Personal Narrative

Before, During and After the Election

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I have a ritual on elections. I volunteer to be a pollwatcher. I have done this several times. It makes me feel like I am “doing something” even though it is probably, on the margin, nothing. I am in a state of suppressed hysteria and can’t sit still or focus on Election Day, anyway.

This time I signed up with the Republican Lawyers Committee. They had a meeting a week or so before the election at the Union League club. It was a class, basically a primer on election law. It had CLE credit, too. Woo hoo. I went to that, and it was pretty good, and I met some cool people.

One guy there was acting really weird, demanding to know why he could not challenge a voter who did not speak English and “does not belong in this county.” His demeanor was all wrong. He slumped in chair, talked too loudly and was offensively argumentative. Other people argued back against him in a sane way. Maybe it is not paranoid to think he was a plant, from some Lefty blog or something, fishing for a chance to talk about how the Republican lawyers are bigoted against Spanish-speakers. He got nowhere, and left in the middle of the presentation. Strange.

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Facebook and Start Ups

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Today I saw the movie “The Social Network” and while I am no expert on social networks (not even on facebook) the movie brought back my start up memories that I hadn’t thought about for a while.

A lot of times when something is fresh or as a loss you remember how it ends; like a break up or a graduation; and only later in life do you think about the day-to-day experience in a new light.

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Still Life

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I am the only one in my family who is interested in history. As we were going through my deceased grandmother’s stuff it was easy to determine who would receive all of the photographs, slides, and family records.

I knew that my grandfather, who died 21 years ago, was an amateur photographer. Boy was he. I was presented with box upon box of pictures and slides of everything from flowers to buildings to bugs.

As I went through the photos I was stunned to find a certain one. It was a guy in an old German/Prussian military uniform complete with helmet and tall boots. On his left lapel he had an Iron Cross. I thought about it for a moment and set it aside, in a special pile of shots that meant something more to me than the others. I hope to present some of these shots here after I get a scanner.

Anyway, this photo was a person I knew, but I just couldn’t place him. After a while and after finding a few more photos that were labeled I figured out who it was. It was my grandfather’s step-father. My grandfather’s dad died in WW1 (my grandfather was 2 at the time) and his mother re-married to the gentleman in the photo. It is very cool to a historian like myself to know that I have an Iron Cross in the family, even if it isn’t blood relation. What I would give to have that medal. I have no idea where it ended up.

As I was thinking about this, I had a rather disturbing thought. In this country we are very used to taking digital photographs. These are saved on laptops, cds, and other forms of storage. But technology moves forward fast. We don’t have 3.5 floppys or zip drives anymore and I assume that thumb drives, cds and other forms of storage will pass us by as well. I wonder if America will become a country without a photographical record eventually. The days of handing armfulls of photographs to the next generation may be coming to an end, and I think that is sad.