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.