On being there, rethinking our pace, and contemplating how the puzzle fits together
November 6, 2018
Dear Eva,
This is a dispatch from a dingy Baptist church lounge that has temporarily been transformed into a polling place. As I have done many years in the past, I am volunteering as a poll watcher, so I am hunkered down at a table with coffee and water to observe and help with problems that occur as the poll workers try to apply the complex voting laws here on Election Day.
I do this to make a small contribution of my time, but if I am being honest, I should admit that I also do it because I just plain love it. The voting process is incredible to watch up-close. There are forgotten IDs, people in the wrong precinct, ballots rejected by the voting machine. There are blue collar workers waiting in line before the polls open so they can participate before their shift at work. There are senior citizens with walkers who pull out crumpled, handwritten notes to remind them who to vote for down the ballot. There are mothers reading the ballot to sons in wheelchairs and then filling in the boxes with their choices. There are poll workers loudly telling stories about jury duty and announcing that the word “lawyer” comes from “liar.” There are poll workers warmly greeting neighbors who walk in to vote. There are poll workers warmly greeting strangers.
In Iowa, it seems that 99 percent of poll workers are retired women who volunteer their time to learn the laws and then work from 7 AM to 9 PM on Election Days while surviving on Cheetos and coffee. These women use walkers to get to the voting machine to help people who can’t get their ballots inserted in the machine. They call for tech support when the voting machines malfunction. They patiently walk through situations with voters who accidentally checked the boxes rather than filling them in as required, or who declare after completing a ballot that they already filled out an absentee ballot and showed up at the polls because they were confused when they got a voter registration card in the mail.
The process is messy, clumsy, confusing. And I fucking love it. It feels like a metaphor for human life and a demonstration of exactly how we should work with and against each other – tugging and pulling this way and that — to gradually move the needle forward ever so slowly. Just like in life, what any one person does is inconsequential. No single vote matters. And just like in life, people disappoint you, contradict themselves, make mistakes. And people help each other, take pride in doing their part, and laugh with strangers.
This is just like life.
But what makes voting different from normal life is that voting is one context where all of us understand that our own personal contribution only matters as a piece in the grand puzzle. I vote, not because I think my vote will change the world, but because I am doing my own microscopic part in something far bigger than me. In other words, it is a context where we recognize how interconnected we all are.
What would the world look like if we acknowledged that reality outside of the voting booth?
Yours,
Sarah
Dear Sarah,
Hello! This week has been full of things, my brain has been full and I’ve been taking notes all along to share with you and it feels like there is something here, and I’m going to put some of the pieces together and see how they fit.
For the last couple of weeks — prior to this week — I was in Portugal, first for work and then with M for vacation. One week in, the work week complete, we rented a car and drove north from Lisbon to Piódão, a mountain village. There were cobbled roads and a street so narrow I first refused to drive down it, backing up the car so I could reassess the width as I got used to the car and how it fit into spaces. M ended up getting out to wave me on and the car just made it through — a small car that had been upgraded from an even smaller car — and he said afterward that he thought I was going to scrape the mirror on the side, and we hadn’t gotten the extra insurance, and there was but a centimeter between the car and the building on the left, but we made it through unscathed.
On the last Sunday in October we woke and my phone said it was 9AM and my watch said it was 10AM, and I worried we had missed breakfast, and then we learned that Portugal observes Daylight Savings time a week earlier than we do in the US. So, this year, two hours reclaimed. After that Sunday my watch began to slow. At first, after sorting out the unexpected daylight hour and resetting and proceeding as usual, it was just half an hour slow over the course of the day. This didn’t seem all that bad. But the rate of change threatened unpredictability — what yesterday had been right on time was today 30 minutes behind, so where are we headed from here? Is the watch on vacation? A few more days passed — perhaps a week, and I’m back in the US — and now it’s a full hour slow and holding, another hour saved. Perhaps it misunderstood the rhythms, thought we were reclaiming an hour every week. It’s time to change the battery, I suppose, but in the meantime it is a bit of a comfort, this object not quite fulfilling its duty but still plugging along, getting most of the way there, trying its best.
I had a couple of moments this week where I thought to myself, This is the last straw! I was tired and still adjusting to the time change, adjusting to the “work week” and the reclamation of the things that were my duties in work and life before I went on vacation. I looked up on Wikipedia the phrase “the straw that broke the camel’s back” to comfort myself with an idiom origin tale, and saw a number of variations on the phrase, among them “the last peppercorn breaks the camel’s back,” “the melon that broke the monkey’s back,” and then in a shift, “the last drop,” as in “the last drop makes the cup run over.” Then we got to Seneca and a discussion of why death is not to be feared. If you don’t mind a bit of Seneca:
It is not the last drop that empties the water-clock, but all that which previously has flowed out; similarly, the final hour when we cease to exist does not of itself bring death; it merely of itself completes the death process. We reach death at that moment, but we have been a long time on the way.
Thinking about time, and back in Minneapolis, I found myself thinking about the time it takes to get around a place, and the various ways you get around. While we were in San Francisco, we had cars (plural!) at one point, and we spent a fair amount of our time looking for places to put them, and then walking to and from wherever we’d left them. I like to walk, but these walks had the flavor of duty about them. Then we got motorcycle licenses — M continuing on the motorcycle path while I scooted around town on a Yamaha Riva — and our rhythms changed. You can lane-split in California, which means you can pass all the stopped traffic, shiny Porsches and Teslas and BMWs, on your Riva with its duct-taped seat cushion. And my strategies for getting around the city felt clever rather than burdensome — walk to the bus to BART, scoot to BART, walk to a place, scoot to walk to a place — puzzled-together rhythms feeling less imposed than the patterns of traffic, waiting in the big slow car, never able to slip between the cracks and sneak away. In San Francisco I could walk almost everywhere — we were lucky to live a block and a half from Golden Gate Park, a block from a grocery story, a block from a laundromat, three long blocks and a regular block from the public library, three and a half long blocks from a street full of good useful shops and restaurants and the best bookstore.
Here in Minnesota I am still figuring out the new rhythms, and we have a car again, and it’s fun while you’re out on the highway conveniently speeding toward something, but when you’re in the city on the streets it feels like overkill, feels in some ways like a bulky body that keeps me from sprinting off where I want to be like the scooter let me do, winnowing between the cars and curbs and stopping just about anywhere I wanted to run in and run out again and be on my way. Back to figuring out where to leave the car when I’m out, and how much does it cost and for how long, and if it is cold outside do I park in between or drive from one place to the next place? I’m getting used to changes in density — not simply the density of the city itself — but the density of time and the time it takes to get from one place to another, and the time it takes to wait with the other cars to move forward to the next light, and the next.
Until next week,
Your friend,
Eva