Honoring Molly Ivins

Maggie says:
Molly Ivins died today after a long struggle with cancer. Hearing the news on NPR tonight, stuck in traffic making my way up to Bernalillo, I started crying. It was an emotional day already, but in the cold air with brake lights reflecting all around me, the news of her passing struck me to the bone. I was inconsolable, because just knowing Molly was in our world was always a comfort. She was proof that talking back is always a good idea, proof that real smarts come from the heart, proof that positive change could and would come one day. And it will.

I became hooked on Molly Ivins in high school, an ultra-serious girl who saw that Molly's true power was not in how fast she could make my head spin, but in just how hard she could make me laugh. And oh, she made me laugh. She was a firecracker with a red-hot brain, a gracious lady with compassion for miles, a down-home woman who could take me back home with her expressions in a second, a no-nonsense stalwart who could tell you before you knew it was happening that you're full of shit and here's why...

I liked to imagine that Molly and my Grandma Jessie Mae were cut from the same cloth, women who could burst in from the fields and put fresh coffee on while dismissing the administration-sponsored newscast playing in the kitchen with a shrug and slice of wit. Guests in their kitchens were leveled with their signature blends of gravitas and ease, a mix that made you feel comfortable but left no question whose home you were in, whose table you were sitting at. Molly's words sat me right down at her kitchen table, offered up a seat in her Austin office, and maybe even a glass of sweet tea on the front porch if I was lucky enough. Molly was the kind of writer whose words came straight from her heart, who didn't want to believe the realities she was writing about, if only they weren't so predictable. After all, this is the old boys' club at work again; this is a system that rewards the most uncreative and unrewarding men alive with the most powerful job in the world...

As I've been lucky enough to see at countless points throughout my life, there is no power like that of a formidable woman who can make you feel at home. Molly took us home in every column.

Today's populist tinge of activism and local roots politics is Molly Ivins through and through. Molly always spoke truth to power. She always identified with the underdog, and she didn't stop at the party line to do that. Right was right and wrong was wrong, no matter who was bombing innocent civilians or cutting single mothers off of the government aid that was their lifeblood. Molly Ivins' politics ran deeper than the current election cycle, her reach much farther than a city whose favorite pastime is patting itself on the back.

As Molly proved, the biggest influence you can have has nothing to do with Capitol Hill. It's in the appeal that grabs us where our hearts are, in the places we shape our lives.

Thank you, Molly, more than you will ever know. Maybe one day we'll meet to talk and laugh over grits and eggs. I'll make the coffee. Grandma Jessie Mae will handle the grits, cooked in the same pan as the sausage in that way that only she knows how. You and Ann Richards can decide who's in charge of the eggs.

And oh, how we will laugh.