Speaker 1: Hollo i' moalcan stories all the time. Glad you are here,
Speaker 1: let's get into it.
Speaker 2: I never found the old post office particularly charming. It's
Speaker 2: an odd thing to admit. After forty three years of
Speaker 2: my life thirty two as Bluffford's appointed postal worker the
Speaker 2: rest as a regular, if headstrong recipient of bills and circulars,
Speaker 2: the place always smelled of warming paper, dust and sun
Speaker 2: struck century old wood. Mornings like this one, with a
Speaker 2: little autumn crispness seeping in under the wavy glass, the
Speaker 2: air grew just sharp enough to sting the nose. Only
Speaker 2: through routine did the beauty start to appear. I was
Speaker 2: there again on a Thursday in mid October, volunteering on
Speaker 2: account of the election busy season. Old habits die slow.
Speaker 2: It's mostly a matter of sorting tall white stacks, every
Speaker 2: name and street in neat black print, the envelopes already
Speaker 2: anticipating family squabbles, and handwritten note for the absentee boxes.
Speaker 2: Most of the new staff worked quick but loose, eager
Speaker 2: to be done. But I lingered, reading cheap logos, chuckling
Speaker 2: at family jokes, inked into return addresses. You notice things
Speaker 2: by the time You're seventy patterns, other people's odd methods,
Speaker 2: the way order unfolds, and once in a while subtly
Speaker 2: tips sideways. That morning, something in the air felt sharper
Speaker 2: than the usual hint of floor polish and fading stamps.
Speaker 2: Maybe it was the lack of Mabel's quiet humming. Maybe
Speaker 2: it was just me. I picked up the top of
Speaker 2: a fresh bundle. Then my eye caught the headline blaring
Speaker 2: red and blue across the cover of the asterisk Bluffsford
Speaker 2: Herald Asterisk A perfect record town predicts them all. That's
Speaker 2: not an unusual headline every autumn, as sure as pumpkin
Speaker 2: sales and the arrival of geese. Overhead, the Herald crafts
Speaker 2: a celebratory front page about Blufford's streak, a regional curiosity.
Speaker 2: The article called it. The subheading added the flourish for
Speaker 2: a century, Bluffford ballots have never missed presidents, governors, super Bowl,
Speaker 2: oscar night, even high school games. The claim was glossy
Speaker 2: and matter of fact. They'd printed it every few years
Speaker 2: as long as I'd lived, with only minor updates. But
Speaker 2: this time, standing under that honed patch of morning light,
Speaker 2: I paused to really read it. I'd always thought of
Speaker 2: it as one of those harmless exaggerations, like a fisherman's
Speaker 2: tail about a mythical bass in the river, or rival
Speaker 2: towns claims to best pie in the state. Yet with
Speaker 2: the ballots soon to pile up again and these decades
Speaker 2: of routine behind me, the assertion landed differently. Something prickled
Speaker 2: all of them, not just presidential races, but every big contest,
Speaker 2: each impossible call, every dark horse winner or head scratcher
Speaker 2: for a hundred years. The words didn't feel as familiar
Speaker 2: as I'd thought, not when examined up close, even, and
Speaker 2: the article's tone was off hand. Bluffsford makes its choice
Speaker 2: the second Saturday before each event, ballots sealed, then opened publicly,
Speaker 2: never yet a miss, an unbroken chain longer than any
Speaker 2: streak in America. I pictured the regular photo, some mix
Speaker 2: of the mayor, a high schooler, an elderly volunteer, sometimes me,
Speaker 2: standing in front of the town's worn white hall, holding
Speaker 2: up the latest envelope. Could it really be so precise? Surely?
Speaker 2: I thought someone would have slipped guessed wrong, especially with
Speaker 2: quirks like the two thousand election or the miracle on ice.
Speaker 2: I'd sorted ballots. Through those years, I'd seen folks argue
Speaker 2: over rival teams, misread movie posters, stubbornly champion a losing cause.
Speaker 2: So why did we always collectively pick the winner no
Speaker 2: matter what? For the first time, I felt a real
Speaker 2: itch behind my old skepticism. It wasn't fear, just an
Speaker 2: odd ball fascination, the sense of a puzzle hiding under
Speaker 2: layers of ordinary life. I looked at the headline again,
Speaker 2: a perfect record, and filed it under questions worth, asking
Speaker 2: if it was just luck, then it was bizarre luck.
Speaker 2: And if not luck, then what the sorting went on?
Speaker 2: Daylight shifting from gold to something more clinical. And I
Speaker 2: made a mental note this year, when the ballots come in,
Speaker 2: I'm paying attention. Maybe it was finally time to look
Speaker 2: twice at what we always take for granted. If you've
Speaker 2: never heard of Bluffsford, you're forgiven. Most folks, even in
Speaker 2: the next county over, know us only by our turn
Speaker 2: off sign or, in recent years, a spot of local
Speaker 2: NPR coverage whenever our record gets dusted off for election season.
Speaker 2: The town sits on a tight bend of the Willow River,
Speaker 2: flanked by crumbling bluffs, steep and forested copper brown in
Speaker 2: the fall. There's a single main street, some brick shop
Speaker 2: fronts left from the nineteen tens, half a dozen side
Speaker 2: roads named for wood and wind Bluffsford isn't especially picturesque.
Speaker 2: It trades more in comfort than grandeur. The population last
Speaker 2: I checked hovers around twenty two hundred, though it's been
Speaker 2: ebbing quietly for as long as I remember. We're close knit,
Speaker 2: but only in that particular Midwestern way. Helpful, sometimes nosy,
Speaker 2: rarely intrusive. New folks drift in and are greeted with
Speaker 2: a casserole or a handshake, then left to find their
Speaker 2: place at their own pace. The center of town physically,
Speaker 2: and I suppose emotionally is the old town Hall, its
Speaker 2: white painted wood, three stories if you count the bell tower,
Speaker 2: which rarely tolls except on officially sanctioned occasions. When I
Speaker 2: was in school, we used to run up those stairs
Speaker 2: on dares and leave our initials on the banisters. The
Speaker 2: paint now peels in graceful curls, as if even the
Speaker 2: building is reluctant to finish the job. I've grown familiar
Speaker 2: with the rhythms over the years, both as postman and neighbor.
