Voted a Week Early

My Zoom class concluded several minutes before its scheduled 2PM end.  In late October, the day's weather allowed comfort with a long sleeved shirt but no jacket.  It seemed like the right time to vote, exactly one week in advance of the formal Election Day.

My state permits early voting up to ten days in advance.  Each county has at least one location.  Mine has several, though a pittance of the number of polling sites that the state will monitor on Election Day.  Each early voting site must agree to remain open all ten days except Sunday at all specified hours.  Very few communal agencies can make that commitment.  As a result, lines become long.  The day before, I had driven past the site.  Parking in the center's lot was unrealistic.  No spaces appeared open along the sidewalks of the street on which the location stood, though I didn't sample the cross streets.  An elementary school sits next door, one that would be letting its students out while I waited my turn.   I opted to return later in the week.  This time I anticipated that I would have to park a block or two away, finding a side residential street with its own median and legal parking in front of a modest suburban house.

After locking my car, I crossed the street at an intersection with crosswalks but no traffic lights or stop sign.  Gaps in traffic and inability to drive very fast along a road that a lot of motorists occupied as they sought their chance to vote assured my safety.

No ambiguity to where this site was or what it was for.  Campaign signs for every candidate on the ballot enticed the undecided.  I was not undecided.  The community center has a small frontage.  Beyond it stands a handsome brick school, now vacant but with its sign still legible in cursive over its front door.  To the left facing that door, visitors could read the cornerstone:  MCMXXIV.  The building's centenary.  It had one fluorescent light visible in an upper-floor window.  Several windows had air conditioning units protruding to the outside.  Its purpose or its occupancy was not readily deduced by the many voters who entered the queue, which extended to the side of the building opposite the cornerstone.  It appeared about the same length as the one I had driven past the day before.  But parking space established and no competing obligations the rest of the afternoon, I affirmed that I would not be deterred from expressing my electoral preferences by any hint of impatience.

I latched myself onto the line's rear, behind a lady who kept to herself the whole time.  Two couples, likely contemporaries of mine, entered the line behind me.  Our conversations, which would last the entire time it took to reach the voting booth, began with me trying to set my smartwatch's stopwatch.  Its black screen reflected the afternoon's direct sunshine.  I could not see it, though I knew how to enter clock mode blindly.  I could not enter stopwatch mode.  Instead, I noted the time:  2:17 PM.  While I had to stroll the width of the abandoned school with other voters filling that distance, I took little assessment of who the other voters were.  I know the catchment area of that center.  Mostly suburbanites like myself and the other two couples.  The district has its demographic diversity.  The Center itself offers community based programs to a population less well-off than me.  Wage earners in retail, security, civil service, healthcare.  People of African, Hispanic, and Asian ancestry live nearby, while those with advanced university degrees who work as professionals in large corporations live a few miles away, mostly to the west.  The two couples behind me fit that description.  We quipped about kids, schools, and other places we had lived.  They were each business people who sold or merged with larger entities.  One handed over the keys to a private equity firm after having built the business over decades from start-up to 400 employees.  Not different from my tale of finding solo medical practice unable to compete with larger institutions, forcing me to seek and accept employment at one.  They wanted to be near their kids.  I wanted to be a healthy distance from mine, just as I preferred settling in a place where it was easier for me to visit my parents and in-laws than for them to visit me.  

