I had the most unusual experience this morning, the nurses and technicians at the hospital where I had a nuclear injection and scan on my heart said it was the first time in their experience that they had fun and a patient had fun.

And we did have fun, although I am radioactive for a few days and was advised not to touch my granddaughter until Friday or to get too intimate with my wife for a day. I wasn’t sure if they were afraid I was going to have a heart attack or turn Maria into Godzilla.

I was warned repeatedly that the side effects might be intense – sweating, racing heart, nausea, dizziness, disorientation. We were having so much fun talking I didn’t quite realize the injection had begun and was moving through the IV, and then I was given some soda to drink, and it was all over.

I felt some flushing and shortness of breath, and my heart seemed to race a bit, but very slightly and very briefly. I have to go back tomorrow morning for the second round of tests. I hope that is as much fun as today was.

The staff was astonished that I barely noticed it, but I told them the good thing about open heart surgery is that makes everything else seem minor.I feel good about my heart. I was truly stunned when they told me it was fun having me there, I wonder sometimes if I have any idea what I am like.

As we talked, the election came up, it turned out that all three women – two nurses and a tech – had voted for Donald Trump, and all of a sudden, we were having one of those conversations that I have been talking about on the blog, the power and value of human beings connecting on a personal level and moving beyond dogma, rage and stereotype.

I am not a pollster or a pundit, I am not drawing any wide conclusions about the encounter, but I enjoyed it, so, I think, did they, and it was very valuable to me. I want to listen and understand more than I do. I sensed an opportunity to learn something, rather than watch people freak about it.

(Note. For those who believe the Trump election is an imminent prelude to a Nazi takeover of  America, or the destruction of America as a democracy, or who do not, as many people I know, wish to consider or listen to anyone who voted for Donald Trump, this is not the blog post for you. I voted for Hillary Clinton, and I like just about nothing about Donald Trump, his campaign was revolting to me. But I am not going down the road to hysteria and outrage at the moment, or hopefully ever. I want to understand what happened, and I  want to know why voters, especially women, voted for him in such great numbers and so enthusiastically. I am uneasy feeling out of touch with half the country, and with the rural people I write about.  If you don’t care to know anything about this – “fuck them,” one relative told me the other night when I tried to tell her about my visit to the Bog Friday with some male Trump voters, she didn’t want to hear a word they said. If you don’t, then get off the train, don’t send me dumb messages about how naive I am. I don’t traffic in hatred or judgment.)

This is the third conversation I have had with Trump supporters since the election face to face, many more via e-mail and messaging systems. I liked these three women very much, they were warm, forthcoming and revealing.  They were far from angry, we were all joking with one another instantly, I told them I was about to levitate and glow, they threatened to plug me into the wall. We talked for nearly an hour while I waited for the effects of the injections to wear off, we were sitting in a room with heart monitoring equipment, there were pads all over my chest.

Oddly, I could not have been more comfortable. I think I was made to feel comfortable, and I appreciated that. We did a lot of tale-telling about horses, dogs, men and politics. Nurses see a lot.

I took a few things away from this conversation, and I will share them with you, for whatever they are worth. I’m just relating my feelings, you can take them or leave them. I had no interest in arguing with them or persuading them, that seems arrogant and self-righteous to me.  We are all drowning in arguments, we have to make up our own minds.  And yes, I am acutely conscious of some of the hateful behavior occurring in our country. For me, time for conversations.

First off, I asked them if they heard about the safety-pin campaign, all three said they would instantly wear safety pins to support their fellow workers if any of them felt harassed or uncomfortable. “What’s the big deal?,” asked one.

All three of these women disliked Hillary Clinton much more than they liked Donald Trump. All three made their voting decisions near or at the last moment. There was the usual stuff about Hillary’s many alleged crimes, but mostly, I had the sense that they just didn’t like her. It seemed visceral, it came from the heart, not the mind. All three said they would have gladly voted for a Democrat, now and in the future, if one came alone who spoke to them and their concerns. In her, they said they saw no prospect of change, only more confrontation and paralysis.