Speaker 2: You start to tell, who leaves the porch light on
Speaker 2: for packages, who prefers letters that are arrive early, who
Speaker 2: will tip their cap in greeting. There's Mabel at the
Speaker 2: post office, technically my boss in those days, but by
Speaker 2: now more a friend and local fixture. Mabel's a records
Speaker 2: keeper in the truest sense, having taken up the books
Speaker 2: from the previous postmasters who took them up from theirs.
Speaker 2: She claims to have every page since nineteen sixty three,
Speaker 2: and I believe her, every postal code, every annual report,
Speaker 2: each a model of legibility. Our neighbour Sam is a
Speaker 2: different animal, an electrician by trade, contractor by temperament, and
Speaker 2: endlessly impatient with local traditions. He'll argue urban versus rural
Speaker 2: grid specifications into the ground, and, as he said more
Speaker 2: than once over beers, it's just luck and small town gossip.
Speaker 2: No one cares outside county news. Sam loves poking holes
Speaker 2: in things, he says, it's his way of keeping us honest. Sometimes,
Speaker 2: after work or on cooler evenings, I cross the street
Speaker 2: and say hello to missus Carr, a librarian for nearly
Speaker 2: half a century. She's the keeper of what she calls
Speaker 2: Bluffsford's official unofficial stories. Her shelves have more clipped newspaper
Speaker 2: columns and scrap book albums than any single patron could
Speaker 2: ever request, With nearly always exactly one page for each
Speaker 2: year's prediction, her place feels like a time capsule built
Speaker 2: by a gentle magpie, brimming with evidence of memory's stubbornness.
Speaker 2: The routines of pre election week bring all these strands together.
Speaker 2: Teenagers bring first time ballots, shepherded by parents or older siblings.
Speaker 2: The town council prints colored slips for each contest, presidential, gubernatorial,
Speaker 2: The Super bowlcomb January, even the annual spelling bee. Cliff's
Speaker 2: Dinah down by the Bridge hosts the prediction pool. Locals
Speaker 2: bet pie, coffee or bills on the outcome, mostly for fun,
Speaker 2: but with the serious air of picking horses at the derby.
Speaker 2: Everybody votes. The slips are gathered in the archive room
Speaker 2: at the town Hall, joined in recent years by perfect
Speaker 2: prediction trophies from the Optimist Club, a nod to the
Speaker 2: record politer than boasting. There's a mural in the school gym,
Speaker 2: begun in nineteen fifty seven and reprinted every decade, A
Speaker 2: bright band of ballot winners, presidents, governors, athletes, even the
Speaker 2: Olympic hockey team. I used to find it cheesy as
Speaker 2: a boy. Now with age, I find myself tracing the
Speaker 2: brush strokes, trying to spot where one year gives way
Speaker 2: to the next, the way stories blur across time. It's
Speaker 2: all so mundane except for that single detail, a streak
Speaker 2: that has become without pomp eternal. The records, the never missed,
Speaker 2: are saved, but rarely discussed. Out of towners ask about
Speaker 2: the bluffs or Berry Festival, not the Prediction Pool. If
Speaker 2: any one calls it out, especially newer arrivals, it's brushed
Speaker 2: off with a laugh. Oh, it's just a Bluffsford quirk.
Speaker 2: The pride is modest, almost shy. Once ask my own father.
Speaker 2: We have a family scrap book full of Prediction Day photos,
Speaker 2: some black and white, others tipped with seventies polaried green.
Speaker 2: Why people cared so much about the tradition, he said,
Speaker 2: it keeps us together, that's all. It's fun. But even
Speaker 2: in those old photos, the one where I'm grinning holding
Speaker 2: up my ballot's slip with our neighbors on the summer porch,
Speaker 2: there's an undercurrent of satisfaction, as if we're all in
Speaker 2: on something invisible, a small claim to certainty in a
Speaker 2: surprising world. The contradiction gnaws the more you look for it.
Speaker 2: Why does everything feel so ordinary when sitting beside us?
Speaker 2: Filed away witnessed as true? Is a record no other
Speaker 2: town shares. Come noon, I found myself loitering after the
Speaker 2: late shift at the post office, fiddling with an envelope cutter,
Speaker 2: half ignoring the perfect record headline now propped against my coffee.
Speaker 2: The gnawing grew. The most obvious place to start was
Speaker 2: the archive room, housed in a drafty corner of the
Speaker 2: old town Hall. The air there always felt slightly cooler
Speaker 2: than outside, with a tight, musty taste like pressed linen.
Speaker 2: Stacked along the wall were battered, gray filing cabinets, each
Speaker 2: hosting a row of annual folders, every contest, every ballot,
Speaker 2: even betting pool receipts going back to the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 2: The system is as much mabel S as the town's
Speaker 2: algorithmic in its neatness, a model for the new city
Speaker 2: clerk to emulate. I made my way directly to the
Speaker 2: presidential elections drawer, running a stiff finger along familiar paper. There.
Speaker 2: Nineteen forty eight, the year Dewey defeats Truman, graced front pages.
Speaker 2: Everyone remembers the iconic photo Truman grinning holding up the
Speaker 2: asterisk Chicago Tribune that called his loss Bluffsford's entry for
Speaker 2: that year was fixed to its folder with a thumbtack,
Speaker 2: gone rust orange at the edges. I slid the pages
Speaker 2: out there neat as you please. Was the crinkled cream
Speaker 2: ballot slip. Harry S. Truman voted and sealed November one,
Speaker 2: forty eight in blue ink, alongside two signatures, one of
Speaker 2: whom was old Man Laski, the barber, my father's friend.
