dog years: America, This Is Your Last Chance My parents voted at the Rosehill Road Fire Department. Set down off the road, the driveway from the firehouse ramped up to the blacktop. Trucks and cars lined the roads, couples returning to them after voting walked single file on the white lines. Daddy parked in the rear parking lot of the station. Mom had voted after dropping my brother and I off at school that morning, so Dad brought us with him that evening. Our shirt-tails were in, a wet comb run through our hair before leaving the house. My dad smelled like the tires he worked around all day, but wore good clothes to vote in.
When we walked into the back door of the living quarters of the station, we entered the kitchen. Out of the kitchen, we moved through to the recreation area. In that room, sitting on a blue vinyl couch sat a woman breast-feeding her baby. Her pink and purple plaid blouse was pulled open and the child's head was pressed lightly to her skin. Joel and I were compelled to stare; we had never seen such before. Daddy waited at the entrance into the truck garage, where the voting booths replaced the parked engines and were lined along a yellow stripe. We were all still in our coats, but it was warm enough to be without them in there. He watched us drag slowly through the room, watching the woman nurse. Never once did he call to us to hurry, or say anything admonishing that would make the scene any less than it was. The warmth I felt before we stepped out into the cold of that garage so that my father could help make a Baptist farmer our next president remains with me.
Who do I want to win the election for president of our country? I want Andy Taylor to win so that he can step from around the desk in the oval office with his khaki pants cuff hung on the top of his boot and crush evil with by drawling a sheepishly condescending observation. I want Martin Luther King, Jr to win so that he can show the true love of God and extend our national hand to countries in need so that they are lifted from suffering, rather than beaten down below their lowest point. I want Dylan Thomas and Robert Frost to win, so that men and women are inspired by words to endure and continue without abandon. I want Bierstadt or Cole to win, so that the breathtaking expanse of creation they've painted overwhelms us into humility.
Who do I want to win? I want a mother to win. A woman who has held a baby to her breast and supplied milk for it's survival.
Who will win? Someone who will send Mrs. Nelly Gatton's eighteen year old son to a fertile crescent that lies between two rivers so that he can be killed with so much malice, it seems he dies twice.
