#158 Electioneers

The soon to be conducted all mail election in Thurston County offers a sad sidenote. Displaced election volunteers. If you’re like me, most of the times you’ve gone to vote in the last few years you’ve gone to your polling place. And that polling place is, inevitably, a church. It makes sense. Voting takes place on a Tuesday. Churches almost never have anything going on a Tuesday. As far as I know there are no “Second Day Adventists.” Or is that third? In any event, if you’re also like me, you’ve noticed that when you walk into that place to vote it always smells the same. Like a church. Any church, anywhere, they all have the church smell. Like the new car smell, you wonder if someone has a spray bottle somewhere and goes around spritzing church smell on all the carpets and pews. Maybe that’s it. Maybe the smell does actually emanate from the pews—certainly not an article of furniture you’re bound to encounter anywhere else. Or maybe it’s a conglomeration smell, like the smell of a tavern—that accumulated odor of decades of tobacco and stale beer and occasional urps—but in this case the combo of old lady perfume and pledge on the pews and damp mold on the hymnals. The semi-annual duty of democracy doesn’t seem to change it much, no matter who comes in reeking of what in their endeavor to exercise the franchise. Truth is, I think it may be that no one has ever had the gall to pass gas in these hallowed halls, and it is the absence of residual odor rather than its presence that lends a church its unique angelic aroma.
In any event, what are we going to do with the election volunteers, the old ladies and gents that help us when we vote? Who is going to peel off the “I Voted” sticker? Who is going to check my signature against the one in the book? Who is going to rip off my ballot stub afterwards? And, more importantly, what are these people going to do to replace this wonderful diversion?
I have this vision of elderly ladies not getting the memo and showing up on the first Tuesday in November to a deserted church. They sit there and they sit there, their lavender cachets and scented blue hair emanating that old people’s smell, which mingles effortlessly into the aforementioned atmosphere of the church, like a soul ascending into heaven. They have nothing to do. They chatter about grandchildren. They break out their crochet hooks. They trade yarns about elections passed. One of them mentions souvenirs and another, inspired, digs into her voluminous purse, and amongst the discarded tissues, cellophane butterscotch candy wrappers and nearly empty rouge tins, she finds and reveals, to the oohs and ahhs of her cronies, a bag of old chads, dimpled, bulging, and yes formerly hanging. For everything, there is a season.
America ya gotta love it.