What follows is a primer on voting in 2020. It’s based on California law, but options are given for everyone. I hope it’s helpful.

First: Where to get information.

Your first asset is your computer and your search engine. Just Google how to vote in your state.

Your next assets are your county clerk’s office, your city’s municipal offices, and various voting organizations. The simplest is the League of Women Voters which provides all the information you could want and various forms of help. And your local public library.

Public libraries are, by definition, available to all people, if they are open, and they may not be due to the COVID emergency. They are a huge resource that we don’t often think of in this day of online searches. But a call to your local public library will get you the information you need, whether regarding voting, COVID closures, or any other issue. In addition to reference librarians, public libraries usually have computers that can be used without cost (NOTE: such computers are not private), and many other sources of information.

We no longer have phonebooks in big cities, but I believe you can still find them in smaller cities and rural areas. In any phonebook, you can find the number and street address of the closest library.

All right, let’s get started: I am providing primarily information for California. It is a good start for information about your state, but remember, there are several areas of difference among states.

Who can vote?

Here is a website which gives the requirements for voting state by state: https://www.usvotefoundation.org/vote/sviddomestic.htm

In California, you must be:
• a citizen of the United States (whether birth or naturalized),
• a resident of California,
• be at least 18 years of age on Election Day (this year, November 3),
• not in prison or jail or on parole for a felony conviction,
• not having been found mentally incompetent by a court.

THERE ARE NO OTHER REQUIREMENTS. Let me repeat that. THERE ARE NO OTHER REQUIREMENTS.

NOTE: If your voting rights have been revoked due to one of the above issues, you can get your voting rights restored in several ways, but that is beyond the scope of this post. I suggest you ask Google how to restore your voting rights. Or your friendly neighborhood librarian.

There are some states that have other requirements, or there are variations on such requirements as age. Some states require an ID to vote. Except for the very first time you vote in person in California, no ID will be requested because your information will be on file.

How do I vote?

You must register to vote. You may register as a Republican, a Democrat, Independent, or without claiming an affiliation. If you believe you are registered, go to http://www.vote.org and find out if you truly are. I don’t know how to check on registration without access to a computer, but I would imagine if you went to or called the Board of Elections you could find out.

Computer databases can be tricky things, plus there are anecdotal statements out there floating around that your registration to vote can disappear without you being aware of it. Please check your registration status immediately.

If you have not registered before, or if you just reached 18, or if you just moved to California or to any other state, please read on. If you are 17 but will be 18 by Election Day, you can pre-register.

Okay, how do I register? And by when?

You may register on-line or by mail. In California, you may request a form and either mail it or hand it in personally at the Board of Elections. Easiest, of course, is online and it takes much less time.

To register online in California, type in RegisterToVote.ca.gov which will provide you with all needed information. Normally, whatever your state, all you need to do is so type into your search engine: how do I register to vote in [name of state].

You need to give them (in the online form) your Driver’s License number, or if you don’t have one, you can get (and should have) an official state ID. You get this at the DMV and for all identification purposes it is valid in the US. You will need to give permission for the state to use the DMV stored digital signature, and the last four digits of your SS number.

If you don’t want to do this, the other option is a mail-in registration. The information required is given on the same web page.

(From the California web page on voting:)
Use the California voter registration form
You can also register to vote using the California voter registration form or obtain a form at your local library, U.S. Post Office, or Department of Motor Vehicles offices. Be sure to read the instructions carefully and fill it out completely. Send the completed form to your county elections official. To register by mail, the form must be postmarked by Monday, October 19.
Use the National Voter Registration Form
1. Print and fill out the National Voter Registration Form.
2. Box 6 – ID Number: When you register to vote, you must provide your California driver’s license or California identification card number, if you have one. If you do not have a driver’s license or ID card, you must provide the last four digits of your Social Security number (SSN). If you do not include this information, you will be required to provide identification when you vote.
3. Box 7 – Choice of Party: California does NOT require that you register with a party to participate in partisan primary elections. However some parties do not allow unaffiliated voters to participate in their party’s presidential, local, or county committee primary elections.
4. Box 8 – Race or Ethnic Group: Leave blank. This information is not required.
5. Review the “Who can vote?” section above and check that you’re eligible.
6. Sign the form.
7. Send the completed form to your local election official. To register by mail, the form must be postmarked by Monday, October 19, 2020.
8. If you are registering to vote for the first time in your jurisdiction and are mailing this registration application, Federal law requires you to show proof of identification the first time you vote. Proof of identification includes: A current and valid photo identification or A current utility bill, bank statement, government check, paycheck or government document that shows your name and address. More information here.

(Back to me.)

In California, you can get the form at the Post Office, the local DMV, or the library, all of which may be difficult in this time of COVID. If you have access, even occasionally, to a computer, I recommend using the online registration process. It is simple and private and safe. If you can’t, you can get the forms as above, and submit them at the time or to the address given on the form.

To request a paper voter registration application be mailed to you, please call (800) 345-VOTE(8683) or email Elections Division staff. Considering current difficulties, I would suggest you do this right away.

