I just voted. It was thrilling to march down the long dark hall to the lighted room at the end where, from the distance, I could see people standing and shifting—people with their commuter clothes on, coats in arms; people with their bikes resting under gloved palms. I entered the room, the library, and savored the heat of hours of bodies standing and sitting. Every nook was filled with voters, hunched over ballots ... and yet there was a bit of a line. Ballot in hand, I waited for whatever space. And when it was my turn, I filled in the bubbles from memory, pausing on the presidential box lest I make a mistake, and then I smooshed the pen into that oval and ground it round round round. When I had decided all of the items—and there were a lot of items on the ballot—I went back to that single box just to savor the truth and to burn it into memory: Barack Obama, Joe Biden. I took my speckled ballot, fed it into the machine, and strolled back into the hallway toward the door, passing a stream of post-work citizens and people coming from unknown corners of alienation, cobwebbed from lifetimes of civic exclusion. My heart warmed to see it.

Overwhelmingly, it feels like all of us want our country back, the country they taught us it was when we were little, the possibilities they said were ours all along, even—and maybe especially—coming from our dark history. The past eight years, maybe longer, it all has seemed a lie: our country, our values, our integrity, our trust in ourselves to be a democracy, and our conviction to act consistently with our values.

OMG, it happened! Defeat for McCain came so swiftly it seemed we'd only arrived at the TV watching place. The TV came from the air and had big bunny ears for catching the signals. A projector spammed the image to a self-supporting pull-down screen, the kind they have in school. After McCain conceded, we milled and drank and then Katie Couric cut to Chicago and out comes the man. We jumped up on chairs and watched in silence so that we could hear, sometimes bursting into roars where he put breaks in his speech. Passersby collected at the windows and the crowd grew. When it was over, the city spilled into the streets, loose with drink and ravenous with victory. People hooted and hollered, roving in cars and on foot. Fireworks popped here and there. We are overjoyed. The relief I feel is profound for the realization that I have been despondent about the loss of trust in my country, its citizens, business, and government. And now, there is this one big instance of reason. Then there is the astonishing revelation that we elected an African American to the presidency. We actually did it! All of us! Momentous in and of itself, I now begin to imagine other, yet unknowable possibilities unfolding for all those who have always been disenfranchised.