Busytown by Jolisa Gracewood

One minute you’re wading through the baby days as if up to your middle in golden syrup. And the next you’re the parent of a three year old who can spell his name (“it got a O like Obama!”), has a best friend, and greets the news that a cousin’s pet has died with a fascinated gasp: “Dyed?!! So that cat got purple hair now?”

Hard to believe it’s three years since the infamous birth story, shorter than an episode of Blue’s Clues, and, mercifully, just as uncomplicated (albeit twice as entertaining). Perfect for his big brother’s attention span at the time.

Harder still to believe that the new guy is now barely a year younger than his big brother was then.

Who knows where the time goes? (Sing it, Sandy). At such moments of existential uncertainty, one naturally turns to the classics. Like The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells, in which the Time Traveller describes his experience thus:

I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute making a day. ... The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me.

(Thanks to everyone who brought food in those early months, when dinnertime arrived on the heels of breakfast and vice versa).

The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye.

(More fool us for attempting to Helen-Keller the speechless toddler into language via teaching him the miraculous action of the light switch.)

I saw trees growing and changing like puffs of vapour … they grew, spread, shivered, and passed away.

(Gardening with two year olds: arcadian, in theory).

“I saw huge buildings rise up faint and fair, and pass like dreams.”

(That would be the lego, crunched viciously underfoot in a darkened room).

You get used to it. Even the Time Traveler did:

The unpleasant sensations of the start were less poignant now. They merged at last into a kind of hysterical exhilaration... so with a kind of madness growing upon me, I flung myself into futurity.

And so have I. David’s gorgeous post the other day moved me immensely, not least because it finally gave me a sense of peace with the word “spine.” I used to hear that word and shudder, thinking of the two spinal taps my little guy endured before he was one year old; his three hospitalizations in two years. Now I look at him and admire his backbone, in every sense.

I confess I was slow to commit; not because he wasn’t gorgeous and wonderful and one hundred percent mine, but because he seemed at first so frail. (Hard act to follow: his robust big brother was the bonniest baby going). I worried. I still worry. He still eats like a bird that’s on a diet; the hand-me-down trousers fall off his snake-like hips.

But he’s as tough as anything and floats through the day with a smile on his face. The boy is constitutionally chipper. When he stubs a toe or bonks his head, he weebles his way back to equilibrium within seconds. If it’s a bad bump, he wails “I need a hug and a kiss, I really do!” and flies across the room - to give you the hug and kiss that will make him feel better.

You do get the occasional volcanic threenager outburst, usually when you’ve just effed up the ineffable in some thoughtlessly irrevocable way. Peel the lid off that yoghurt container at your peril, even if you have five others just like it in the fridge. What do we want? Total reversal of the laws of physics. When do we want it? Like five seconds ago, you fool.

The blow-up always takes me by surprise, but he’s almost always over it by the time my ears stop bleeding. (Flashback to our wry pediatrician in New York who said “Oh yeah, a healthy two-to-three year old is clinically indistinguishable from someone with OCD and a few anger management issues.")

By special request, I made him and his best friend a mother-flippin' spectacular penguin birthday cake for their party, a triple-decker cakey Antarctica, swathed in a thick layer delicious snowy icing and surrounded by a sea of toxic blue jelly.

(Penguin slide designed and engineered by big brother and a vegetable knife.)

It was a huge hit. And when I say hit, I mean birthday cake = sugar yard-glass. I'm so very glad the other family hosted the party.

Only after the whole birthday palaver wound down did I remember the very explicit gift list he dictated before Christmas, and which we had completely failed to honour: “A yellow dump truck, a real parrot that talks, and jellybeans.” He didn’t seem too miffed with the castle lego, thankfully; he is obsessed with castles, castle guys, castle hats, and castle weaponry. The fact that we have a castle at the end of our street is a particular point of pride. (It's a Polish Catholic castle, since you ask).