Speaker 2: A date stamp, a roll of witnesses, five town residents,
Speaker 2: most of all, a photograph faded pink from sunlight and
Speaker 2: polary dyes, showing the announcement posted outside the hall before
Speaker 2: the actual election result. In fact, every detail pointed to
Speaker 2: the same chronological truth. The vote was finished, public and
Speaker 2: posted before the asterisk Tribune's press run. It wasn't a
Speaker 2: back dated stunt or an in joke. Our town called
Speaker 2: it right openly, while the rest of the nation, indeed
Speaker 2: the press called it wrong. I pressed my thumb to
Speaker 2: the old ink, puzzling over the odds. Could they have
Speaker 2: guessed better than the statisticians and news wires. I wanted
Speaker 2: a practical reason. I made a note of the witness list,
Speaker 2: put the ballot away, and reopened the next folder. The
Speaker 2: two thousand election, Bush gore the infamous recount. Bluffford's ballots
Speaker 2: typed that year were sealed and witnessed November. The winning name, correct,
Speaker 2: of course, stood inked days ahead of Florida's final tally.
Speaker 2: I checked further back the nineteen eighty Winter Olympics, when
Speaker 2: our high schoolers filed ballots over their lunch hour. They
Speaker 2: d picked the U S team to pull the greatest
Speaker 2: upset in sports. The tape attached to the yearbook page
Speaker 2: read ballots opened February nineteenth. The real game was on
Speaker 2: the twenty second. None of it lined up with common sense.
Speaker 2: I leaned out and called for Mabel, busy poking through
Speaker 2: the safe for registered mail. She looked up dust rag
Speaker 2: tucked around her wrist. Hey remember forty eight. I asked
Speaker 2: you ever hear whether folks really thought Truman would win?
Speaker 2: She shrugged. Dad said he saw it coming. Wasn't a
Speaker 2: popular opinion, Not with mister Grant or the Hawleys, but
Speaker 2: that was before he had a radio. But the records.
Speaker 2: I showed her the signatures. Oh sure, she said, voice fond.
Speaker 2: We always took it for granted. I remember that year
Speaker 2: folks sang after they posted the result, made the school
Speaker 2: choir learn I'm just wild about Harry. I grinned, but
Speaker 2: something in her answer was a half shrug, half apology.
Speaker 2: Everyone knew it'd go Truman's way. That can't be right.
Speaker 2: If everyone did, then history would remember it differently. The
Speaker 2: rest of the country was shocked. We weren't, at least
Speaker 2: not according to our ballads. A contradiction then, not in
Speaker 2: the paperwork, but in memory and fact, and not just
Speaker 2: for the dramatic years. The pattern held everywhere I looked.
Speaker 2: I tucked the files away, closing the drawer with an
Speaker 2: audible thunk, the hairs on my arms rising not from
Speaker 2: cold but excitement, coincidence, or something more. For the first
Speaker 2: time in years, my old certainty faded. I resolved to
Speaker 2: follow the trail deeper, and not simply by checking another
Speaker 2: year's paperwork. That evening, after supper and a half hearted
Speaker 2: attempt at the crossword, I pulled out the family scrap book,
Speaker 2: a thick album with cracked leather corners. I'd expected only
Speaker 2: nostalgia may be a reminder of what the tradition had
Speaker 2: meant to my parents. Instead, I found a timeline yellowed slips,
Speaker 2: each with my mother's spidery date and notations. Oscars Super
Speaker 2: Bowl IIIE winner, always stamped days or weeks before the event.
Speaker 2: Most years my parents had posed us snap and develop
Speaker 2: beside the prediction day sign hung on the oak outside
Speaker 2: the school. Examining these, I was struck by the collective pride,
Speaker 2: a gleam in every eye, as if each resident had known,
Speaker 2: as if there had never been a doubt. The same
Speaker 2: feeling haunted the record books. The Oscars folder in Mabel's
Speaker 2: archive was heavy with ballots nineteen hundred and seventy four.
Speaker 2: The town picked the sting to win collectively and publicly
Speaker 2: sealed and dated two weeks before the ceremony. Even the
Speaker 2: betting pool slips rescu ued from old cigar boxes showed
Speaker 2: the same thing, names, dates, outcomes, always preceding the actual results.
Speaker 2: In the school's yearbooks, I found photographic evidence that would
Speaker 2: have satisfied even the most dogged outsider. A hand painted
Speaker 2: banner Bluffford's winning guess hung across the gym's back wall,
Speaker 2: with each year's ballots pinned for visiting parents to marvel
Speaker 2: at all dated, All Springtide official. An audio cassette labeled
Speaker 2: simply State Election nineteen seventy six played the principal's scratchy
Speaker 2: voice announcing the town's pick again a day before the
Speaker 2: state numbers were called. Everywhere I looked, the pattern reaffirmed itself.
Speaker 2: Each record glimpsed confirmed another fragment. In missus Carlyle's corner
Speaker 2: at the library, a cork board backing supported an endless
Speaker 2: patchwork of old newspaper cuttings, her grandfather's voice echoing through
Speaker 2: an interview. Blufford keeps in step with history. Sam's reaction
Speaker 2: was more acidic. I caught him at the garage bickering
Speaker 2: with his apprentice about circuit diagrams, those old dates, he said,
Speaker 2: when I brought up the Truman folder, back dated for
Speaker 2: the laugh of it, Probably or maybe everyone's just retro
Speaker 2: fitted the memory. People like a good legend, but numbers
Speaker 2: don't lie. He thumped the tailgate of a truck for emphasis,
Speaker 2: raising a faint dust of sawdust and July pollen. Later,
Speaker 2: my niece Lauren, just visiting from Chicago fresh from a
Speaker 2: public health internship, peeked at my pile of prediction slips
Speaker 2: while passing through the kitchen. That's quirky, uncle, Will. Every
Speaker 2: town wants something to tell itself. I mean, look at
Speaker 2: all the little legends people tack up. Maybe you're just
Speaker 2: ahead of the trend. She didn't ask for details, didn't
Speaker 2: probe deeper to her. It was little more than a
Speaker 2: regional coloring book. Most locals, when questioned, would shake their
Speaker 2: heads in genial amusement. Old George at Cliff's Dinah, who
Speaker 2: ran the prediction pool for a decade, treated the record
Speaker 2: as self evident. Folks just have an no for it.