The line plodded forward.  Periodically, an official from the state Elections Department would venture along the line, asking us if anyone needed to sit down due to frailty.  None of us took her up on the offer.  Slowly we got close enough to read the carved concrete above the front door with the center's name, then onto a small front concrete patio leading to the glass front doors with benches for those who needed rest on the side.  Not long after, our turns arrived.  The identity station had three workers for four polling booths.  The usher pointed me to a most personable official in the middle.  She took my drivers license, had me sign an electronic form on a screen, then announced my name as the next voter, as she handed me a paper with a list of contested offices that I would need to insert into a window once at the voting screen.  The booth monitor held the black privacy curtain at booth #3, which I entered. Paper inserted, error response, re-inserted, followed by a screen with each candidate for each office.  Democrats listed vertically in the left column, Republican list just to the right of that.  All offices but one were contested.  And farther to the right of the screen appeared isolated names of independent candidates or fringe parties.  Irrespective of their worthiness, their placement on the election screen disadvantaged them.  This time I voted straight party.  Touch each name in the column, watching the box with my candidates' names transform from white to traffic light green.  It questioned me a few times if I wanted to review my selections.  Confident that I voted for the best people from President at the top to County Council President at the bottom, I asked the machine to give me the confirm vote option.  Another electronic box to touch, this in a somewhat lighter shade of green.  I pressed that box with my index finger, so at least one list of hopefuls could rest assured that each of them at least appealed to somebody.

As I exited the curtain, I encountered a table with I Voted stickers.  I peeled one off, adhered it to my forehead, confirmed my watch time as 3:25PM.  The line took about an hour and ten minutes.  And my new acquaintances told me about an attractive restaurant right near my home that I had never visited.  Checked out their web site when I arrived home.  As expected, school would be letting out just as I exited the voting location.  Having parked about two blocks away, I strolled to the intersection where the school crossing guard with neon yellow vest stopped the traffic to allow me to the other side of the street.  While I did not really know the way home from that side street, I drove along its length.  It intersected with a main road.  From there I knew the best route to my house.

The designated Election Day will arrive.  My house sits about a twenty-minute walk or three-minute drive from the border with a swing state.  Media, particularly TV, originates in the megacity on that side of the border, putting me in the unwelcome advertising cross-fire.  My old HS friends reacquainted on FB some fifteen years ago.  In the end, we vote the same way, though their postings of their preferences always make me wonder whether we derived the same level of analytical skills from the classes we shared.  I've minimized my time there as a result.  And that's before we even get to paid candidate advertising, most highly dependent on innuendo of some type.  And I no longer even sign on to Twitter, as much as I have made an effort to follow mostly reputable journalists.  With my ballot submitted, I become immune to external influences.  Not the ads. Not the signs stuck into the lawn sod outside the polling place I just visited.  I'm done.  Polls with posted results showing who you favor always ahead on YouTube.  No bandwagon for me to jump aboard.  Just tune in again when the real public preferences counted and reported.

The Darndest Things

To the best of my memory, the first book I ever read cover to cover must have been Art Linkletter's Kids Say the Darndest Things.  I was a new reader, probably in second grade exiled to a school annex at the local Firehouse, as my district could not keep up with new construction that suburban migration to my district required.  TVs showed images in Black & White at the time.  Art Linkletter's House Party had considerable popularity.  It ran in the afternoons.  My mother wouldn't miss it.  When I returned home from school it would be airing.  At the end, Art Linkletter added a signature segment.  Each day he would interview children about my age selected from the local schools.  He asked each a question or two, presumably unrehearsed.  And those kids responded in the darndest ways.  He compiled favorite responses to create a short book, which I read in paperback.  YouTube has captured some of those sessions for anyone with cyberspace access who might like a chuckle, long after this classic has faced into the history of American public media.  I've never forgotten those sessions or those kids or that book.

Without knowing it, being much too young, one of our Chabad Rabbis recreated a version of this, which is why I earmark every Simchat Torah evening to attend there in lieu of my own shul which essentially has no children.  Simchat Torah and Purim evenings depend on children for the vitality of the festivities.  In the evenings, we got flags to wave and engage in minor sword fights with the sticks.  For those who returned the next morning, and a many did even when it meant missing school, hijinx continued.  Friends would bring squirt guns.  The Cantor could expect some kids to tie his shoelaces to his tzitzis.  He could be a good sport in different ways, adapting prayer melodies to what the DJ's then played on the Top 40 or the sounds that introduced our favorite TV shows.  Congregations of 70-somethings, mine and too many others across the USA, cannot generate that controlled irreverence which Simchat Torah and Purim require.  We are scripted to decorum.

