President Obama

November 5, 2008

A gang of us sat in Kyle’s living room watching history be made last night. When Ohio went for Obama, we knew it was won, but we stayed to savor every moment. It was like the night I sat with my dad in the living room in Akron and watched men land on the moon. That a person even of my not-quite-so-advanced years would live to see a black man in the White House would have been, a little while ago, inconceivable. Watching tears roll down Jesse Jackson’s face said it all. I am sanguine enough to believe a whole nation has wandered out of the wilderness and set its feet in the promised land. In his acceptance speech, President Obama pushed not one of the hysteria buttons that have been the singular watchword of the present administration. He did not call upon us to cling to him out of fear, or to cleave together out of hatred for others. He stretched out his arms and gathered. In one night America steps into a cleansing rain, and emerges clean and whole in the eyes of all the world, when it had been smeared almost beyond recognition. I know my friends in Ireland will be dancing in the streets tonight. I will be too if I can find a dance to join. Maybe I’ll dance by myself, under the great golden gum tree where only the squirrels can look on with bemusement. Though at the end it looked inevitable, we thought that something might at last happen to steal the new age away. It did not. I have been happy to be alive before, but never once before because of politics.

M phones that she is off to San Diego next week to the arms of a boy who has loved her since high school. Interfering with-- or even having a firm opinion about–the destiny of another is a dangerous proposition, and I don’t know how even to have a perspective on this, except that I will miss her. The Asheville theater scene will miss her, where she has left a deep mark in a very short time. Everybody will miss her. The only one we know for sure who will profit by this is the boy she runs to. I hope for him that all is well.

Wednesday is open for me, so I tried to write–and will try again–but since this summer I have found myself oddly scoured clean of fancy. My own imaginative worlds do not, for the moment, interest me. It’s not a bad feeling–rather clean and streamlined, the way I imagine other people to live, who do not drag around longings and imaginings that somehow they believe, if they labor desperately enough, they can make real. I miss it. I do not totally recognize myself. But I also don’t know what to do about it, so I busy myself with concrete undertakings–fixing the house, playing the market, waiting for the next night out. This is probably how I would have lived all my life if I had not been a poet.

Robin Farquhar shoots himself at the cabin at Flat Rock Playhouse. Who knows why anybody does anything, most especially this.

John asks for an advance on his check to cover “an unexpected expense.” I give it to him, noticing the perfection of his teeth. We chat for a moment, and he reveals that his oldest daughter is off next year to college to study psychology. “Where?” says I “Liberty,” says he. “In Lynchburg?” I say. He nods. I stop myself from saying anything else. He has said not one word about my Obama T-shirt, so I decide to return the favor. I realize there could no more be understanding between our worlds than if one of us were a Martian. This makes me sad.