The primary address of the Elections Division of the Secretary of State of California is:

Mailing Address
Elections Division
1500 11th Street, 5th Floor
Sacramento, CA 95814
Phone Number & Email
Phone: (916) 657-2166
Fax: (916) 653-3214
I have not used the address above or the email or phone, but I would imagine at this time they are very busy.

MAJOR NOTE: THE LAST DATE TO REGISTER FOR THE UPCOMING ELECTION ON NOVEMBER 3, 2020 IS OCTOBER 19, 2020. YOU CAN GET A “PROVISIONAL REGISTRATION”AT A POLLING PLACE IN CALIFORNIA WHEN YOU GO TO VOTE, BUT YOU WILL NOT GET A MAIL-IN BALLOT AND MUST GO TO YOUR LOCAL POLLING PLACE.

(Again, from the California website:)

Same Day Voter Registration, known as Conditional Voter Registration in state law, is a safety net for Californians who miss the deadline to register to vote or update their voter registration information for an election.
Eligible citizens who need to register or re-register to vote within 14 days of an election, can complete this process to register and vote at their county elections office, polling place, or vote center. Their ballots will be processed and counted once the county elections office has completed the voter registration verification process.
Visit caearlyvoting.sos.ca.gov for a list of early voting locations where you can complete the Same Day Voter Registration Process.
Need to register on Election Day? Use our polling place lookup tool to find your local polling location.
Have additional questions about locations where you can complete the Same Day Voter Registration process? Contact your county elections office
(Back to me.)
NOTE: The Board of Elections will match your signature, whether on a mail-in ballot or in person, to your DMV signature OR to the signature you provide when you register to vote by mail.

NOTE AGAIN: The issue here is to prove your residency in California and that you are a citizen (via the SS number). THERE IS NO OTHER PURPOSE.

NOTE THRICE: In regard to the National voter registration form, please check with your Board of Elections, DMV, or Post Office in your state to see what information your state requires. The above highlighted information applies to California.

Special Circumstances

College Students and Voters Living Abroad
If you are a Californian living away from home while attending a college, trade school or technical school, or a voter living temporarily outside the United States, please see College Students and Voters Living Abroad
Basically, there is NO difference in California law between an “absentee ballot” and a “mail-in ballot”. If you are a California resident but live outside the state temporarily, or a college student ditto, you will need a computer to go to the main website listed above to request a mail-in ballot.
Are You Already Registered to Vote?
To find out if you are currently registered to vote, visit Check Status of Your Voter Registration.
When to Re-Register to Vote
You need to re-register to vote when:
• You change your name, or
• You change your political party choice, or
• You change your address
As a California voter, be aware that local elections in some areas are held on dates that do not coincide with statewide election dates. The 15-day close of registration deadline for these local elections varies depending on the actual date of the election. If you need to know a deadline for a local election, contact your county elections office or visit County Administered Elections.
California Motor Voter
The California Motor Voter program is making registering to vote at the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) more convenient. Eligible applicants completing a driver license, identification (ID) card or change of address transaction online, by mail or in person at the DMV, will be automatically registered to vote by the California Secretary of State, unless they choose to opt out of automatic voter registration. For more information, visit California Motor Voter
Okay, I’m registered. How do I vote?

Mail-in ballots in California are supposed to be sent out October 5, 2020. My local mail carrier tells me that they should arrive in voters’ mailboxes within a week. Please ask your mail carrier if you don’t get your ballot in a timely manner.

Please register before then, at least a week before, to give yourself the best assurance that you will receive one. When you register, you will receive, hopefully timely, a card stating that you are a registered voter.

Technically, you may register up to and including Election Day as noted above. If you go to your polling place and you haven’t registered or it can’t be found, you can register there and cast a Provisional Ballot. If this is your situation, make sure you take with you ID (driver’s license or California ID), plus something (printed utility bills are the best here) to prove you live where you say you do. You will also need to do this if this is the first time you’re voting.

However, this year being the carnival ride it is, I would urge you to register now. That means today if you haven’t already registered. If you know you have, check it (see above). I would also urge you to NOT to wait until November 3 to vote, even if you wish to vote in person.

If you wish to vote in person, you can early vote any time between October 5 and November 2. Please check via the Board of Elections or online to determine which polling place is yours (based on address) and whether and during what hours it will be open for voting after October 5. Make sure your registration is active before you do this or it will be an exercise in frustration. NOTE: Not all polling places will be open for early voting. Please check with the California Department of State.

If you want to vote by mail (in spite of everything this is still my plan), fill out your ballot and seal it and DO NOT FORGET TO SIGN THE ENELOPE WHERE STATED. This signature is matched against the signature provided by the DMV or by you on your registration application.

To give it the best chance of arriving while it still can be counted, you can do any of the following:

• Go to your local Post Office and ask that the envelope be postmarked right while you’re there. By law, any mail-in ballot or absentee ballot MUST be counted if it is postmarked on November third or BEFORE.
• To make assurance double sure, sacrifice two stamps (the postage must be 55 cents for the size and weight of the ballot) so that it cannot be mailed bulk rate but must be mailed first class.
• If you are as paranoid as I am, you can at that time mail it registered mail, return receipt requested, which is an additional charge and a nuisance, but the return receipt is postmarked when it is mailed to you so you can prove to yourself that your ballot arrived.

