in 2022 I have…

It has been a year, y’all. There’s no way a list can capture it all, but here are a few highlights from the past 12 months:

• run miles and miles through my beloved neighborhood of Eastie, mostly in the mornings before work
• knitted myself a pair of gloves, a cozy headband and two sets of legwarmers
• lived in leggings, jeans, Allbirds sneakers, scarves and my green coat (see above)
• discovered volunteer ushering and leaned hard into it
• returned to Vermont, and adventured to western MA and the North Shore, with my guy
• spent a couple of sweet solo weekends in NYC
• delighted in hearing and promoting our young people’s music at ZUMIX
• made lots of chickpea curry, ratatouille, black bean soup and other simple meals
• drunk hundreds of cups of tea
• spent a sweet Thanksgiving with my guy
• interviewed several authors for Shelf Awareness
• read roughly 230 books
• done a lot of yoga, mostly at The Point
• sung in a local carol choir for the fourth year
• said goodbye to my beloved Darwin’s
• written a couple of pieces for ACU Today
• spent a little time in Texas
• hosted my parents for their first joint visit to Boston since 2018
• continued to savor my writing class on Tuesdays
• worked the polls again, twice
• gone to the movies alone (and with my guy)
• helped pull off the ZUMIX Gala and Walk for Music
• started a newsletter
• done a “Southwest tour” to visit friends in Arizona and California
• become a regular at the Eastie library
• published a couple of essays online
• gone back to some local museums
• been to Portsmouth, Amherst and Westerly with my girl Jackie
• taken a salsa dancing class
• been to my first Comic-Con
• survived having COVID
• attended a number of outdoor concerts here in Eastie
• seen both the Indigo Girls and the Wailin’ Jennys in concert (!!)
• loved All Creatures season 2 and Magpie Murders
• turned 39
• tended geraniums, a fern, an African violet, paperwhite bulbs and cherry tomatoes
• tried my best to pay attention, love my people and be brave and true

What has this year looked like for you?

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on working the polls, again

This fall, I’ve spent two Tuesdays – one in September, one this week – working the polls at my local community center. I first worked the polls in 2020, when the pandemic put many older poll workers at risk. Despite the long day, I loved the experience, and I’ve been happy to do it again.

Poll work isn’t sexy, or glamorous, or particularly shiny (though it can be fun). It’s hours of (sometimes tedious) work, answering the same questions over and over again. It’s even more work for the city employees who take over when our job is done. It is an often unwieldy process, and it is worth defending. It is ours.

Voting, like jury duty, is part of the mundane work of democracy: millions of decisions by different people – some of whom will disagree vehemently – on so many subjects that affect our lives. Sometimes a ballot question strikes me as confusing or arcane. Some races seem obscure or inconsequential, while others get all the attention. But the truth is that it all matters. The people in these jobs, and the way these questions are decided, will have an impact on the way we live in this country for the next several years (if not longer).

I’ve been amazed, each time I’ve worked the polls, by the particulars of the process: the specific way that ballots must be entered, the checks and balances to make sure we count accurately. (I’ve rarely seen so many tally marks in one place.) The tools are simple, mostly analog: ballpoint pens and paper booklets of addresses, felt-tip pens and cardboard voting booths, electrical tape for hanging signs in multiple languages. The ballot machines are digital, but we still have to pull out stacks of paper and hand-count certain ballots at the end of the night.

I love seeing my neighbors walk in, all day long: construction workers and young moms with kids, sleek young professionals and elderly adults, brand-new citizens and third- or fourth-generation residents. I love seeing the couples who have clearly been doing this together for decades. I love handing out “I Voted” stickers to people of all ages. I especially love seeing the first-time voters, like the young woman with the Central European accent, and the lanky teenager whose dimples flashed when I congratulated him. I love seeing all the pieces of the mosaic that make up our democracy.

I’ve been impressed by the dogged dedication of the election department staff, the police officers who are there for security, and my fellow workers: all of us are there to do our parts. (It also strikes me that true, concerted election fraud – the kind we’ve been hearing about on the news – would take so much coordination to actually pull off.) Every time I look around a community center or high school gym, or the elementary school gym where I vote, I think: this is truly what democracy looks like. This is how it’s supposed to be.

I believe everyone who can should work the polls at least once. It’s a humbling, eye-opening reminder of the way we continue to build this country. It’s worth a long day – really, more than one – to make sure your neighbors get to exercise their right to vote. It’s a reminder of the breathtaking diversity of America, multiplied by thousands of precincts in cities, towns and villages. It is both unassuming and vital. It matters.

