Fine Young Fauves

This morning Isaac started the day refusing to go to school. Those were his first words, "I'm not going to school today." I maintained that he was indeed going to school today and what ensued was about two hours of struggle. I won, in the end, which is the main point. But now I'm exhausted and emotionally drained and it's only 9:45 a.m. I'm not a big drinker, but a fifth of Jack Daniels sounds pretty appealing to me right now.

Let's review the victories:

1. I won. He is now in the school building attending class. Only a half hour late, and there's a snow storm going on too!
2. I did not beat him to a pulp or actually harm him in any way. I did not scream hysterically nor shake him till his teeth rattled. I called Ben and he talked me down. We got through it with a cold and steely resolve and no screaming and no violence.
3. I won.

But this leaves me with some questions. If we go through this now, does that mean that it will be smooth sailing when he's 16? Or, will it just be one steady and endless tooth and nail struggle until he's a grown person? At which point, presumably, it will only continue albeit long-distance?

Which brings me to another question: where did I go wrong? How is it that a nice and charming person like myself has a hell cat like this for a child? Oh yes… I remember now. A whole bunch of reasons, some of which are circumstantial, but many of which lay squarely at my own feet:

1. We lost our first born. When Isaac came into the world, I wanted nothing more than to tend to his every need.
2. My own childhood– not to go all Little Match Girl on you– but was pretty Little Match Girl at times.
3. I read a lot of attachment parenting books, and came into motherhood at a time when over-parenting and over-indulgence was all the rage.
4. I left work to be his mother, and thus turned all my talents and skills to the task of meeting his every need, nurturing every little spark of interest, and soothing every slight difficulty in his path.
5. Isaac came into the world an exceptionally intense, intelligent, sensitive, needy, and high-strung person. He can feel the seams in his clothing– and they bother him.

Yep. There you have it. It's something of a perfect storm. The question now is how to right the ship?

Ack! This cat continues her lifelong project of repaying love and kindness with being a real pain in the ass. She's back. And not just back any old day… she's back THE very day that I finally got myself confident enough that she was gone that I actually took the children to a cat rescue place, where we petted many a cat and considered getting a pair of kittens. I got excited about it. I mean… we went there, and we came home, and she was in the garage.

She vanished in early November. Since then, I searched high and low for her. I walked all over the place. I searched the garage as thoroughly as possible. I contacted the local animal shelters. I made these flyers and put them in mailboxes of all the adjoining properties:

 lost_cat2.doc

SHort of contacting the pet psychic, I did everything I could to find the stupid girl. And I worried. Since then, it's been incredibly cold and miserable at times. Like, 5 degrees with a wicked wind chill, or driving rain blended with ice. And she's been out there.  By herself. I wondered whether she just got wet and cold and froze to death right off the bat. Or got eaten by a coyote. Or carried off by one of the large and lethal-looking hawks we have in our woods (they can carry off a full-grown rabbit and she's no bigger). Or whether she got hit by a car and was lying dead in a ditch some where. Or whether she got taken in by a nice old lady, who didn't see my flyer. Or, or, or. 

Meanwhile, as you know, we have mice issues. I can say that having many if not most of the major thoroughfares in the basement plugged up with steel wool and foam insulation seemed to really discourage them. And the new kitchen, with all the non-chewed wood slowed them down and disrupted their supply lines. But they were not technically GONE. And indeed, as prey animals, their population is designed to be preyed upon. Meaning, there could be an explosion if we had no cat whatsoever. So all this, plus a desire to bring in fresh horses, turn a new page, a new chapter in our lives, got me looking online at cat rescue sites. There they have millions of cats. What about a matching pair of half-grown kittens? Wouldn't that be nice? My mother even has a fine, highly skilled mouser to offer me also, and I was thinking about it. On the way out to Minneapolis for THanksgiving I brought up the idea to Ben (my mom said she would bring the cat to us in Minne), and he said we should rescue a cat that truly needs a home. What he didn't say was– no cat. In fact he sort of implied, Yes cat. 