California State Government has a website that provides all polling places and all locations of ballot drop-off boxes. These are not, so far as I can tell, currently up and running as the Board of Elections is searching for safe polling places. My second plan for myself is to fill out my ballot and take it physically over to the drop off box closest to me (probably in a fire house or some other secured location), drop it in and then give a big sigh of relief. The sooner you do this after you receive your ballot, the surer you can be that it will be counted before or on November 3.

I want to say good luck, but this shouldn’t be a matter of luck. If you have special issues that I haven’t covered, the California Secretary of State website is a real resource. Plus, the website allows you to use a language other than English if that’s necessary.

The franchise is a basic citizen’s right and duty in the United States and it has never been more important than now to make your voice heard. Please remember that your local, county, and state governments are run by YOUR elected officials, so this is not merely a matter of the Presidential or other national elections. Your vote can significantly impact the way you live in your neighborhood as much as it does the national government.

Please vote early to make sure it is counted.

Thanks for taking the time to read this and I hope you find it helpful.

Today is the Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere on our planet.  Among many things, today neo-Druids celebrate the returning of the sun at henges throughout the British Isles, but most particularly at Stonehenge.

(NOTE: I originally wrote this in 2015. I’m sending it out again in celebration of the Solstice, but I am making myself a promise that I will post more often on my blog, so perhaps next year it will be a different posting about the fascination of the Solstice.)

But the Winter Solstice happens all over the Northern Hemisphere and is celebrated in many different ways. Christmas, Kwanzaa, Saturnalia, Festivus (thank you, Jerry Seinfeld), all base their festivals and celebrations on the Winter Solstice. You may note that the date, December 21, doesn’t seem to match up precisely exactly to the celebrations. Well, calendars drift over time (the Earth takes more or less – which is where a lot of the drift comes from – 365 and 1/4 days to travel around the sun). In another post – someday – I may even go into how humans created calendars and why (other living creatures either have internal calendars and/or clocks or do not seem to find the need to know that they’re running away from that bear on 10:35 am on November 3). It is probably in this world we’re attempting to live that even while (whew!) the earth moving around the sun may precess a bit over time, it still hits the point where the North Pole is farthest away from the sun every year on the 21st. At its simplest, this means that the day time (when the sun is illuminating a wedge of the planet) is the shortest of the year, while the night of the 21st is the longest period of darkness of the year.  (NOTE: The Southern Hemisphere has its Winter Solstice in June of the calendar the world is currently using – the December 21st date is the Southern Hemisphere’s Summer Solstice, which simply means the longest daylight hours and shortest nighttime hours).

And that shortest day business is why we “celebrate” the Winter Solstice. In this context, “celebrate” means doing our animistic magical best to make the sun come back.

Which is what the Winter Solstice has always been about.  When we were first getting started as a species, perhaps it didn’t matter.  Perhaps the immediate, the now, of life was all that could matter.  Can we run down that gazelle?  Are these roots edible, not poisonous, let alone palatable?  Is that fruit ripe yet and have the birds and the chimpanzees left us enough?  Is that highly smelly (and they are) lion we know is napping on the other side of the hillside going to wake up hungry or can we stay here for another sleep?   But after many thousands of years, we began to grow things on our own instead of merely finding them.  We began to raise the sweeter-natured (and dumber) babies of various kinds of useful animals to have a portable pantry instead of always having to go out and find something to eat.  And we began to notice that during the autumn of the year, the sun spent less time every day shining down on us.  More, the farther north we wandered, the shorter the day, the longer the night during the fall.

And, worst of all, at some time during a period of time that came to be known as a month (meaning then and now the circuit of the moon around the earth), the name of which month came to be known as December (much, much, much, much later – and note it means in Latin the tenth month, not the twelfth and that, too, we’ll get into in a post about calendars), the sun seemed as if it was going to disappear completely, that it was going to keep on spending less time above the horizon and more below until it never came back.  Never. Came. Back.  Imagine that, if you can or will.  The people (not the Celts or the Druids by the way) who raised the henges, the priests whose job it was to bless crops and domestic animals, the populations wandering ever northward as the ice sheets receded, were pretty good jack-leg, practical astronomers, but they had no way of knowing that the sun appeared and disappeared simply because the earth rotated on an axis and revolved around that sun.  The didn’t know that the sun wasn’t doing the dancing, the disappearing and reappearing act, their own solid earth was.  In growing panic, they would watch the sun shine less and less each day.  All the Gods help us, it might at some point, perhaps because of the sinfulness of human beings (that has never changed), not come back at all.  And they were definitely smart enough to realize that without the sun nothing on earth could survive.

We mustn’t think that because the sun always came back no matter what that these tribes of human beings were silly or stupid.  After all, in this 21st century there were quite a few people who believed the world would come to an end when the particular long-count calendar the so-called experts were interpreting ended (ah, that would be this morning about 4:00 a.m. in 2012) and we’re, after all, 21st century humans living in a highly technological civilization.  And we must remember, too, that life was usually short and a generation was considered (and still is for that matter) to be about 25 years.  Even with bards and priests and all those trained to remember the history of the tribe and the knowledge that had been gleaned over many generations, the memory faded of the days when there were no priests praying throughout the longest night so the sun would peep over the horizon again.  The priests had always prayed, always danced, always sung, begging the sun to come back, and it would always be necessary.  (This was a fairly handy situation for the priests, to my cynical (realistic?) eyes, since it certainly meant for job security for those priests.)

