ArcaMax

You can never know who is behind the door, but you try to take the cues from the yard. There are the homes with the porch add-ons you know were made by weekend warriors. You see the American-flavored decor or the lack of any personalization with patches of dead grass. I always appreciate an overabundance of gnomes because of the mismatched community I have outside my door as well.

If, for me, public speaking while campaigning is hard, knocking on doors is easy. Even with reluctance from those who open or storm doors that only allow you to hear their voice, humanity at their home is a type of magic, every castle with unknown stories with some moats more evident than others.

Plenty of houses announce themselves as home of the abuela or offer that their house is yours as well. You smell their cooking or a type of fabric detergent that reminds you of the home of an ex-boyfriend.

Then, there are the doors that have a strong stench of urine. There are ones that threaten they won't call the police because they have a gun. There are homes where the dogs are not pets but a security system. There are conversations where you're not sure what side they stand on, and they want to see where you do first. And for me, honesty is the best policy. It is the only policy where others seem to grow.

A swap in tone came quickly from a gentleman who asked about the homeless, and he grew more agitated. He leaned back and narrowed his eyes, "I think we might be on the same page," and I wondered if we were, until, "but how to convince old men that we don't live in a 1950s Western?"

It was a question I'm not entirely sure how to answer. But there's a similar desire to look backward with my generation, too.

Millennials are accused of having an unhealthy amount of nostalgia for our past. Especially us geriatrics, with one foot in the analog and one foot in the digital, we are the last of those whose digital selves are incomplete against those who swam in the murky ether of the internet since their birth, baptized many times by their parents obsessed with the novelty of new technology.

The millennial joke is that our parents had warned us about sharing too much of ourselves online but were then the ones who took "facts" from the internet hook, line, and sinker. Even I've had to counsel my mom on YouTube: Who produced the video? Why do you think they had the motivation to tailor their information in the way they did? Were the organizations that made the content even who they said they were?

Millennials still have the luxury of the moat around the stories of our youth. Those cues that others could use to gauge our backgrounds, even if the Wayback Machine pulls out our LiveJournals or Tumblr accounts, thankfully still hold a no solicitation sign.

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Cassie McClure is a writer, millennial, and unapologetic fan of the Oxford comma. She can be contacted at cassie@mcclurepublications.com. To find out more about Cassie McClure and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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