THE BIG QUESTION on everyone’s mind? “Who is that woman”? It was Cheryl Johnson, House Clerk since 2019, trying to keep calm amid the storm, calling the role 15 times and counting the votes. Since there were no rules during the Speaker dogfight, she had few guidelines for enforcing order amid the chaos. The position of House clerk is filed by election elected every two years, at the start of a new Congress. Each party nominates a clerk after the Speaker is elected. The usual duties include delivering messages to the Senate and certifying the passage of House bills.

I watched C-Span off and on. Since there was no Speaker, there were no rules regarding what C-Span’s cameras could show us. Seeing the House members live, in living color, and observing the mundane things they do even in moments of high drama, was a revelation.

Whatever your opinion of The Former Guy’s “My Kevin,” he did make history. The failure to elect a House speaker on a first ballot has happened only 15 times before, and it took fifteen ballots to elect this one. A coincidence? I do not know what you think, but I think not. In 185556, a similar circus required 133 ballots. Four of the 15 failed Speaker votes in history occurred between 1847 and the beginning of the Civil War. Since then the House has failed to elect a Speaker in one ballot only twice—in 1923 and now 2023.

One casualty of events was the usual Friday night Republican staff’s “GRAB-N-GO Pizza & Salads.” One journalist covering the fiasco noted that the last Democratic House Speaker never called for a floor vote on any matter unless she knew she would win—a rule that, in hindsight, McCarthy probably should have followed. His insistence on the multiple votes proved to the whole country how dysfunctional his party is and how he abased himself by making more and more concessions to a tiny group of people, which will probably make him the weakest Speaker in House history.

McCarthy needed every Republican vote he could find. One he found was that of George Santos. Because George proved loyal by voting for him 15 times, McCarthy has never yet—at the time this is being written—said a public word about the party’s inarguably most infamous current member.

You remember George. He is the man who never was. Like The Former Guy, George lies a lot. He lied about attending the academically elite Horace Mann preparatory school in the Bronx. He lied about graduating from New York City’s Baruch College and attending New York University. He lied about working for the Wall Street firms of Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. He lied that he is Jewish, that his grandparents are Holocaust survivors, that he lost employees in the Pulse nightclub shooting, and that his mother was a financial executive who was killed in her office in the South Tower on September 11. George is now under investigation by the Nassau County district attorney, federal prosecutors in New York and prosecutors in Brazil, where he lived as a youth.

What we witnessed last week was one man’s years-long and single-minded pursuit of raw political power and his willingness to do anything, including giving away much of that power, to finally obtain it. He did not do so in the light of day, but in the darkness of the midnight hour. McCarthy brings to mind Matthew 16:26 (New International Version): “What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?”

Steve Wintermute is a journalist and history student. Contact him at stevewintermute1@gmail.com.

LAST SATURDAY, I TOOK THIS PHOTO of my grandson, Arthur, helping me prepare the Sausage-Stuffed French Loaves that I traditionally make for my family and friends at Christmastime. This year, I failed, though to be honest, I have undoubtedly failed far more often than I’ve succeeded.

Arthur is a college student now, and by all rights and reason, should not be standing in his grandmother’s kitchen cooking on one of his few remaining days at home before returning to his pursuit of higher education.

In the photo, you may notice that he is wielding a cordless drill with a dauntingly large drill bit, preparing to hollow out a long French baguette. The procedure is delicate—particularly so because the loaves should be fat and long, as the recipe specifies, and not long and skinny, as were the ones I grabbed in a frantic effort to collect post-Christmas cooking supplies at Oklahoma City’s Whole Foods Market.

Why so frantic? you may also wonder. Because that is how I shop, and cook, and live, and spend treasured time with my grandchildren. Frantically, if at all, though to be honest—and that is my quest—my grandchildren would more accurately characterize it as rarely. I live by deadlines, and have for the last 40 years, believing with all of my heart and soul that the work I do is necessary, and beneficial to others.

Lest you think that I recruited Arthur to this weekend task, I did not. Arthur recruited me.

These particular Sausage-Stuffed French Loaves are delicious. You know immediately that they will be delicious because one of the first steps in their preparation is melting butter—a generous amount of butter—and infusing it with fresh-crushed garlic. You know when it has reached the point of sensory perfection because that is the exact moment you suspect you may have begun to drool, ever-so-slightly, as the tantalizing scent of garlic butter, and all that it promises, wafts through the kitchen.

Arthur decided that the time had come last weekend for me to share this special family recipe, and to show him how to carry the tradition forward. He unilaterally determined when this training would occur, and even disrupted his normal teenage sleep pattern—which I envy—to accommodate my aging newspaper editor sleep pattern—which no one with a lick of sense would envy—to join me.

I vaguely remember thinking, at some point, that there was work to do at the office, that if only I could spend a few hours writing, it would make this week so much easier. I am fairly certain that I—like some poor lost soul, addicted to a habit that will not sustain life—had contemplated postponing our cooking event, fearful that my column would again not be written, that reporting the interview with our state representative was more pressing, that piles of unfiled notes on my desk would suddenly collapse and bury me in a tragic office avalanche, and that my body would not be discovered for days.

But Arthur showed up at my front door last Saturday, and the next few hours were transcendent. We drilled, we sautéed, we mixed and searched for the perfect balance of flavors. We made a mess, a glorious mess, in my kitchen, and we talked and laughed and savored this rare time together.

Later, we ate, and it was good. So good that I wondered why I had waited so long to share this secret recipe with my grandson.

That’s when I knew. The real recipe is time. That is the magic. The rest—the garlic, the parsley, the perfect bread knife, the oft-used skillet—all of that is superfluous.

I made Arthur smell the fennel seed, and told him the story of how I happened to buy parsley, instead of the cilantro which I had traveled to four stores—no five—to find, so I could frantically make the perfect guacamole.

I showed Arthur how to wrap the bread in foil so that the top could easily be opened in the baking process. I photographed the recipe and texted it to him. We both promised to search for wider loaves of bread.

As I write this column, I have no idea whether he really wanted to learn how to make those Sausage-Stuffed French Loaves. Maybe he just wanted me to stop and think about what a wonderful morning we had making them, and to imagine a few more mornings just like that. Maybe he just wanted to figure out who I really am, or for me to stop just long enough to realize who he is.

A couple of years ago—perhaps it was just months—I wrote about my plans to retire, and my hope of turning this newspaper over to a younger generation. Since then, I’ve been touched by the response from our readers, who counted on how hard it would be for me to leave, and who assured me that I could never retire.

As gratifying as that response was, as touched as I have been by the support and appreciation so many have shown for what we do at The Canadian Record, and how much it matters, I know it is time for me to stop and smell the garlic butter, and to spend a few more mornings baking with my grandkids.

I’ve been an absentee mother, and grandmother, and friend, for far too long—or maybe just long enough to know how much I’ve missed along the way.

Thank you, all, for your support and encouragement and tolerance. Change is necessary, and today, it beckons. By this time next week, I hope to be able to report that our efforts— mine and my partners, Cathy Ricketts and Mary Smithee— to find a good transition to new ownership for The Canadian Record have been successful.

I hope, too, that our readers and advertisers, our friends and fellow citizens, will understand that time passes and change comes, and that oh-so-often, it is change that we need the most, whether we know it or not.