Election Day in my elementary school gym
On voting where I learned to play, to pass, to pay attention
It’s been twenty-five years since I’ve been in this gym. Amazingly, not much has changed. I expect to wait in a long, tense line – but as soon as I step through the propped-open side doors and onto the paint-textured elementary school linoleum tiles, a kind middle-aged woman calls me over. I hand her my ID, on which is listed the address of my parents – the house I grew up in. Because of my nomadic adult life, I’ve never bothered to change my permanent residence. And that’s how I came to be here, standing on the vaguely sticky tiles of the gymnasium of Joelton Elementary School, where I attended kindergarten (Ms. Fortner) through fourth grade (Mr. Brewer).
The poll worker hands over the long rectangular ballot and the requisite red coffee stirrer, pointing me to a spot in the middle of the gym, where I join one other person in line. The gym is small, kid-sized, shaped like a trapezoid, a diamond with a cow lick. The far wall is lined with faded blue-ish padding tearing at the seams, seemingly a remnant from my tenure there. When we played kickball, a ball whacked over that padding was a home run. Near the padded home run wall are two voting booths a few feet apart. Just one is in use – a certain dignity to that. One at a time. A grade school mantra. I wait my turn.
I stand in the middle of the gym and look around. Most years I take advantage of more convenient early voting locations, and when I learned I’d have to come back to my elementary alma mater, I planned to take eager notes, to soak it in. But here I am, marooned in the middle of the gym like someone caught between dodgeball teams, weapons hurled from the right and the left, estranged between my old life and the new.
Someone I recognize from my parents’ church feeds her ballot into the maw of the machine. I am next in line. I don’t have time to soak it all in like I’d planned. I go to pull out my phone, fire up the Notes app, jot down what I see – but I suddenly fear that having my phone out might break the rules (??). In school, here, I learned to follow the rules so well that at 37, I follow ones I’m not even sure exist.
I scan the room, take mental notes. Banners for the kids foundation Jump Rope For Heart line the wall. High above, ceiling tiles are speckled black, haphazardly pocked, half of them missing, victims of decades of kickball games and wayward halfcourt heaves. The padding around the gym changes colors at various points, seemingly based on which color was available at the time it needed replacing. Rims from the first Bush administration.
A man named Fred calls me forward. Fred possesses a friendly mustache and a name tag that says Fred and off to the side under a basketball hoop is a little lawnchair bearing a nameplate (Fred) that I guess Fred sits in when the line dwindles from two to zero. Fred shows me how to vote, and I step up to the screen. It feels oddly satisfying this year, touching the screen with that little coffee stirrer. I think maybe it feels so good because of the way the selections light up – a generative glowing green. I don’t remember it doing that last time. Or perhaps what feels so good is the subversion, the self-subversion, the reverse Trojan horsing – voting differently than how I’d been raised to, picking up my ball and walking to the other side.
When I was in fourth grade, our entire school completed a project in which we counted a million beans. Every day for a few months, our class would huddle up and drop kidney beans in a bucket, counting aloud as we went. The school collected them, and when the pile of beans got big enough, they dumped it on the floor of the gym for all to see. Closing in on a million, we’d walk in single file to the gym and toss our beans right onto the pile. Chest high, wide as a couple of my neighbor’s cows, that pile. The pile was so huge, and my contribution so impossibly small, one bean skittering down the side of a mountain. I couldn’t fathom it, how my beans built up to all that, still can’t. I stood there, tossing my portion onto the pile, as our teacher Mr. Brewer insisted that, no matter how small, our contributions counted. And who was I to argue with him? Plunging my little arms into that hill of beans, I had no choice but to believe him when he told me I mattered.
Mr. Mac was the classic P.E. teacher: whistle dangling, cheeks ruddy, arms juggling several balls at once. In an elementary school, the P.E. teacher has a unique job – in a universe of straight lines and quiet mouse, Mr. Mac whirled us through a galaxy of play, of noise, of shouting and sneaker-squeaking chaos, constellations of competition, of danger, of tears and triumph, of childhood. Mr. Mac knew ball (I played for him in the local rec league), but at school, in the gym, his whistle fell silent more than not. He didn’t care if we kicked the ball, made a free throw, won a ribbon at Field Day. He taught us to pass, to share. He taught us to play, to play together, to make sure everyone got their shot. He taught us, as we lined up across the old linoleum tiles to pick teams, to look out for the kids usually left out and chosen last. He taught us to pick them.
On the last day of school, Mr. Brewer gave each of us a collage. He made them individually, for each of us, framed them, glued photos of us all around. In the pictures, I wear the gear of at least three different sports teams (shoutout to Drew Bledsoe and those mid-90s Patriots jerseys!). I smile, my grin a little off-center. I smile, surrounded by friends. I smile, hugely.
In one, I stand beside my life’s pride and joy: the assignment was “Thesaurized Christmas Carols,” and we were tasked with using synonyms to change a few words of a Christmas song. I changed every word. “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” became “Heed! The Forecast Seraphs Warble” (the verse continued: “Respect to the suckling chief!”). I delighted in taking the ordinary and somersaulting it into something strange, in taking a standard form and animal balloon-twisting it into something silly and new.
In the space between the pictures, Mr. Brewer wrote something for each of us.
Raleigh
Who gives great leadership to his reading group
Who needs a teacher who will constantly push him
Who loves the spotlight, learning new words, and writing
Who looks forward to sitting with people who don’t finish their lunch
Who will be missed by his brother Jordan, Mr. Mac, and all of his teachers
Mr. Brewer would be glad to know that I still love learning new words (and the spotlight). In fact, I learned one the other day. I’m a palimpsest, come to find out, scribbling and scrawling over all the mes that have been written before. All the people I’ve met, all the words they’ve jotted on me, the gentle words they used when they told me my words were hurting them, the way they’ve helped me to erase, rework, reword. The way I’ve learned to thesaurize myself, old words dropping like heavy coats, new ones donned with lightness and play. All the forms I’ve been given that have stopped working, so I’ve had to contort them into something new, the weirder the better, twisting myself into a squeaky pack of balloon Corgis.
I’m a palimpsest, a constantly re-worked “Heed! The Forecast Seraphs Warble.” We all are. I do wish that more of us would have voted in our elementary school gyms. That more of us had been reminded of the kids in the corner, overlooked and left out, that more of us had chosen to side with women and gay people and trans folks and immigrants and people of color. That we’d keep on listening and revising and finding new and better words, sillier and weirder and more welcoming songs.
I stand in the old elementary school gym, and it’s a palimpsest too, a place that’s been so many things, a place for beans and impossible dreams, a place for belonging, a place for play, a place to pick sides, to be an adult and to be a kid. It takes no time at all. I slide my ballot into the slot, and peel off a sticker, and press it to my chest. In just a few steps, I’m across the gym, safe from the dodgeball crossfire, and I thank the poll workers, and walk out the door and into the great big world.
"a place for beans and impossible dreams" :') I love this