Don't Get Too Comfortable Read Free Page B

in New York I'm usually on some rooftop miles away from the action. We are right under the explosions here. A little girl behind me, strapped into her stroller, twists in fear and panic as the percussive reports of the rockets thud through her rib cage. “No no no,” she moans softly throughout the entire thirty-minute show.
    She has my sympathies one hundred percent. I have made a terrible miscalculation, at least insofar as coming down to D.C. I adore my friends, and the floodlit Greek revival buildings of Capitol Hill are undeniably beautiful and a suitable representation of the majesty of this great nation of which I am now a part, but I'm not being glib when I say that one of the most compelling reasons for my having become a citizen was to entrench and make permanent my relationship with New York, the great love of my life. Being down here feels a bit like I chose to go on my honeymoon with my in-laws while my beloved waits for me back at the apartment. There is a supercomputer somewhere in the Nevada desert whose sole function is to count the number of times that I have said the following, because it is unquantifiable by human minds at this point, but this time it's really true: I should have stayed home.
    THERE ARE ALREADY forty people waiting on line by seven o'clock on Election Day morning. My local polling place is in the basement of a new NYU dormitory on the corner of Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue. An ugly box of a building, it was erected on the site of the old dirty bookstore where, coincidentally, one could also enter booths to manipulate levers of a different sort.
    It has been an awfully long time between drinks for me. I haven't voted since I was eighteen, when I cast a ballot in Canada during my first summer back from college. It's not that I take voting lightly. Quite the opposite. Living down in the United States where the coverage of Canadian politics is pretty well nonexistent, I never felt well-enough informed to have an opinion. But even if I had made it my business to stay abreast of things—going to the library to read the foreign papers in those pre-Internet years—after a certain point, I no longer felt entitled to have a say in Canada's affairs, having essentially abandoned the place. I suspect this is going to happen for the next little while every time I have to do something unmistakably American, like cast a ballot in a non-parliamentary election or go through customs on my U.S. passport, but standing here on line, I am stricken with such guilt and buyer's remorse, overcome with a feeling of such nostalgia for where I came from, with its socialized medicine and gun control, that it is all I can do not to break ranks and start walking uptown and not stop until I reach the 49th parallel. There is also an equal part of me that is completely thrilled to finally be part of the electoral process. I am not alone in my exuberance this morning. Many people around me also seem filled with a buoyant and tentative excitement that George Bush might very well lose
this
election, as well. Complete strangers are talking to one another, almost giddy at the prospect. Others emerge from having voted and raise both their hands with crossed fingers, shaking them at us like maracas. “Good luck!” they wish us as they head off to work. It's almost like a party in this crowded dormitory basement that smells like a foot.
    I love everything about the booth: the stiff, pleated curtain; the foursquare, early-industrial heaviness of the brass switches; the no-nonsense 1950s primary-school font of the labels; the lever that gives out a satisfying
tchnk
when I pull it back. It all feels solid and tried and tested. In the very best way, un-Floridian.
    For the rest of the day I bound the floor of the apartment like a caged tiger, unable to settle. I make and receive dozens of phone calls. My in-box is full of well over a hundred e-mails from friends, all on precisely the same theme: early numbers and preliminary