We don’t actually know what the huge stone circles were for.  The tribes who made them are long gone and their function and structure changed over time as new tribes came in and took over the henges (which is what the British call the stone circles).  But there are many human-made monuments, monoliths, and cut-outs in certain hills (called granges in Celtic Ireland) all over the world (except in many cases, for reasons that shall be left as an exercise for the class, immediately around the equator where the monuments seem to our eyes to be designed more for the measuring of star movement) whose function makes no sense to us until we watch the moment of sunrise on the day after the Solstice and see a beam of light hitting one particular spot in the monument.  The moment the sun comes back.  The moment of relief, of success, of validation of nights of prayer, of dance, of songs of praise.  It is really a several-day vigil, for the Solstice itself is the longest night and shortest day.  And the monuments are, if not designed so, definitely able to show the incremental increase in daylight after the Solstice each day.  After perhaps a week, the priests would be able to announce, in perfect truth, that the sun was coming back and that in a few cycles of the moon it would be time to plant once more.  They would also, of course, announce that their prayers and the sacrifices of the tribe were the reason for this bounty.  The great god behind the sun was pleased.

One of these days, one of these millenia, we hope many millenia from now, the sun may change from a beneficent god who makes life possible on our whirling ball of water and earth into something different.  It may explode.  It may become red and colder, making the earth unfit for habitation unless (and this too is possible) we have changed to fit the new circumstances (we have done so before).  It may wink out one day.  Stars do that, and our sun is merely a star among the billions of stars in our galaxy, amidst the billions of galaxies in our universe.  But until that day, the Winter Solstice will happen in the Northern Hemisphere every year, just as it does six months later in the Southern Hemisphere every year, and the sun will come back to make spring possible, to make food possible, to make life possible.  And the winter will be gone, one more time.

So this day is a marker of hope, still and forever while we live only here on this planet and are as we are, utterly dependent on the sun for everything.  Everything.  Think about that for a moment, this round pale ball we should never look at directly that rises every day and sets every day as our solid-feeling planet (okay, except in certain places like California that wiggle every once a while) rotates and revolves, is the only reason this ball we live on is a planet, the only reason it has water, the only reason it can grow things, the only reason that we exist, that anything on Earth exists.

And we should, I think, even in our sophistication, give a prayer of thanks that this be so.  Religions throughout the history of the world have done so.  Almost all of them have called the celebration of the Winter Solstice a feast of light in one way or the other.  In Jewish tradition, there is Hanukkah, a celebration of a time when the perpetual lamp in the Inner Temple could have gone out but did not because of a miracle.  In Christianity, there are many references to light and the returning of light.  The Christmas tree began as a way of celebrating Christ’s eternal power and meaning.  The evergreen does not lose its leaves in the winter and the lights we put on it symbolize “the light of the world.” Christ, who was born, or so say the priests, on a day less than a week after the Solstice when it could be and was proved that the sun was coming back for another year has always been associated with light.  (That Jesus was probably born in the spring because the shepherds were out with their flocks, thus, at lambing time, is merely a more likely supposition and has very little to do with the symbolism of the timing of his birth.  Many religious scholars and historians say that the Christian Church moved the feast of Christ’s birth to Solstice in order to pre-empt the Roman celebration of Saturnalia, which was yet another religious feast day celebrating the Solstice.)  Other religions have similar feasts.  And our old friend the Mayan long-count calendar begins and ends on the Winter Solstice.

(Just to be clear, the Mayans, who were apparently brilliant astronomers, had many calendars that counted different cycles, some as short as a few months, some as long as millions of years.  The long-count calendar that got some people in such an uproar a few years ago measured a kind of medium-long cycle.  Some of these different measurings of time began and ended on the Winter Solstice.  I don’t know if all do, and at least one source I’ve read said the ending of each calendar was for symmetry’s sake and the beginning of each calendar’s measuring period would be a Solstice primarily for convenience because this is a date easy to pin down. I know very little about the reasons for these differently-counted calendars of theirs, and anthropologists, while learning more all the time, are still more or less at the beginning of figuring this out. Wikipedia has a very interesting discussion of Mayan calendars. Just use the “search” function.)

For the time being (and I recommend without stint W.H. Auden’s long poem “For the Time Being” about what happens to each of us during and because of Christmas, which is my own tradition of celebrating the return of light to the world), the Solstice is happening once more.  The sun will come back after this shortest night of the year.  The world will rumble on and most of us will try to make the best of it and some of us, sadly, will still try to make the worst of it.   In honor of the Solstice, in honor of all the people throughout the history of our species who have prayed and danced and sung the sun back above the horizon, this year I will try to see past the Christmas tree and the presents and the special foods and the candles and twinkly sparkly lights all over the place to a calmer center point where the grand dance of our home bringing back the sun to warm us and nurture us continues.  And I will give praise and thanks.

