Choices

One of my earliest memories is walking to City Hall with my mother on Election Day. City Hall was a two-story brick building two blocks from our house. The fire department occupied the majority of the ground floor. The rest held a couple of small businesses, one of which was what we called a beauty shop. A salon, it would be now. The town library and a communal room were upstairs above the fire station. Next to that was an apartment, where one of my school friends lived with her parents. I always wondered how her family handled the noise level when the fire siren went off but I was never there when that happened. The communal room was up a curving open stairway and on Election Day it held a few voting booths with a black curtain that covered the top part. I still remember the sound the metal rings made when they slid along the rod to shut me away from things inside that booth. My mother prohibited me from going into the little booth with her, which made it even more mysterious. I was directed to sit on the floor by the wall and look out the tall windows. (Too bad I didn’t know the line, “Nobody puts Baby in the corner!” Or in this case, next to the wall.) My older sister had taught me to read before I went to kindergarten and I probably had even less filters as a child than I do now. My mother knew I’d be able to read the candidates and that I was likely to blurt out her choices. Not a good idea in a town of a thousand where everybody knew everybody’s business anyway. From an early age, elections have always felt important to me. I couldn’t vote until I was 21, that was the law at the time. I couldn’t wait to vote, especially in a presidential year. I’ve lived in a lot of different places since that small town in northern Wisconsin but I remember the polling places in each one. Sometimes it was a community building, sometimes a school, and in 1988 when we were moving, it was by absentee ballot. My favorite of all was a rural Grange Hall, the wood floors pitted and worn from numerous meetings. A glowing wood stove stood in the corner. Capable looking women from nearby farms marked names printed on a sheet of paper, while the males stood around the crackling fire and discussed the current price of wheat. I live in a state where voting is done by mail now. Sometimes I miss the old way but this makes it more accessible for everyone and all I can say is, they better not try and take it away from me.

Photo courtesy R. Arezaga