Chabad seems to attract children who attend on Simchat Torah with their parents or grandparents.  A few Lubavitchers have large families, but most in attendance seem to be Jews attracted to the Chabad environment without adapting its Orthodox observance stringencies.  Each year about thirty pre-Bar Mitzvah children attend.  There seem to be some women nominally in charge of the group, maybe volunteer parents, maybe teachers in their Hebrew school.  They assemble in the sukkah for the last time, that repast between Mincha of Shemini Atzeret and the onset of Simchat Torah.  Some cake, some salads and spreads with crackers but never bread to put them on, liquid refreshments adult and pediatric.  The Rabbi has prepped the children in advance.  They will each be asked, one at a time, as they sit in chairs lining the front of the sanctuary what they will pursue in the New Year to enhance their Jewishness.  

Their two minutes in the spotlight arrives as they parade in with flags, taking their seats in roughly size order.  While adult women and men take seats on different sides of the sanctuary, the physical barrier known as a mechitza is temporarily removed, largely to enable dancing with the Torah Scrolls that will be taken out of the Ark at the front of the sanctuary when the children's interviews conclude.  

Each child has his or her prepared answer.  They will give a coin each day into a tzedakah box.  Some will recite the Modeh Ani prayer on arising or the Shema on going to bed, almost never both.  Some will begin lighting candles every Friday night with their mothers.  Some of the older ones will add the Psalm of the Day.  Other's will begin making Challah at home.

While all seem laudable, all seem to miss some of the essence of what being an optimal Jew entails.  Nobody over several years has ever committed himself to having lunch at school with the classmate who always seems to be alone.  They put coins in the tzedakah container's slot, but never consider where the accumulated money is best donated, let alone why.  Some might be old enough to have cell phones.  Nobody has ever committed to leaving it off from candle lighting Friday evening through Havdalah on Saturday night.  And if anyone ever announced that he would not join his father at the Pornhub screen until after Havdalah, the Rabbi would be able to begin his sequel to Art Linkletter's best seller of the 1950s.

Judaism has its identifiable trappings.  Observances of all types. Who has the most stringent standards for Kosher, Shabbos, Study?  Mezuzot on all doors.  Coins in the tzedakah box.  Who puts on their tefillin every day and wears tzitzis under their shirt?  Just what the kids pledged themselves to do.  But it's not only kids.  Reddit as its r/Judaism has many participants, primarily young adults of secular Jewish background, who seek to strengthen their Jewish identities.  They pose to the more experienced Jews how they should go about it.  What books might they read, what videos would enhance their quest, maybe pledging to read the weekly Torah portion in translation each week as primary text.  Should they buy tefillin, or maybe put a mezuzah on all the doors of their apartments. Those elements particular to Jews.  What too often bypasses them may be the realization that many people across the globe do things that are honorable but no longer uniquely Jewish because we have succeeded in bringing to the world standards of conduct, days of respite to our calendars, advocacy for ourselves and for others who we can help move forward.  Those are missing from the r/Judaism requests, as they were from the kids as they announced to their adult audience what they might like to pursue.

When I respond to the r/Judaism seekers, I will recommend written resources for their learning, while discouraging primary Bible readings.  From our earliest reading years, we learn from the wisdom of those who have gone before us.  We read physics texts, not the lab notebooks or research papers of the people who wrote those texts.  The seekers need to read commentary of people before them who have proficiency to share.  The primary Bible sources are not ignored but put in context.  That is Chochma, or Wisdom, one of Judaism's pillars.  We have Tzedek or Righteousness expressed in many ways.  As Kindness.  As Generosity.  As Respect for boundaries of our traditions, whether in our diets or our calendars.  So turn off the cell phones, designate an empty jar to put spare coins into so they can be donated periodically, don't demean people, be a friend when friends are scarce.  Not overtly ritual but Jewish.  The Chabad kids sort of have Kehillah or Community, the r/Judaism seekers understand they need to be part of one.  But methinks they are too quick to gravitate to a synagogue.  Jewish gatherings are sometimes social, sometimes for advocacy, sometimes for communal learning.  The r/Judaism adults have much too restricted a view, the Chabad kids have exposures directed by parents.  Chochma, Tzedek, and Kehilah have a common destination.  We recognize the intersection of these as Kedusha or Sanctity.  Making Kiddush on Friday night contributes to sanctity, but Holiness is never stand-alone.  It is mindset, communal, behavioral, sometimes avoidance of immediate druthers.  The kids at the Rabbi's House Party interview may get there.  So might the Reddit explorers.  But they will have to think about what to strive to become Jewishly in a more expansive way than I heard at Erev Simchat Torah or read on the Reddit app.

