On my way to the polls this evening, at a stoplight, I noticed an elderly lady next to me roll her windows down and motion to me. She was speaking in Spanish, and looked frightened. As the light turned green I motioned to her to pull ahead and pull over...

I put the flashers on and the poor little lady pulled in behind...in a trembling voice, she explained, in Spanish, that she was lost and she thrust (unbelievably) her entire wallet and drivers license out the window to me...with my handy Touareg halogen light, I saw that she was about five miles away from her home, "an edificio grande". Getting my friend Tim on the cell, who after 15 years on various church missions in Central and South America, is completely fluent, we got her to relax a bit--she was about to break into tears, and got her to follow me to local school where I could get her out of traffic and figure out how to get her home. The poor lady must've gone out and gotten totally disoriented in the dark and the rain.

At the school, a polling station, I got a native speaker to help me to get her to agree to let me drive her home. She waited, I got my wife, got the lady's license again and plugged in the address to the nav and followed the X5 in the Dodge Dynasty. Her DL stated a DOB of 10-8-1927...On the way, I find out, she was from Calle, Columbia, and worked for most of her life in Chicago.

We pull up to her retirement tower, and as we pull up to the front door, tears in her eye, she takes my hand in both of her hands, kneels on the floor of the car, Senora Trujillo lays a huge whup-ass Catholic style blessing on me that would've made the Pope sit up and notice. Pretty intense stuff. The cool thing was that she had this "I Voted" sticker on her blouse.

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