Vote Early; Vote Often

A really big election is coming up. I have thought about writing an endless diatribe on the last eight years, He Who Must Not Be Named and his doctrine of preemptive strikes, violations of the 1st, 4th, and 5th Amendments, the "Patriotic Act,"the double speak of the Clear Skies, Healthy Forest, and the Help America Vote Act. But you have probably read all about it and would support the only rational candidate for President, Barack Obama. Instead I thought I would recount (no pun intended) a little story about how democracy works when you have every reason to doubt that it will. This is the story of voting in a school board election held last December.

Last December here in Oklahoma we had a major ice storm , and the power was out for 750,000 households including my own for many long dark days. Trees and tree limbs had snapped like kindling and just getting around was very difficult.

On the day after the outage, my town held an election that determined some school bond issues. The little school across the street from my house would benefit from a “yes” vote with new doors, improved drainage, a new air conditioner and a few other capital improvements. I love watching the kids at this school. I like to see who is learning to line up correctly, who is bullying and who is getting bullied, whose parents are having trouble getting their child to school by the 8 o’clock bell, and whose papers end up in my front yard at the end of the day. I believe in public education in a deep Jeffersonian sense: the future of our democracy rests on the foundation of a broadly and well-educated electorate. I like to think I do my part to facilitate that by paying taxes that benefit schools. I back that up with my vote on school bond issues.

Election day dawned with a determined election board but one that was crippled by lack of power. There was no electricity at the courthouse and so no way to electronically count ballots. Many polling places also lacked lights and the electronic counting apparatus on each ballot box. The school bond issues required a 60% majority to pass. I knew the stalwart naysayers would get to the polls but would enough of the defenders of our civic virtue? It would take a determined electorate to get to the polls today, folks who were willing to take a few minutes away from the urgency of the outage recovery and traverse the debris in order to cast a ballot.

Nothing inspires me more than voting. I love to vote; I love to wear the little sticker, “I voted today.” My love of voting came from my mother who sought and was elected to public office in the early 1950s. Whether I was an integral part of her campaign or not I can’t tell you, but I walked the neighborhoods, or I rode my shiny green two wheeler and passed out her campaign paraphernalia. When she won, I felt I had a part even though I was years away from being able to cast a ballot myself.

Election day dawned dark and still treacherously icy. I ventured out around noon, trying hard to avoid an icy fall on my slow half-block walk to my polling place (oh my God she broke her hip on the way to VOTE!). There I saw the reassuring sign "Vote Here." I opened the door to find our poll keepers holding vigil for our democracy, huddled under blankets and coats with only a few candles to light the big registration books. These ladies were like freedom's beacons and they were happy to see a voter! One of these lively ladies pulled my ballot, took one of the candles and escorted me to my little privacy booth, leaving the candle so I could see where to mark my YES. Holding the candle close to the ballot, I made quick work of the few questions and returned it to the poll keepers. I asked how the votes would be counted and indeed my vote was to be counted by hand in the chilly dark little polling place. I got my sticker and wore it for days.

Not too many people ventured out to the polls that day but enough. After a long hand count the election board determined that the bond issues all passed. Hurray for our republic and its democracy. We live in a great little town, lights on or off.

On November 4, please vote, be a beacon. It is just so important. (Yes We Can!)

Love and Sing

My sweetie Joe and I went to the Norman Stamp Club Christmas party last night and it was okay. For the first time, though, I really missed Missoula where I lived for the last couple of years. I first met Joe there, and we have been constant companions ever since. At the age of 60 I had pretty much given up on a romance, but then this handsome Italian, aged 70, swept me off my feet and the rest is history. Joe is a stamp collector and, because I love him, I go to stamp meetings with him.

