Looping my signature across election day memories

To one end of my elementary school cafeteria, a stage upon which we produced annual Christmas pageants. I remember being an elf one year. Never breaking out of supporting cast, I was a stocking another year. Both years, Jingle Bells was a featured song and like every other kid, it was one of my favorites. I'd sing my heart out, seeking my parents' proud faces in the audience, singing right to them, for them.

We ate lunch by our grade. Our plastic lunch trays were sectioned and pink. We were offered milk or juice. Sitting on the bench of the lunch tables, we were too young for our feet to rest on the ground. I remember swinging my legs back and forth while I ate, my first memory of a lifetime being for the most part unable to sit still.

Through reasons that are more about staying connected to the neighborhood in which I was raised, and less about procrastination, it's to that same school cafeteria that I go to vote. It never escapes me that I go to a room from the past to cast my two cents for the future.

There were a couple times that voting was a family outing. I'd meet my parents at their house, and Dad would drive Mom and me to the school. Afterwards, we'd return home, have a cup of coffee, then move out into our days. A couple times, I arrived after them, smiling at the signatures there that I recognized as their own. We all took particular pride when my niece voted and placed her signature there among ours for the first time.

I'll return today. Sitting in my kitchen this morning, I'm anxious about what I'll find there. Will my father's name still be beneath my mother's? I'll pause at the blank signature line. And if his name is not there, I know it will hit me and I'll be saddened by seeing three names and not four. This year, the niece has voter apathy, and my mother isn't able to vote. It will be my signature alone in the little group of names that says family. And so it goes in this little room in my life, this room that has been the backdrop to lunches, pageants, and now voter signatures both present and remembered.