Or at least, pondering my mother (that’s her above, with me, a photo taken by my father). She lived to be eighty years old. She gave birth to me, her third and last child, when she was 35. My two brothers, one sixteen years older and one eleven years older than me, both from a different father than mine, I barely knew until I was an adult.  She loved me. I do know that. And she did her best to raise me, not just let me scramble on my own. And I loved her and I still miss her in many ways.

And it wasn’t easy for her. I wasn’t easy for her. My father died when I was eleven and my happy childhood – and it was happy – disappeared at just that moment. My mother loved him enough to change her life for him and her fury and chagrin and misery at his death never really left her. She was 46, she was homeless (although I didn’t realize it at the time), and she was desperate. That summer, my father had quit his job and my parents had put all our things in storage. We took a long driving vacation, ending in Wisconsin where we stayed with friends in the town of Appleton. My dad’s plan was to go back to the University (at Madison) and get his Ed.D. To this day I have no idea what my mother really thought about that idea, but pondering it now, it can’t have been fully what she wanted even if she agreed. I don’t have any inkling that she didn’t agree. She and Daddy had a lot of fights – more like spats, I’d say now looking back – and they both seemed to enjoy the process. A friend of mine now, after I’d described my memory of one of the occasions of watching Daddy watch Mama slamming around the kitchen, laughed and said “foreplay”. Being ten at the time and it was an innocent time, I had no idea, but listening to my friend laughing, I realized that must have been so. They deeply and physically loved each, but I would bet now, looking back, that Mama spent a lot of her time being talked into something she probably didn’t really want to do. That reads way too strangely in our modern day awareness of coercion and abuse. As carefully and objectively as I can (which isn’t very of course, I was a child and a happy child of happy parents), I don’t see my mother putting up with anything, nor my father insisting on anything that wasn’t positive and good. That said, my memories seem to center around my father proposing, creating, organizing – deciding – and my mother reacting, negatively, positively, having some but not much veto power, and finally and often being happy the way things turned out because she agreed with my father’s ideas.

But of course not that time. The damned fool hadn’t listened to his doctors, and up and died on her, of a sudden heart attack (okay, there are mostly no un-sudden heart attacks), left her, an eleven-year-old daughter, and a dog stranded in Appleton, Wisconsin, staying with friends that, face it, weren’t that good friends, and no actual clue what to do. He didn’t have a will, he didn’t have insurance, there was some money in savings and he had a military pension that stopped when he died. Face it, as both my mother and I had to  do over time, although I think we both resisted with all our might and main, my father was a grasshopper, a dreamer, a feckless happy man who was convinced that everything would work out. And it always did – until it didn’t.

My eldest brother, then an adult with a good job in San Diego, took leave, flew with us to Washington, D.C. for my dad’s funeral at Arlington, and then drove us back to Colorado. And then my mother had no blooming idea what to do.

What she did was find us a house to rent in Estes Park (cheaper rent for more and better space than any other place she looked) and got the furniture out of storage (the movers had come before she’d been able to defrost and scrub the refrigerator and I remember our mutual horror when we opened the damned thing in the new house), and set up to begin a new and very unwelcome life without the central reason for living her life.

Looking back now, I’m startled to realize it never occurred to me until today to wonder why she didn’t go “home”, back to Oneida, New York, where she’d lived until after WWII, married once, where her sons were born, where her father still lived. Or back even further, to her relatives in Richmond, Virginia. Why did she strike out all alone, except for a sullen daughter and a spoiled cocker spaniel, to a new home in a place of happy memories (Daddy had loved visiting Estes Park and it had been a favorite picnic destination, but so far as I know, he didn’t have any idea of ever living there) where she literally didn’t know a soul. There is so much about my mother, about her thoughts and dreams and plans, I never knew.

And that is a lot to ponder on this Mother’s Day. Does it mean that with childhood selfishness (and later, adolescent angst) I simply assumed she was on this earth to be my mother, to keep me from doing stupid (or wonderful, sometimes) things, bedevil and nag me, insist I learned what she felt to be important for a young lady to know? Or does it mean that in spite of her voluble tongue and her quick and verbally violent temper, she never really revealed, at least to me, what she deeply felt about it all. It feels like a combination of those, and I suppose it was. It wasn’t until after her death that I found out from a friend of hers that she had spent all the years in between 46 and 80 in a rage at God and at my father for dying. It made perfect sense. She and I had talked when I was growing up and after I’d grown up (sort of) that she had met my father when she was fifteen, that her mother (interesting, that, isn’t it? she never mentioned father ever having any say in her life except for the unforgivable moment when she did marry and her father refused to let her take any money at all into the marriage) forbade her from seeing him because he was unemployed (and this was the depths of the Great Depression), and that she, in spite and fury, married the next man who asked her just to get out of the house.

Odd isn’t it how generations repeat? Her mother had done the exact same thing, married my grandfather, and they definitely lived unhappily ever after, or at least until my grandmother died, tragically, of peritonitis when she was 38. Thirty-eight! And my mother couldn’t then even have what her mother had forbidden her to have – she was married to someone else, with a son, and my father had gone back into the army, and in a spite of his own, married someone else. So there they were, stuck. At least for a while.