When he was a little baby, he laughed like Arnold Horshack. Gratifyingly, he still does, especially when he’s “just joking you,” which he pronounces with an extra “n”, as in “I just jonking you.” (Note to the linguists reading: is it an exaggerated attempt at a New Zealand accent? “Beanch” gets the same treatment, as do many words with long vowels and short consonants). "What say we get a sea lion for our house? That be nice. Ha ha, I just jonking you! [wheeze, snort, honk]."

The truly nice thing about this full-on breakthrough into language is that he is steadily forging a proper relationship with his big brother. The other day I stood downstairs in the public library and watched them walk off hand-in-hand to get to the children’s library upstairs. They stopped and conferred about whether to take the lift or the stairs. Big brother kindly let little brother push the button for the lift, and carefully ushered him in.

I waited there amid the New Books feeling all proud and misty, watching for them to come out onto the mezzanine floor above. The lift took long enough that I worried briefly that they were headed to the basement, or to the offices on the very top floor. And then the doors opened. And they didn’t step out.

My heart was in my mouth.

Until with a banshee shriek first one big boy, then one smaller one, launched themselves through the doors and barrel-rolled across the floor to the edge of the balcony. They picked each other up, dusted themselves off, and headed off into the children’s library, holding hands. It was half Hundred-Acre Wood, half Star Wars, all good.

24 kid-free hours in Wellington, the checklist:

Land into teeth of northerly gale, rediscover religion. No calming rosary beads to hand, console self by reworking current project's opening scene: "FADE IN Our heroine crawls out of a crashed plane, ukulele case in hand..." Yeah, that'll work.

Zephyrometer horizontal. Persuade sister to drive straight to Frutti so you can buy the cardie you didn't pack because it's meant to be summer, dammit. Buy a skirt as well, you big spendthrift! It's only money.

Return to the source: lunch at a cafe right next to wellspring of all childhood inspiration and awe. Ko bucket fountain taku awa.

Lurk stalkerishly on fringes of soundcheck at Bodega and bump into two of tonight's stars. The ones I just had lunch with. They're just like us! Only a teensy bit starrier!

Admire gobstopping sartorial awesomeness of Wellington's artistas. It's like a tornado in an opshop around here... in the best way.

Slip out to take advantage of best bargain in town: the $10 fifteen minute back massage at the Chinese Health Center on Cuba St, upstairs from Hunters and Collectors. Brisk and to the point. All tension from this morning's bumpy landing has now left me.

At the Mighty Markets, pounce on a teapot-shaped tea spoon like the one my nana had, although hers didn't have a revamped medallion with the legend AoTEAroa. Cheesy, and yet I love it.

Hasty dinner at Deluxe, where all this ukulele nonsense began. Ooh look! A poster for the gig! Check out the profane nativity theme... when good Catholic girls go bad.

Join shoulder to shoulder crowd at Bodega. Watch as civil servants go off their nuts for the Sounds Like Us choir, that Bob Dylan guy from Cuba Mall, the moustachioed MC Griffin Point, and ultimately, the Wellington International Ukulele Orchestra.

Fail to find adequate

after-party location, repair to sister's flat for gourmet toasted sandwiches and cup of tea, prepared by exemplars of new generation of gentlemen. (Note to self: teach own small boys art of gourmet toasted sandwiches so that some day they can impress some lucky chick or feller with 3 a.m kitchen prowess.)

Fall into bed.

Sleep in, voluptuously. Like ten a.m.!

Eat pancakes for breakfast with a view of Oriental Bay, then blog uninterrupted. The luxury knows no bounds.

Nudge dear readers to run out and buy tickets for Wellington International Ukulele Orchestra Lazy Summer Tour. Oh, and: buy someone you love an instrument for Christmas: DIY music will get us through this economic turbulence. Better than rosary beads.

Wish everyone a Feliz Navidad, prospero año y felicidad!

Living within the orbit of one of the world’s great cities is a wonderful thing. You know that at any minute, you can hop on a train or jump in the car and emerge, an hour or so later, in the middle of Metropolis. Wheee! It’s like teleporting, albeit very very slowly.