Speaker 2: You get a feel after a while. Yet, watching him
Speaker 2: recount the winners, his eyes grew distant, as if trying
Speaker 2: and failing to recall a time when things went awry.
Speaker 2: But when I brought up the nineteen sixty eight World Series,
Speaker 2: Bluffford's ballots in favor of Detroit before Game seven had
Speaker 2: even unfolded. Before the Tigers trounced the Cardinals in a
Speaker 2: last dinning drama, missus Carlyle drew in a thoughtful breath.
Speaker 2: She recalled how half the town backed the Cardinals until overnight.
Speaker 2: It felt like the mood shifted by ballot day Detroit
Speaker 2: won out. Sometimes the wind just changes. My father used
Speaker 2: to say, never could put a finger on it. It
Speaker 2: was difficult to ignore. The evidence wasn't circumstantial or casual.
Speaker 2: The record was there on slips and screens and faded photos.
Speaker 2: It was, so far as I could prove, not a
Speaker 2: fluke at all, And even the suggestion of back dating,
Speaker 2: of massaging memory failed in the face of witnessed, dated
Speaker 2: displayed ballots. If the story persisted, it did so with
Speaker 2: its own stubborn logic. Yet the rest of the world
Speaker 2: rolled forward, indifferent, untouched. It was a quietly wondrous feeling,
Speaker 2: a sense that something ran contrary to known laws and
Speaker 2: had done so in plain sight. Untroubled for decades. I
Speaker 2: spent the week end further immersed vacillating between elation and bafflement,
Speaker 2: unable to sleep for the quiet thrill of unearthly regularity.
Speaker 2: What made Bluffford so certain and so infallible? When Monday's
Speaker 2: mail root beckoned, the ballot question lingered at the edge
Speaker 2: of every task. Old explanations comfortable and neat fell away.
Speaker 2: It wasn't error or chance or collective deception. What then
Speaker 2: my old skepticism had finally crumbled into honest to goodness curiosity.
Speaker 2: The only thing to do was to dig deeper. If
Speaker 2: the streak was not a myth, but a persistent, irreducible phenomenon,
Speaker 2: then the army, Sir, or at least the next clue
Speaker 2: had to reside somewhere between the ballots and the people
Speaker 2: who filled them out. The universe must have sensed my
Speaker 2: newphone obsession, because by the following Thursday, the town hall
Speaker 2: greeted me with something unexpected. Julia Liang, data science major
Speaker 2: and temporary Chicago transplant, introduced herself with a sheepish handshake
Speaker 2: and a spiral bound notebook. She de kissed her mother
Speaker 2: good bye just outside cliffs, with a promise to bring
Speaker 2: pie back to her dorm, and presented herself at my elbow,
Speaker 2: notebook open. She hoped, she said, to run a sort
Speaker 2: of statistics project for a course at her college, a
Speaker 2: full compilation of Bluffford's predictions for her professor's analysis. It
Speaker 2: was the first time, as far as I knew, that
Speaker 2: someone trained in numbers eager for outliers had piled into
Speaker 2: our archive room with a laptop, three USB keys, and
Speaker 2: an appetite for excruciating accuracy. Welcomed her, led her through
Speaker 2: cabinets and folders, and watched she indexed dates, outcomes, and
Speaker 2: official witnesses. Her questions sharp but politely delivered, pressed in
Speaker 2: on places even I hadn't considered. Did we save prediction
Speaker 2: slips for crop prices and spelling bees? Yes, in a
Speaker 2: brown folder marked MISK. Do we include years when, say,
Speaker 2: the oscars were borcotted? We did? Picking the winner anyway,
Speaker 2: even weather predictions precise to the date sometimes entered the
Speaker 2: betting pool for fun, Julia built a table so dense
Speaker 2: it looked like a snake's belly. Each contest, each ballot,
Speaker 2: the outcome, the filing date, the witnesses. After only two hours,
Speaker 2: she pulled out her phone and called her professor, voice
Speaker 2: low but urgent. These records aren't just unusually accurate, I
Speaker 2: heard her say into the phone. There, statistically, it's like
Speaker 2: finding a flock of flying pigs. The odds are off
Speaker 2: the charts. I've never seen anything like it, even with
Speaker 2: honest ballads. She ran three models, then four, and sat
Speaker 2: blinking at the screen. At her insistence, I helped check
Speaker 2: a handful of the oldest ballots. Several had signatures of
Speaker 2: outside witnesses. The regional editor of the Asterisk star ledger
Speaker 2: Asterisk a census worker even one year. A traveling columnist
Speaker 2: from down state, Julia tripplechecked the processes, no opportunity for
Speaker 2: after the fact correction, photographs lined up dates were irrefutable.
Speaker 2: The probability of this is, she started, then stopped, mouth
Speaker 2: working as her numbers scrolled higher and higher. I thought,
Speaker 2: maybe you had an unusual selection effect or group think.
Speaker 2: But across this many Asterisk events with external witnesses, there's
Speaker 2: no precedent in any statistical literature. She met my eyes,
Speaker 2: suddenly less confident. What exactly do people here think is happening?
Speaker 2: I shook my head. Honestly, it's the Bluffsford Way, I offered,
Speaker 2: feeling how thin the old answers sounded among all that data.
Speaker 2: They call it that nothing more. She laughed, tight and uncertain,
Speaker 2: then tucked her hair behind one ear, lost for words.
Speaker 2: Local officials, when Julia approached them with her findings, only smiled.
