Election-Day

Photo by BobbaLew.

Today, Tuesday November 6th, 2012, is Election-Day, my first since my wife died last April.
Which meant I thought I had the sad duty of informing the election-clerks at my polling-place, the West Bloomfield Firehall, they would never see my wife’s signature again.
The county Board of Elections was on top of it. My wife’s signature wasn’t there.
“Probably because she died,” I said.
“I’ll look it up,” the clerk said.
She took out a book that had the names of voters who died.
There was my wife’s name.
Yrs trly voted for another four years of Obama-lama-ding-dong.
I’ve voted in every presidential election since I registered, probably in 1968.
I attained voting age in 1965, while in college, but didn’t register.
Voting would have been a hairball. Residency would have been at issue.
I was attending college in Western New York, yet was from northern Delaware.
Since I spent most of my time in college, I had no idea about local elections in northern Delaware.
Franklin D. Roosevelt would have been president when I was born in 1944, but the first president I remember is Harry Truman.
I came of age in the ‘50s, when Eisenhower was president, a time of wretched excess.
The assassination of President Kennedy was an extreme downer — as if our nation’s efforts to get back on track were also snuffed.
Lyndon Johnson was still president when I graduated college in 1966.
My first presidential election since graduating college would have been Richard Nixon versus Hubert Humphrey (also George Wallace) in 1968.
That’s probably the first I voted in. I got married in December of 1967 living in Rochester, NY.
I’ve always voted Democratic, although I declare myself Independent.
I can’t vote REPUBLICAN. I can’t agree with a party that coddles fatcats, which I’m not.
That makes me a so-called “liberal” (Gasp! —Cue slavering tirade from the OxyContin® King), trusting human nature.
My wife was a registered Democrat, which meant she could vote in Democratic primaries. I couldn’t, since I wasn’t a registered Democrat.
My wife always said she wasn’t a member of an organized political party; she was a Democrat.
in order to vote in the 1980 presidential election, I had to get absentee ballots. We had scheduled vacation to include Election Day.
The election was Ronald Reagan versus Jimmeh Cah-duh. I voted for Cah-duh. On that year’s Election Day we were probably in the Rocky Mountains on our way to the Pacific Ocean.
During my employ at Regional Transit in Rochester, I and another guy set up a voter-registration. It meant showing up at 4:30 in the morning; some buses pulled out at 4:35 a.m.
Hardly anyone at Transit was a registered voter.
Even management approved our efforts, and usually they were negative.
I think we registered a few.
Even when my wife was alive, voting was always done in passing.
We’d hook it up with some other errand.
Out here in West Bloomfield, voting took no more than 5-10 minutes.
Today I was on my way to the YMCA, and had my dog with me.
15 minutes at the Firehall; longest ever. About five were ahead of me in line.

• My beloved wife of over 44 years died of cancer April 17th, 2012. Like me she was 68. I miss her dearly.
• The “OxyContin®-King” is Rush Limbaugh.
• For 16&1/2 years (1977-1993) I drove transit bus for Regional Transit Service (RTS) in Rochester, NY, a public employer, the transit-bus operator in Rochester and environs. My stroke October 26, 1993 ended that. I retired on medical-disability.
• My current dog is “Scarlett” (two “Ts,” as in Scarlett O’Hara), a rescue Irish-Setter. She’s seven, and is our sixth Irish-Setter, a high-energy dog. (A “rescue Irish Setter” is an Irish Setter rescued from a bad home; e.g. abusive or a puppy-mill. [Scarlett was from a failed backyard breeder.] By getting a rescue-dog, we avoid puppydom, but the dog is often messed up. —Scarlett isn't bad. She’s our fourth rescue.)