When we first achieved escape velocity (or, properly speaking, were launched into orbit by the end of one job and the beginning of another), the gravitational pull of the city was still strong. Our entire social network was trundling along, uninterrupted, in the old neighbourhood, so we made a point of visiting as often as we could. Every other week, if possible, and sometimes more often for special events like birthdays. And, eventually, other people’s farewell parties.

Slowly the old village began to break up – academic communities are always fissioning – just as we started to put down tentative roots in our new city. The pilgrimages stretched to monthly, then every other month. And then after a while, without even noticing, it was almost as if the city wasn’t there. Had we reached the New York event horizon?

I knew such a thing existed. Before I first moved to this country, I had never closely looked at a map of the northeast US. I figured that “upstate” was kind of like “uptown.” I’m not an idiot, I knew Ithaca wasn’t on the subway, but I figured it might be a quick trip on a bus. It turned out to be four hours in a car, much longer on a bus. Still, it was achievable.

And yet every now and then I’d meet someone upstate – and occasionally still do in Connecticut – who had never been to the city. This seemed unfathomable. As unfathomable as my current self would now seem to my old self, when I realize that it has been uncountable months since any of us has hopped in the VW-TARDIS for a spin to New New York. It was almost as if I’d never been to the city.

So over Thanksgiving we made a point of venturing back. Ironically, not all the way to the city itself, but to a handier part of it. One that -- when we were actually living there -- seemed at the outer edge of the known universe.

The New York Botanic Garden is way up in the Bronx, next to the zoo. I have a thing for glasshouses, and the boys like trains, so when I discovered that there is a “holiday spectacular” exhibit consisting of miniature trains zipping round the famous Haupt Conservatory it seemed like the perfect excuse to finally visit the gardens.

You know, we really don't live in the city any more. The culture shock began with the ticket price. Ouch. Sixty smackers for two adults and two children (that’s several million of your Pacific pesos). Add another twelve bucks for parking. I had frugally squirreled away some mandarins and scroggin and muffins, to stave off hunger, but we succumbed to the café nonetheless, which rounded it up to three figures, not counting gas.

But what price family togetherness? Especially when every other family in town has voted with their wallets and declared this the place to be. We turned up smartly for the 15 minute slot that our advance ticket purchase had guaranteed, and stood, patiently, in a marquee outside the greenhouse for a quarter of an hour. And shuffled forward, and waited as long again. The boys couldn’t fathom this bit at all - they’ve forgotten how to queue, since we never have to any more.

It was worth it, though. The greenhouses are gorgeous, and the exhibit itself was completely nutty. Also, fruity. And quite twiggy. The model trains are only half the attraction: they weave their way around and through a Lilliputian cityscape consisting of scale replicas of New York buildings made entirely from vegetable matter.

Like the Guggenheim, if the Guggenheim were made of tree fungus.

And here’s the building we were actually inside. Some poor sap had to make all those windows. Out of sap.

And if you like that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

It’s a one-man (and his son) (and many helpers) operation, one of those magnificent obsessions: given world enough and time, and a small army of elves, you get the impression they’ll eventually get around to reproducing the entire city.

The junior trainspotter was riveted, especially by the yellow trains, which impressed with their sheer yellowness. (He’s a hard-core Jaunist, whose daily prayer is "All shall be yellow, and all shall be yellow, and all manner of thing shall be yellow. And God help the parent who cannot locate the yellow spoon or the yellow tiny bowl or the sacred yellow ukulele T-shirt. Amen").

The bigger lad, on the other hand, is beginning to age out of this sort of spectacle. His memories of the city are now like faded polaroids, reduced to a few well-thumbed mental snapshots and a dozen oft-told tales. He was a grudging Gulliver in Lilliput, when once upon a time he was the little boy who owned the big streets. Still, old habits die hard: he had dressed for the occasion.

After we’d had our fill, we shuffled out again to lord it over the patient herd awaiting their own fifteen minutes of train.

