I have been volunteering at one of Obama's local offices in Pittsburgh, PA. My first time was a few weeks ago, which is when I first heard the term "Obama Widow".
I had been walking and driving by the office, always thinking "I need to stop by and volunteer".
Then, one afternoon, I walked up the stairs, and told the nice lady at the desk that I had signed up to volunteer a while ago, and I was now there ready to work. She asked me what I could do, and I said anything at all, from working on computers to running errands to managing projects. She smiled and said "We don't have anything fancy like project management, but we do have a lot of work". She immediately put me to work, running errands (they had a nicely organized errand board). For the next couple of hours, I delivered mail to the post office, carried paperwork from one local office to another, walked to the local grocery store, bought phone cards and programmed phones for the phone banks, etc...
Finally, the errand board was all checked off. So they asked if I would assemble Obama yard signs. And as I spent the next couple of hours in the office assembling signs, I met my first "Obama widower".
A man walked up the steps, and the room full of volunteers stopped and said: "Here comes an Obama Widower!" The man came in, sat next to one of the volunteers, chatted for a while, and then left.
A few minutes later, the entire scene was repeated.
Curious, I asked about the term "Obama Widower". And they told me that some of the people in that office were volunteering for so many hours and so many days, that their spouses has started calling themselves "Obama Widows" and "Obama Widowers". The only way these "widows" got to spend time with the vounteers was if they stopped by the office and spent some time volunteering side-by-side with their spouses!
A couple of weeks later, my son came home for a week from boarding school. He is a high-school junior, and a big Obama fan. So I took him with me to volunteer. We spent a lot of time together assembling signs and running errands. We ended up assembling 300 signs that day: it is much quicker with two people working together. And it was the best time I have spent with my teenager in months. He almost never has time to just talk.
After we finished, we asked if there was anything else to do. Well, they said that phone banking was the next big task they needed help with. My son is very shy, and HATES talking to people on the phone. So he gave me the look that said "no way, mom!". But I ended up persuading him to give it a try. So we both got our lists of people to call, our scripts, and sat down on a long table. I started calling, my son just sat there and listened to me. I could see his hands shaking; he was so nervous! He finally made his first call: an answering machine, thank God! He ended up leaving a message in a shaky voice. And then he made another call; and then another; and then actually talked to a real person. By the end of the day, he had called 52 people. He was so proud. And the other volunteers really praised him and made him feel good. He left the office with a special spring in his step that day.
Have I told you all about the food? The very first day I walked in, there was a spread of food on a table in the back of the office. Casseroles, dips, pizza, pasta, sandwiches, salads, drinks, fruit, napkins... When I finished my shift, they begged me to take food home with me. Apparantly, the neighborhood folks just stop by with home cooked meals for the volunteers. There is so much food that the tiny refrigerator in the office can't hold more than a fraction of what is brought in.
Late one evening, I walked in to my home with a large container of home-made chilli that some kind soul had brought in for the volunteers. My husband was in the kitchen, just starting to rummange in the fridge. As he sat and ate the delicious chilli for his dinner he said "I was beginning to feel like an Obama Widower, but this chilli makes up for not having you here all day!"