During the war years, my mother and her first husband became estranged for reasons she never explained, and my dad came back into her life. I have a bracelet he bought for her in Persia (Iran now) – he was stationed there as an officer of the Quartermaster Corps helping to build a highway across Iran to get materiel to Russia during the buildup to D-Day. The bracelet was inscribed “Mary”, and “Art” (their names), and the year 1943. She never explained the bracelet either and oddly she never wore it, but it stayed among her treasures where I found it after she died. In any event, in 1946, she got a Nevada divorce, Daddy divorced his then wife, and they married. After his retirement from the Army, they moved to San Francisco where they had an apartment in the same building as Daddy’s brother Jack and he planned to go to some college there with an eventual idea of going to law school. He had been retired from the Army for permanent disability resulting from wounds he suffered in a Bedouin attack. I’m leaving so much out of this account, but it’s a book, not an essay – and that’s only the parts I know.

I was born two years later (I’ll let my readers do the math) when they lived in Greeley, Colorado. What happened between those two places and times I’m unsure of, although my brother David, who lived with them until he was eighteen and went to college and later joined the Navy, has some wonderful stories about those years after a glass of wine or three . . . .

In any event, my dad wanted to get an education and he had finally decided he wanted to teach, and so the three of them and a cocker spaniel moved to Greeley. He went to the then titled Colorado State College of Education (now the University of Northern Colorado, but it is now and was then the state “normal” school – that is, the college that was designed by the legislature to train and educate future teachers), and that’s where my brother went to his last year of high school and his first year of college before transferring to Colorado University in Boulder, and that’s where I was born, while my parents were living on his Army pension and while he established residency and was earning his BA in Education. After he got his MA at the University of Wisconsin in Madison (my first memories are from living there), he started his career as a high school principal at the high school in Evans, which is a smaller town just outside of Greeley. We lived there so happily, simple family life with a cocker spaniel (there was always a cocker spaniel, just not always the same one), sitting down to dinner at six, bedtime for me at 7:30, picnics in Estes Park, trips to the A&W Drive-In after supper for a root bear float, drive-in movies, me running wild in the summertime. A red letter day always when David visited, first from the Navy and then later from his time getting his own MA in mathematics at Colorado University. We were happy.

And I remember my mother being truly happy to be a housewife (this is definite – she never liked working outside the home), sewing, cooking, reading (constantly), reading to me (constantly), insisting I practice my piano (I hated practicing, I was a fidgety child), house training the pup, being chivied by my dad into going to school (we were back in Greeley, so to CSCE) to get her BA (he did that by saying he knew she couldn’t do it, which made her mad). I remember her teaching me to cook and to sew, I remember the time I was whining about having to practice and she said she’d practice for me if I did the ironing for her and I called her bluff. (I discovered but was too stubborn to admit that I hated ironing worse than practicing the piano, with the results that she probably had in mind: I learned how to iron really damned well (although I never liked it and haven’t ironed anything in years) and I learned the real lesson, that if you don’t practice, you get Hail Columbia from your piano teacher, which is no fun.) That also had the unexpected benefit of her getting back to playing the piano and singing popular songs with Daddy.

She loved getting lots of presents on any present-giving occasion, and since they never had any real money, Daddy managed by getting multiples of small things. Sheet music for songs they both loved from the movies was one of those multiples, and I still have sheaves of old songs transposed (is that the proper word?) for the piano, with lyrics.

Was it idyllic? I have no idea. I was happy, Daddy was blissful being with her, and I know she loved him, but I found out much later how much guilt she carried around about the choices she made – both to marry somebody else while still loving him and to leave her then husband to be with my daddy.

I have so much more to say, mostly about the choices she made after he died, choices that put security first (never Daddy’s priority) and led to her marrying a third time, choices about what was best for me, which never seemed to be aligned with what I wanted or, as it turned out, genuinely needed to be the best possible me – I’m still working on that. And about that deep rage and sorrow she always carried with, let’s be honest here, so much grace. She had that. Grace. And she was charming. Everybody said so even if a daughter wasn’t likely to see it or appreciate it. And I did finally see that, not in photographs (she did not photograph well and hated having her picture taken), but in how friends, acquaintances, strangers would simply light up in her presence throughout her life. And she was tough in a very lady-like way, making decisions, not going home to her family (even though she never could understand why I never came home to her after great pieces of my life fell apart), making the best of things, and never letting on (that was the Southerner in her) any of the ugly little secrets best kept swept under the rug.

And she was ruthless sometimes. In order to be with my Dad without having to have her choice made public (in New York at that time, the only grounds for divorce was adultery, not even insanity or abuse could get you out of a marriage, which led to many people making up things to get divorced), which she could not have borne, she agreed that her then husband could have custody of the children so long as he agreed to her getting a Nevada divorce. My brother David was asked by the court and told the court he wanted to stay with our mother, but my brother Robert was too young and stayed with his father. Or so I was told. She and Robert (called Chaz) never connected until his father had died and he was into adulthood. He wrote her and that started a correspondence (he and David had maintained a connection over the years, thank heavens), but Chaz and our mother never actually met – the guilt cut her too deeply. But she made the choice and she lived with it.

