Make a gesture of belief
Tomorrow I will be changed. Somehow in the next passage of light, I will shed reptilian skin and feel the wind's friction again. Sparks will fly. It's a hope for the right kind of fear, the kind that does not turn away. -Kim Stafford, Having Everything Right
"What's that sticker?" Tess yelled as she saw me at the bus stop on Thursday.
She is a sticker and temporary tattoo fanatic of the Highest Order.
"It says, 'I voted,'" I answered, causing her to halt mid-stride as we passed in front of the stopped and blinking school bus. "YOU VOTED?" she screamed. "WHO DID YOU VOTE FOR?"
"I voted for Obama," I answered, pulling her across the street. She stopped again, hands on hips, her little backpack weighing heavy on her, one glove missing and forever gone, the other on her right hand folded neatly against her waist in indignation as only a five-year-old can muster.
"I WANT TO VOTE FOR OBAMA TOO!" she yelled, still in the middle of the street. Heads turned. Cheers erupted from two men in work coveralls, and the older woman who walks all over the neighborhood using a golf club for a cane saluted Tess with the 8-iron.
"Okay, honey, I'll take you to vote on Saturday morning, I said.
And so, two days later, on the last day of early voting, dreading the crowds, I took Tess to the polling place where I had voted at the North Asheville Public Library. She disregarded the long line, marching straight through it and up to the small cardboard polling booth that had been set up in the hallway for the kids to "play vote."
Before Tess' time, taking Emma to vote with us was a long-standing family tradition. But this year, i knew I would be spending most of election day at 37,000 feet on my way home from Seattle.
Twenty-nine years ago yesterday, I was a young college student in Greensboro, North Carolina. Less than a mile from where I lived, on November 3, 1979, five people were shot and killed on a city street–in broad daylight, by members of the Ku Klux Klan–in an event soon to be known as The Greensboro Massacre.
Now, 29 years later, an African American man is running for president of the United States of America.