Then we went in search of trees to climb. Small problem: it is forbidden to climb the trees. We looked for some grass to roll on, but the signs all agreed that this was forbidden too. So we headed back to the Children’s Adventure Garden for some permissible outdoor fun.

The popular highlight of this crowded but lovely subsection of the garden was a small hill, featuring enormous boulders piled in a carefully undangerous fashion so as to constitute a not very complicated maze. Young Tenzing efficiently summitted a relatively undangerous boulder, while his brother leap from rock to rock like a mountain goat.

What the picture can’t capture, though, is the thousand words on the soundtrack. I'd forgotten the neurotic tenor of a certain strain of city parenting, the throbbing whocketa-whocketa of the helicopter parent en masse. All around me a chorus of parents hollered querulously at their offspring. It was a veritable oratorio of impending doom:

“Careful! Max! Be careful! Lily, I said careful! Jacob, do you want to ruin those shoes? Be careful! Get down! It’s time to go! Watch out! Django! Watch what you’re doing! Ivy! I said careful! Those are your good shoes! I said, it’s time to go! Do you want to ruin those shoes? Emily! Oscar! Get down! Be careful! We’re leaving now! Shoes! Put your shoes back on! Do you want to lose them?”

Imagine proudly and cautiously clambering as high as your innate good sense will take you, only to be constantly second-guessed, out loud, in public. Heck, I found it irritating, even though I was in fact wearing my good shoes and didn’t want to ruin them.

Luckily, all of the children had temporarily gone deaf.

Including mine, who, while I was busy judging the other parents, had exhausted the thrill of the boulders and disappeared -- over a small fence that apparently marked the official limit of undangerousness. I assumed it was all part of the same adventure-space. When it became clear that they might have actually gone off-road, I bided my time, trusting they’d be sensible enough to stick together and not climb any bigger fences, like the one dividing the garden from the zoo, which has a large and well-stocked African carnivore exhibit.

When they failed to reappear, I decided to (carefully) clamber off in pursuit (taking care not to ruin my good shoes). Over the little fence and into the wild territory where I’d last spotted them. Beaten back by vicious, impenetrable shrubbery, I started to worry a bit. Maybe I should have added my voice to the parental chorus of doubt and constraint? Was the crowd right, and I was wrong? Would I ever see my children again? Worse, would there be shoe-related regrets?

I worked my way back around the fence until I head their voices. There they were, only a few metres away from me but completely inaccessible, having worked their way – on their bellies – into the centre of a prohibitively dense vortex of thorny bushes, where the younger explorer had wedged himself into a hollow rock that was just his size.

With a bit of call and response, and some judicious tugging by big brother, they eventually worked their way back out of the labyrinth and emerged breathless, triumphant, and with hardly a scratch. They hadn’t even noticed they were lost, and I certainly didn’t tell them. Wild things, I think I love you.

Of all the sweet, sweet ironies of Barack Obama’s historic victory -- aside from the real President Sarkozy's speedy congratulations on his "brilliant win" -- consider the fact that he won Virginia, where people queued for up to seven hours to vote. It’s sweet not just because VA hasn’t voted Democrat since Obama was four years old. Nor because it’s the state that has produced the largest number of Presidents. What’s beautiful is that it is a state in which Obama’s very existence would have been illegal when he was born, and for another eight years thereafter. Until the Supreme Court ruled, in the excellently named Loving v. Virginia, that interracial marriage was not a crime, but a constitutional right.

I’m loving it. Cost per presidential vote? $8 Winning a state that, in your lifetime, defined your parents as criminals and you as a legal impossibility, a non-entity, a bastard? Priceless.

Which is why the Prop 8 outcome in California is doubly shocking. We can only hope that California comes around on the question of marriage rights for all, or (imagine it!) is obliged to come around by an Obamafied Supreme Court. You can keep your conservative "strict constructionists": I’d love to see a decent set of judges apply the letter and spirit of the constitution to gay Americans.