Halloween Treats

As voting time approaches, the price of edibles will likely sway its share of voters.  Not all prices rise uniformly.  The steepest are those related to intellectual property, followed by those highly processed products that require ingredients from around the world available at the factory for assembly or mixture.  Candy fits both criteria.  Hershey's has distinct recognizable brands, as does its few competitors.  Chocolate, coconut, sugar all need extensive transit to get to central Pennsylvania or wherever else Hershey and Nestle have built their facilities.  That can make for an expensive Halloween.  I don't have that many kids come to our front door, but those who seek a sweet need to get one.  

Each week I look at the supermarket ads, which invariably promote packaged candy in their weekly circulars.  Very high prices this year.  My GoTo place for packaged candy has been the local farmer's market which has a variety store at one end.  They sell Hershey products, though an unpredictable assortment.  When they cost $6 if you buy three, I would get myself a bag of chocolate nugget variety pack, KitKat, and Almond Joy.  As prices rose, $6 became $7 for three bags, still undercutting the supermarket.  I used that as an excuse to stop purchasing any for my own use, but for Halloween, that's a best buy.  Slight glitch this year.  The market only opens on Friday and Saturday.  Our Yom Tovim this season all include Fridays and shopping on Shabbos I gave up long ago, unless traveling.  After getting my biennial car inspection and registration renewal, I made a small detour to a Walmart not far from the state's DMV.  No bargains on candy there either.

I am a very proficient kitchen maven.  My Oatmeal Chocolate Chip cookies in the style of Frog/Commissary, two pioneering Philadelphia eateries of my young adulthood, always bring favorable reviews.  I make about four dozen at a time.  Not that hard with modern countertop appliances.  I made a batch about a year earlier for my synagogue's project to feed folks down on their luck at a soup kitchen.  I also made rugelach for another session, roughly the same number.  Ghosts and goblins and witches would find either of these tasty and unique.  Alas, people have become less trustworthy in the current generation.  As a grade schooler doing trick or treating, lots of families put some baked goods and loose candy in small goodie bags to distribute, along with a penny or two for the UNICEF cartons.  The charitable redemption of a basically problematic holiday is long gone, as is the stature of the UN Agencies.  In my children's day, medical facilities started offering free x-rays of the holiday loot to detect surreptitious razor blades or paper clips inserted into fruits or candy.  For decades now, most parents will discard anything in a child's bag that is not factory wrapped.  I understand.

While the Hebrew calendar this year is unfavorable to shopping at the Farmer's market, it is also the year of my biennial bifocal update.  Best buy has been Costco.  The discount from what the chain opticians charge more than offsets the membership fee.  In addition, I get to shop from their megastores until the membership runs out without renewal a year later.  As an empty nester, a prosperous one, I really don't need anything edible in the quantities that Costco purchases require, nor do I really need any stuff.  Not electronics, appliances, furniture.  Close to nada, though a clothing item attracts me as does some often expensive food delicacies like lox, herring, and kosher-certified cheese.  But Costco is open every day.  The bulk packaging can expand my options of what to offer costumed kids.  Maybe candy.  But maybe something of greater nutritional value.  Oat bars, lunchbox-sized pretzels, granola for some of the older children who can handle the almonds.  Their goodie bags or repurposed pillowcases need not return home with zero nutritional value.  I might even pay a little more to fill those bags with something tasty but worthy of feeding to a child.