So yesterday I was talking on the phone with my mother when I saw the damnedest thing: Zane Gray sitting under the bird feeder?! I got off the phone, got my boots on, and darted outside within one minute. She was gone. Or was it Zane Grey? I didn't see her cropped ear or her non-tail. Last summer during her other "sabbatical" there was an identical male cat, like her in almost every way. Was it him again? I put out some cat food and waited for its return. I have noticed in the last few days, lots of cat tracks in the snow. Crossing our lawn from far away in the woods, all the way to the far woods on the other side, and also, circumnavigating the house, round and round. But that could be any cat, I figured. We have lots of feral cats around here… 

SO last night after we got back from the cat shelter, visions of wonderful cats dancing in our heads, Ben came in and said, "Guess who I saw in the garage?" I said, "Was it really her? DId you see her no-tail?" He said, "Just a flash of gray." So I went out with some canned cat food, stood there and opened it noisily, talked to her and called her and meowed until I heard a faint reply from behind the wood pile. With just the slightest peep I knew it was her, and she'd come back just in time to reclaim her place as our cat, just indeed a DAY before it was usurped by arrivistes. 

I coaxed her out, got her to eat, and after a little while, got her to let me pick her up and carry her in. I took her down to the basement, where it's very warm, and refilled her litter box. I settled her in and did a brief medical exam. She's skin and bones again, but she seems fine. No injuries, no obvious damage. Just… TEN WEEKS on her own in the woods for no reason whatsoever.

What an dumb kitty!

My mother has known probably hundreds of cats in her day and can't say she's seen one this dumb. "Did she walk ten feet from the house and get lost?" she asked. Maybe. And what about the basic cat protocol: when locked out, sit in front of the door and meow. Last night Ben suggested that we change her name to "Stupid Loser." But this morning took a softer line, "Maybe she really has a head injury of some kind? Maybe she was hit by a car as a kitten?" I mean, maybe the cat really is retarded. In the meantime, she's our cat again!  She has at least 15 lives, many of which she wants to live with us. 

My mother says that I should just tell Ben, "THis cat is unreliable. We need a back-up cat." It's true. This cat is such a flake, and not all that great of a mouser, and not all that cuddly, and tends to have the negatives without many of the positives. She does pee in closets at times, which I loathe. And many people who know us well have never seen her, she's so hidy, but only can tell we have a cat due to the snowdrifts of gray fur… I ask you. 

And yet, what can we do? I gave her a bath this morning and brushed her fur all out. I've been feeding her the nicest foods and keeping her extra warm. She's our cat, and apparently plans to be our cat forever!  

Have you been wracking your brains, trying to imagine what minor insult or slight in the past year cause me to summarily kick you off my Christmas card list? Well, let me reassure you. I did NOT send out a Christmas card this year, or you surely would have gotten one! It was impossible in the thick of the kitchen hell to get one figured out and implemented. I might have pulled it off, maybe, had all my address labels  not been lost in the hard drive crash of 2008. But combined kitchen insanity and the lack of easy one-touch addressing made the whole thing just way, way too daunting. Impossible, even. Didn't happen. Fear not. Anyhoo, I'm looking at maybe a Valentine card. No shortage of adorable pictures to choose from. 

Speaking of the hard drive crash, here's what happened in the end. My dear friend and favorite geek in whole world Colin hooked me up with a computer savvy and very kind-hearted soul in the Cleveland. This wonderful man, I'll call him K, took my hard-drive under his wing and tried his damnedest to salvage it. K even FROZE it, attempting a scheme to expand the metal and thus get it running for a few moments to pull off the much-missed material. It didn't work. Then he managed to persuade those incredible hard drive surgeons in California– with the white suits and the "clean room," the ones who wanted to charge me upwards of $2,000– to attempt to rescue my material for as little as $100, in return for an article about their services. I loved this idea and shipped my hard drive to them with a glimmer of hope. 

However, what happened was that even THEY could not rescue it. Imagine, they save hard drives that have been crushed by trucks, burned by fires, sunk deep in the ocean, and yet they couldn't save mine. It just quietly died one day of natural causes, sitting safely on a table, but was totally and finally dead. No resurrection. No Lazarus.

