Vote

I just got in from voting at the local community center (only a block away, just past Thomson's barber shop), and the chill in the air and the smell of pancakes frying at the bake sale just inside reminded me of election days gone by.

Every election day, from who-knows-when until I was 15 or 16, my dad and I would get up early and go vote together. I remember getting my school stuff together and setting it by the door while dad went out to warm up the car. We drove up the hill to the Athletic Association building, snake through its wood-paneled staircases and corridors, and confront the blue-curtained machine. As a child, I went inside the curtains with my dad. It was my job to pull the red level, closing the curtains and sounding a bell.

The secrets of the electoral booth are not to be shared, but I feel comfortable saying that dad rarely ever pulled the "party" button, which triggered the whole booth for one party or the other. Whether for my benefit or because of his political conscience, dad went down position by position and told me which arrow to flip down. Then, my favorite part of the whole process, I would pull the red level again, and the curtains would fly back, the arrows we had painstakingly chosen would flip to their unselected defaults, and our ability to participate in government came down to an issue of trust in our local election judges.

McDonald's hotcakes topped off the morning, and then dad would drive me to school, because, unlike in his day, we did not have the day off for election day.

P.S. Don't worry -- the aforementioned zombie anecdotes are still in the works.