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Ellison's Must Read of the Day

Ellison must read
September 17, 2014

My must read of the day is "Marco Rubio," in Esquire Magazine:

My grandfather, who desperately wanted me to be able to achieve the dreams that were impossible for him. And then my father—he was the guy who got up and went to work even on the days when he didn't feel like working and came home every night to his family. He set an example of what it meant to be a man and a father.

He was a bartender, and in the late 1970s, the job market for bartenders became very difficult in Miami Beach, where we lived. We had some family living in Las Vegas, and my father decided to move our family there. He had had twenty-five years of experience, had grown to be the head bartender at a very prominent hotel in Miami Beach. But when he got out to Las Vegas, he found that the only way they would hire him—he was now in his fifties—was to be, basically, what they called a barboy, or a bartender's assistant. So here he was in his mid-fifties, with twenty-five years of experience, serving as an assistant to a twenty-year-old bartender just out of bartending school. That was an incredibly humbling experience. Someone with more pride would have basically said, "I'm not gonna do that. That work is beneath me." But my father did that work. And as it turns out, they saw his talents, and within a year he had been promoted to a bartender himself and ended up doing pretty well there. But I know that during that time, it was difficult for him to accept that, after all these years building up a career and a résumé, he was once again starting from the bottom and had to work his way back up.

I have a (possibly weird) fascination with hearing people’s stories. Some of my favorite books are memoirs or picaresque novels. When I write fiction and short stories it’s almost always from a first person narrator. If you haven’t told me your back-story yet, I’ve probably already Googled it.

It’s not that I want everyone to have a riveting tale of obstacles they overcame to make it—I just like knowing the little things. I’m convinced tidbits tell me much more about who a person is than any elongated explanation of their aspirations or deep-rooted beliefs.

It’s hard to find those when it comes to politicians.

Everyone’s rightly focused on their policy stances and how they’re voting, but I love to hear stories such as this one from Rubio. There’s great value in learning things such as Rubio’s father was a bartender, Paul Ryan was once a waiter at Tortilla Coast, or Patrick Leahy loves Batman and is in the movies. It gives you the chance to remember a politician is actually a person and in the process might tell you more about them than random votes.

Published under: Marco Rubio