Alternatively, as Salon's Glenn Greenwald suggests, a Democratic house could choose to pre-emptively overturn the federal Defense of Marriage Act. All in good time, yes; patience is all, and change doesn’t happen overnight, I know. But sometimes history needs a kick up the bum, eh?

Of course, Obama’s win has, in the immediate term, changed nothing material. And yet it’s changed everything that matters. It has changed everything.

For one thing, it gave the dead-tree newspaper biz a shot in the arm. I couldn’t get hold of a copy of the New York Times on Wednesday – first time that’s happened since 9/12. This was the only newsstand I passed that wasn’t sold out by mid morning.

But less flippantly, this victory has really changed the way America feels, to Americans and unAmericans alike. To paraphrase Michelle Obama, for the first time in my adult life, I’m almost proud enough to call this my country. Citizenship is something I’ve never seriously considered, despite having lived here for thirteen years. But now I can see it.

On the night of the election, I wished I was still living in New York. It would have been so wonderful to go down into the streets, among the people, and feel the change. Instead, we drove home from a small but ebullient party, through the dark and silent streets of New Haven, our exhausted kids falling asleep in the back seat. The silent streets were a good thing; I imagine a McCain win would have brought many unhappy citizens out into the streets to express an impotent anger.

The next morning, I walked downtown to get the temperature of the town. Life as usual, but a few unbidden grins summoned up by signs left over from the campaigns; and the man selling Obama 08 buttons was still plying his trade.

At the post office, fumbling for the right money, I apologized for being a bit slow on account of having stayed up to watch Obama’s acceptance speech. The woman behind the counter – grandmotherly, African-American – lit up. “You and me both,” she said. We agreed it was worth it. “This is a great day,” she said, and in words that have become a refrain for so many, “I never thought I would live to see this day. I never thought it could happen in my lifetime.”

She had cried at the announcement. So had I, and several of the people in the room with me. The kids from sheer exhaustion and delirium, the adults from ... well, what, exactly?

Back in graduate school, I took a class in which we read Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a harrowing, powerful, strange and difficult novel about unspeakable things. Some students confessed that the book had made them cry. And the professor, a powerfully regal person of considerable mana, whose teaching method involved long silences broken only by oracular pronouncements, embarked on a silence even longer and more forbidding than usual. Then she quietly asked - and I’m working from memory here - what is the value of those tears? When a book about slavery makes white people cry, how does that help? Whom does that help?

It was uncomfortable, but she was onto something. Cathartic tears of apology and regret may be genuine, and yet still be cheap.

But I think the tears for Obama’s win -- and they were shed worldwide by many different kinds of people -- were of a different quality: a mixture of relief and shame (that it took so long) and joy. Unfettered joy. Not just for a dream delivered after centuries of deferral, but for a promise fulfilled, a self-evident truth recognized.

(Q: Would we have cried, would so many have been so moved, had a woman been the candidate and the winner? I’m thinking not, and I’m not sure why. I’m also a little dismayed at myself for putting this question in parentheses; feel free to tease it out a bit more in the discussion thread).

Election day itself was sweet. I spent it with the boys, at the ballots, running a cake stall for the PTA. Since I can’t vote, I went balls out on the cupcakes. No campaigning within 75 feet of a polling booth, by law, so I ditched the plan to write “Yes We Can” and went with this:

Chocolate and vanilla, you’ll note. They sold out, at a dollar a pop. (Hard work, though! I did another couple of dozen for the party that night, got about six Yes We Cans into it, and suddenly realized No, I Can’t. The rest just got red white and blue blobs.)

Speaking of chocolate, there’s been a lot of singing going on; plenty of Presidential playlists, Sam Cooke, classic spirituals... all good stuff, but the song that I can’t get out of my head is so very very wrong.

And yet so very right in many ways, not least because this is a president whose wife calls him Baby. “How’d ya know I needed you so badly/ How’d ya know I’d give my heart so gladly?”

