After locating Mr. Tingle’s registration card in a file marked Personal Receipts, and giving a rousing listen to the Clash’s “Know Your Rights”, we went and voted. We were numbers 191 and 192.

Our polling place is in the gymnasium of a local elementary school. The guy standing in front of us in line was wearing jeans and a cheap leather jacket with stripes of gray netting in it. He was very pale with dark scrubby hair and a bright pink pimple on his right cheek that must bug him. The older lady with a beehive checking people in in the A-J line recognized him as one of her former kindergarten students. “Come forward, Mr. Cash,” she said when it was his turn. “I can’t believe you’re old enough to vote!” We were an everyday group, a ragtag motley group of citizens: I saw hunting jackets and motorcycle shades and hippi courdoroy and business suits and faded jersey dresses. A lot of older country women in pastel turtlenecks with their pale jeans riding too far up on their stomachs (this is the silhouette of white rural Southern women: skinny spidery legs, hunched shoulders, flat asses, faces very thin and lined from chronic smoking). A lot of people who obviously knew each other from church. A lot of chipper senior citizens working as volunteers who seemed pretty jazzed about helping out. Comfortably padded moms with their kids. And I got all misted up by the fact that we were all waiting there to cast our votes because we live in a democracy, and by the prideful look of people who are about to cast their votes, and by the good grace people were demonstrating by not talking politics in line. It made me feel hopeful and like I might start hugging on people. Mr. Tingle restrained me.

Forgive the blubber. But I’ve been so uneasy the past few weeks, it was great to feel like this. I don’t think I’ve been so in love with America since one time a few years ago when I was riding the subway out to Coney Island in fall, and I looked around the subway car, and it just seemed impossible that all these different people were assembled together, in one car, rumbling toward a rundown amusement park and an empty boardwalk.