I was getting into my car this morning when a neighbor pulled into the driveway and was crying.

Alarmed, I asked her what the matter was. “The Queen is dead,” she said, “she is the only Queen I have ever known in my life; I’m devastated.” God Save The Queen.

I was about to point out that Elizabeth was not our Queen but their Queen, but I held back.

I knew how she felt.

Elizabeth was the only Queen I’ve ever known, and losing her felt sad. The Royal gossip often hooked me as well.

Nothing is more potent in politics than longevity and pageantry, two elements that have vanished in Washington.

Since we never knew what Elizabeth felt or thought, we had no reason to dislike her or eat her alive, the way we eat our politicians and leaders alive in this country.

Our politics are more and more like the Hunger Games movies; we stalk and hunt our opponents down and pore over the most intimate parts of their lives, looking for scandal or flaws. There is little nobility left.

Since there is no such thing as a perfect person, there is no such thing as a perfect politician.  Like the rest of us, they are human. Few ordinary people could survive the process. Few ordinary people do.

Now, they celebrate their flaws and compete for the title of most hateful.

Elizabeth had a great sense of propriety, honor,  and shame. America has lost all of those things in its public life.

Elizabeth had a solid wall around her; no one ever really got through it except for Michael Fagan, the disturbed young man who snuck into her bedroom in 1989 to chat before being dragged out by guards.

No one else ever got as close or closer.

This sense of mystery and dignity saved her from the viciousness that now characterizes our politics and communications with one another and is increasingly savage in England. She stood for something solid, something good, something honorable.

How did she pull this off? Perhaps we know too much about the people chosen to lead us. That is one lesson from Elizabeth’s reign.

There’s a tidal wave of commentary, analysis, and hand-writing pouring out of England over the death of Queen Elizabeth; it looks like every TV and cable news anchor in the country has been rushed to London to grab surprised and unsuspecting people off the street and ask them why they loved their Queen and how much will they miss her.

On one cable channel, I saw a live TV crew approach a man sitting on a bench to ask him how he felt about the death of the Queen. The man seemed to have been asleep. “Oh my God,” he said, sitting up straight. “Is she dead?”

The crew moved on quickly.

I don’t think I’m going to learn much from this. I want to watch the funeral, which will be a fantastic sight, the  Queen herself planned every single detail.

The only surprising point of view I heard in several hours of watching was a young woman saying she stopped caring about the Queen after seeing how she treated Princess Diana. “I don’t care about the royals anymore.”

But everybody else did, and those who didn’t weren’t around to talk to reporters.

I’m no cynic regarding the Queen or the Royal Family, as messed up as many of them were and are.

I was touched by the people gathering to bring flowers, singing God Save The Queen (I often tear up when I hear that), and line up to attend prayer services at beautiful and ancient churches.

And I was touched by her death and the response; I won’t deny it.

Since I was eight years old, I was mesmerized by those parades and ceremonies and the idea of a King and a Queen living in a palace. It seemed like a fairy tale to me. And it was.

But the most exciting part of  Elizabeth’s reign was not really about the monarchy,  England, and its history.

It was about America and our endangered love of democracy.

What, I wondered, does one have to do with the other? A lot, I think.

Why can’t we muster that unity and warmth of feeling and emotion here that a 96-year-old Queen generated over there? Our politics has become a killing field, the social opposite of Elizabeth and her reign.

We elect people and then set out to destroy them.

Elizabeth was wise and disciplined.

She made keeping quiet much louder and more powerful than speaking out. She made hiding her feelings more potent than arguing for them. Is there one single American politician that wise and disciplined?

Would our runaway, increasingly greedy, ruthless corporate media permit it? So many people and institutions in our country are making money out of hate.

Elizabeth offered something no other public official, there or here, was offered in England and filled a void no one else wanted to serve. It was a bold gamble, and it worked brilliantly. In an unstable time, she was the Queen of stability.

I have nothing to add to the commentary about Elizabeth herself. I’m not a scholar of the Royals. I did come close to meeting her once.

I almost met the Queen when I went to Buckingham Palace to meet with her Press Secretary and ask if the Queen would agree to be interviewed by CBS Morning News. I was the Executive Producer of the show at the time.

When the Palace agreed to an appointment – we thought we should at least ask – I was rushed to a high-tone tailor in Saville Row to get a proper suit. They did it overnight.

The British producers working with us on a week-long remote broadcast were horrified at the idea that I would wear my rumpled chinos and work shirt to Buckingham Palace. Rumpled then, rumpled now.

We did not get an interview. Of course, the Queen does not do interviews, but I was told I might get a wave from her as we stood by a side entrance as she left the Palace if we stood by the window.

We did rush to the window, and sure enough, a big black Rolls Royce came rolling slowly towards the gate. There was the Queen in the window, doing that little hand wave she does. And right at me! All of my cynicism and “toughness” melted away.

I was once a hard-boiled reporter, but I rushed to call my wife on the phone to tell her that the Queen had just waved at me. I was excited.

I asked her to put my daughter on the phone to give her the news. Emma had no idea what I was talking about.