Most of my infrequent visits to Costco have a purpose, whether bifocal purchase, eyeglass frame repair, or I just want a cheap slice of pizza or a sundae.  That does not preclude browsing.  So the kids get something for them, I get some delicacy or related splurge for me.  The salvage of Halloween.

Consecutive Days

This fall, Rosh Hashanah and Sukkot occupy Thursday-Friday.  Add shabbos, which makes three consecutive restricted days three weekends out of four.  While our Rabbis regard these as special times to escape daily obligations, I kinda like what I do most days.  No electronic devices for three consecutive days, three weekends out of four?  That's a lot of FOMO.  The purpose of Yom Tovim and shabbos might be separation.  They have a measure of compensation for what will be missed.  Special dinners.  The preparatory efforts for shabbos each week and the Yom Tovim as they arise.  A completed sukkah.  Special liturgy.  An OLLI schedule that omits Thursday and Friday classes this semester.  But nine days of separation all in the same calendar month seems a lot.

I don't really miss the laptop when it is off.  Social Media really does get too absorbing.  It needs a break. Not much happens if I don't do crosswords for a few days.  FB, Reddit, and email avoidance challenge me more, though they shouldn't.  I've largely abandoned Twitter.  It's a detriment to me.  Minor withdrawal symptoms but don't miss it.  FB has a few contacts with friends, offset in a big way by unsolicited posts that the psych major Stanford alumni think will keep me on their screen instead of somebody else's.  Reddit might be a little harder, as I make contributions that others might find helpful, though few make contributions that I find helpful.  Setting these aside for shabbos each week is not hard.  Three consecutive days generates minor withdrawal, though never overt FOMO.

These three day breaks never really become Me Time, though.  I have guests or am a guest.  But some Me Time gets carved into those three days.  Social Media is not Me Time.

Rosh Hashanah with its social strains but new horizons completed.  Some sukkah inspiration ahead.  Then the concluding days.  The designers of the Hebrew calendar anticipated folks like me would be Jewish saturated by the end of this.  They scheduled the subsequent month to be devoid of special days, but nicknamed that month Mar Heshvan, or Bitter Heshvan, due to the absence of designated times other than shabbos.  I think of it more as respite.

Board Discussion

My Zoom access malfunctioned.  I could not see myself on the screen, though I appeared on the attendance list of participants.  Perhaps others could see me.  This distracted me somewhat from our Board Meeting's agenda as I did connectivity troubleshooting while other people spoke.  For the first time since I joined the Board, I said nothing the entire session.  This is a good thing, especially since I had nothing of substance to contribute. Multitasking never turns out well.  I did not multitask.  I shifted between tasks, listening attentively without concerns of what I ought to say.  At my next meeting, I will likely have much to say.  The week after, I am featured speaker.  Any opportunity to restore Zoom to its full capability cannot be set aside.

So, as more a spectator than participant, what did I hear or sense?  Very little served as a forum where issues are raised, discussions ensue, people challenge each other's perspectives, and votes resolve divides.  That did not happen.  In its place, I heard announcements of what had already been decided.  I heard The Clique commenting amongst each other how wonderful they all were.  One piece of adverse news, the departure of what had been a lifelong member.  Not our fault, unavoidable.  Announcement of our Rabbi's proposal to expand connections within our congregation.  Where can we take this?  There are lots of places to take this.  I heard none.  We need more members.  Why do we need more members?  To generated revenue, of course.  Never a recognition of how much our newbies add by their efforts once among us.  Mostly Hear Ye, Hear Ye.  A pro forma evening in the congregational Echo Chamber.

They need to either have the Rabbi stay for the whole thing or plant a mystery shopper who can have coffee with the Rabbi and President.  I heard, or at least sensed, what might be.  It wasn't.

