LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Dear Editor, I’m right there with Joni Mitchell when I hear her sing, “It’s coming on Christmas They’re cutting down trees They’re putting up reindeer And singing songs of joy and peace Oh I wish I had a river I could skate away on” I’ve been asking myself almost every day for the last couple of weeks, “Where is that river I could skate away on?” Because almost every day there’s something new to pull my focus away from the holidays.
It’s like this every year. Once Becky and I have finally polished off the turkey soup, the turkey casserole, the turkey pot pies, and that new turkey leftover dish that we read about in the food magazines, I foolishly begin to think we can sit back for a bit, take a couple of deep breaths, and put our feet up before we have to engage with Christmas.
“But nooooooooo,” as John Belushi used to say back in the day when “Saturday Night Live” was the hottest thing on TV. Just today, the ghost of Thanksgivings past came a’haunting — a full two weeks after Thanksgiving — when the cooking staff of a great metropolitan newspaper emailed me a recipe for turkey meatballs. Do they think I’ve got any more turkey stashed away somewhere? They’ve got to be kidding. They’ve got to be kidding! They don’t think I’m trying to focus on Christmas and tuck Thanksgiving away for another year?
For us, there’s no downtime between the two holidays. It’s not quite the Christmas rush. I guess I could call it the Election Rush. For Becky, it’s her work with Centro, the Bluebonnet Lions, and of course, Blue Santa. These things just don’t happen spontaneously. They take a lot of work and planning and time.
For my end, it actually began a little before Thanksgiving when the filing period opened for folks who want to be candidates in the March primary elections. They had a 30-day filing window. A full month! Sounds like a piece of cake, but it’s not. It means building a schedule and kicking up office staffing. Of course, we wanted it to be convenient for filers. This meant adding Saturday office hours, evening office hours, and making sure somebody was available almost every day — except Sundays and Thanksgiving.
And it was the same few people, doing office duty every day because the law says only a certain few people can accept candidate applications. They worked hard. They worked smart. They scrubbed through the applications, making sure the filers had dotted every legal “I” and crossed every legal “T.” They didn’t want to see any candidates excluded for some obscure technical issue.
If they had any preferences among the candidates for the same office, they didn’t let it show. As party officials, it was important that every candidate was greeted and treated equally and professionally. The goal? To make sure voters have choices when they go to the polls in March.
Party officials are an important part of the process, but it’s the voice of the voters that counts. They will decide, with their votes in the primary election, who will be a party’s candidates in next November’s midterm elections. That’s the great beauty of the democratic process. Ultimately, the people decide.
The days could be long. In general, we didn’t know who would come into the office to file or when they’d come in. Sure, some would give us advance notice, so we’d be ready for them. Others didn’t, but they were just as welcome. And some days, nobody would come in at all. That’s when we’d try to catch up on our Christmas card writing.
But when they did come in, some came with family. Some came with friends. Some came with groups of supporters. Some came with even larger groups of supporters. Some came by themselves. For everybody, though, that meant smiles and handshakes all around — and trying to fit everyone into a camera’s viewfinder in a long, narrow conference room that puts too much distance between the photographer and the candidates. Willie and Diann made it work.
Sometimes more than one candidate showed up at the same time. That would strain the logistics a bit, but everyone was patient and, even better, it was a great opportunity to share classic political stories. Like the time a pollworker was delivering the ballot box from his polling place to the county courthouse. The problem? He seemed to have disappeared, and with him the ballots.
The drill was to get on the road as soon as the polls closed and get the ballot box back to the courthouse ASAP. Over the course of the evening, every box came back but his. Folks kept looking at their watches, wondering why it was taking so long. Was he okay? Was there a problem? Maybe extremely long lines of voters showing up just before the polls closed?
Unfortunately, nobody could reach him to find out. These were the days before everyone carried a cell phone all the time. So it was a long night at the courthouse.
Finally, somebody got through to somebody who got through to somebody else who got through to him. Turns out our pollworker stopped for dinner after closing his polling station and then decided to go home, get some rest, and deliver the ballot box in the morning. The problem? He didn’t tell anybody about his plans. Not that he should have done any of that anyway.
So the ballots were retrieved safely. They were counted. There were winners. There were losers. In most cases, gracious winners and gracious losers. There were celebrations. There were swearings-in. Then there was the hard job of governing.
Just a few years later, the cycle begins again. With the office hours, the staffing, and the forms. And the satisfaction of knowing that it’s the people who make the choices. Nobody owns an office. There is no entitlement. There is no guarantee that today’s winners won’t be tomorrow’s losers. And vice versa. And there just might be somebody whose name few know today who will finish at the top of the heap when the votes are counted next time.
Performance matters. So do new ideas and new approaches. But above all, there is the will of the people. That sets us apart from so many others. That is a gift, and at this time of year, it’s something worth remembering. If being part of that process means I’m a little late to the Christmas rush, it’s a small price to pay.
But I do know that when I get there, I’ll be singing songs of joy and peace with so many others. It looks like I found that river that Joni Mitchell was looking for.
Sincerely, Jon Leonard