And yet I was still incredibly happy to have K's help with the whole thing. Because otherwise, it would all be about the $2,000. I would tuck the drive away and say to myself, "Someday… I've get that $2,000 and doggone it I get that writing back!" It would perhaps take years, but I would continue to believe that it might, just might be possible. And now, instead, I can just move on the final stage of grief process, acceptance. I can say, no money on earth could save it and it's truly gone. This provides closure, which I appreciate.

Meanwhile I've found at least some of what I thought I'd lost. The addresses came along as an unpleasant additional loss I had not realized until I needed them. Oh well… live and learn. I now have a 320 gb harddrive sitting right here on the desk and am backing everything up constantly.

In other news, the kitchen is still wonderful. The children are trying to destroy it, which makes me crazy. Elias attacked a cabinet with a fork, gouging it. He also colored on the counters, but at least it was only pencil. Isaac has thrown projectiles at the walls, marring them. Everyone, myself included, tends to leave things on the counter. Even a stunning sink can get filled with dishes mighty quick. I've learned that maintaining it in ready-for-photo-shoot perfection takes constant, near-psychotic vigilance. But I'm trying, I honestly am. It pains me to see it in any way scuffed or "lived in." It's like a new car or a newborn babe. I am reminding myself of that sort of fish, I can't recall its name, but the male makes a nest on the ocean floor. He then tends the nest constantly, moving bits of sand here and there to increase its perfection in ways only apparent to himself. If another fish comes anywhere near it, he chases it away and even bites it. This is like me and the kitchen.  Can it last forever? I don't think so, but I will hold the line as long as I can. 

Great news: the kitchen is done, and Christmas has been vanquished. It was touch and go there for a while, with everyone sick, the contents of the kitchen disgorged,  and everything covered with dust. But bit by bit we got the house back together. Seems like it's been months… but the last kitchen person was here last Friday, just a week ago. And compressing recovery completely, from a state of total unreadiness for Christmas, we somehow managed to get the house functioning, get the kitchen put together, get a Christmas tree up and hold a perfectly respectable Christmas. I've been sick through the whole thing, especially on Christmas Eve Day and Christmas itself, during which the magnetic pull of all horizontal surfaces was almost impossible to resist. But, with a Santa-obsessed six-year-old in the house, we just had to pull a mind-over-matter and just do it. 

It's been interesting to me what a well-known rite of passage kitchen renovation is. All through this process I've talked to people who have "been through it." That's the sort of language they use: "We went through it ten years ago…" and "We went through it one hot summer…" It's like almost a scarring experience, although after it's over you do emerge better for it.  It's on a par with being "wedding-ed." Seems like there's fodder for an essay there, but I will have to save that thought, like all the others, for another day. 

It's 6:22 a.m. and Elias is climbing on my back while I write this. Elmo is babbling away about his two ears…

Elias is now getting good enough at talking to say some pretty interesting things. Such as the other day when we were in the car and he seemed to say, "Elmo is a two-bit hood." His exact words! I wasn't sure if I heard him right, so I asked him, "Honey, did you just say that Elmo is a two-bit hood?" And he replied, "Yes!" most emphatically, but I remained unsure whether we were really on the same page.

He's made up some interesting verbs– like "to cozy" ("cozy me!") and the reflexive use of "sneeze" ("I sneezed myself!") He struggles with the whole me/you situation, which is understandable, but leads to some sentences that are pretty complicated to punctuate. Like when we  stayed with my aunt and uncle in Madison, and ran into a cat who grew quickly weary of Elias's interest. I told him, "The kitty is mad at you." Later, when he wanted to tell about this, he would say, "'The kitty is mad at you!' [ME!]"

