Good Strange Things (vol. 1)

Once in a while, something magical happened. Amid the grey slog, in the middle of the trudge through the swamp, a burst of sunshine would appear, a moment infused with light and color would lift me up. Maybe it’s what happens when you work hard, or when you really need it, or in accordance with some sort of cosmic rhythm beyond my grasp- or maybe it just happens. I don’t know. I’m just glad that those moments do happen, not least because they had a funny tendency to show up when I was at some sort of low.

My car broke down (for the first, not last, time) one sunny afternoon. I was on the highway, not close to anything in particular, except for a house where no one was home. I called a towing service, and found a shady spot to wait. I had half an hour or so, and I took some time to think about the operation I was trying to create in Richmond County. I needed volunteers and I needed to up my voter registration numbers. I was short of where I wanted to be in volunteer numbers almost every day. At points I had some weekly participants who helped keep the flow a little steadier, but as a general rule I needed more volunteers than I had.

I took a minute to present my wish list to the universe. I don’t mean to get into a whole discussion about what that means, so I’ll just say this. This is not quite praying, or an attempt to make a deal with a higher force. It’s more of a “Hey universe, if you want to conspire some things in my direction, I could really use some volunteers and better voter reg numbers.” The trick to asking for something like that is to forget about it as soon as you’ve said your piece. If you hang on to your wishes, they can’t fly high enough to do anything. If this paragraph didn’t make any sense to you, don’t worry about it.

The tow truck came, and as it did I get a phone call from a woman who had gotten my name and number somehow, and wanted to volunteer. She was available to come in the very next day. Great. The rest of my day was spent dealing with my car situation and figuring out how I was going to get around until my car got fixed.

The next day I got a call as I was getting up from “Jon.” I met a lot of people and it was hard to keep track of all of them, so I pretended to know him until he told me that I didn’t. He also told me that he could bring me 40 filled-out voter registration forms that day, and that he had 200 more. Let me put this in perspective: my quota was 13 a day. I was generally happy with anything double digits for a given day. 20 or more was golden. My single day maximum was around 30- maybe lower. I was happy enough to be able to get into my office that day. To have someone hand over numbers like that out of the blue left me speechless. On top of that, when Jon came by the office to give me the forms, he gave me the names and numbers of about 10 really solid volunteers. Not every one panned out, but even 3 solids is a huge boost.

That’s how it happened so often. I would scratch and claw and grind for results, and it was never quite enough, and then someone would walk in and give me everything I needed. That happened a few times on the volunteer front, but the other two occurrences that come to mind didn’t get me any volunteers. They were strange and powerful though, so stay tuned.