I’ve realized lately that although I often talk a good game about politics, I very rarely do anything else. Blah blah blah blah blog — that and a few small campaign contributions are about it. So as Election Day got closer, I started thinking about volunteering. Friends of mine have given a lot of time to the Obama campaign and to campaigns in past election cycles. Me, not so much.

The problem is, living in New York, I don’t have much access to swing voters. (Yes, I could have done one of those Move On phone banking things.) I thought about going to Ohio or Pennsylvania. But then my roommate, who works for the Working Families Party (a progressive third party here in New York), told me there were some state Senate races here that were really close and could definitely use my help on or around Election Day. And one was out in Queens, just a long A-train ride away.

I ended up being really busy in the month leading up to the election, so the Queens option sounded like the best one — easiest and doable for just one day, not a multi-day travel commitment. (My roommate spent a week up in Buffalo, working on a really crucial race that our side ended up losing.)

I was assigned to be a “poll captain.” I was to show up at campaign headquarters at 5:45 a.m., go to the polling station and take down some numbers from the voting machines before they opened, then hand out literature to voters outside the 100-foot electioneering line. They told me they might pull me off the site to go door-to-door in the afternoon, something I’m happy to say never ended up occurring. I put in my time knocking on doors for the Lord many years ago.

So I voted absentee and got up well before dawn on Election Day, put on my new plaid shirt and a tie to look respectable. The train was a long time in coming and was kinda the wrong train — the A forks when it gets that far out in Queens, and the one I took meant I had to get off a stop ahead of the stop near headquarters and hoof it. So I got to campaign headquarters just a few minutes before 6, and by the time I got to John Adams High School there were already 30 or so voters in line. Luckily, the campaign also had an attorney as a poll observer, and she had taken down the machine readings before the poll opened.

I headed outside with my packet of blue Joe Addabbo cards. “Working for incentives to create jobs. Standing up to HMOs and big insurance companies to put patients first. The Change We Need.” I didn’t know this guy from Adam, but he was a Democrat running against a longtime Republican incumbent, and the Democrats were two seats away from taking control of the state Senate, a sclerotic, obstructionist, conservative institution. The change we need — definitely.

Problem was, there were two approaches to the polling site, one from Rockaway Boulevard, a big thoroughfare, and the other from a small residential street that led to a whole bunch of houses and apartments. I picked the Rockaway Boulevard side. Even there I faced a geographic dilemma: east or west corner of the intersection? I picked west, crossing with a quick walk when I saw a voter coming from the other direction.

“Hi, are you voting today? Can I give you this?” That sounded lame.

“Hi, are you here to vote today? It’s a really important race on the ballot today.” Better, but later I figured out I should say the guy’s name.

“Hi, Joe Addabbo for State Senate. It’s a really important race today.”

Around eight, I think, a middle-aged white guy showed up, sweating, with a backpack full of Addabbo cards. He was Steve, my first of many helpers that day and a longtime activist, and had just had to push his broken car up a hill to an emergency parking place. I got to shoot the shit with him during a lull that afternoon and found out he’d been in the SDS (at one point, Bill Ayers was to his right), active in reformist union politics, and was all-around an interesting guy. At eight in the morning, I was relieved we had somebody to cover the other main approach to the school and sent him off down the block. He ended up staying there all day, sitting most of the time on a milk crate we borrowed from a bodega across Rockaway Avenue because his foot and hip were hurting. Steve helped me come up with the final form of my greeting: “Hi, please consider Joe Addabbo and the rest of the Democrats on the ballot.” Polite. Soon, my hands were turning blue from the cheap, not-quite-dry ink on the cards I was handing out.

The other guy in the race, the evil Republican incumbent, was named Serf Maltese. Yes, “Serf”! (Short for “Serphin,” I later found out.) Around 9, some doofus-looking young union guys came and stood on the other corner from me, handing out lit for Maltese. Yes, in New York politics, sometimes anti-labor conservative Republicans have union backing. The guys were burly and intimidating-looking at first, but they were more concerned with demonstrating to each other that yes, in fact, they had penises than with effectively reaching out to voters. Serf also had a couple of thirty-something women in a sedan who came to set out a sign and would come back from time to time to check up on things. They looked unpleasant.