For weeks and weeks, one of his main themes of discourse has been this "dark cave" we visited some warm fall day in November. It was in a national park not far from here and really quite a fine cave. Just a deep limestone overhang with a pool of still water under it. I brought the boys there and then struggled with their very different reactions: Isaac loved it and wanted me to climb around in it with him (C'mon Mom!"); Elias was terrified and wanted me to hold him as far away from it as possible ("Back home!"). It was too dark! The only selling point as far as he was concerned was that it had lots of wonderful spotted frogs in it! Anyway, since then, he's been telling everyone about it. Unfortunately this is a line of conversation that most people can't easily follow. His opening salvo is usually simply, "Cave. Dark." And then sometimes he adds the flourish, "Frogs!" I usually try to translate for him, but still, people are mystified.  He will happily pick up the phone and say, "Hello. Cave Dark. Bye!" Combined with his rather thick baby accent and the lack of context, this is hard to understand…

Another thing is that he mixes up V's and W's giving him a German accent at times. "Mommy, vait!" he yells. He sings the Wonder Pets song all the time: "Vat's gonna verk? Team verk!" ANd since he is a Montessori child, he has a lot of "verk" to do. He adds a special twist to it by mixing up me/mine or… mein. Apparently this Anthony kid at his school is up in his grill all the time and so, at random intervals, Elias will declare, "Mein verk, Anthony!"

Isaac is of course fluent in English now, but he still can say something pretty odd. Such as when he was quoting Mike Rowe, the host of "Dirty Jobs," without fully understanding what he was saying. He said, "Did you know the great white shark has two penises? That's why it's called a GREAT white shark!"

On that note, I will now post some kitchen pictures.  

Here is our before picture. Note the gaping hole where the fridge was (we traded fridges with our house in Cleveland, but the bigger better fridge didn't fit there… it was like that for months!). Note the limited counter space, the sparse cabinet space (one of those big drawers didn't even open!), the dark wood cabinets and light=absorbing green walls, to say nothing of the "Shakees Pizza" light fixture. Oh yes– and don't forget the horrible textured ceiling!

 Here's a during picture, after they ripped it all out:

Here's during the ceiling ordeal:

 During the painting:

All done!!! (although no pictures on the wall yet, or rugs, etc.) :  

 Another view of all done… our beautiful new island… Oh happy day!

Okay, deep cleansing breath. We're almost there. This is painting week. I had much concern about the color… there's a lot of it, as it's all over the walls and the stunning new ceiling. Make a mistake there and.. oh, perish the thought. But ultimately I went with a shade lighter than I thought I needed, and this was just right. It's beautiful!!  Sunny, buttery, creamy, without being yellow. The trim is white without being cold. And most importantly, it's almost DONE!!!

The painter is still hard at work today (day three), and will need a bit of tomorrow too. Then, lighting and hardware goes on and we're good to go. I have a cleaning team coming on Friday to help with the next phase– putting life back together. They will clean the dusty new kitchen and prepare it for launch. Then they will help with the long, arduous process of cleaning all the items we took out of there and putting them back into their new homes. (Yes, we had boxes, not as many as you would think with a box company president as a husband, but we didn't seal them up tight. How naive. Now all the contents of all the boxes are full of dust. The dishes need to be washed and all the pantry goods need to be wiped off…) The amazing thing is that for the first time, ever, we will have adequate storage space. We will be able to put things away instead of just parking them all over the counter. And counter? There's a lot more of it. In any case, I think it's high time for some photos.  

What a bad combination. Dust, noise, confusion, power tools, croup, asthma, fevers…

At times I have been forced to ask myself an uncomfortable question: If my children are the devil's spawn, what does that make me?

Isaac is especially bad when sick. I think it's an off-shoot of the phenomenon in which the more tired he gets, the faster he runs in circles. When he's sick he's so tired that he has to leap from chair to couch, sneak away and eat horrible little red candies that we have to decorate cookies. (Usually these are in the way back of a top shelf, but since everything is upside down in boxes, they are in plain view.) He has to get mouthy and rude and physically uncontrollable.

When I'm sick, too, it's all the harder to cope with psycho boy.

