Election Day
November 5, 2008
Although polls opened at six a.m. yesterday, it felt more civilized to wait until after work to vote. I didn't have much time in the morning anyway, as I needed to catch a ride with a guy named John in Manhattan to visit an art storage facility in New Jersey. The storage facility closed at five, giving me plenty of time to get back to the city before the polls closed at nine.
"Did you vote?" asked John when I got in his car.
"Not yet. How about you?"
John has a nine-month-old baby at home, which meant that, unlike me, he had no problem waking up in time to vote before we left. Apparently, he wasn't the only one. He described waiting in line for two hours at a school that spilled out into the street and wound around the block.
Despite New York City being the financial capital of the world, the epicenter of big business and free market capitalism, I hadn't met a single McCain supporter during the entire campaign. That's not to say I didn't know any. Until the very last minute, my father kept emailing me links to partisan YouTube videos in an attempt to save the world from socialism. But here in New York, even when meeting someone for the first time, if the conversation turned to politics, no one ever asked, "Who are you going to vote for?" Everyone just assumed.
When I got home from New Jersey, Deborah and I walked a few blocks to our polling station—a nondescript apartment building in Bushwick with a few small signs taped to it: Vote Aqui.
Through the front door, we followed more signs leading us downstairs to a no-frills recreation room that looked like something out of AA, where everything was either brown or beige: the ceiling, the linoleum floor, the walls, the card tables, and folding chairs. At the far end, there were two voting machines: one with no one waiting, and another with about five people in line. After signing in, we headed to the machine with the line, where an elderly black man was cheerfully helping people, almost dancing as he explained to someone voting for the first time what to do. He wore a black baseball cap with a single word written in bold white letters: CANADA. I imagine he was ready to go there if Obama lost.
As we stood in line, Deborah started to cry.
"Why are you crying?"
"I don't know," she shrugged.
"Because it's such a historic election?"
She shrugged again. "I don't know. I cried when I voted in the last election, too."
"Overcome with civic pride?"
"Something like that."
After voting, we went home to watch the results. When the news broke that Obama had won, fireworks went off on the rooftops.
