Restores Your Faith

     I've just spent  a wonderful afternoon. Three hours in Mt. Hope Cemetery here, never had to get out of the car, spoke to lots of people. 
     My opening gambit out the car window was  "I cast my first vote for Harry S Truman"* and everyone wanted to talk. When I told one man I had nearly voted, in 1948, for the third party candidate whose name I'd forgotten but he had been Secretary of Agriculture, the response was "Henry Wallace, I'm just reading a book about him."  That kind of afternoon, that kind of crowd.
     The older Victorian section of the cemetery is all glacial mounds and dips, big old trees, wonderful fall colors.  Wish I'd taken the camera.   And --
     an amazing spontaneous gathering, thousands of people in a two-hour waiting line carrying flowers, flags, little girls and "I VOTED" stickers to the modest gravestone of Susan B. Anthony, the suffragette leader who went on trial in 1872 because she had registered and voted. 
       I believe the web site Anna sent is a morning feed,

https://www.facebook.com/News8WROC/videos/10155360574159386/

but when I left the cemetery gates at 6pm, more cars were  pulling in.  The city? the cemetery? someone? was firing up floodlights at the grave site, and folks were getting flashlights out of their cars. 
       After all the stress of the past few months, I'd pretty much forgotten there could still exist so many patient smiling happy people. 
        It was wonderful.          

.*No period after the S, it was "S for nothing."