It’s Sunday morning in my kitchen. I’m sitting beside my Guadalupe altar. Here a waving Tim Russert still stands affixed to the inner glass of the cabinet holding also six tiny paintings of the Virgin. They surround him like flags, like talismans. I have never left anyone on my altar so long after their death. I’ve missed Tim every single day since then, never more than in the euphoria and relief of late last Tuesday night. Barack is here too, in a beautiful red white and blue portrait, a tiny piece of chum given to me by my Union. I put this rendering of Obama in a maple shadow box and stood it next to Tim in his cabinet, and I keep a votive burning there throughout the day. I have the loteria card of the fire-swallower there and two wonderful campaign buttons from Café Press, a pale lime green that declares: “Obama across the Universe.”

I wore my button through my vacation days as I wandered about waiting for the day to come, the day of the election, a day I feel I have waited for all of my life. A fair number of aged white men and women sidled up to me to touch my arm and make soft, favorable comments about the button. The old gentleman who checks out my groceries saw it and leaned forward to me, saying: “We have to be strong.” A clerk at my favorite department store, a woman nearing or past sixty whispered to me: “I love your button! I try not to talk about it here.” This hope was not exactly furtive, but it was hushed and sub rosa, as if we all shared a secret we could not speak of freely, not yet.

I don’t care about the clichés and I don’t care about the cynicism, either. Obama is a radiant man, a roman candle of a man. I read Mark Danner’s article in the November 20^th New York Review of Books, an article that details the exuberant, even giddy proprietorship among blacks in Germantown, PA, for Barack. I share it. I credit the time I spent with Obama, that I was able to take his hand and watch as a hundred others around me took his hand. I wept and I watched others weep.

Those who disparage the validity of such transformational power mystify me. This is the transmission of pure joy, pure energy. It’s just simple as hell – it improved me, it improves me, it will improve me. My reclusive son voted this year and was buoyed by the experience, sitting through the night with us as we watched the election returns. He relaxed completely when Obama won, a thing I have only seen very rarely and treasured. It truly is as if everything I hoped for in the sixties may come to pass after all – without the mud, the LSD, and the random sexual encounters.

One must…like God…spend all one’s blue. – Agha Shahid Ali

I covered our Days of the Dead altars in birds this year. I had made the souls of five murdered children in Iowa City our primary focus for 2008. “From betrayal to eternity on the wings of doves and sparrows,” I told myself, “into the limitless blue of the love of Our Lord and the great Empress of the Americas.” My elusive friend Colleen sent me a poem she had written about Janusz Korczak, a doctor who died in the death camp at Treblinka. She wrote of his ministry to the children there, and of how they clung to him “like stricken swallows.” I was amazed as usual, and as usual, somewhat resentful, for I never see Colleen anymore, and she resurfaces in my life from time to time like a fragment of music I long to hear in its entirety. I tucked the poem among the spare candles, under an altar cloth.

I know only enough of God to want to worship Him, by any means ready to hand. – Annie Dillard

My secret ingredient for Barack’s favorite pie is ground white pepper. Sounds odd, works perfectly to bind it all up into bliss. As Colleen said in the last word of her poem then, “Amen.” Dry your eyes, because that long and winding road ahead is not one we have seen before, but believe me, it is going to look like home at last.