Credit Card Failure

Gas tank not yet empty, though it would be when I return from dropping my departing daughter at the airport.  Gas stations are plentiful.  The pumps work on Sundays.  All fully self-service.

On my way home from a small outing, I pulled into my usual station.  Following what I've done every few weeks forever, I inserted the Bank of America card and removed my gas cap.  When the pump screen asked me to lift the nozzle and select an octane grade, I pushed 87.  Instead of allowing BP gasoline to flow, the screen thanked me for shopping there and wished me a pleasant day.  Maybe a pump problem.  I pulled one pump ahead, where a motorcycle had just refueled.  Same cheery good wishes by the dispensing algorithm, but not gas for me.  Maybe the station had some snafu.  I drove to another station a mile away, inserted my card, waited for approval on the screen, and pushed the octane grade appropriate to my Toyota.  Thanked again on the screen, wished a pleasant day, but no gas.

Then I drove home and called the Bank of America card's customer service number.  Irritating automated menu, but eventually I got to an agent, told my tale, waited patiently on hold while she investigated, until the triplet buzz of a disconnected signal arrived.  I called back, told my story to the next agent who had to investigate.  He transferred my call to a Merchant Service desk, which asked for a number.  I typed my card number, receiving a response that my information was invalid.  I retyped it.  Still invalid.  They transferred me to a place that could not proceed.

Maybe my card's chip had a malfunction.  I drove to a much larger station, tapped the card, and this time did not get as far as an approval.  While the other two stations were small neighborhood operations not manned on Sundays, this enterprise probably made higher profit margins from the convenience store than the pumps.  I went inside, handed a twenty-dollar bill to the cashier, and a one-dollar bill to a hungry panhandler.  6.5 gallons later, I had my gas gauge reading enough fuel to last me the week.  I do not know if the panhandler got himself a snack or would hold out for enough donations to get himself a more substantial meal.

Back to Bank of America's helpline.  Despite being a conglomerate with every expertise on staff, the agent really had no interest in investigating the glitch.  I've gotten tampered OTC medicine in the past.  Their helpline took great interest in their customer's plight, sending me a mailer to return the damaged pills and a coupon to replace them.  Bank of America has had some adverse publicity for disinterest in the needs of customers.  Though I've had this card going on forty years, my offer to send it back to them for investigation was rejected in about one minute.  They are not perfectionists.

While traveling a month ago, I had a similar encounter in a rural area of another state.  That time, the pumps just rejected my card.  Two pumps at the first station, one at a larger place anchored by the regional convenience chain.  The cashier could not get the card to work at her desk, at least for filling my tank.  Twenty-dollar bill enabled enough gas to proceed to my next destination.  At the hotel, I called the card's carrier who assured me that my card was still valid.  At the restaurant for dinner, I used it, as I did for gasoline the remainder of my road trip and beyond.

While the professionalism of the agents, their willingness to explain and explore a problem, let alone show any curiosity about it or experience with it, fell below what I had come to expect in my medical world, I am not harmed.  A new card will come in a week.  I have a debit card from my bank which I use only for ATM withdrawals and a second card which has a premium-for-use feature that I use only for charges in the thousands like air travel or major home repair.  And I can keep a little extra cash in my wallet.  It is tempting to just get another card, though snafu's over forty years of relying on them for my credit needs have been few.

If they as employees are not curious about what happened, at least I am.  Type Credit card does not work at gas station onto a Google search and lots of references appear.  Apparently selective malfunctions when acquiring gasoline, without limiting effects on other purchases are well-documented.  Most of what Google retrieves are testimonials posted to Reddit and other public forums of expression.  Why it occurs selectively at gas stations is less well-defined, but the interface between the pumps and the banks takes a different path from most purchases.  At least I wanted to know why.  That curiosity apparently is not a contributor to promotion from entry-level customer telephone agent to a position of more responsibility by some credit card companies.  Getting me a new card, mostly automated, is the retail path of least resistance.  Especially if it keeps me with their company when defecting after decades is still tempting.