Democracy, like any relationship, is more like a garden than a building: it requires tending. It is constantly growing and shifting, day by day. It can nourish us in important ways, but it takes work. And it only works for all of us if we all keep showing up.

If you were able, I hope you voted. And I hope you’ll join me in working the polls next time there’s an election. (Also, YES to this story from Karen Walrond in Texas – so important, and so cleverly told.)

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Ninety percent boring. And very important.

Last Tuesday, I did something entirely new to me: I spent 15 hours (yes, basically my whole waking day) serving as a poll worker at my neighborhood high school. This year, many veteran poll workers, who tend to be older, are stepping back due to coronavirus risks, so I signed up to help fill the gap.

As an experience, it was both eye-opening and at times mind-numbingly mundane. We did a lot of counting: blank ballots, tally marks, voter lists, early-voting ballots, all the scanned ballots at the end of the night. There was a lot of recounting and double-checking, to make sure the numbers matched the tabulations on the electronic machine. The smell of hand sanitizer hung in the air (with the universal funk of high school gym underneath). I wheeled my bike out of the gym at the stroke of 9 p.m., too tired even to pedal down the steep hill toward home.

All day, I kept thinking of something I heard Elizabeth Gilbert say a few years ago, in a podcast interview: some of the most important things in life are “ninety percent boring.” Writing is this way, she said, and marriage, and certainly raising children. And it occurred to me that this is true of democracy, as well.

Voting is, typically, modest and understated: you go to a school gym or City Hall or the Knights of Columbus clubhouse, give your name to a neighbor or a stranger, mark a ballot with a few dark circles. No one who came to vote on Tuesday was doing it to call attention to themselves. But what I loved was the aggregate: the mosaic, taken together, of all these people of different races, ages, genders and walks of life.

There was the young Hispanic mother in scrubs, holding her two children by the hand, who came to vote after work. (We made sure both kids got an “I Voted” sticker.) There were the retired couples, thin white hair and thick Boston accents, who came together in their sensible shoes. There were several women in hijab, alone or with their husbands, and a few men who walked straight in from their construction job sites, chunky boots and jeans smeared with dust.

We saw a number of first-time voters, young people feeling shy about feeding their ballots into the machine, unsure if they were doing it right. One woman rushed in at 7:45 p.m., saying she’d been on a deadline all day but was determined to come vote. The one that nearly made me cry was the biracial family with two tall teenage sons. One was voting for the first time, and he smiled shyly when I congratulated him. The other one wasn’t old enough to vote yet, but he followed his mother to the booth, and I knew: even if he didn’t act like it, he was paying attention.

Signing petitions, serving on a jury, ensuring free and fair elections: these things are ninety percent boring. Even protests can get hot and dusty and dull, though they’re fueled at first by passion. But these small levers of democracy are the ones that move it forward.

On Tuesday, there was a lot of sitting in hard chairs and watching people come through the line, one by one. There was a lot of pacing back and forth, answering the same few questions over and over, handing out stickers and pens, putting my limited Spanish to use (East Boston has a large Latinx population). It was, perhaps, ninety percent boring – though I truly enjoyed chatting with my fellow poll workers, and my guy came in to bring me dinner. But that made it no less important: in fact, possibly more so. And at the end of the night, we left satisfied that we had done our part to ensure that everyone’s vote counted.

I’ll be working the polls again this November. If you’re able, I’d urge you to consider joining me.

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On voting.

Yesterday morning, I left my house a little earlier than usual, walking down the block to a plain, unadorned brick hall that regularly hosts community events ranging from AA meetings to meat raffles. (The latter, apparently, are a real thing here in New England.) I walked through a hallway that smelled of stale coffee, into a large, bare room with two tables of cheerful volunteers and a dozen or so voting booths, standing against the wall in a neat line, balanced on spindly legs.

I gave my name and street address to the women at the first table, in exchange for a ballot and an information booklet. After spending a couple of minutes filling in circles in a booth (no one looking over my shoulder), I fed the ballot into the big gray box next to the second table. The volunteers there gave me a sticker (which, as we all know, is just as exciting for adults as it is for kids). I thanked them and headed out to catch my train to work.

Every time I exercise my right to vote, I marvel at the quiet, peaceful simplicity of the process: register, show up, give your name, make your choice, submit your ballot to be counted. Everyone has a say; no one’s vote carries more or less weight than anyone else’s.

