I’m thankful (with apologies to Furman Bisher) … … When people don’t laugh when I tell them I used to teach English.
Okay, so it’s English on a Southern cob, buttered a little too often with some “down home” salt. Take it or leave it.
… For fall and Georgia’s changing of the seasons.
In the morning light a couple of weeks ago, the slightest puff of breeze made the twisting, turning, floating of leaves from my neighbor’s hickory tree seem like a yellow rain. It was beautiful.
… That Brad Raffensperger ain’t selling parachutes.
One of the aims of Georgia’s new 98-page elections procedures law was to boost voter confidence in the procedures, machinery and results in the general elections every two years. One addition in the law requires a partial audit of one statewide race in all of the state’s 159 counties, to be overseen by a third party outside the secretary of state’s office.
Raffensperger, the incumbent secretary of state, chose his own race with Democrat Bee Nyugen to be audited.
Even though he won pretty handily, the choice makes some sense, especially considering the hubbub raised by Stacey Abrams after then-secretary of state Brian Kemp oversaw the 2016 election in Kemp-Abrams governor’s race.
The trouble is that the standard for confirming the partial audit is 90-percent accuracy, to which Raffensperger graciously upped to 95 percent. With 159 counties there are going to be some mistakes. Some clerical errors. And, yes, maybe even the possibility of some shenanigans.
Typically, these are small potatoes, a handful of votes here and there, all quietly corrected after the scurrying of election night – but never enough to affect the outcome of any race.
Now, 95 percent efficiency was a pretty good number – actually, a really good number – for the COVID vaccine a couple of years ago. But you won’t sell many parachutes with a 95-percent success rate. And a five-percent margin of error in hundreds of thousands of votes? It makes Donald Trump’s push for Raffensperger to “find” 10,870 votes seem almost reasonable.
… That my memory still works as I have grown older.
Well, kinda-sorta. The mold and dust bunnies of memory retain some pretty oddball mental snapshots. Fortunately, few are traumatic, or even dramatic. Just oddball, why-do-you-rememberthat? type of memories. Figuring out what they might mean is something else.
As an example: I took Latin in high school. (Mama “suggested” it. End of discussion.) Generally speaking, it probably did prove useful later, but I have only a couple of specific memories of the class.
One features the teacher, Miss Moran, a slight, even scrawny, red-haired little woman who would sometimes in winter wear two sweaters and a couple of pairs of the old hosiery that had black lines wiggling down the back of her legs. As proper teenagers, we shared snarky thoughts about how uncool she was.
Later, after finishing high school and college and a couple of years in the army, I briefly returned to my old high school to teach. Miss Moran was still there in a room down the hall, as the entire foreign language department – Latin, Spanish, and French.
At the teachers’ table during lunch, I often sat near Miss Moran. I found she had a sense of humor. I found her interesting, even charming. And, in the course of lunchtime casual conversation, I found that she had lived in Spain during World War II, where she was an interpreter for the French Resistance.
Yeah, this scrawny little woman did not care a whit about wearing two sweaters in wintertime. She knew who she was.