Fam, friends, future: What's up!
Happy... New Year?!?!
Or, as Grandpa was singing when he answered the phone Tuesday evening:
So long sad times/Go long bad times/We are rid of you at last
Howdy gay times/Cloudy gray times/You are now a thing of the past
Happy days are here again/The skies above are clear again/So let's sing a song of cheer again/Happy days are here again
So, yeah. Let's write about, oh, hmm, let's see, how about... Tuesday?
We got up early, expecting longish, at least, lines at my new polling place (I finally changed my address just before the deadline); Kit came over to join us and we all bundled up (it was, like, 60 degrees, yo!) and strolled around the corner to the Toll Middle School auditorium.
Strolled past the house on the corner, now for lease, where the woman was murdered by her boyfriend a few months ago.
Strolled, after looking both ways and then looking both ways again, and -- got that Izzo -- looking both ways again, across to Toll's campus.
Strolled past the huge memorial of flowers and cards and dolls and candles and love set out, wet after that night's rain, for 11-year-old Meri Nalbandian in front of the gym, stopped and paid respects, as a few other voters were doing, too. One of them was in tears; I wasn't far behind. Picked up Izzo and squeezed her real tight, and then turned away, tried to refocus on the day at hand, wishing, somehow, that what I was about to vote for would, in some way, honor little Meri, but I couldn't forge a connection.I entered the auditorium blue and bummed and feeling very, very small.
There wasn't a line at all, they quickly found my name on the blue sheet, I signed, I voted with my ink-a-dot pen in my right hand and Izzo in my left arm, watching how it worked. Kit snapped a quick photo of us, and we strolled to go get our free-for-voting Starbucks coffee (Izzo got a vanilla milk packet) at the other end of the block. From the beginning, it was a remarkable and remarkably emotional day. It just felt, well, it just FELT.
One of those so-rare just-rained days in L.A. where you can clearly and crisply see the mountains. Where the blue sky peeking out of the rapidly dissipating clouds shows brighter than usual. Cool, but not cold. One of the few days that could win an Oscar, or at least a Golden Globe, for acting like fall. And that big, big something brewing. Seemed like every conversation you heard a snippet of included the word, "Obama." We all knew what the polls told us, but still there was an edge to it. A weight to it.
And through it all, we tried, all day, to get Izzo to join in the chorus, to say her first, "Obama." We chanted and sang and 'peat and repeated O-bam-a, O-bam-a. But Izzo wouldn't even give us an "Oh."
After our free coffees, Izzo and I took off for the, yay, flu shot. Stopped behind two cars at a red light halfway there and got rear-ended. Tapped, really. Enough that I noticed, but not enough that Izzo appeared to, thank goodness. Still, I motioned for the driver behind me to pull over, and when the light changed, we moved forward and pulled along the side of the road, where amazingly a big stretch of curbside parking was available.
I got out, told myself I was gonna be cool about this as I turned to greet the woman getting out of the gold Lexus SUV behind me. It was one of those moments where you tell yourself, OK, I get to be an adult here. OK, I get to be a good example for my daughter here.
One of those moments where I was thrown completely off my game because she said, "What were you doing?! Why did you back up into me!"
Huh?
Long story short, there was no damage, except to my faith in my fellow women. The chick immediately went and called her husband! And put me on the phone with him! And then he tried to bully me: "If there's not really any damage than I suggest you just drive away, we don't want to make things hard on you." Oh, the things I wished I said to him in retrospect, after telling him, "That's nice, but I don't want to make things hard on YOU."
No damage, except to my faith in democracy. Maybe, I thought as I watched the woman nearly collide with another car as she hurriedly pulled away, we shouldn't actually give the American public a voice in really important matters. Television ratings, yeah, we can handle that as an electorate. We deem that American Idol will be huge. But Presidents and major state constitution-amending propositions? Maybe that's better left to actual smart, responsible people?
Flu shot went fine, as far as flu shots go. Izzo conked out for a couple hours when we got home and I did something I hadn't in months: reclined on the couch and read the newspaper. Then I ordered pizza (including one Hawaiian-style, for the man of the hour), picked up Robert, welcomed back Kit and got into election mode.
Fox News couldn't stop showing shots of a pair of guys they were IDing as Black Panthers, though I was never clear why they were showing them except for the overhanded attempt to scare white folk. Them folk at MSNBC seemed extra chipper. Both MSNBC and CNN decided to use these bizarre, offensively bad green-screen digital sets that didn't exactly reek of a stringent focus on reality and truth.
And still, Izzo refused even to give us that "Oh."
The action, naturally, picked up when the first polls closed on the East and the tallies starting coming in. For a minute, McCain led. But before you knew it, Fox News, of all networks, moved Obama in front.
