We walked to the town office, our polling place. All of three and a half blocks.

You come in and face the five election judges seated at the table. You know four of them by name. The first announces each of us, one by one, and our voter numbers, to the judge seated beside her. And they each highlight our names off their respective computer printouts, writing in our voter numbers.

Handed a black marker and a ballot within its protective cover, you head off to a booth. Or, like one fellow in the corner, you use the top of the grand piano.

As we are leaving after hand-inking our ballots and feeding them into the hungry machine, the wife is delayed, getting a phone number from a fellow voter who has some youngsters that we want to get into the paper, in uniform, for the food drive in two weeks. Then delayed again as we encounter another couple coming in to vote. The other woman has some photos with kids in them that the town wants to identify for the museum, and has been trying to get the wife to come by and name the ones she knows.

"Rhonda [x] will be number 193," the first election judge announces to the second.

"She's not at the table, yet," the second judge objects.

"Rhonda! Get over here and vote!" the first judge orders.

The conversation about photos is abruptly halted, and so, eldest son having finished with his balloting, we leave.