She cut my father’s family completely out of her (and thus my) life after Daddy died, and she more or less lost contact – and the choice was hers – with most of her family. She made up her mind and she refused to look back until she was old and the anger and sadness she had lived with silently sometimes overwhelmed her. She was ruthless with herself too. I’ll close this exceedingly partial (in both senses of the word) essay with the close of her life. She was sick and tired, as she tried to laughingly put it, of being sick and tired. She’d had it. She was hospitalized once again for the always recurring hiatal hernias that plagued her last years, and simply would not put up with it. The on-call doctor and the nurses told me after she died that she had simply pulled the IVs out of her arm and folded her hands and turned her face to the wall and willed herself to die. I didn’t make it back to Estes Park in time to say goodbye and that was so damned hard. But I guess she knew I would have done my damnedest to talk her out of dying and she didn’t want to live any more. She didn’t see the point and she cut to the chase as she always did.

And now, pondering on this Mother’s Day the mother she was, the mother she wanted to be, and the mother I wanted her to be and never really got, that she was far more complex as a human being than I was ever able to see. I don’t really have the resources to find out what was in her heart all that time, only the resources to find out the facts that can be found on paper and in records, and that’s, I realize more and more, not at all who she was. On this Mother’s Day, I salute and remember with tears and a little laughter and a lot of complicated love, the mother she was, the woman she was, the human being she was, and wish with a heartfelt longing that I could actually know who she was.

Yesterday approximately half of registered voters in this country went to the polls (or, previously, as I did, mailed in their ballots). Half. Of those who voted and by a narrow margin, Hillary Clinton gained more votes.  Because, however, the United States does not elect its Presidents by direct popular vote, but by a cumbersome and possibly outdated process called the Electoral College, sufficient electoral votes were awarded to Donald Trump for him to be elected President of the United States of America.

This morning, when the race was called, Ms. Clinton conceded and Mr. Trump gave a speech in which the hate-filled rhetoric of the campaign was noticeably absent. Later, Hillary Clinton gave a gracious speech, calling for the country to rally behind its new President and President Obama invited Mr. Trump to the White House to discuss the transition.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party kept its majorities in both the Senate and the House, which will provide a clear field and no possible obstructions for Mr. Trump’s goals for this country, at least for two years.

Also, in several key states, if those who voted for Stein or Johnson had voted for Clinton, the electoral votes of that state would have gone to her.

And, in something resembling a huge irony, California legalized the recreational use of Marijuana, as did several other states.

And, in something that perhaps was a cosmic joke but more probably was sheer coincidence, the electricity in three buildings at Park La Brea went out for perhaps two hours. One of those buildings was the one in which I rent an apartment. I was irresistibly reminded of a quote often stated during World War I – “When the Lights Go Out All Over Europe”.

So much is fact.

But the feelings of loss, of fear, of premonitions of disaster, they linger within me. Perhaps my reaction to the election is overblown, perhaps the checks and balances built into our system of governance, perhaps even Mr. Trump’s own need to be the savior of the country he called himself during the campaign, will ameliorate at least some of his oft-stated goals.

But inside I have a feeling that Leonard Cohen wrote in a song called “Everybody Knows”: “Everybody got this broken feeling, like their father or their dog just died.” I can’t get that our of my head or my heart.

Inside me, the feeling is leaden and sad and, yes, broken, and I think it has something to do with what were obviously mistaken feelings I held and would still love to hold (but no longer can) about my beloved country. There has been a great deal of analysis and head-scratching and astonishment, lots of conviction of disaster, lots of “broken feeling(s)”, as those of us who proudly proclaim ourselves liberals try to understand what just happened. What seems relatively clear is that the last eight years have left a significant section of the population of the United States convinced that their country, the country they grew up expecting to live in, a country wherein they were welcome, a country they believed to the bone was theirs and designed for them, was no longer theirs but was being given away to — and insert your own buzzword here — people who were of a different color or religion or had a different set of values. This section of the populace felt deeply that they were being left behind and at the same time were being pushed into a world they did not recognize nor want to live in. They no longer were the masters of this country, but its victims.  And Mr. Trump spoke to that sense of loss, bitterness and rage, to such an extent that his supporters seemed not to (and probably genuinely did not) care about campaign statements proved to be lies almost as soon as he uttered them and then switched to something else when the wind of citizen reaction blew in a different direction. It is part of my sense of shock today to discover that a significant percentage of women voted for Mr. Trump, either not caring or not believing in Mr. Trump’s self-stated views on the function of women in society.

In my naiveté, I was proud of how as a nation we were moving forward toward diversity and inclusion and considering everybody within or outside our borders to be people with as much right to be here, as much right to be considered individuals of worth, as any of our “founding fathers (and mothers)”. But it seems apparent to me now that a significant part of our citizens did not feel that this was progress, felt instead that, just as Mr. Trump told them, if somebody else got a piece of the pie, there was less for them.  It’s called, in game theory, a “zero-sum game” and it means just what it sounds like – that all the things wanted or needed by someone are a pie, finite and encircled with walls, and if somebody else gets a piece of that pie, there is that much less for those who prior to that time were convinced that the pie was theirs and theirs alone.