Speaker 2: The mare, a broad shouldered woman in her forties, told
Speaker 2: her with cheerful finality. Oh, it keeps life interesting. I
Speaker 2: don't think any of us worry too much about being
Speaker 2: right all the time. It's tradition, isn't it nice once
Speaker 2: in a while for a story to simply work. No
Speaker 2: one claimed cheating, No one cared to offer an explanation
Speaker 2: more complex or less charming. Even Sam, the arch skeptic,
Speaker 2: just shrugged when presented with the print outs. Must be
Speaker 2: some kind of home town advantage, he joked, though his
Speaker 2: voice sounded slightly thinner than usual. As Julia packed up
Speaker 2: her equipment, still wide eyed, she pressed a c D
Speaker 2: of her data into my palm. Show this to some one,
Speaker 2: she said, as if the proof itself could conjure meaning
Speaker 2: for me. The revelation landed softly. It wasn't just the
Speaker 2: absurd scale of the luck or the meticulous nature of
Speaker 2: the documentation. It was something more fundamental. Away These people,
Speaker 2: these routines, this little town seemed to partake in a
Speaker 2: reality where prediction and outcome grew strange and inseparable. I
Speaker 2: thought about how every year townsfolk gathered for the ballot box.
Speaker 2: There was no grand voting strategy, no evident leader swaying
Speaker 2: the group. Each wrote their slip, trusting some communal current.
Speaker 2: The mystery wasn't in the logistics anymore, or even in
Speaker 2: the math. It lay instead in the intersection where prediction itself,
Speaker 2: made humble by repetition, acquired a kind of uncanny substance.
Speaker 2: At the midpoint of an ordinary Thursday, I found myself
Speaker 2: standing in a little wave of astonishment, no longer trying
Speaker 2: to solve for chance or error, but instead opening myself
Speaker 2: to a brand new category of impossibility. Impossibility as a
Speaker 2: communal fact whitnessed and documented, unforced but underlying everything I
Speaker 2: had ever known. Here, I was delighted and just a
Speaker 2: little bit terrified by the widening horizon of what that
Speaker 2: realization might require of me. Julia left town the next morning,
Speaker 2: drifting off in her mother's old civic, the trunk heavy
Speaker 2: with pie and statistical impossibility. After the car turned the
Speaker 2: bend half glimpsed between Sumac and Pale Maples, the sensation
Speaker 2: she left behind was something like vertigo. I wandered through
Speaker 2: the day with the memory of her voice still in
Speaker 2: my ears. The odds are off the charts, and a
Speaker 2: nervous energy in my feet that kept me moving, rarely
Speaker 2: pausing long in any one room. Once in my younger
Speaker 2: years I might have let go of such questions, content
Speaker 2: to trust the patchwork logic of small places. But the
Speaker 2: certainty with which Julia grasped the strangeness now left me
Speaker 2: more awake than ever. By mid afternoon, the post office
Speaker 2: was closing up. I pocketed her ne neatly labeled C
Speaker 2: D circling the building before heading out. The sky had
Speaker 2: turned brittle and blue, the kind of autumn light that
Speaker 2: forces everything into sharper focus, from the network of cracks
Speaker 2: in the window sills to the stray thread on my coat.
Speaker 2: The quieter I became the louder. The mystery rang out,
Speaker 2: Why Bluffsford? Why this streak sustained through border wars, the depression, floods,
Speaker 2: a century of migrations, and always always an unbroken record
Speaker 2: wherever a winner could be picked. I felt heavy with expectation,
Speaker 2: as if I might, in the right place, with the
Speaker 2: right document, finally find the crack in the logic. I
Speaker 2: set out with a basket of apples for Missus Stanton,
Speaker 2: the oldest living resident at ninety four, who lived alone.
Speaker 2: Now her house braced against the oldest bluff at the
Speaker 2: north end of town, line road. In her youth, missus
Speaker 2: Stanton had worked at the switchboard and kept years worth
Speaker 2: of spiral bound ledges to pass slow hours. Her front
Speaker 2: parlor always smell held of onions and moth balls, and
Speaker 2: a hearing was sharp as tax. She watched the apple's
Speaker 2: roll on to her counter, eyes sharp above her rimless glasses.
Speaker 2: I asked if she remembered the ballots, the old ones,
Speaker 2: those handed out on thick card years back, inked by
Speaker 2: fountain pen. Of course, she said, with a leisure bread
Speaker 2: of age. I never missed a prediction. My father would
Speaker 2: march us down the steps, stop at the hall, say,
Speaker 2: don't question, just mark your slip like you feel it.
Speaker 2: So we did. She poured herself a cup of tea.
Speaker 2: It was always I don't know, like deciding what coat
Speaker 2: to wear, if that makes sense. The answer was always
Speaker 2: right there. I tried to press, did anyone ever argue?
Speaker 2: Did anyone ever have doubts? Oh? Certainly, plenty of times
Speaker 2: we had fusses. I remember Old Harriet insisting the Browns
Speaker 2: could not would not win the sixty four championship. But
Speaker 2: when ballot day came, she changed her mind. Bluffsford's heart,
Speaker 2: not mine, She said, I still wonder what she meant.
Speaker 2: We sat quietly, the house around us, ticking in the
Speaker 2: afternoon heat. Did you ever vote against the rest, I asked.
Speaker 2: A shadow passed over her face. Just once, I was
Speaker 2: a girl picked the losing horse. Stubborn mother took my
Speaker 2: slip and pressed it into a cook book as a keepsake.
Speaker 2: But by the time the ballots were counted, even I'd
Speaker 2: started to feel well, sure the other would win, She smiled,
Speaker 2: without apology. It was the same as what I'd heard
Speaker 2: from Missus Carlyle. Each person's vote eventually swept up by
Speaker 2: something greater. Not pressure, not persuasion, but a sidelong consensus
Speaker 2: that seemed, at the last moment impossible to resist. Why
Speaker 2: do you think it happens, I asked her. Chuckle was
Speaker 2: gentle habits maybe, or something in the river water or
Speaker 2: she leaned forward, lowering her voice. Maybe we just listened
Speaker 2: very hard to each other, and only hear does it
Speaker 2: work so strongly? Outside the wind shook the hedges. As
Speaker 2: I rose to leave, Missus Stanton pressed a faded index
Speaker 2: card into my palm from the old prediction box. She said,
Speaker 2: my first vote, thought you'd like it. The card was yellowed,
Speaker 2: almost translucent. Across it a single name in neat Child's script,
Speaker 2: dated and initialed in the lower corner, Harriet's coat written
Speaker 2: in another hand. I slipped it into my coat pocket,
Speaker 2: feeling its small gravity. Back on main Street, I stopped
Speaker 2: by Cliff's Dinah, where Sam lingered at the counter, hunched
Speaker 2: over a plate of onion rings, looking for all the
Speaker 2: world like skepticism embodied. I slid into the next stool,
Speaker 2: and after a minute, asked, outright, you ever think the
Speaker 2: streak's more than luck? Sam? His eyes flicked over, then
Speaker 2: back to his food. Will folks love a good pattern?