Elias, for his part, has been more a traditional sick person, i.e., subdued. A couple nights ago he scared me half to death with serious breathing problems. He was struggling over each breath, grunting to exhale, and getting pale gray or even almost blue around his mouth. The cure for this is cold air, which was plentiful outside. So I sat with him bundled in my lap, only his little face showing, in a chair positioned right next to an open window. He was burning up with fever and so his cheeks were aflame, his little chest rattling. (Was pneumonia setting in??!) But then, as I determined that he would have to go to the emergency room, and began formulating the steps, it passed. His breathing evened out and his gray overtone went away. He slept badly, though, and we had to do this drill a few more times. Exhausting for all!! So I took him to the doctor yesterday and got the diagnosis I expected: croup. The treatment for that horrible condition is just steroids to take the swelling down. He slept beautifully last night and refused to get up this morning for school. 

Isaac has been blighted by this wracking cough that looks to me like it plans to stay until spring. This morning I tried to get him up for school too, meeting strong resistance. And since Elias was sound asleep and seemed desperately to need it, I couldn't feature dragging them both out into the cold to go to school. This wouldn't even have been a question were it not for the difficulty of being HERE. And the difficulty of containing them both in any building all day, let alone one as screwed up as this one. 

It's only 10:00 a.m. …  

Advanced kitchenlessness has little to recommend it. Even less when small children are involved. It's been quite a run here, for the last month or so, a packed series of events and circumstances that have made even a short blog entry unattainable. Well issues, stomach flu, lost cat, kitchen packing and destruction, a trip to Minneapolis and back by car with the kids, ceiling problems, reading glasses, and a return home to lots and lots of DUST, NOISE and confusion. Yes. That about sums it up to the present moment.

The well: still total coliform positive… meaning still contaminated with harmless bacteria from the surface world. Probably just crud in the pipes and the new well is fine, but further testing and hassles are needed before we have that ever elusive goal of safe and potable water fit for human consumption. Arg.

The cat: the damn fool cat. How I worry for her and fear that she's really dead this time. She ran off about a month ago, one uncommonly summery night when I was, not surprisingly, running in and out to work on the dratted well. I then was felled by the stomach flu– indeed, it's never fun to be vomitted upon, I think you'll agree. But in the pitch dark? While asleep? On the night the pipes are being treated and so there's no running water? Surely this takes the cake! Elias was the culprit and I the victim. Soon I got it too, and thus was totally flat out incapacitated for a few days and did not even know the cat was gone. Then when I realized it, I assumed she would come back. Then I began to search in all the old places, especially the garage, where I think she hid much of her ten week sojourn before. I then thought perhaps she was hiding at a neighbor's house someplace and made and distributed flyers about it. How many cats are there out there with no tail? I'm at the library so I can't post a photo of her, but I assure you she looks quite silly. My friend Colin says that perhaps she'll get teased and then come home. He asks, "what have you done to make her hate you so much that she'd rather brave the Siberian landscape than be home and warm?" That's a good question. I don't know. In any case, although I really can't fathom how she could still be alive, we've been down that road before and so I don't rule it out. I can say that one nagging worry is that she will return 98% dead again, and again seem to demand $1,000 in veterinary treatment. And this time…?

Did I mention the kitchen? Agh!! It was ripped out completely before Thanksgiving. Then the real work began. The ceiling is of particular importance, because it was a big huge vaulted ceiling, with ugly texture on it, and cracks, and loomed over one in an unpleasant manner. I sought advice. I got it. Different advice. A) leave it and just live with it, said one guy; or B) dampen it and scrape it off, then repair the dings; or C) sand it and skim coat it, then sand it again; or D) drywall over the whole fricking thing and just start anew. (The one thing they could all agree on: it's going to make a huge mess.) I place these roughly in order of difficulty, although other than doing nothing they all cost $$$ the same about it. So, Ben was for doing nothing, but that was really his wallet talking, understandably enough!! But I looked it at long-term. What ceiling would I like to spend the next 40 years under? Hm. Well, I guess if you put it that way, the best idea would be to just drywall the bastard. That's what I pushed for. Ben I think didn't care all that much about the ceiling either way, but 40 years of hearing me complain about it… that deterred him enough. Anyway, although it was totally expensive and inconvenient, I kept eyes on the prize and lined up the drywall people. They got into it while we were out of town. But silly fools– they assumed there would be STUDS under there. But no, the old drywall had large areas of no studs under it, and the incompetent parties who hung it there had massive chunks just hanging on nothing! So… the poor drywallers had to actually tear open the whole mess and build in their own studs and move large angles so that corners would meet. Oh god. It went on and on, and still indeed is not done, only paused while the cabinet people are having a turn. And dusty? They sealed off all the doors as best they could and yet the whole house is covered in dust. Since all the contents of the kitchen have also been spewed all over the place, the house looks like a junk store– a long-abandoned one at that, thick with dust. You can write your name on the couch.

