Our Time

It was a dark and cold winter day in the South side of Chicago. A shiver went down my spine as the wind blew across the concrete and the metal buildings surrounding me. I quickly pulled the collar up on my scratchy winter coat and scrunched my neck down a little to shield myself but it was no use. It was election year and as I made my way to the podium the metal railing felt as cold as ice.

“Just stick to the script sir,” my assistant Beverly said as I leaned in to look at the speech one last time.

“You know me Bev,” I said sarcastically. “Nothing to worry about.”

She gave me a nervous grin and let out a chuckle. I walked to the podium with the sound of cheers echoing through the loud speakers. I stood out in front of the crowd and saw their faces, weary of the cold but full of hope. I put down the small stack of papers in my hands and spread them out in front of me. I took a quick glance at the tele prompters and gave a moment for a dramatic pause. Is this what it feels like to run for president? I didn’t let the weight of that thought stay for long but couldn’t help but smirk a little and wonder how in the world I got to this moment. I took a deep breath to let the adrenaline calm itself down a little. This was my time… I thought.

My whole life I had been defying the odds. I was Puerto Rican by heritage but born in southern Miami and was fluent in Spanish before I was fluent in English. The air growing up was always filled with Cuban cigar smoke as I would walk down little Havana on my way to class in flip flops and a hand-me-down shirts that was at least two sizes too big. Where I grew up there were really only two ways that a kid could have hope. One was through sports, and the other was through school. I quickly learned that sports was a dead end for me as I didn’t have the coordination or the build for it. My buddies would tease me saying that I had about as much coordination as a newborn giraffe. They weren’t far off. But I was good at school. I never met a math test I couldn’t conquer or a spelling bee I couldn’t win. But there was a problem, no one wanted to be good at those things where I grew up. No one wanted to stand out too much and the label “nerd” was more than just a schoolyard jab, it could get you beat up or worse walking home.

My solution was to become an entrepreneur. I quickly learned that if I could solve people’s problems, like a rusty old vending machine that still had candy bars from the Truman administration, I could make people like me. I quickly starting buying candy from a local market and sold it for a reasonable price to the playground, occasionally giving an extra discount to my friend Beverly. That candy business quickly transformed into an auto mechanic business, and later into a real estate empire that gave me a net worth of over 30 million dollars by the time I was 27. I wish I could say it was easy or that I did it all by myself, but the truth is that it wasn’t easy at all and if it weren’t for the community of that humble Havana town in Miami I wouldn’t have the confidence or the courage to have gotten into politics. It was those people I represented in my heart and those people who helped me on every step of the way and as I looked out on that crowd I didn’t even mind the cold. This wasn’t just “my” time, it was “our” time.