The other side also had a slick, snake-looking poll observer for the other in a suit. He convinced the head poll worker that I shouldn’t be allowed to check in on the actual poll site (per my instructions), even though I wasn’t electioneering in any way inside the limit, because a voter might see me outside with a flyer and inside without one and somehow be intimidated. This was a blatant misreading of state law, and a guy from our campaign came over and made an issue of it before we decided that our lawyer/observer, Iris, could just do the observing job herself. I was secretly happy, since the little controversy meant I could go home at 9 instead of waiting around until 10:30 to call in the tallies to headquarters.

I could go on and on about all the things that happened that day, all the little interactions. Just a few:

A short, wiry man of 40 or 50 came up to me, not speaking very good English. He had never voted before, he said, and he didn’t have a voter card with him. Could he still vote? How could he do it? Would they let him in? I found out that he had registered and that he lived in the neighborhood. “Just go inside and tell them where you live. They’ll have your name. You don’t need a card. You just need to sign your name. You have a driver’s license? Good. Maybe they’ll ask to see that.” I also told him that if there was a problem he should ask for a provisional ballot and vote anyway. He seemed reassured. About 20 minutes later, he came out of the polling place and shouted to me across the street. “Hey! Hey! I voted!” He had his fist in the air, a grin on his face. “First time! First time! I voted!”

Around lunchtime a man and a woman shoed up, again with union jackets on, to hand out lit for Maltese. The man had hair like Anton Cigurh’s in No Country for Old Men. Within twenty minutes they must have figured out that the Republican brand was doing badly among the many South Asian voters in this area, so the guy started telling people that Maltese was a Democrat. I’m not sure what good he though that did for his side, but I tried to correct it anyway. “Here’s the real Democrat,” I told a tall Indian man who was going with his wife to vote. He looked at the Addabbo card, with “Democrat” and “Barack Obama” on it, and turned back to Cigurh-Hair: “You should be ashamed of yourself! You shouldn’t be lying to us! It’s the Republicans who got us into this mess!” Preach it, brother.

Not long afterward, we got some union people of our own, including a father and daughter who almost immediately began talking to Cigurh-Hair and his companion in a foreign language. It turns out they were all Iranians. The dad on our side promptly decided he had to talk the other side’s Iranians out of supporting Maltese, and over the next hour or so had intense discussions with them in Farsi. And it worked! They put their cards in their pockets and stood with us on the street corner chatting as we handed out lit for our guy. The opposition was disarmed by the power of a cultured Iranian gentleman.

In the afternoon, a young guy was walking toward the school dressed in baggy jeans and one of those baggy white hoodies with little colored shapes printed all over it. His ethnic background looked to be what they call here “Spanish” — some mix of European, African, and Native American ancestry in a Spanish-speaking country. He looked like he might be too young to vote, but I tried him anyway.

“Hi, are you voting today?”

“No, man, I’m too young to vote. I’m seventeen.”

“Alright, next time, then.”

He was already past me, but he turned around. “Did you vote?”

“Yeah, I voted absentee. Already voted.”

“Who’d you vote for?”

“Obama, of course.”

He held out his hand to me and I shook it. We were both grinning. He said, “Right on,” and for just a second our eyes met. I don’t know how to describe that moment and what passed between us. I like to imagine we both felt a bit of gratitude — maybe he was grateful I’d voted when he couldn’t, and that I’d voted for the right guy; I know I was grateful that this seventeen-year-old kid in Queens, wearing the uniform of the streets, was excited enough about a political race to talk to a dorky guy handing out cards on the sidewalk. Or maybe gratitude wasn’t it. Maybe we were both just happy that day, that moment, when it looked like for the first time in a long time we could look at the future again, the big future, and smile.

Fifteen hours after I arrived at the polling place, Steve and I packed up and hobbled, literally hobbled, back to the A train. I watched the returns come in at my friend Scott’s apartment with a bunch of Internet politics nerds, and Scott plied me with small-batch ryes and bourbons until Obama was done speaking and I had to go crash. The next day I was a complete wreck, with sore feet and acute sleep deprivation and a mild whiskey hangover. But the Times said our guy had won, and another guy, so the Dems will control the Senate and be able to pass all kinds of good stuff (including, maybe, same-sex marriage). And after a day on the front lines, I feel much better about democracy than I have in a long time.