Election international

Tomorrow, as you are all painfully aware by now, is the much-awaited inauguration day. While I am across the ocean, currently hunting for a bar or a friend with a television so I can watch Obama's speech with my fellow expatriots tomorrow evening (due to the time difference, it will be from five to eight pm here), I am thinking tonight about November fourth of last year.

My memories of the first presidential election during which I had the right to vote are decidedly positive, and also charged with feeling.

I remember walking into the polls, fixing the familiar middle-school gym with a direct stare, aware that history was being made. I stood in line and thought, most appropriately, about showing you the movie Iron Jawed Angels, about the sacrifices that were made so that I, and not only you, could vote on that day.

Exit polling was a whole new excitement for me, and I stood in the rain and did it, to the delight of a PolySci student in the parking lot. Then I ran back to the car, raving about how exciting exit polls were, and you laughed as we drove away.

That night there were two bottles of wine, the winning bottle and the losing one, a white and a red, and we curled up tight in the already-drafty living room and held our breath as the results came in, state by state.

It was eleven pm by the time that they called Virginia blue, and I looked at you, and you looked back at me, in disbelief and the dawning realization that it had really happened. We ran out into the dark street and set off fireworks, listening to the exuberant reveling that was starting around us, enveloping the two of us in a cloud of smoke and noise. I called my mother, woke her up, screeched my excitement into the phone over a bad connection.

We left the door standing open and I didn't hear a word of any victory of concession speech, didn't see the footage of proud supporters crying and laughing at the same time.

We stood on the corner of the damp porch and held each other tightly under the eaves, and I think I cried a little bit when I said we did this, this is happening because we're here.

And then I said something else, something I hadn't intended or even known I would say, the words tumbling from me into you like little birds, half-whispered in my second language (prettier by far than the first) and you stared down at me. Say it again, you said. And I did, brazen and eyes wide open this time, unmistakably there.

You picked me up and carried me across the threshold into the house, kicking the door shut as we went. We turned off McCain's concession speech and that was the end of that.

You're going to miss inauguration, you told me, and I just smiled.

And yes, I do wish I could be home to celebrate with the rest of everyone, but most particularly with you. It will be good and it will be moving and it will be unmistakably positive to watch it here, whenever I can, bonding in our little island of Americana one third of a world away. But it won't match even a quarter of the goodness of last November.

On an unrelated note, here are the songs that I have come to miss the most:
Babylon / David Grey
When You Were Young / Oasis
So Alive / Ryan Adams
Reva Thereafter / Girlyman
Live Your Life / Rhianna feat. TI
Wonderwall / Cat Power
Under the Table and Dreaming / Dave Matthews Band

All those songs that I used to play while I was driving and sing along with, drumming my hands on the steering wheel, constantly ramping up the volume until it filled the whole world.