I’d also like to salute the first Hawaiian president. Aloha! Obama’s perspective on Native Americans and Native Hawai’ians hasn’t had a lot of mainstream coverage, although it’s been followed closely across the Fourth World. (YouTube of his most significant campaign speech on the matter here). Looks like we’ll see indigenous issues on the presidential agenda for the first time -- as one blogger noted, the words “My Indian Policy” have not been known to pass GWB's lips. By the way, Obama was apparently the first presidential candidate to campaign on a reservation since Robert Kennedy - wow.

Meanwhile, over in the McCain-Palin camp, the debriefing, or should we say downtrou-ing, has begun. McCain’s concession speech was a good start, a decent if belated attempt to soothe his riled-up base and forestall a rash of cross-burnings. His crowd did not play well on television, coming across as mean-spirited, bellowing, and belligerent. I’d have liked to see McCain pause at the first interjection to demand respect for his words and their meaning. His speech was, on the whole, a class act and a bit of a surprise. Who was that unmasked man?

But I was watching Sarah Palin, who looked bitterly disappointed, God having refused her last minute prayers for victory. Also, too, the campaign having refused her request to make a speech. (Hello, lady? Not your job.) This might be schadenfreude talking, but to my eyes she wore the glassy-eyed, angry smile of the beauty-pageant runner-up, smiling and waving while checking that she didn’t have lipstick on her teeth, and all the while furiously wondering how her rival had gained the crucial edge – was it in the swimsuit parade or the talent pageant? (Clue: d’ya it might have been the question section?).

Do we feel sorry for her? As the horrific extent of her unsuitability for the job unfolds, she very predictably becomes the scapegoat for the campaign's own mistakes (although, seriously, Africa?? There's being the designated whipping boy, and then there's having whipped cream between your ears).

And now she has to negotiate her return to the wilds of Alaska -- which has just nuttily re-elected a convicted felon -- with her original reputation as bipartisan bridge-builder somewhat under strain.

This has been a campaign of many stories and complex narratives; in a literary mood, I’m thinking that, given their spectacularly failed attempt to fashion a perfect running-mate for McCain out of spare parts, the GoP might usefully revisit Mary Shelley's classic novel of hubris, Frankenstein.

Here is Victor Frankenstein confronting with his creation when it finally goes, as they say, live (and eventually rogue):

“How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! - Great God! [...] For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.”

Can it be a coincidence that, in the book, the distraught "monster" is last seen stalking across the frozen Arctic wastes, albeit not in outrageously expensive campaign-funded spike-heeled boots?

The votes are in and counted. It’s not just a landslide. It’s unanimous. Obama trounces McCain by 21 votes to zero. No surprises there: this was a blind straw-poll in Miss Regina’s class, and New Haven is a blue city in a blue state. But as my second-grader’s multicultural public school classroom goes, so goes the nation?

We can hope. I’m dreaming of an Obama landslide. Because he is hope on a horsie, dammit.

(Image swiped from Shakesville. I want it on a T-shirt, yesterday).

So I was downtown this morning, watching my older son’s class participate in the city’s annual Halloween parade for schoolkids. There’s often something grim and ominous about the calendrical conjunction of that ghoulish festival and the national election. But this year’s parade had the theme of recycling and alternative energy (yep, the Mayor is a Democrat).

There was something incredibly cheering about a thousand children dressed as recycling bins, solar panels, cyclists and trees and sunshine and wind and the planet Earth, parading through downtown with big grins on their little faces, chanting “Save Our Planet!”

It was hope in a bottle. Delivered by a fleet of autumnal yellow schoolbuses.

The outfit that got the most enthusiastic reaction from onlookers was this happy little iPod. She dreamed it up herself.

I got chatting with her dad, whose happy job it was to do most of the grunt work on the costume (same way I’ve spent all week making suitably Gaulish accessories for Asterix and Obelix).

Mia’s dad is adamantly planning to vote but is not optimistic he’ll actually get to. The waits in this state are predicted to be 3-4 hours long this year. “Why a Tuesday?” we asked, with ritual indignation. And if it has to be a Tuesday, why isn’t it a public holiday?