Last year, we attended the Garden City Stamp Club annual Christmas party. As I recall, I had had a rough couple of weeks—the office move, performance reviews (“you know Megan your expertise is really a detriment.”), the $100 NFS telephone-delivered parking ticket for “blocking” the horse trailer gate in the Rattlesnake Wilderness (I was foolish enough to think that the three feet of snow and locked gate meant the horse entry was closed and I so much wanted to capture the day for my 60th year Christmas card), plus at work the never ending Fort Peck oil and gas report (how many times and in exactly how many ways can Indians get screwed?). On the day of the party I wanted nothing more that to pull the covers over my head and I wasn’t overly interested in going to the Stamp Club Party—At 70, Joe was the youngest member and the party had been, well, overly quiet as parties go. The year before last year’s party was livened up a bit by the also pretty elderly Terrie and Dean who both played guitar and sang some Christmas carols. Dean, of course eventually broke into the hilarious “I Just Don’t Look Good Naked Anymore.”

I really liked Terrie and Dean quite a bit and later got to know Terrie a little better. They lived over in Pinehurst Idaho. The two met because both of them sang in area nursing homes. Terrie couldn’t play the guitar and asked Dean to teach her. In his youth Dean was a professional, and he was really pretty good. And so he taught Terrie enough so that she could accompany herself on her goodwill missions singing for the elderly. Well Terrie and Dean fell in love and got married and began to perform together. If you can imagine Malvina Reynolds in a duet, you know what Terrie and Dean sound like—full of heart but maybe wavering a little on the high notes.

The point here is that Terrie and Dean weren’t going to be at last year’s party. Two passes separate Missoula from Pinehurst, Idaho—the same passes that forced Lewis and Clark to eat their horses—and with recent snow and that Montana weather condition called “freezing fog,” odds were long against the two making the trip. So it was only with great affection for Joe that I agreed to spend the evening at the Stamp Club Christmas Party.

The Garden City Stamp Club met in the First Lutheran Church, in the basement, but when I arrived, signs directed me instead to the second floor (Joe arrived early to help set out the spread of Albertsons hor d’oeuves). Apparently the children’s fellowship party conflicted that week with the Stamp Club and the youngsters had taken over our space. Just fortunately, the minister was there to mediate and he escorted the stamp representatives up to the fellowship room. The problem with the fellowship room, and the reason why the kids couldn’t use it, was because the new pipes were being stored there. They had just arrived, pipes intended for the organ, delicate silver pipes that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The pipes were maybe twenty feet long and a foot in diameter. To me they looked potentially like they might be the long sought Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) but for Joe they prompted flashbacks to days up on the Montana highline watching over our “nucular” arsenal.

After taking in the dramatic digs on the second floor, I immediately found to my desperate delight that Terrie and Dean had made the trip and that their two guitars stood ready. First though we had the lottery—it was Montana—Terrie had brought a number of crafts produced by the nursing home crowd and Joe, with number 200376 (I had 375-so close!) actually won a rubberized hanging angelfish skillfully constructed around two CDs that formed the silvery fish body. At last the two singers broke out the mimeographed sheets with the words to all the great Christmas songs—Hark the Herald Angels Sing, O Little Town of Bethlehem and so on. Feeble but heartfelt voices joined in, no concerns here about singing on key—just add some strength. Terrie and Dean had also brought Rich Angel (really). For some reason Rich Angel knew “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” in Japanese. He sang that and then sang a direct translation and that was pretty cute. I wished hard that my grandbaby Naomi could hear it but like most of life, the song was gone before it began and so was Rich Angel. Then, just when I thought I might cry, Dean broke into his rendition of “You’re the Reason Our Kids Are So Ugly” and I thought I was safely beyond the tears. But I was wrong.
There stood old Terrie and Dean, and they wanted to finish by singing a song they had just learned—a love song. They tuned and hummed and then Dean began to sing the first verse to my favorite—Emmylou and Guy Clark, “I don’t love you much do I…just more than all the stars in the sky” and Terrie joined in “. . . see how it sparkles in my eyes. . . I couldn’t hide it if I tried…” Well it was a moment in time and I looked at Terrie and Dean and marveled at the power of love. Then I saw the stamp group—elderly disheveled men without wives mostly, but with the passion for their stamps getting them here for all these years and just lighting up their eyes and all the good companionship they sought here, all the longevity, and all standing under those now really beautiful giant silver tubes, purchased by the quiet, humorless Lutherans just to make music and then Terrie and Dean looking so intently at each other and trying so hard to get the ending to the song timed just right “. . . just more than anything else in this whole world.” And they surely did get it right, well pretty close anyway, close enough. It was a Christmas miracle to me—the moment when the meaning of everything, if there is such a thing, and surely there is, seems right there, tangible, and Christmas warms you to your toes. Which we also needed. Because, like Joe, Lutherans never turn up the heat.