What else?

Oh, yes. The oil slick to the grave. For about a year, I've been having an internal conversation with myself. It's been along these lines. "My eyes are just great," I tell myself. "I have 20/20 vision. I have no problem with reading. I'm not middle aged. My body is not falling apart. It's not just an oil slick to the grave from here on out." (I get the term from my cousin Mischa's blog, where someone wrote, "Remember, once you hit 30 it's just an oil slick to the grave.") Then alternatively, I have to ask myself, "Why the fuck can't I see?!" So after complaining about this for ages, and getting some drug store reading glasses (the wrong ones? but which ones are right?) I finally decided I should get professional help on the matter. I went to an eye doctor the other day. He rendered the much-feared verdict: "Your near vision has gone to pot," he said. "Your distance vision will head out in about five years." Then… to twist the knife he prescribed bifocals!!! "This is the way to go," he said. "You'll be able to see near and see far. We can make them lineless." I said, "No, I can't deal with that." A true statement! He said, "Okay, get reading glasses. Your distance vision is fine for now. But you'll lose them. You'll lose them all the time. When you get infuriated enough with that, come on back."

So then I chose the reading glasses out of the thousands. All of them seemed wrong for me, my face, my lifestyle, and everything else. I ordered them and now await them. I have had plenty of days to regret my choice and to become ever more certain that I should have brought a stylist with me to pick them out. What do I know about picking glasses? Isn't there some sort of science to it? Meanwhile, I ordered this necklace thing from J. Jill. It's NOT a librarian chain thing, it's more like a single loop in the center and the glasses hang there. But irony of ironies it's too short and I CAN'T SEE the damn clasp when it's right under my chin! So I'm working on a plan to get a new chord for it (I really like the silver lobster claw part) and make it longer. But honestly… this is all taking up way too much of my time, at a time when I have none.

But at issue here seems to be "what sort of old lady will I be?" This is a question I've never grappled with before. In the midst of it I turned 42, a couple weeks ago, which has done nothing to improve matters. Indeed on my birthday I had this depressing moment, kneeling in front of the bathtub to wash the dishes, and then mentioning to Isaac, "Do you know it's my birthday?" And having Isaac reply, "Who cares about that?" (Sometimes he seems to be just bones, sinew, and a smart mouth.) Since the reading glasses situation last Thursday, SEVERAL people have made reference to the "bun and glasses on a chain, like a librarian." Hello, people, that's not helping! But the sad fact is that I bet this is the sort of old lady I'll be. I have had long or longish hair most of my life, and the pony tail is looking more ridiculous by the day. (I am a walking makeover waiting to happen.) An up-do of some sort would surely be better. And the reading glasses are being inflicted upon me. And how am I supposed to not lose them?

Wouldn't you all be shocked if I went another route– cut my hair short, started wearing track suits, and parked those glasses atop my head in a sporty manner. Who'd have the last laugh??? I have this vague vision of Meryl Streep in the French Lieutenant's Woman, the modern part. She was reading something on a bed, on her stomach, and she had this lovely bob and… reading glasses. She made it all seem gorgeous, classy, erudite. I've had a bob before. Maybe that's the angle.

One time I was sitting in an Eastern European deli with my mother. Some of the old ladies there had on babushkas. My mother said, "I wonder when I'll turn into an old lady wearing a babushka?" Like one day this would just happen. I said, "Mom, those ladies have been wearing babushkas since they were little girls in the old country. When you're old, you'll wear a beret, since you've always worn a beret." So too, Ben as an old man will wear a light blue shirt and khakis. We're creatures of habit, young and old.