As he put it, if you can have Columbus Day for the guy who arguably kicked off this whole USA thing, surely you could have a national holiday for the maintenance of the democracy itself? Then people like him wouldn’t have to worry that they won’t get a chance to exercise their vote, despite turning up first thing in the morning, and then again at lunch, and then again after work, and standing in line each time for literally hours before giving up.

The only upside of the queues is that it's good news for those of us running cake stalls at the public school voting booths (school is the one thing that actually closes for the day). Captive audience, meet red-white-and-blue cupcakes. We’re anticipating a handsome profit to help cover some extra-curricular activities for the kids.

(Do they ever need it! This No Child Left Behind law, tying school funding to test results, has bled all of the fun and enrichment out of the school day. Second and third graders -- six to eight year olds -- only get recess two days a week, and art and music and library get an hour each, so that teachers can concentrate on teaching to the test. A test that drives the kids bonkers, with its ambiguously-worded questions and rigorously inside-the-box thinking. Don’t get me started.)

As well as a historic result, I’m anticipating a record turnout this year. People are doing the usual grumble about how their votes don’t count unless they’re in a swing state, but honestly, how could you not want to be part of a record number? Not to mention all the other not-so-little items on the tickets this year.

There are so many reasons to vote. Pick one! (I pick the Supreme Court). And as always, there are so many impediments to it. One of the little-noted side effects of the foreclosure crisis (local vignettes from which can be found here) is the voting status of the residents of those million foreclosed homes. As the New York Times asked a few weeks ago, where are those people living now? Have they updated their addresses on the electoral rolls? Will the mail find them in time? And do they know they're likely still allowed to vote anyway? Who knows?

One thing is sure: whichever way the election goes, I’m going to cry. At a birthday party the other day, the conversation turned to possible election outcomes (in fact, it started there and never moved, as all conversations do these days). I found myself joking with a friend – a peace-loving, staunchly Democrat greenie and old college pal of Obama, no less -- about how we’ll be mixing cocktails of one sort or another, mojitos or molotovs. If Obama doesn’t win, I’m up for a riot. But honestly, what would we burn? The public library? City Hall? Our own overvalued houses?

Trust me, we want to be unreservedly hopeful about this. But something -- the last four decades? the last two elections? -- has sedimented a layer of superstitious paranoia deep into the bedrock of every Democratically-inclined soul. We’ve been wrong (and wronged) before. Eight years ago, I knew Gore had it over Bush, and four years ago, I thought Kerry had it in the bag (what can I say, I’m sentimental about old soldiers and have a soft spot for intellectuals).

We agreed to do the optimistic thing and stock up on rum and mint, which are far tastier than petrol and more or less the same price. In fact, I’m putting my chips on the table: the kids will be allowed to stay up as late as they want on Tuesday and sleep in as late as they need on Wednesday, waking just in time to party in the streets.

Yep, I’m cautiously predicting a happy riot. A self-declared national holiday. BYO unicorns and dancing iPods.

We went trick-or-treating tonight, by Toutatis, looking for signs and portents as well as candy.

We didn’t see a single gosh-darn Sarah Palin, but we did bump into this guy hanging out on somebody’s front porch.

Of all the decorated houses -- giant spider-webs, hovering ghosts, elaborate graveyards -- this one was by far the coolest. From a distance all you could see was the McCain-Palin billboards, which was chilling enough. Then as you approached, you realized there were in fact two tables set up on the front porch. On the left, Obama; on the right, McCain.

The home-owners swore up and down that they weren’t biz-school types or psychology grads doing their homework on the sly. But they were operating a suspiciously sophisticated candy scheme, and they were taking notes.

As kids mounted the steps, they were randomly sent one way or the other. And at each table, they were offered this conundrum:

“Would you like FOUR pieces of candy from McCain, or TWO from Obama?”

Told you it was a blue city, blue state. It was no contest. The Obama candy was flying out of the box, and this guy looked awfully lonely.