If it hadn’t been for an email I received yesterday morning where my friend told me she was going out to vote, I probably would have forgotten it was Election Day. Back when I was a kid, I liked Election Day, mostly because it meant we had a day off from school. If my birthday happened to fall on a Tuesday, it meant I got off for my birthday. Pretty cool deal, I thought.
Now, school closings are sporadic. Some of the schools seem to have the day off and others don’t. There was also hardly anything in the newspapers about the elections - not yesterday and not today. Okay, it is slightly possible that today’s paper has the results buried someplace but it seems that for the most part, it was completely ignored. I guess an election only counts if there’s someone important running.
I couldn’t decide whether or not I wanted to be bothered voting. When we first moved here, our polling place was in the school right across the street. Sure I was annoyed that you had to go in the front doors, which meant walking all the way around the block but still, it was nice and convenient. Now they had the nerve to move it to 3 blocks away. Did I really want to get in my car and drive over there? (Hey, it was cold and rainy out yesterday. You couldn’t possibly think I would walk!)
In the end, I decided what the heck, might as well go and vote. After all, our ancestors fought for this right. (Never mind that mine weren’t even in the country until the early 1900s.) There was 1 other person in the school building there to vote. The workers all sat around completely bored, reading magazines. When I walked in, they all perked up and acted like barkers at a carnival.
“What district are you in?” they called out, each hoping that I would be in theirs so they would have a brief moment of needing to do something other than reading. After it was determined which of those big books my name was in, the man flipped through the names.
“Are you Theresa?” he asked when he found my last name in there.
“Nope, that’s my daughter.”
“You don’t look old enough to have a daughter who’s old enough to vote.” I didn’t tell him I just turned 50 and that my mother was a grandmother when she was my age.
Who would have thought that voting could turn out to be good for one’s ego?