Speaker 2: We see what we want? Fill in blanks for the
Speaker 2: sake of a story. He tore a ring in half,
Speaker 2: grease glistening on his fingers, but he picked at the
Speaker 2: table top. Hesitation rare for him. Only thing that rattles
Speaker 2: me Sometimes if you pick random, law of averages kicks in.
Speaker 2: But our averages they break the law. And why do
Speaker 2: you think that is? He groaned? If I start talking
Speaker 2: collective intuition, shoot me, he laughed, but then shrugged, as
Speaker 2: if admitting defeat. You ever sit ball at day pen
Speaker 2: in hand and feel sure for no reason? Maybe it's
Speaker 2: a fluke, but I sure as hell don't trust it
Speaker 2: enough to put money against the town. Mabel breezed past,
Speaker 2: catching the tail end of our talk, already rolling her eyes.
Speaker 2: Some of it is timing, sam Some of it's just tradition.
Speaker 2: People breathe into something long enough it takes on a
Speaker 2: weight of its own. Still, she paused, eyes thoughtful. Hans,
Speaker 2: busy organizing a stack of forms. Show me another town
Speaker 2: with the same run. And if it's not chance, she winked,
Speaker 2: then we're lucky to live in odds. Defying company, luck, intuition, tradition.
Speaker 2: It felt like standing on a pond whose ice had
Speaker 2: never quite cracked, only wavered beneath the boots of generations.
Speaker 2: The old explanations, practical or mystical, all seemed to skirt
Speaker 2: the depth of the pattern. The next step, I knew,
Speaker 2: couldn't come from sampling more ballots or tallying another spreadsheet.
Speaker 2: It would be rooted in the overlooked spaces, woven through
Speaker 2: the stories and artifacts nobody recorded officially. I decided to
Speaker 2: pay a visit to Missus Carlyle's Library, the town's store
Speaker 2: house of formal and informal memory. Missus Carlyle, guiding me
Speaker 2: between over stuffed shelves, produced a handful of local histories
Speaker 2: and something older. Thin tissue papers, edges, ragged clippings pasted
Speaker 2: beside song sheets, and faded ticket stubs. Folklaws got its
Speaker 2: own ideas, she said, offering a doggyared pamphlet. Some say
Speaker 2: Bluffsford was blessed the day Tom Wilkes rescued the mayor's
Speaker 2: son from the River James. The town made a pack
Speaker 2: to honor the moment forever. Others guess some traveling peddler
Speaker 2: dropped a lucky coin into the well. I found the coin,
Speaker 2: by the way, It's Canadian. A smile crept across her lips.
Speaker 2: But here's what matters. Every version contradicts itself. Ask three
Speaker 2: residents the origin, you get four stories. Nobody knows for sure.
Speaker 2: She paged through an old scrap book, stopping at a
Speaker 2: lace edged photo labeled in Looping Fountain Pen inc Prediction
Speaker 2: Day Parade nineteen thirty two. Dozens of people in their
Speaker 2: Sunday best lined the court house steps in the foreground,
Speaker 2: a row of sealed ballot jars fronted by that week's
Speaker 2: asterisk Herald asterisk for proof behind them a chalkboard in
Speaker 2: block capitals predictions sea led October twenty nine to be
Speaker 2: opened November eighth. None of them looked nervous. If there
Speaker 2: were skepticism, it didn't reach the photographers. What about arguments,
Speaker 2: I asked, watching her scrutinize the ink plenty over soup
Speaker 2: in the shop aisles after voting. But the closer people
Speaker 2: came to ballot day, the less fight there was, as
Speaker 2: if some shared mood took hold. I remember my own
Speaker 2: mother sighing, saying, this town has a way of steering
Speaker 2: your vote, heart and hand. I wanted to pick against
Speaker 2: the crowd, just to see, But when the slip came
Speaker 2: it was always obvious. I never thought it was strange
Speaker 2: until now. On a bookshelf by her desk, missus Carlyle
Speaker 2: revealed a mason jar sealed with yellowing wax within a
Speaker 2: scroll brittle as birch bark. She held it up to
Speaker 2: the window sunlight, catching the label the town's secret Verier
Speaker 2: fish looking dating from the bi centennial. People love their mysteries,
Speaker 2: she said, but the scrolls blank always has been seems fitting.
