One election day, when I was in elementary school, our teachers took us to the lobby to explain the voting process to us. We got to see the machine, which was an old fashioned machine with little levers for the candidates and a big red pull lever that opened and closed the curtain and committed your vote. One voter even offered to let us watch her vote, and our teacher sternly refused. “Voting is a private act, and these children should understand that!”

I was very jealous. At that time, nobody in our family could vote.

My parents still intended to move back to India and so they retained their Indian citizenship both out of patriotism and pragmatism, since they were considering buying a place before they actually resettled, and you could only own property then if you were a citizen. My sister and I, both born in the USA, were too young.

When I was around 11, my father became a citizen so that he could sponsor his parents to come and live with us. There was no fanfare about this, I don’t remember when he took the oath, the family didn’t go down and watch him. But voting, now that was special. I’m pretty sure I went down with him to the high school down the block, stood on line for an hour, and went into the voting booth with him. That first act of voting was wrapped up with family.

Then my grandfather became a citizen, so he could sponsor my aunt to come to America. I helped him study for the test, sitting with him on his bed and drilling the material as he apologized for the fact that he couldn’t learn it perfectly the first time. Grandpa had always had a mind like a steel trap and although we couldn’t have known it then, his struggles were actually the first symptoms of the Alzheimers that would become obvious in coming years.

I went into the polls with him, even though I was a teenager and already looked like I was in my 20s. When we got inside, Grandpa let me vote for him. I said, don’t you want to vote? He had such strong political opinions, I didn’t understand. He said, no, I trust you. I turned the knobs, asking him if he agreed, and then pulled the lever. This was the first vote I ever cast, at age 16. In retrospect, that vote was tinged with sadness.

<

p> My first vote was an absentee ballot I cast from college. I got to vote in a Presidential race, but still, it was anticlimatic to fill out a dinky paper ballot after having been embraced by the mammoth metal hulk that was the NYC voting machine. Still, that vote was about becoming an adult and becoming an American, more than anything else I have ever done.

My mother became an American citizen after I became 18. My father had arrived in the US during the Vietnam war, and they had agreed that one of them would retain their Indian citizenship in case I needed to escape a draft! I always thought this was funny. I told my father that I would go to Canada like all the other Americans did, but he insisted that I should have that option. By that point, we realized we were staying in America. Again, we didn’t make a big deal out of the swearing in, but Ma’s first election was special.

By the time my sister turned 18, voting was old hat. We had been Americans for some time. (The only one who never became a citizen was grandma, who never learned to speak or read English. This year she could have become a citizen anyway, but she was too frail, and then she passed away this summer.)

Now we (those of us who are still alive) all vote in almost every single election. I think I’ve only missed one regular election, when I was out of the country and there were no important political races. I know I’ve missed a couple of primaries. Voting is my opportunity, each year, to re-enact my Americanness. Swearing allegiance reminds me of baseball, not patriotism, but voting … voting reminds me of how much I truly love this country.