Love is the best--for someone special, for stamps, for music. Never give up.

Advice from my mother: Never marry a Republican; never marry a county commissioner

I begin with the advice of my mother. Born in 1915, she was a politician back in the 1950s when women didn't do that sort of thing. A yellowdog Democrat from Little Dixie (southeast Oklahoma), my mom remembered driving voters to the polls at the age of 12, steering the car propped up on a Montgomery Ward catalog. During the Great Depression her dad had a state job--cotton gin inspector--a step up from being a guard at Big Mac, the state pen. She went to college with funds provided by FDR’s New Deal, and her loyalty to the Democratic Party ran deep.

She became mayor of our small town and was pretty busy. She didn't spend much time doling out advice to her daughter. Instead she was busy with a progressive agenda for the community--writing zoning laws, protecting our water source from polluters (before we even knew there was a problem called pollution), and fighting for civil rights. So when she passed along wisdom I tended to pay attention.

Her advice not to marry a Republican was based simply on her perception that Republicans lacked any redeeming ethical core. The typical Republican, in her mind, had one goal: to get even richer. She divided people into two categories: Big Fat Republicans and the rest of us. I well remember the newly televised Republican convention in 1952 when my mom sat me down in front of the television and explained just whose fault it was that Ding Dong School was not to be televised. By 1956 I spent my after school hours on a bright new blue Schwinn campaigning for Adlai Stevenson. I was nine.

As I grew up my mom explained more sophisticated reasons never to marry a Republican. Under Big Fat Republican administrations, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. How did this happen? By cutting their own taxes and shifting the tax burden to their inferiors—the poor. BFR’s believed in preserving their wealth by using the government to grease the skids of economic opportunity, this at the expense of the least powerful, the children. For example, Republicans ALWAYS cut funding for children--the WIC program for example and free immunization programs. Sound familiar?In my family, immunization was HUGE. Remember FDR had polio? And then Eleanor Roosevelt helped begin the March of Dimes to eradicate the disease. My mom revered Eleanor Roosevelt and thought that she had, after all, practically invented the Salk vaccine. For my first decade of life, each year for the March, I stood tall with back against the wall and measured my height. A strip of tape was measured out to equal my height, and then, along with the rest of all baby boomers, I stuck my carefully saved dimes to the tape, matching my height with the shiny images of FDR. When the Salk vaccine was distributed--I was in the second grade--my mother came to school to help with the compulsory vaccination. She was sort of Eleanor's personal representative I believed. So of course when Republicans failed to fund routine childhood vaccinations, it confirmed all her beliefs. Did I need more evidence?

I trusted my mom on this one. Though I have known Republicans that were not the embodiment of pure evil, for the most part I find my own "family values" tend to include funding public education for all children; providing health care (and free immunization) for all children; providing maternity care for even the poorest members of our national family. I have chosen friends and men friends who share that ethical core because I wanted to have children and I wanted men that seemed, you know, to like them and seemed to want them to survive to adulthood. Not to support that seems somehow mean and small.

My mom's advice about county commissioners may seem somewhat esoteric. What even is a county commissioner anyway? Well she explained simply, they are all crooks. Now I don't want to cast aspersions on all county commissioners (and trust me there are quite a few out there). I am sure many are mostly hardworking and honest. But soon after I married a non-cc, most of Oklahoma's county commissioners did a stretch in the aforementioned Big Mac for accepting kickbacks. Dare I say, my mom was right.

Sometimes I imagine that our mothers were right about everything. I lost my mom in 1981, and each year I find myself understanding this complex woman better and better. And I think her advice about marriage material is perhaps even more relevant today. What do you think?