They were looking for an underdog, an outsider.

Their talk of Clinton reminded me of the times when we left a party or dinner with someone and Maria and I said to each other, “I just didn’t like him.” It seemed very personal. “If you like somebody,” said Patty, “it doesn’t matter what they say. If you don’t like somebody, it doesn’t matter what they say either.”.

Jenine said she had been stewing about illegal immigrants for years, especially those who come to America illegally, break the law, take American jobs and use social services and schools without paying taxes. It is just wrong, she said, and Trump is finally going to do something about it. Nurses often say they see too many people taking advantage of the system, none of the people in the room said they would miss Obamacare for a moment, they were sure Trump would figure out a way to save parts of it.

And they seemed angry about illegal immigration.

“I don’t buy that they only take jobs Americans want, they drive prices down and costs up. I’m happy to welcome immigrants to America, but our parents and grandparents came legally, laws and borders matter,” said one. “A country has to have borders to be a country.”

These women were what I always call real people, they were direct and down-to-earth, they looked me in the eye and listened when I spoke.There was no pretension or guile about them. And they were far from self-righteous.

If there was any hatred or genocide in them, they did not reveal it to me. I found them empathetic and caring, if not well-informed. They were casual with facts and indifferent to differing truths.  They did not seem to grasp why so many people were so upset and frightened about Trump’s election. Shouldn’t health care professionals care about that?, I asked.There was no answer. I think if the frightened people were in the room, they would have cared.

They made sure I was comfortable and relaxed and treated me with dignity. It’s not always like that on the journey through heart disease.

When I asked them about Trump’s foul language and hateful statements about women and other people, they said they didn’t like them either, but they had heard men talk like that their whole lives – fathers, husbands, brothers, bosses, sons – and while they didn’t approve of it, it wasn’t as big a deal to them as it was to others.

They all said they were uneasy voting for Trump and reluctant about making a choice. None of them trusted the mainstream media many urbanites follow to tell the truth or be fair or to cover the election honestly. Interestingly, all three said they were sick to death of cable news in general and Fox News in particular, they said it was a network of angry old men and blowhards, they hated hearing it in the background all day in their homes. None of them had ever read the New York Times.

I found their views to be experiential rather than intellectual, emotional rather than detailed. They were not sophisticated or urban in their point of view, their agenda was plain-spoken,  different from the urban agenda. Their views were much caught up in their lives and were shaped by them, not by things outside.

None of them spent any time trawling around blogs researching political positions.

They had no interest in being lectured to about women’s rights.  “Up here,” said Rhonda, “women have two options, “jobs in health care or cleaning houses.”  All three had held up to a dozen jobs in their lives. They frequently move, take courses, find that health care positions like nursing offer them the most security and greatest benefits. All of their husbands struggle to find good and permanent jobs, or drive great distances to work.

They have all seen their fathers lose work and decline.

Did they see their few work options as a feminist issue?, I asked. “Maybe, said Patty, but Hillary Clinton wasn’t talking about us when she talked about glass ceilings. She never came to see us or talked about us. There aren’t a lot of options for us here. When the jobs come back and we have some money in the bank, we can talk about women’s rights.”

I felt clearly the idea that there are at least two very different realities in America, and even though I live quite happily among rural people, and see their suffering every day, I didn’t quite grasp the depths of their alienation and disappointment. The system, they say, does not work for them or their families, they have no stake in preserving the status quo, they see no future for their children or their communities.

The economy is great, they said, if you live in Boston or San Francisco or New York. Just come to our towns, they said, they all live in rural Vermont or New York State. They talked about the rising rate of suicides, the many foreclosed homes, the opiate drug epidemic. “You don’t have to go to Chicago to see young men kill themselves,” one of them told me, “they also have no hope.”