One day, I thought, she’ll know. She has never once mentioned it.

I kept the black pin-striped suit and took it home,  although I never wore it again.

I was more excited by the Queen’s wave than when I saw Ted William’s last game with the Red Sox at Fenway Park.

Royalty stirs feelings in people that almost nothing else does.

And pageantry on the level of the British Empire is stirring and beautiful. Elizabeth looked and acted like a Queen and traveled around like one. She was always the Queen; we never saw anything else.

What I was thinking watching some of the coverage was that the unique thing about Elizabeth is that she unified that fractious country because she was so careful not to reveal herself that everyone on all sides of the spectrum could love her and project anything they wanted onto her.

In an increasingly divisive and partisan world, she was never once divisive or partisan.

She stood out with all the grandeur, history, and pageantry. She floated above the muck, and none of it came off on her. She was said to believe that God had chosen her and her family to rule England, and that gave her confidence and poise.

She was a brilliant marketer, her signature hats and colorful clothes set her apart even more from ordinary mortals.

I couldn’t help thinking there is no single public person in American public life that everyone likes, red and blue, left and right, conservative or progressive, whatever those labels mean.

There is no equivalent above-it-all public figure we can all trust and follow. Everyone becomes a belligerent warrior.

We have forgotten how to celebrate our traditions, which have gotten dusty and old. One Baptist leader told a conference this year that she was “sick and tired of all this separation of church and state stuff.”

Talk about sacred constitutional traditions. George Washington wrote that that was the most critical tradition the new country could embrace. It’s never even mentioned, even as it’s slowly being chipped away.

We are seeing Washington’s wisdom; look what happens when religion mixes with politics.

Our once sacred constitution is under fire by a new generation of angry and aggrieved Americans.

King Charles said in his first talk to the nation that he would honor the country’s constitutional traditions as his mother had.

That is not controversial there. This is partly because Elizabeth held those traditions to be sacred; she said her mission was to honor and protect them.

It’s worth noting that Elizabeth did not spend much time texting or emailing. When she had something to say, she looked into a camera and said it.

There was no misunderstanding her.

Elizabeth’s genius came partly from her refusal to engage in any argument or partisanship.

She saw her duty as being to the people, not one political party or another.

Nobody ever knew what she thought about anything or if she did think about anything aside from her precious red boxes. She made restraint one of the most powerful statements ever.

That and longevity and mystery helped to make her valuable and beloved. All those royal trappings and bowing and kneeling and parades didn’t hurt.

I had the sense that Elizabeth and her family, perhaps knowingly, kept the system lubricated with pageantry, tradition, and her all-encompassing sense of duty, which we are hearing so much about.

British politics are just as screwed up as ours right now, but in the next few weeks, the country will be mesmerized, if not hypnotized, by the pageantry, sense of history, and tradition that the monarchy has kept alive.

They will be united in grief and spectacle.

Her death has not diminished the monarchy but enhanced it.

They know they need it, now more than ever. King Charles clarified that he will continue what she carried out for so long.

All those soldiers in the big black hats, the horses and their upright riders, the marching bands, and the gorgeous spectacle go back hundreds of years. They seem to pull the country together and touch its heart and soul.

I am sorry to see the Queen leave the world stage.  Like my neighbor, I’ve known her as a Queen since I was a little boy, watching those pageants and parades on TV, a medium that was beginning to change the world.

King Charles and I grew up just about the same time; I wonder if he will capture my respect and interest like Elizabeth did. I think he will.

Charles looks like a King, sounds like a King, and seems to have shed his somewhat goofy and erratic instincts and lurchings.

I can testify that finding the right partner can work miracles.

I’m sad about Elizabeth’s death, but I’m even more pained about what it says to me about our country, much of which is rejecting our constitutional principles and working feverishly to undermine them.

I think the real legacy of Elizabeth – my English friends agree in their emails to me – is that she embraced these traditions as unifying and even sacred. For 70 years, she practiced them and preached about them.

Constitution traditions are one of the few things the British people have steadily embraced for all the years of her reign. For all of its archaic strangeness, the monarchy seemed to remind the people of what connected them, not what divided them.

To me, there is a lot to be learned from that.

It seems to me the commentary misses the point. Elizabeth was a great leader, first and foremost, making her a great Queen. We could wonder about her rather than hate her.

There are lessons in that for us.

I don’t see America going for a King; I can’t imagine Joe Biden or Donald Trump fitting that historic and stirring role.

Thinking of Elizabeth and the extraordinary impact she had on her country, my fantasy is of a new kind of political leader, an American Messiah arising from the ashes of our smoldering political system and reminding us of the many things that unite us, rather than the many things that divide us.

And many things could unite us.

Joe Biden is not the person to do that. Neither is Donald Trump.

In a sense, that was the role Elizabeth played for me, a messiah who rose about politics, embraced pageantry and spectacle – see how admired that is, all over the world – and seemed to care about people, not positions.

Queen Elizabeth showed us that it is possible.

That’s the fantasy I take from watching the coverage at Buckingham Palace. This is our Mother Country. It could happen here.

(Photo by Annie Liebowitz)