He lost the fight. He won the street.

This is the story we tell about Mike when someone asks what kind of man he was. Maybe it's grown an inch in the eighty years of retelling — most good stories do. I tell it anyway, because it's true in the way that matters. It's true to him.

He was an Irish kid from the streets of San Francisco, back when the streets were a rough place to be a kid, which is to say always. One afternoon he was walking home from school — or from some mischief, knowing him — when he came on a knot of five or six older boys working over a smaller one. The little boy was on the ground, wore glasses, and was crying for a mercy that wasn't coming. The big boys were having fun. It was that particular cruelty that has started to enjoy itself.

Now, you should picture Mike before you picture what he did. He was short. Wiry. He wore glasses himself. There was nothing about him that said danger to anybody — he was no more able to win this fight than the boy already losing it. By every measure available in that moment, jumping in was a stupid thing to do.

He didn't hesitate for a heartbeat. He went in swinging, throwing punches and kicking wildly into a wall of boys twice his size. It wasn't strategy. It was just enough chaos that the boy on the ground found his opening, scrambled up, and ran — gone, safe, done. Which left Mike. The bullies turned the whole of their attention on him and doubled the fury, and pretty soon he was fighting from his back, still wailing away with everything he had, refusing in any language to quit.

Here's the turn. After a while the bullies began to tire — because beating a boy who will not stop swinging is actual work — and in that breath of a lull Mike got to his feet. Blood and snot running off his nose, one eye swelling shut, comprehensively and obviously not the winner of this fight. And he started to laugh. Hysterically. At the sheer ridiculousness of all of it. It stopped them cold. And then, one at a time, the bullies were laughing too — with him now, at the absurdity of the whole stupid scene.

He did not win that fight. He won the street. From then on he had a name on those blocks: the small kid in glasses who would throw himself at anything twice his size for somebody smaller, and who'd be laughing before the blood dried. A fierce one. And somehow, all his life after, a cheerful one.

Fight like hell to earn their respect — then laugh, because a man who laughs with his oppressor has begun to turn him into an ally.

That is the essence of the man, and it is the essence of this thing we're building, and you cannot keep one half without the other. You fight like hell for the person on the ground. You don't run the math on whether you can win, you don't ask who they voted for, you just go — that's the part that earns you the right to be heard. And then you keep your good cheer, because the human experience deserves a laugh, and because of the secret that schoolyard taught a bloody-nosed boy: get your opponent laughing with you, and the door between enemy and ally swings open.

So when we say in the same breath that we'll build bridges and fight like hell, this is the picture in our heads. Fight hard enough to be worth listening to. Laugh warmly enough that there's a way back to each other when the fighting's done. Blood on your face and good cheer in your heart. That was Mike. That's us.