Election Diary, Pt. 2
The apex of autumn, seen from my father-in-law’s porch in Philadelphia, which is of course in PENNSYLVANIA, which is of course THE GREATEST STATE IN THE NATION. (Also, please help me, I can’t stop taking pictures of trees!)
Alright. Here’s how my election diary draws to a close. On Saturday morning, right around 11:15, Andrew and I left the apartment to take a bike ride in Central Park. At the last minute, I decided to leave my phone in the apartment. I’d been glued to it all week, and Andrew could use his phone to track both of our rides on Strava (as a sidebar, someday I will write a post about how Strava has become my favorite social media app), and honestly, it would be good for me to take a break from the constant-plugged-in-ness of the Longest Tuesday Ever.
We rode up Madison Avenue, turned left on 72nd Street, and entered Central Park. The foliage was luminous against the blue sky, it was so beautiful that it seemed unreal, and I said to Andrew, This must be the best fall day yet. As we were merging into the East Drive, I heard a woman shout. It was a loud, surprised shout. At first I thought she might be yelling at a cyclist for cutting her off or running a red light. Then I realized what she’d said: “It’s called!”
It’s called? I thought. And then: Oh my God. It’s called?!?! Andrew was already a good way ahead of me, but I started shouting his name and pedaling hard. Partway up the incline to Cedar Hill, I caught up with him, and, feeling like one of those old timey extra-extra-read-all-about-it! newspaper peddlers, repeated what I’d heard. Just ten or fifteen seconds had elapsed, but the news was quickly rippling through the park. Two guys biking next to us had their phones out. “Yup,” one of them said, in a British accent. “CNN has it.” I passed a woman who was checking her phone and thought I heard her call out, “NBC has it!” I shouted over my shoulder, “NBC has it?” She shouted back, “No, ABC has it!”
“ABC has it!” I shouted, in the grips of the deranged giddiness that would characterize the rest of the day. “ABC!” the Brit said. “If Nate Silver says so, it’s gotta be real.”
Already Saturday feels like a long time ago, and already I treasure the memory of those magical minutes: watching every person in Central Park, every runner and biker, every parent and child, take in the news of Joe Biden’s victory. You could literally see it happening: a woman, noticing the unusual noise around her, would slow her run to a jog. She’d glance at her phone, and slow her jog to a walk. Then she’d stop, dead in her tracks. Maybe she’d read it twice to be sure. Then she’d start pumping her fist. “Yes!” The spontaneous shout. “YES!!!!”
Giddiness. Yes, that’s the word for it, plain and simple. “I bet this was what it was like when World War II ended!” I said. “Everyone finding out and running into the streets!”
“Should we go to Times Square?” the Brit said to his friend. “Find a girl to kiss, like those sailors?”
“Wooohooo!” I shouted. “Yeah! YEAAAAAHH!!!! DEMOCRACY!!! WOOHOOOOOOO!!!!!” (Andrew happened to be recording the ride on his GoPro, so there is audio proof of my derangement.)
By the time we reached the bottom of the reservoir, car horns were blaring on Fifth Avenue. By the time we reached Engineer’s Gate, people were clapping and cheering. By the time we reached the Harlem Hill, my adrenaline was so high that I sailed right up the hill barely breaking a sweat, and I promise you, that never happens. It was a beautiful Saturday at the end of a long year, warmer and sunnier than November has any right to be. It was the kind of gorgeous weather that asked you to come outside and greet it; that asked you to remember the open air is always here for us, offering safety and solace. This is to say that Central Park, and the city writ large, were already bursting with life that morning. The ingredients for joy were already there. But that morning, in the minutes that followed the news of Biden’s win in Pennsylvania, you could watch the individual joys coalescing into a collective joy, and this is why I’ll always remember those moments—because that kind of collective joy is rare, and so beautiful that it causes words to fail. At one point, looping down the West Drive, I said to Andrew, “I just love everyone,” and the words felt a bit silly and trite, but also felt like they might be true.
**
Does the feeling eventually fade? Does reality eventually come roaring back? The election is over, but the transition is yet to come. In a funny way, during this year of deep uncertainty, lately so much has unfolded exactly as the experts said it would. The red mirage vanished, and Biden came out ahead, and Trump doesn’t want to hand over the keys. The cold weather came back, and the second wave is here. Logistics of traveling and gathering for Thanksgiving look trickier than they did just a few weeks ago. None of it, really, comes as a surprise. I started writing this post a few days ago, on Monday, when it was just as brilliantly sunny as it had been all weekend. Then I got distracted, and now it’s Wednesday, and the weather is gray and rainy*, and when I look at the news, at the mounting numbers of this second wave, the joy feels a little further away, and my heart feels tender and sad. Sometimes (honestly, much of the time) it is impossible for me to internalize just how sad this year has been. I tend to reach for silver linings. That’s my nature. Death can be hard to look at. I’m not trying to end this post on a gloomy note, or to understate the happiness of Biden’s victory; but sometimes you can’t really let yourself grieve until someone arrives with a heart big enough to hold your grief; and Biden gave us sunshine and hope on that unforgettable Saturday, but maybe next he will give us the quiet calm of normalcy, the ordinary gray of an ordinary Wednesday, which is to say: maybe he will also give us the space to let ourselves grieve, to feel what is so difficult to feel, to let ourselves be changed by these saddest and hardest parts of life.
(*As I write this, I can hear the note from my editor: “you’re describing the weather again!” It’s true, she’s absolutely right, I describe the weather constantly. I could write a million novels and still I’d keep making this mistake. The pathetic fallacy, my oldest and dearest friend.)