Early Voting With My Friends — the Enemy
Kate Shaffar
Every day I wait for this election to come and go. I haven’t been this excited since my very first when I happily cast my ballot for William Jefferson Clinton. I’m excited to work at the polls this year. And I want to vote early so I don’t have to worry about it on Election Day.
We have formed sides; there’s no way around it. While the press chase the “undecideds” like so many drunken boys searching for Yeti, I say let’s vote, call this whole thing done. Friends and I follow the few early voting lines out here in Suffolk County. Everyone I know wants to go.
It won’t all be over when the Trump era ends, but oh, it could be. I sense a blue electricity suddenly; people waking up from the fever dream dipped in fool’s gold, tarnished from its own refuse. But bitter experience has taught us all better.
I’ve lost people to rage. Good people. On both sides. Because everyone I talk to is spitting nails and 100% right, and while I know that cannot be — my side is clear and absolutely righteous. But so is theirs. To them. Like religion. Or cilantro.
It’s not like I didn’t try. I have campaigned and volunteered and sobbed and protested, railing at the idiocy of their moral indifference, ticking off all the skin I have in the game.
I have learned more than I ever wanted to know about people I love. Like the boy in elementary school I had a crush on — who played dodgeball at the same Brooklyn diverse school I did — and now drapes himself in MAGA gear and outrage all over Facebook.
Needless to say, when the call came from one of my closest friends, so innocently, it caught me off guard.
“What time am I picking you up?”
To be fair, we have been cancelling each other’s votes out since we became friends over babies and puppies nearly 20 years before. We go to the polls together, share a cup of coffee, laugh at how we should have just stayed home and called it a wash. But that was before.
I blinked rapidly. I’d assumed that we’d skip this year together. Many of our conversations had dissolved into angry, resentful, often passionate disagreement. I do think it’s a moral imperative, but in the end we come back together, because we are neighbors, and best friends.
With myself still speechless, she said, “I’ll grab Dunkin Donuts and we’ll get on line first thing. It’s supposed to rain. It’ll be short.”
“Ok,” I said, nervous but feeling magnanimous. Once we got past the politics, maybe we’d hit the familiar territory I’d been forced to miss. Gossip over our friends. Catching up on our kids who are away at college during a pandemic.
The Trump era will end. And we are sisters who raised our children in each other’s kitchens. We helped with birthday parties, confirmations, Bar Mitzvahs and graduations. We bitched endlessly about our husbands and cried over our dying and dead parents together.
Moral imperatives aside, that means something to me.
As wrong headed as I feel she has been over Trump, when Covid 19 hit my house in early March, she, a Covid nurse, spoke to me everyday to check if my husband could still catch his breath. He was sicker than I and she not only monitored his health but made sure I took care of my own.
Let’s go vote, I decided.
I came out to the car and saw her husband, a police officer who enjoys goading me by spewing rage about rioters and lazy people and if everyone was working, they wouldn’t have time to vote.
Cringing, I thought about going back inside, but he did all my shopping during Covid, bringing me food and medical supplies at a time when there was no help, when if I didn’t have him, I’d have to go out myself and risk infecting other people.
I got in. I don’t remember which one of us started it, but it began. He said something about China and every pandemic. I said something about masks. He said Obama raised his taxes. I said something about white privilege.
He said as a kid, he’d been “roughed up” by a cop on the corner for being a “knucklehead.” I ignored the police brutality and pointed out that it might have ended very differently if it turned into jail time instead of boys-will-be-boys, and how much more likely it was that a black kid in the neighborhood would be incarcerated over it. That didn’t go over well, but we arrived finally, me dreading standing in line for three hours with them.
At one point he told me whomever won would be his president. It felt like an olive branch. I said the same. It was pouring rain. We took our place in line.
Fairly soon we were laughing about growing up in Brooklyn and the best bagels in the neighborhood, and history podcasts we’d discovered since our last conversation.
Our talk turned naturally. We waited, them trying to keep me dry with their umbrellas, me refusing, a scenario repeated often over the last few decades. We reminisced about our now college kids. I held my smile firmly in place when they told me their phenomenal daughter was a Republican through and through.
We reminded each other of that rare earthquake we happened to be together for, she taking care of something in her kitchen, me on the floor with the then babies and dogs when the ground rumbled. Or the blackout where we brought out all the food that would have otherwise gone bad and enjoyed a feast on their stoop.
Occasionally, someone drove by the 3 hour line and beeped support for either side, but we hardly noticed. We have connections that are deeper than what is happening now. I know him as a human being, and am fully confident, that it’s good cops like him that we need to implement any solution.
She rescues spiders and gives homeless people clothing she’s wearing. With a heart as kind as any I’ve known, she nurses whomever she knows. These are my friends. Trump voting and bullshit believing.
By the time we limped home, I was soaked but a bit hopeful. We are one country after all, and we’ve been through a lot together. We will find our common ground again.
As they dropped me off, I asked if their daughter sent their absentee ballot yet.
“No,” my friend said. “She didn’t even register.”
So for the first time in our families, we’re one ahead. My son sent his last week.
