Barack Obama read to me for six hours this weekend. We were all alone in my car, except for the sometimes-sleeping, sometimes-crying baby in the back, and he was telling me the story of his life. It has been quite a life, even before the events still to come today.
I had checked out Dreams from my Father on CD from the library a couple of weeks ago. I expected to enjoy listening to it, but I didn't expect to be totally engrossed. I was. The drive between Livingston and Great Falls is three hours each way, and my interest never flagged. I think that's one reason that I started to cry on Sunday night when he and Michelle Obama came across the stage at the beginning of the pre-Inauguration concert on HBO. Here was the same man whose calm but passionate voice had told me about his upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia, his struggle to find his place, his ideas about the world. His thoughtfulness and intelligence and care was apparent in every word.
It's just such a damn relief, isn't it?
I know he'll make mistakes. Hell, he already has in my book (Rick Warren?!?). But I can't imagine feeling--as I have for the last eight years--that I don''t even have a president. (Or that I had a president, but that he was a fictional character and therefore somewhat less effective than I might have liked.) In November 2000, I remember vividly sitting in our tiny first apartment in Prague, waiting up until the wee hours to find out whether Gore or Bush would be our next president. When I went to bed, I had just talked with my brother back in the States, and it was looking good for Gore. I thought it was safe to go to sleep. Like everyone else, I was dismayed to wake up and find out what had happened (and extra dismayed to know that I would be trying to explain the intricacies of the Electoral College, which I daresay I scarcely understand myself, to a bunch of Czech trade school students and business people over the next month in the English classes I was teaching then). When Bush was given the presidency, I was as dumbfounded as anyone.
But I didn't know how bad it would get. I didn't know that by the next election night, we would be back in the United States--driven back, in part, by the collapse of the value of the dollar under Bush's watch. I didn't know that I would witness the outpouring of love and grief after September 11th from friends and total strangers alike in Italy, where we happened to be vacationing at the time--only to see all of those sentiments dissapate in the wake of an unjustified war and the revelations that my country was involved in torture, warrantless wiretapping, rendition... I didn't know that by November 2008, I would begin to have serious doubts about whether I could raise my children in my own country. If the election had gone differently, I might be blogging about our preparations for another international move.
But it didn't. I cried that night, and I expect to cry many times today. In less than an hour, I'm going to have a president again.