So that’s one theory of how this could happen. Another is simpler and uglier – misogyny and racism and xenophobia. Those are labels that are rejected by most of Mr. Trump’s supporters even as they embrace the fact of their continued existence. Some of us thought those ugly values were finally, finally melting from the body politic. It is a horrid realization that they are not. Not only do they still exist but can now be openly once again celebrated.

But right now I’m not thinking about the theories of why it happened. I am only thinking of what will happen now. And I am frightened and sad.  You see, I do not completely believe in what others who voted for Ms. Clinton are clinging to in order to try to make themselves feel better. That it can’t happen here. That we have checks and balances and a constitution that will hold the worst of what Mr. Trump has clearly stated he wants behind a barrier of reason and logic and precedent. That we cannot compare ourselves to the Germany that woke up one day to discover that Herr Hitler, a buffoon they thought, was Chancellor, and then they woke up another day to discover he had dissolved the Reichstag and declared himself Führer.  That can’t happen here. But what I know to be true is that this was said – and believed – in Weimar Germany. And it did happen there.

But wait, there’s more. Mr. Trump is first, last and always a businessman. And anything that interferes with deals and with profits and with the protection of profits must be discarded. I am very frightened by his stated belief that “global warming is a hoax” and by his stated objective that the EPA will be at the very least made smaller with a much more limited purview. People, except the very rich who somehow believe that they can avoid it or move away from it, do not want pollution, but they do not trust government to fix it. Neither does Mr. Trump. But situations like the ongoing disaster in Flint, Michigan are very difficult to fix by private means. Further, it feels to me as if when Mr. Trump looks at sacred lands or the small bits of wilderness we have left, he sees no value in unexploited land or open space. That’s a feeling I can’t back up with any facts, but it feels of a piece with his belief that global warming is not real, but is a conspiracy theory with a monetary goal that will be at his or the United States’ expense.

Further, if I understand at all the workings of his mind (and I don’t, I find his processes of thought incomprehensible), he may have a Cabinet and a set of advisors, but there is no guarantee, not even much hope, of his following their advice, whether that advice be good or ill. I believe that at this moment he is beginning to realize that the achievement of becoming President is only a starting point, and his sense of being completely central in the world will depend not on this win, but on his upcoming performance.  That may be the only hope the world has at this point.

As to the other planks in his platform, the building of walls, the desire to remove all Muslims from the country, the desire to close our borders to all, and to raise tariff walls high, the desire to dismantle certain cabinet departments, the NATO alliance, and the desire that Japan and Korea have nuclear weapons and that the United States use its nuclear weapons as a means to impose its (Mr. Trump’s) will on the world, let alone his admiration of various tyrannical leaders in the world, to say nothing of the conflation of Islam with terrorism, I cannot respond now, it saddens and enrages me too much. I can only hope, and it is a dreary and hopeless hope, that those checks and balances actually work somehow. But I don’t have much faith in checks and balances with a President, Senate and House all in the same party and with one vacancy now on the Supreme Court and at least two (much deserved after a lifetime of tireless work on behalf of this country) upcoming retirements. The make-up of the Supreme Court will be changed fundamentally and soon. And what that will mean for generations to come I can barely begin to contemplate. It is only one topic, and perhaps not the most important, but I am convinced that Roe v. Wade will be reversed, which will not mean that abortions stop; no, it will mean only that rich women can get them, and poor women will die from the butchery of illegal abortions.  I am also convinced that while the Republican-hated Obamacare (as they term it) will be dismantled as quickly as possible, there is no plan to implement anything to replace it.

It is said, and it’s true, that after a period of growth and progressive movement, there is an inevitable reaction and that is what is happening now. That’s sad enough to me, but some of the decisions made during this backlash will outlast the persons who are making them and that is terrifying.

I find all of this terrifying. The country I believe in and love seems not to be the country I believed it to be. For all of us who are mourning a huge loss, for all of us who are frightened of what this will mean, even for those of us who find the thought of a vulgarian in the White House distasteful, there are (apparently) more of us who are thrilled, who are cheering, who believe their country is theirs once more, to do with as they will. They are proud of their votes, proud and thrilled about their new President.

The speeches and statements made by President Obama and Ms. Clinton today implore all of us to recognize that Mr. Trump is the President of the United States, of all of its citizens. I cannot go there yet and may not ever be able to. I will show respect to the office of the Presidency, but I can find no good, nothing to admire, in the person who will, as of January 20, 2017, hold it. And yet, unless I can find a positive (and financially feasible) reason for leaving, this is my country too, and I won’t simply turn tail and run.

However, for the present, I am going to limit my presence on social media. I simply cannot be rational and measured right now, and I have no desire to rant and rave, no matter how deeply angry and frightened I am, and this disaster (and it is a disaster to me and to many others) makes kitten videos and pretty pictures of beautiful places seem trivial. So, perhaps to the relief of many, and the complete indifference of most, I won’t be commenting, retweeting or sharing as much if at all.

I have only three widely separated times in my life imbibed Marijuana. Now that it’s legal here, I may break that precedent.