Speaker 2: We sat in the hush for some moments, library dust
Speaker 2: drifting between us if the secret's blank, I ventured, maybe
Speaker 2: the secret is that there isn't one, or that the
Speaker 2: act of preserving it is the point, she replied. As
Speaker 2: I rose to thank her. A burst of school children arrived,
Speaker 2: chattering about civic intuition day next week. I watch them,
Speaker 2: remembering myself at that age, barely tall enough to sign
Speaker 2: a ballot, told by teachers to listen to the town
Speaker 2: around you, then trust your slip inside the absurdity of
Speaker 2: the phrase, I now heard resonance rather than nonsense, leaving
Speaker 2: I caught up to Sam, who begun hanging decorations for
Speaker 2: the annual mural at the school gym. As he balanced
Speaker 2: atop a ladder scraping last year's tape, he admitted, every
Speaker 2: decade it gets harder to add the new winner. I
Speaker 2: keep waiting to have to reprint the pattern you know,
Speaker 2: just once, but no always fits neat as a row
Speaker 2: of pennies. Does it ever bother you? I asked, to
Speaker 2: live with something so off, he grinned, voice echoing through
Speaker 2: the rafters, only bothers me when outsiders act like they
Speaker 2: can figure it out. Towns have their ways. Maybe this
Speaker 2: is just ours. The mural half finished, shimmered in late sun,
Speaker 2: blues and reds, gold leafed numbers, a procession of decisions
Speaker 2: that had never gone awry. I stood quietly, listening for
Speaker 2: a floor in the song of brushes, but it remained
Speaker 2: steady as breath. When the data science professor called, having
Speaker 2: received Julia's report, he sounded weary, almost defensive. The data
Speaker 2: set is real, but the pattern, he coughed, either your
Speaker 2: running a decade's long joke or the universe overlooked Bluffsford
Speaker 2: forgive me will, but it makes me uneasy? Should I
Speaker 2: send it to my colleagues at the polling Institute? I
Speaker 2: heard the discomfort in his voice. If you like, I answered,
Speaker 2: But don't be surprised if the only conclusion is confusion,
Speaker 2: he laughed despite himself. You'll get plenty of that. Days
Speaker 2: blended into repetition. I joined the crop of volunteers prepping
Speaker 2: the town for the next ballat every street echo with
Speaker 2: the sense of anticipation, not for the outcome, but the
Speaker 2: act of gathering, voting, and guessing. Each year, the event
Speaker 2: drew the same faces, new children, recent retirees, and the
Speaker 2: odd stranger. I'd expected that by now someone would challenge
Speaker 2: the tradition outright. Instead, each generation bent toward participation, folding
Speaker 2: itself into the seamless record. Once or twice I reconsidered
Speaker 2: what Julia and her professor had said. If the streak
Speaker 2: should be impossible, maybe we want seeing the real process.
Speaker 2: I probed a bit further during archive cleaning, unearthing a slim,
Speaker 2: black bound diary from the effects of my late neighbor,
Speaker 2: Mister Thelen, dated nineteen hundred and eleven nineteen hundred and thirteen.
Speaker 2: Its entries were sparse and sometimes cryptic, but one caught
Speaker 2: my eye. Prediction day remarkable correct again. Mayer's wife says,
Speaker 2: towns gift shows in dog race too. Some debate whether
Speaker 2: we ought to ask first or merely consent All shrug
Speaker 2: as usual. Another entry read outside eyed man Census surprised
Speaker 2: at our honesty, Shake's head says we defy sense. He's
Speaker 2: right about that, at least. Near the diary, a yellowed
Speaker 2: envelope yielded a nineteen fifty two letter written in beautiful
Speaker 2: school teacher penmanship, addressed to E. L. Porter Census Office
Speaker 2: d C. It described the town's uncanny accuracy and honest
Speaker 2: record keeping. Bewildered but impressed, I cannot offer explanation save
Speaker 2: for the peace with which the custom is preserved. I
Speaker 2: am left confounded, but not alarmed. There are stranger things
Speaker 2: in smaller places. I re read that phrase stranger things
Speaker 2: in smaller places several times, as if it contained the
Speaker 2: kernel of meaning I couldn't quite grasp. My attempts to
Speaker 2: engage the outside world, after all, evidence and witnesses abounded,
Speaker 2: brought little more than incredulity, sometimes mild irritation. A polling
Speaker 2: expert wrote, statistically, these records should not exist. You should
Speaker 2: expect at best sporadic accuracy over a century, but nothing
Speaker 2: even approximating your claims. Our models break on your numbers.
Speaker 2: Yet I could see the streak was an about static population.
Speaker 2: People had come and gone, World wars had interrupted, two
Speaker 2: floods had displaced hundreds. Even leadership mares, counselors, school heads
Speaker 2: had churned as frequently as the river changed shape. Still
Speaker 2: the streak held true, more immutable than any town ordinance.
Speaker 2: As autumn deepened its hold, I became more certain that
Speaker 2: the cause was not in the records, nor in the
Speaker 2: rituals themselves, but somewhere in the act of gathering and guessing.
Speaker 2: As a whole. What made it possible a phenomenon so
Speaker 2: layered with memory and intuition, if not some honest, unintended
Speaker 2: miracle of context and culture. I decided to map what
Speaker 2: I could not explain. Several nights in a row, with
Speaker 2: Julia's spreadsheets open on my kitchen table, I lined up
Speaker 2: the decades results with time lends of public announcements, radio broadcasts,
Speaker 2: and news wire releases. In every case, even in years
Speaker 2: of regional blackouts and the pre radio era, Bluffford's ballots
Speaker 2: came in before the rest of the country knew anything. Conclusive.
Speaker 2: Old parade photos showed balloons and banners celebrating winners, not
Speaker 2: just before, but despite the mood of the nation, even
Speaker 2: in moments of sharp discord, late migrations split families, long
Speaker 2: absences due to plague and war. The ballots unified around
Speaker 2: the right choice. But it wasn't uniformity from birth or tradition.
Speaker 2: When I examined roll calls after great upheavals, years when
Speaker 2: half the town was newcomers, two classes of school children
Speaker 2: born elsewhere, the same clearing would arrive indecision, then an
Speaker 2: overwhelming unity. Just as ballots were sealed, even stranger when
Speaker 2: an outsider, some one recently arrived, first participated. Their ballots
Speaker 2: sometimes broke rank. But years later these same people swore
Speaker 2: the feeling grew on them harder and harder to resist.
