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Early one morning while I still snoozed, he drove through a steady, cold rain to talk to potential voters in Johnston County. Returning home late in the day, bone-tired but cheerful, he greeted me with, "I met a fan of yours today at Shirley's Restaurant in Smithfield. He said that although you're a little too far to the left to suit him and you write about birds too much, he still reads you faithfully."

"Yeah, that sounds like one of mine," I muttered. "But I'm glad to claim him."

Two days later, as the rest of the household slept, my wife rose at 5 a.m. to send Adam out with a cup of hot coffee in one hand and a Granny Smith apple so that he could catch the dawn flight to Milwaukee, where he would be greeted with far more ice and snow than the amount that reached Raleigh next day.

As I noted earlier, today's "boys on the bus" have it rougher than Crouse and his cronies, who passed the long boring pauses between speeches by playing cards, boozing and sleeping.

But I imagine that when this year's campaign ends, my son-in-law and his fellow travelers will feel much of the same emotion described by Crouse at the end of the Richard Nixon-George McGovern campaign:

"Suddenly, everybody realized it was all over, and their emotions flooded out. They wept, embraced, exchanged manful handshakes, cried on each other's shoulders or simply stood in a daze. It was like an orphanage being shut down."

For a journalist, being one of the boys on the bus surely must constitute the best and the worst of times. How I envy them.

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