Anyway. That's the update. I'll post cat/kitchen pictures when I can.

"Don't call me Darth Vader," Isaac said. "Call me 'Dark Lord of the Sith.'" Um… okay… Here is the Dark Lord of the Sith, in his suburban back yard.

The above photo was taken at Isaac's sixth birthday party a couple weeks ago. So on a related note, here is Godzilla, on a rampage atop Isaac's birthday cake. He's destroying a train! Made also of cake!

Yesterday Isaac claimed that he had a cold. It may actually have had some seeds of truth. He sneezed repeatedly and, at one point when he was screaming enthusiastically about something, I caught a glimpse of his throat. It looked a little red. Partly because of this I decided to let him take at least the morning off and come with me to vote. We brought Elias to school, though. Some things that don't mix include long lines, complicated ballots, and toddlers.

At our house, like so many others, we have a mixed marriage. I have tried hard not to corrupt Isaac to my political way of thinking, and to always be respectful when discussing Ben's different opinions. But somehow Isaac has become a devoted Obama supporter. At dinner the other night, he explained to Daddy exactly why he was against John McCain: "Because he's grumpy all the time and he wants to start wars." Exactly!! That about summarizes it. But I swear I did not tell Isaac this. He must have picked it up from his school chums or received it through osmosis. In any case, he and I were both excited to go and cast our vote for Obama.

The thing that surprised me the most is that, upon arrival at the polls with my bright and excited 6-year-old son, any trace of remaining cynicism instantly evaporated. I actually had a lump in my throat as I began to explain the process to him. Our democracy! Our country! And you get to be a part of this historic day! It felt bizarrely moving to be among the shuffling masses. Bureaucratic and yet… electric.

We brought some supplies to get through the line– a godzilla toy, which recently played a starring role destroying a train atop Isaac's birthday cake; and our knitting. Isaac decided a couple days ago to learn to knit and has been carrying around needles and a ball of yarn ever since. He wasn't restless or bored or in any way a nuisance. (Luckily we only had to wait about a half-hour.) I think he was just so happy to be included in this important event, to be the big boy while the little boy couldn't come, and, of course, to have a free day off school. The poll worker with the big name book explained everything to him as she found my listing. Isaac stood at my side peeking over the voting "booth" as I went through all the details. "Mom," he whispered. "This is just a big suitcase." The little table thing with sides that I was using did, upon closer inspection, have a handle. You could fold the whole thing up apparently and carry it off.

The only thing non-glorious about the process was that my ballot kept getting spit out by the optical scanner. The dottering, almost enfeebled poll worker finally gave up and put it in a different slot. "It will have to go to the board of elections," he told me. "Will they hand-count it?" I asked. he shrugged, "Whatever they do."

Humph!! This didn't inspire much confidence! But what could I do? People were piling up behind me. And surely they would tally up mine along with the other spat-out victims'. Right?

Last night we all went to bed before results were in. But this morning when my clock radio turned on, "President-Elect Obama" was being discussed. And Ohio went blue! I'm so proud of it! Isaac was already up and taking a shower with Daddy. When he came in, wet hair plastered to his head, his little wiry body wrapped in a towel, I told him the news. "We have a new president," I said. "Who is it?" he asked. "Obama!" I told him. "Yippee!!" he said, "That's the same one I wanted!'

Me too.

I has been a lovely morning. The weather is simply spectacular. I went for a walk this morning along this stunning gorge. As golden sunlight poured down through yellow leaves, a doe walked across the path right in front of me. She stopped and looked at me with the sun catching her steamy breath. I thought, "This day does not seem real. This day seems miraculous." I stood still and watched her for a few moments, until another doe walked into the frame and they both ran off, their cottony white tails flashing.

Even though I'm back in the real world, at the library, using the public computer, I can't shake the feeling that this day is all a beautiful dream.  President Obama. That has a wonderful ring to it, doesn't it?