Patricia got angry once when she talked about the “elites” she reads and hears about in urban centers, “they look down on us, they think we are stupid racists and bigots or sheep women. We fight very hard for our lives, and every day. It makes me crazy when I hear someone call us “deplorable.” They don’t know us and they don’t want to know us. I don’t ever remember a politician before Trump talking about our lives…That’s what I don’t like about liberals.”

The most poignant conversation for me was their lifetime experience of watching their towns and communities decline, since the 80’s it has been downhill and profoundly disturbing. “We’ve seen jobs and businesses leave, farms go under, buildings rot,  stores close, schools consolidated, small business disappear, the downtowns disintegrate,  the restaurants and diners are gone, so many houses abandoned to banks, children leaving..there is no promise made to us by a politician that hasn’t been broken. There is all this talk about the rising economy, we don’t see it here. The more we fall apart, the bigger the trade agreements, the bigger the lies.”

I sensed it was important for them to talk to me,  and they seemed to need to be listened to, as we all do. None of them asked me many questions, although I told them about my own beliefs and convictions and hopes. We talked about our marriages, our grandkids, the life of a writer. None of them had ever seen a writer.

These women process information differently than me or people in my world do.

They don’t follow the news closely or browse for details or check facts. They seemed to follow their hearts and guts. They were far from enthusiastic about voting for a man like Donald Trump, unlike many of their husbands and sons, who saw a vote for Trump as a kind of rebellion and “fuck you” to the political institutions like Congress and the federal government, who they believe have sold out to the rich and powerful. Can’t say there is no truth to that. But I don’t believe they had many illusions about him either.

There are, of course, so many seeming contradictions to seeing Donald Trump as a savior of the working class, and of rural people, he seems to have no connection with either in his long life. It didn’t seem to matter. Their expectations of politicians and our system is almost non-existent. I doubt they will be shocked if Trump fails them, but they don’t see how they could be any worse off. There is the off chance he will somehow set fire to Washington and jar the system into action. I will be interested to see how this plays out in six months.

Feminism and racism didn’t seem motivating factors for these women, one way or the other. I think the genocide of the Nazi’s would be horrific and unimaginable to them, unless they are great actors.

They just seemed pressed, they weren’t thinking about those things, or so it seemed to me. They are trying to survive, to see their children have the same opportunities as the children in Silicon Valley or Brooklyn. They are very much afraid of the country  being overrun by foreign people, it is a deep issue in rural America, which does tend to be isolated and xenophobic sometimes. How can you like and trust people you never see?

They knew absolutely nothing of refugee resettlement programs or the actual process of emigrating to the United States. They could not name one politician in their lifetime who has ever talked about the issues in their lives or to them until Trump.

So it was fun. I am no Pollyanna, I am acutely sensitive to the pain and turmoil and anguish all around me. And the threat to things I care about. Someone sent me a message on Facebook advising me that there is hatred and bigotry in America. I resisted the temptation to message them back “Duh!” I can see and hear and read.

These were just three people today, they are representative of nothing but themselves, and their obvious affection for one another.

But I can say with growing conviction that is is possible to speak to the other side, it is grounding and helpful to listen. For me, panic and outrage accomplishes nothing, it just pushes all of us farther apart, and it makes me sick, much sicker than I feel getting a radioactive injection. Empathy is powerful, we cannot grow and change or do much good if we cannot stand in the shoes of others. I do not intend to spend the rest of my life shouting in the darkness, waiting for the echo of my own ideas.

How curious to have this conversation in a hospital, me strapped into a chair, wires and tubes sticking out of me like some bionic man in a movie. If I can have that conversation there, it can be had anywhere.Tomorrow morning, back for more tests, in a different wing, with different people. I will once more bring my biography of Ulysses S. Grant.

Maybe I’ll even get to read it.

My conversation in the hospital will not alter the world or fully explain it.  But it made me feel hopeful and rational.

And it was fun, as the nurses said. Maybe good for my heart, which is probably glowing blue right now.

It can be done, I thought. It can be done.