Snapshots from Canvassing

• You will spend the entire hour's drive to your canvassing location drinking coffee, thereby needing a bathroom break before you've even started. Of course, there are no bathrooms in close proximity, so you're S.O.L. until halfway through the morning when you take a three-block detour from your canvassing route to cross a busy highway and borrow a scary restroom at the local Dairy Queen.
  
  
• More people have little yippy dogs than should be allowed by law.
  
  
• You will be cat-called. Chalk it up to the fact that he's never seen a woman in a wool coat and pashmina before.
  
  
• Despite meticulously planning an efficient route, you will invariably miss a block somewhere and have to walk through half the neighborhood to access it. Again.
  
  
• People will answer the door in their underwear. Yes, really. Be glad there's underwear involved.
  
  
• The voter on your list identified as "Ricki" is not the Indian woman you expected. Rather, Ricki is the husband of the chain-smoking woman who just answered the door. In retrospect, you'll realize that if she were Indian, it probably would have been "Rikki." Also, she probably wouldn't live in rural Indiana.
  
  
• Following this episode, you'll spend the next fifteen minutes with the text of Tikki Tikki Tembo* running through your head. Wonder why your brain sees fit to remember a book from your childhood, but almost let you leave the house without packing underwear.
  
  
• Because elections only come every-other year, know that you'll forget all of this until the next time you're out canvassing.

*Also known as "Tikki tikki tembo-no sa rembo-chari bari ruchi-pip peri pembo." For those of you who don't remember, the crux of the story is that he fell into a well.