By the fall of 1992, Susan and I had been friends for two years. I turned 17 at the end of August; she turned 18 a week and a half later. She was a year older than me, which mostly didn’t bother me, but I don’t think I ever as young as I felt on the first Tuesday of that November. It was Election Day. Susan could vote. I couldn’t.
I had been a political junkie for as long as I could remember. I was a likable child, but my political fixation must have made me seem odder than I felt. The 1984 presidential election was my first foray into politics. I was a John Glenn man in the primaries, mostly because he’d been to space and the other candidates hadn’t. In my grandmother’s birthday card that year, I wrote, “Happy Birthday. Vote for John Glenn in the New York primary.” (She did.) When Walter Mondale won the nomination, I wrote him a friendly letter. He promptly added me to his fundraising mailing list and sent me no end of solicitations disguised as personal letters – most of them signed with his nickname, “Fritz.” He even sent me a signed picture of him and his running mate, which I hung in my bedroom. (In retrospect, I thought about how sad it was that he’d invested so much postage in lobbying a 9-year-old for his vote, but at the time I felt flattered by the attention.) When Mondale lost, I was crushed – mostly because it felt like my pen pal lost the election. Then again, it was not unexpected. He lost very badly in our fourth grade classroom’s mock election. Still, to help me debrief the whole affair, I lobbied my father to buy me the special double-issue of Newsweek with a smiling Ronald Reagan on the cover and a headline that said, simply, “LANDSLIDE!” I read and re-read it for weeks.
The 1988 election was a more subdued affair, no doubt in part because I was preoccupied with the trauma of being in eighth grade. By 1992, though, I was energized. I soaked up the coverage and cursed my birthday for being one year too late. At the time, it felt like the most important election in a generation – growing up in New Hampshire, I relished all of the candidates parading through our town. I was a Jerry Brown guy in the primaries, in part because he gave a speech at the coffeehouse where all of the teenagers and dropouts went to smoke cigarettes and feel important. When Clinton came out on top, I got on board mostly out of an anti-Bush sentiment stirred up by my listening to R.E.M.’s anti-Bush anthem, “Ignoreland,” on repeat. But here it was, Election Day, and I was still disenfranchised. But Susan wasn’t. Thankfully, she and I were close enough that when she thought to invite me to come vote with her – really, just to stand in the voting booth to watch her vote – I jumped at the chance. I drove to her house before school and we went to the elementary school polling place.
At least ten Christmases had passed since I’d felt so much like a wide-eyed child. I craned my neck to try to take in every detail: the campaign workers clamoring for attention, the feeling of smug privilege as we walked past the children on the playground, the signs in the corridor that said “Vote Here,” the gradual but unmistakable swelling of patriotism in my chest. I remember the poll worker handing her the ballot and then walking into the booth behind her and looking over her shoulder as she marked her choices. It was all over in less than a minute, but it felt like something had changed. That night, watching the election returns on television, I imagined the vote that Susan cast being counted. One of those numbers on the screens was the ballot I’d seen her mark up.
These days, I still feel excited walking into a polling station and feel wonder at seeing my name in the book of registered voters. This morning, walking into the basement cafeteria of our local elementary school, I was pushing my one year-old daughter in a stroller. Looking down at her as she scanned the room, I thought that she seemed wide-eyed to the point of shellshock. Someday, perhaps, the luster of voting may wear off, but not just yet.