Today is Election Day and I voted shortly after the polls opened at 6:00 AM.    Although it is a gubernatorial race in New Jersey today  there was none of the chaos at the polls that there was a year ago.

Yesterday, when I let my co-workers know that I would be in late because I was voting before work, they said “Is tomorrow election day?”  “Of course,”   I responded, “It’s the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.”   And then I remembered with fondness and sadness that it was my father who had taught me all the rules for the holidays such as election day.   That Thanksgiving was the fourth Thursday in November and was not necessarily the last Thursday in November and that Easter was the first Sunday after the first full moon after the first full day of Spring.   (The latter did not really assist me in determining the date, except to know that it could never be earlier than the first Sunday in Spring and never later than about a month later.)

I felt good after I voted.   Although so many may say that one vote does not make a difference, when I lived in Pasadena, California,  there was an election in which there was an actual tie and there had to be a run-off election.    If I had not voted, the other candidate would have won.   I felt guilty for all the times I neglected to vote in “minor elections”  or elections whose outcomes seemed so obvious that I failed to cast my vote.   That’s worse than not staying to watch the credits at the end of the film you just enjoyed, something which I would never do.

I launched my website last night.   My husband and I had a private launch party at IHOP this morning.   Last year I had hinted that I wanted to have a website and he gave me a domain name for Christmas and then introduced me to a talented website developer.   I told her I wanted a quotation field, and yesterday, as I began to add content  to my site I also began to add my favorite quotations.   The first source I turned to was my “Quote Box,”  a small metal box filled with 3×5 index cards of quotations I collected in high school and through college.

I had filed them meticulously, with bibliographic references on the back of each card and the date I added it to the box.    As I sorted through the cards I was able to chronicle my eras of idealism, my period of interest in Chinese poetry, the influential class I took on Philosophy of Science at Bryn Mawr College.   I could see my handwriting deteriorate from its former neat printing or cursive writing.  Some quotes were even typed on an old manual typewriter.    Although I still love quotations,  I wish I had maintained the habit of collecting them.  What would have been the quotations for the thirty years since I stopped adding to my box until I started searching for quotations with renewed vigor yesterday?  I fear that the deterioration of my handwriting paralleled the change from the idealism of my youth to the too often cynicism of my adulthood.    One of the quotations I stumbled upon yesterday was from F. Scott Fitzgerald, “At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.”   I am hoping that as I approach fifty-five I can climb again, not the hill of my youth, but a different hill of hope and optimism that I have forgotten for too long.