Fresh off voting in his first general election, Uncle Rob controlled the television and gave us his own commentary from the numbers that were coming in at latimes.com on the laptop. The numbers started piling fast, so fast that within a couple hours, before Kit was done cooking up yummy couscous and chicken, with the polls in our West Coast blue states still open, it became clear: Obama was, indeed, gonna get to that 270 electoral threshold, no problem. Obama was gonna win this thing.
And still, Izzo wouldn't say it. Wouldn't even say "Oh."
We pleaded and nagged and teased and taunted, O-bam-a, Izzo, O-bam-a!
She laughed at us. And danced to us. But she wouldn't join in the chorus.
Instead, at around 6 p.m., she started her own chant: "BrrakBrrackBrrackBrrack! BrrakBrrackBrrackBrrack!" Which she followed with a necessarily sassy bet-you-didn't-see-that-comin'-didja smile. Seriously, ask the boys.
At 7 p.m., we turned away from the supposedly serious networks to Comedy Central, where the Daily Show/Colbert Report went live, offering the same updates as the networks, but with funnier, probably better analysis.
And suddenly, party girl Izzo, whom I can't get to drift off before 10 p.m. on a really good night, wanted up into my lap, where she curled herself into a ball and went right to sleep.
Maybe the emotional weight of the day exhausted her? Maybe she saw Jon Stewart and registered that as her bedtime? Either way, she slept the rest of the night.
Slept through the cheering and partying and champagne-swigging that happened over the next couple hours, during which both Daddy and Caitlyn showed up. Slept through Obama's amazing speech in Grant Park, so that I'll have to tell her what that was like someday, how it was the type of inspiring moment that I never imagined I'd get to witness, a moment I thought they didn't make anymore, a moment sharing words and the spirit of Lincoln and King, a moment where great things actually seemed possible, a moment that Izzo can already claim, 17 months in. And how that thrills me!
I'll tell her, later, how I find myself feeling differently about President Elect Obama than I have about other presidents. It's a strange sensation, actually, to not simply be preferring one guy to the other guy, but to be believing in the guy. To be trusting the guy. To be trusting him to take good care of us.
And I was a Hillary supporter.
... of course, it's all a bit tempered by the narrow passage of Prop 8 here in California. It's odd, to be hearing the incessant and wonderful talk of our great civil rights victory and have this issue wedged painfully into the mix. The increased irony, of course, is that exit polls tell us that 7 out of 10 African-Americans voted in favor of Prop 8, voting on the basis of religion rather than party, and that so many African-Americans turned out to the polls to support Obama likely made the difference.
Talking to Hamlet about it afterward and my husband tells me, "It's just marriage. It's not that big of a deal."
To which I get to reply, "Gee, thanks honey. And what do you mean, it's not that big of a deal! Everyone should have the same rights as everyone else. Discrimination is discrimination is discrimination. That's what Amo told me, all that she lost in World War II taught her you have to beware of and fight discrimination in all its forms, all the time..."
"What I mean," he says, "is that gay people won't be equal until one of them can be elected president. That is a big deal."
"What!?" I hadn't seen that coming. "C'mon man, I won't live to see the day..."
And then I stopped myself when I realized just how many times (hundreds, easily, literally) that I'd heard just that statement uttered on airwaves and in real life over the previous 48 hours or so.
Progress. It's slow. But it's real. And Izzo, your generation will get the baton next, whatever that means and wherever that takes us.
....................
Izzo is afraid of sticks. Loves leaves and flowers and plant life in general, but if you want to hear her scream, introduce her to a stick.
Izzo weights 24 pounds, 8 ounces. Or she did, the morning Obama was elected.
Izzo is saying more and more words in Armenian -- and English. Not counting Brrack, which actually, probably, was mostly an accident. Maybe. In English, the vocab is growing, too. Lately, she's added Shoes, Chew, Bye-bye, Baby and Doggie to her collection.
Izzo can take off her pants and socks by herself (almost) now.
Izzo's newest thing is throwing away stuff. Stuff like our socks, our mail, my unused Christmas cards, bookies, newspapers, magazines, canned food, her shoes, just about anything she can lift high enough to dump in the trash can. I just know someday I won't be able to find my keys or cell phone...
Izzo has a very distinctive whine for "I'm stuck." I recognize it immediately, this muffled but borderline frantic "Nnnnnnnnnhhhhnnn!" It comes when she's managed, somehow, to squat underneath one of the dining room chairs, and can't get out. When she's caught in the laptop chords. Or, lately, when she's almost completely submerged under the couch, for who knows what reason.
And there's more, of course, but my goal was to finish this before The View comes on. So I'm about to head over and make Hamlet watch it with me.
Good times. Great times. So, so glad Izzo is here to experience it, sort of, with us.
Love,
Us
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