New Day

A year ago I wrote about how dearly I wished I could enjoy a Presidents' Day with a President I was actually proud, and how long it had been since I'd felt that, and how it looked as though I might actually get my wish this year. My success records on predictions like that isn't especially impressive: just a few months before that I'd ventured that it looked as though my screenplay might actually go into production in 2008, and almost immediately afterward I got the notice that my producer had gone into Chapter 11. But this time, this time, I was right.

       I wrote about how I'd grown up on my father's reminiscences of FDR, how wonderful and impossible it seemed that a President could have such power to inspire his people. I wish my father could see and comprehend that we finally, again, have a president with at least a portion of that power, that we may be entering another time of national reimagining like the one Roosevelt led my dad's country through when he was twelve years old. My dad's still here: he turned eighty-eight just eleven days ago. There just isn't enough left of his cognitive powers for him to grasp what I'm saying about that handsome black man on the TV. Sometimes I think he's got it for an instant, although maybe that's just my wishful thinking.

       Also a year ago I wrote about how I wished my mother could have lived to see this election. She loved Hillary Clinton, and I know she would have loved Barack Obama too, and I wish I'd had the chance to talk to her about the process of decision she would have to go through. My mother was a feminist and a civil rights activist, and as painful as the choices of February would have been, I know the triumph of November would have been one of the great moments of her life. Her birthday is in five days. She would have been eighty-four. Her mother, her many aunts, and her brother all outlived that by a decade or more. But my mom was the one cancer chose to visit. She died in March, 2001, and so she didn't have to pass through the long valley of the last seven years, but she also missed this climb up the peak.

     The augury of the future is already beginning. Obama has clocked twenty-seven days and we're already hearing assessments of his presidency. His Guantanamo decision was stunning. Daschle was crushing. The economic and finance advisors he's assembling are worrisome. There's no way to know yet whether these next four or eight years will be a great upswing, a great struggle, a great disappointment. But I treasure this moment, this Presidents' Day, so filled with hope and passionate engagement. This alone is a gift, and nothing can ever entirely take it away.