My baby, Isadora, woke me up at 4:00 AM, the morning after the election, and I got up to attend to her. My wife Nancy woke up soon after to feed her. I asked her if she had checked the news for any election updates at the last feeding, and she said no.
For the next few hours I kept dreaming about the Ohio results, then waking up to realize that dream results aren’t reliable.
I woke up again at 7:30 AM. Nancy was in the baby’s room. I put on my robe and, with a queasy feeling in my stomach, asked her if we had a president. She said, “Not yet, but we almost do,” and told me the situation in Ohio.
I tried to go back to sleep, but it was impossible. I finally turned on the radio and heard that Andrew Card was claiming Bush had a statistically insurmountable lead. My stomach ache got worse.
In the kitchen, I filled my coffee maker with grounds and water and turned it on. I only realized a few minutes later that I’d forgotten to install the carafe. Water and coffee grounds bubbled up over the brim of the filter, and I had to start all over again.
Nancy and I puttered around the living room for a few hours, listening to the radio on and off. Before we’d even gotten the news that Kerry had conceded, we were already referring to the election as having been lost. We discussed what Democrats might have done differently, and what positive sides of the situation there were, if any, and we tried to make jokes, but we were both miserable.
I kept heaving deep, theatrical sighs. Nancy thought I was being funny, but I felt as though I was scooping my misery out of my chest with each big exhale.
My sister-in-law called while we were listening to Kerry’s concession speech, and when I told her what we were doing she said, “Wow, you guys are masochists.”
After lunch, we decided to rake the leaves in our front yard, something we’ve been putting off for weeks. I put Isadora in a sling around my belly and raked while Nancy bagged. It was one of those beautiful, sunny fall days, crisp enough to make you feel alive but not uncomfortable. Isadora mostly slept. As we finished up the job, Nancy said she felt like it was symbolic of putting the election behind us: wrapping it up in plastic bags and taking it to the dump.
She stayed home while I took the leaves to the dump. On my way to the garage, I saw our neighbor Mike, who’d recently taken down his Kerry Edwards signs. We commiserated. In the middle of the conversation, he said, “I’ve already lost my job twice under this president. That’s why I’m home right now.”
The dump was crowded with people dropping off leaves. The pile was huge, and I noticed that, as I emptied my bags, my leaves were much more colorful than the leaves to which they’d been added. A man sat in a pickup truck watching everyone unload, and I assumed he was some kind of authority figure, there to make sure we were dumping the right things in the right way. I wondered if he could tell by the way I struggled to untie my bags that I had voted for the losing presidential candidate.