Especially in these midterm elections, when the electoral college does not come into play, the process is beautifully, humbly straightforward: one citizen, one vote. In town halls and libraries and even grocery stores across the country, my fellow citizens – rich and poor, male and female, of every ethnicity and political persuasion – can exercise this fundamental American right. (And receive the stickers to show for it.)

I am as sick of campaign ads as the next person, already bracing myself for the firestorm of political rhetoric that will start long before the 2016 presidential election (and which, some would say, never really ends). I grow weary of the personal attacks, on Facebook and elsewhere, that attempt to reduce a person’s identity and character to the box marked on his or her ballot. I won’t tell you which candidates I chose on Tuesday, and I won’t ask you which ones you chose. That information belongs to each of us and no one else.

But I will say this: I hope you voted.

I hope you voted, because the system of a democracy depends on its citizens’ willingness to participate, to decide for themselves which laws they would like to uphold or repeal, and whom they would like to serve as elected officials. I know democracy is often a complicated thing, shadowed by back-door deals and mutual political favors and the byzantine processes of government. But I believe it still works, and it still matters. As a woman, I am particularly aware that I owe my right to vote to a number of brave women who fought for it – and I have a responsibility to exercise it, to honor their work and their sacrifice.

As Ann Patchett noted recently in the New York Times, “voting is like brickwork – the trick is to keep at it every election season, laying brick after brick.” I am not naive enough to believe that one vote on one day will repair all the problems that plague this (sometimes shaky) edifice of democracy. But I believe the act of showing up, trowel (or pen) in hand, is a worthy start.

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Entirely about character.

Election season is upon us with a vengeance – a vengeance more bitter than most elections I can remember. I am planning to vote, because I believe in exercising my right to have a voice in my government, however small. (I am also mindful of the decades when women could not vote in this country, and of the millions of women around the world who still have no say in either their governments or their lives.)

But I spent a recent evening enjoying a different angle on politics. J and I watched The American President, the witty and romantic 1995 film in which Annette Bening plays a sharp-tongued, sparkling-eyed lobbyist who falls in love with Michael Douglas as he plays the sober, thoughtful and warmhearted President of the United States.

(Image from imdb.com)

I watched this movie as a teenager, when some of the political commentary went over my head, but I loved the clever interplay between the President and his staff members, and the tender (if complicated) love story. Watching it as an adult, I’m struck by how not dated it is. The banter is still brilliant and utterly quotable; the power suits are still (mostly) the style in the halls of power; and the overarching concept that “politics is perception” has never been more relevant.

The movie is set in an election year, with the President trying to keep his job while sending two important bills to Congress (the issues at hand are gun control and the environment). A likable, urbane widower (with a teenage daughter whom he adores), he has been consistently popular, until he starts dating Sydney Ellen Wade, a lobbyist hired to help the environmental folks push their agenda on the Hill.

Despite his attempts to keep his personal life private, the President finds his ratings sliding, and as congressional votes on his bills also start slipping away, he must decide which issues to support. Sydney isn’t sleeping with him to get votes, but the pundits – and his opponent – pounce on the potential for scandal.

This President is an intelligent, well-informed man who carefully considers his decisions (the scene involving an attack on Libya under the guise of “proportional response” is one of the film’s best). He struggles, privately and deeply, with the power and influence accorded him as the leader of the free world. He listens to his staff’s advice (the supporting cast, including Martin Sheen and Michael J. Fox, is outstanding), but in the end he makes his decisions alone. And crucially, he has the courage to admit his mistakes.

The movie’s climax comes when the President finally steps up to address the White House press corps, refuting multiple accusations brought by his opponent, Senator Bob Rumson (Richard Dreyfuss). Whether or not you agree with the political statements herein, it is an incisive, rhetorically dazzling speech, and it begins with this statement:

For the last couple of months, Senator Rumson has suggested that being president of this country was, to a certain extent, about character. And although I have not been willing to engage in his attacks on me, I’ve been here three years and three days, and I can tell you without hesitation: Being president of this country is entirely about character.

 

I am more weary than I can say of the mudslinging, name-calling, pandering, dodging and mean-spirited comments that pervade the political ads, debates and social media sites in this country. I am not suggesting that a romantic comedy holds the solution to these problems, nor am I suggesting that it is quite that simple.

But I do believe we would all benefit by remembering that this country can be best led by people of character, whatever their political affiliation or stance on certain issues. And I also believe we ought to act as people of character toward our friends, coworkers and fellow Americans, even (or especially) when their political views don’t agree with ours.

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