Voting

Walked up Park St., up Somerville Ave. to my polling place (the fire station), arrived to find a line out the door at 7:03 a.m. But it was a good kind of line, full of several senior-citizen earlybirds who also happened to be pals with poll workers, so there was much exchanging of pleasantries among neighbors & joking around. I was a little envious of the folks with friends, and was imagining how long it would be before I had some polling-place neighbor-friends of my own. But then, moments later, I stepped out of the station & saw a friend & band-mate of D.’s. She was standing on the corner, holding a sign urging voters to mark No-No-No on their ballots. I made a joke about having voted right, and she had a moment of concern that maybe I’d just guessed, or had been uncertain when I fed my ballot into the scanning-machine, but I reassured her that I knew what I was doing all along.

I made it to the bus stop with 20 minutes to spare, more than enough time to get a doughnut and wait in the cold and wonder at how worried I’d been about not making it in time.