's. passions ran high.