Imaginary Election
Dreamed the other night I was back in New Hampshire, our home of six years, and it happened to be election day. So I drove over to the middle school to see if I was still registered in the town of Durham. And hey, I was! So I went in to vote.
I've noticed that at some point after moving from a place I'll have a kind of goodbye dream about it, signalling the transition out of active into archival memory. I was up in NH for real the weekend before last, and could tell that my relationship to the place had changed – navigational sense slipping, a feeling of being a visitor rather than a returning resident. The dream was partly about this sense of having left.
At the same time, it evoked election day euphoria, a simple, goopy joy in civic participation which in my case probably hearkens back to sixth grade social studies classes, municipal fairs, Fourth of July fireworks…I cherish the biennial trips to the school auditorium, its parking lot filled with banners, campaign workers, exit pollers and the LaRouche people. In NH, there's the bonus of being in a small state with a disproportional influence on presidential elections. Hang around long enough in one of the aging milltowns and you're likely to see most of the contenders eventually. And when your community has 7,000 registered voters instead of 70,000, all politics feels local.
I'll miss that.
10:45:47 PM 
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