Forgotten happenings in Gary...

Somehow I forgot two of the most moving moments in Gary, when I helped one elderly (black) woman and another disabled (black) woman who had trouble writing help fill out absentee ballot forms (both were already registered).

The first was this lady who was born in 1922 and goes to the polls every year, but she doesn't get around so well, so she figured she'd just vote absentee and apply for a ballot using the forms we were carrying around.

(One of the conditions for voting absentee is being over 65 years old.)

After I filled it out for her, she signed and dated it with trouble, and then I had to fill out a mini-affadavit at the bottom of the form swearing that I helped fill out the form in good conscience and that the person was a registered Indiana voter to the best of my knowledge. It doesn't seem so big now, but it made realize how much responsibility it was and how official it was to go around signing my name on forms when I was signing up voters, that this was a federal process I could be held accountable for.

The one lady was very sweet. Her husband had passed (that's the way she said it, "he passed five years ago"), but his glasses were still on the kitchen table, so when she sat down and realized she had left her glasses in the other room, she was like, "But my husband always left his glasses here, thankfully", so she took up these thick glasses with thick black frames that were much too big for her and put them on to sign her name to the form.

She was also saying that 2008 is a year that's seen a lot of changes, with Obama being the Democratic nominee and Palin being the GOP VP nominee, and what with the flooding that happened recently, even though God had promised that it wouldn't.

All her furniture was covered in plastic, too.

The other lady was on oxygen and goes for dialysis, so she requested a ballot since she's disabled. She had just moved back from Georgia like a week ago to live with her daughter and help her and her granddaughter out, and she sat down with me to fill out her registration and absentee ballot forms despite the chaos that was happening with this one-and-a-half year old running around. I kept apologizing for having the forms take so long to fill out, and she was like, "No, thank you for coming here and helping me!"

Also, when I was talking with that one (black) security guard before the day started, he for some reason was telling us about how back when probation used to be on the 8th floor of the bank building (the building his store was in), Thursday used to be pedophile day, so you'd see all these pedophiles drifting through the building entrance or stopping through the party store, and some of them were teenagers who were both underage but had been fucking each other.