Speaker 2: Mabel once noted, half embarrassed, I voted my father's way
Speaker 2: for years, but after a while, I don't know. I
Speaker 2: just started knowing how the rest would choose. What emerged
Speaker 2: was not evidence of cheating or some hive mind, or
Speaker 2: even the pressure of conformity. Each year brought new names,
Speaker 2: new arguments. Only in the act of public gathering for
Speaker 2: prediction day did the sense of certainty descend, and after
Speaker 2: the ballots were cast, no one seemed eager to speculate
Speaker 2: about what had just happened. I watched one of those
Speaker 2: mural painting sessions at the school, careful to linger at
Speaker 2: the edges. The art teacher, a tranceplant from Omaha only
Speaker 2: three years in town, stood with arms folded, watching her
Speaker 2: student's debate which color best matched the year's winner. When
Speaker 2: I sidled up, she admitted, first year, I almost picked
Speaker 2: against the group. Came right up to ballot day, even
Speaker 2: planned to go rogue. But then just before the vote
Speaker 2: I looked around and felt well settled. It wasn't possible
Speaker 2: to be certain, but I was sounds odd. I know
Speaker 2: it fits, I said, to which he only smiled. That evening,
Speaker 2: with the dusk thickening at the edges of my windows,
Speaker 2: I played again those nineteen seventies tapes of Prediction Day
Speaker 2: announcements and flipped through Missus Stanton's index card. Everything pointed
Speaker 2: back to the same ineffable convergence. At the moment of decision,
Speaker 2: Bluffford seemed to inhale as one, and without visible coordination,
Speaker 2: pointed unerringly toward the future. It was obvious by now
Speaker 2: that the answers were not in further examples or tests.
Speaker 2: It was the phenomenon itself that demanded a new kind
Speaker 2: of attention, a reframing. If luck, tradition, fraud, statistical error,
Speaker 2: and population control failed to explain it, what did The
Speaker 2: following Saturday? As bellringers in the town tower readied their
Speaker 2: ropes and children painted banners on the court house steps,
Speaker 2: I lingered in the town hall, shuffling through packets of
Speaker 2: unused ballots. The place buzzed with convivial energy, the sense
Speaker 2: of an event greater than its apparent importance. It struck
Speaker 2: me with the force of something both sudden and long prepared,
Speaker 2: that the entire process, this annual collective intuition, was a
Speaker 2: kind of subtle communal intelligence. Not telepathy, not mysticism, not
Speaker 2: secret cheating, but a phenomenon were for reasons beyond the
Speaker 2: visible consensus formed out of thin air at the moment
Speaker 2: of decision. Somehow, by coming together each year and sharing
Speaker 2: in the ritual of guessing, Bluffsford enacted something that lay
Speaker 2: at the outermost edge of probability. Each person swept into
Speaker 2: a certainty larger than themselves. The resulting action paradoxically ordinary
Speaker 2: and impossible. I realized then that the street was not
Speaker 2: the point the true fascination. The real anomaly was the
Speaker 2: process itself. Bluffsford's ability to constellate as if the act
Speaker 2: of coming together, this lived experience of close knit repeatedly
Speaker 2: affirmed trust produced conviction so strong it rewrote what was
Speaker 2: possible for a group, even for the universe's stubborn rules.
Speaker 2: I saw then that certainty, in its deepest communal form
Speaker 2: was not just a matter of numbers, ratios, or even luck. Rather,
Speaker 2: it was a kind of shared feeling or quality that
Speaker 2: enacted in a place with the right patterns and expectations
Speaker 2: carried real consequence, a latent power, living unnoticed in the
Speaker 2: spaces between people. Standing in the near empty hall, I
Speaker 2: found myself grinning, not because I'd solved the puzzle, but
Speaker 2: because I saw how the puzzle sustained itself. The ballots,
Speaker 2: the streak, the records, in all their variety, they were
Speaker 2: manifestations not of supernatural ability, but of a rare moment
Speaker 2: where communal life so overwhelmed the solitary self that reality
Speaker 2: improbably gave way. For a moment, I felt a kind
Speaker 2: of humility. Even are there are places and moments when
Speaker 2: people together can do the impossible, if only no one
Speaker 2: questions too intently. How Perhaps that's the hidden contract at
Speaker 2: Bluffford's heart, to cherish the wonder, to preserve the fragile balance,
Speaker 2: where certainty accumulates only as long as the community holds
Speaker 2: it softly. A secret so secret even the sealed scroll
Speaker 2: remains blank. Outside evening had fully settled. Through the windows.
Speaker 2: I watched neighbors gathering envelopes tucked beneath arms, small children
Speaker 2: spinning on the court house lawn. The bell was ready
Speaker 2: to be rung. The air smelled of distant woodsmoke and
Speaker 2: wet river stone. I wandered out to Main Street, standing
Speaker 2: at the edge of the growing crowd, part of its gentle,
Speaker 2: expectant hum. The weight of years felt lighter. Now I
Speaker 2: understood that our tradition, with all its improbability and contradiction,
Speaker 2: was less about predicting and more about paying attention to
Speaker 2: each other, to the whisper of sentiment moving subtly through
Speaker 2: a gathered group. I watched the faces, old, young, skeptical, convinced,
Speaker 2: draw together as the ballots were handed out, and felt
Speaker 2: a rush of almost childish gladness. The impossible here was lived,
Speaker 2: not solved. As dusk deepened and children's voices faded, I
Speaker 2: knew my place was neither to expose nor to explain,
Speaker 2: but to participate honorably, joyfully in a phenomenon whose meaning
Speaker 2: would always live slightly out of reach. The streak would
Speaker 2: continue or it wouldn't. The town would gather, cast its slips,
Speaker 2: and in that act hold something wondrous and strangely enduring.
Speaker 2: Standing at the edge of the scene, the final answer
Speaker 2: felt less urgent than the quiet realization that being part
Speaker 2: of this impossibility was in itself enough. When the first
Speaker 2: bell rang, and the river glittered beneath the town hall.
Speaker 2: In the deepening dark, I found myself wondering, if a
Speaker 2: gentle miracle could persist here without notice, quiet among routines
Speaker 2: for so long, how many others lie disguised within the
Speaker 2: folds of ordinary days, waiting for someone in a post
Speaker 2: office over ballots beside friends to look twice and recognize
Speaker 2: the strange gift that binds us together in Bluffsford. The
Speaker 2: ballots never guess wrong, and I think maybe neither do
Speaker 2: we when we truly listen together.
Speaker 1: And that is the end. Thank you for listening, and
Speaker 1: I will see you in the next one.