At This Special Time of Day

It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood. Plottie got a good night's sleep. The shots of Barack and his family on stage made tears flow down Plotnik's face and he couldn't shut them off. Ever since the Plotnik family moved to Snowy Valley, we have all been saddened to realize the only black faces that kids in this community ever see are either super-bling celebrities on TV or homeless people in front of Walgreens. Now that has all changed. Sure it's good for black kids but it's every bit as important for white kids.






Last night, there was a play to review, but Plotnik canceled at 7pm. The Press Agent wrote back and said: "I'm staying home tonight too." Once Pennsylvania and Ohio were in, that pretty much took care of it.

Pennsylvania, where Plot and Duck once lived on a farm, and one morning went to pick up half a freshly-butchered hog from a nearby farm. They were planning to cut the meat into pieces and freeze it. It was early December and frost had made the dusty farm path crinkle underfoot. It was prime time for hog-slicing.

There had been a Muhammad Ali fight recently in New York, and the stout, German-stock women who were cutting up all the hogs, wearing white caps on their heads and white blood-stained butcher's aprons, pounded their cleavers through the meat and into a huge wooden table thirty feet long and fifteen feet wide. They were upset at Ali, who had recently become Muslim and Anti-war, had changed his name from Cassius Clay, and had always been black. These women, a dozen at least, swung their cleavers from over far over their heads, with enough force to splinter a leg bone, and punctuated each swing with shouts of: "Nigger!" (Whack!) "Here's you go, Clay!" (Whack!) "Commie Nigger Pig!" (Whack!)

Plotnik stood watching, amazed that Ali, who was his absolute hero, could be so hated by country women who had cut up lots of hogs but probably never shaken a black man's hand. Pennsylvania.



So times change. Plotnik feels proud this morning, proud to be American, proud to be part of what will have to be a new morning for this country. America the way we want it to be. America with a heart as well as a nuclear arsenal. America for all the people. America 2.0.

Of course, no one Plotnik's age can be completely confident. There are too many ideologues, evangelicals, people convinced they and only they have God's cell phone number. Most of them are good people and will get on with their lives, but it doesn't take many crazies. No one alive in the 1960s can ever forget this.



And look at the electoral college map and you see a swath of Southern and Western red. It has been explained to Plotnik that most people just vote the way they always have (he does it too). But that's a lot of country who is far more comfortable with America 1.0 than America 2.0. Obama will have to win them over.



Plotnik feels like singing. Here is a Billy Collins poem. Plottie thinks Mr. Obama is the gin.

"...I have had a little gin in a glass with ice
which has softened my mood
...has allowed my thoughts to traverse my brain
with greater gentleness, shall we say
Or, to put it less literally,
this drink has extended permission
to my mind to feel -- what's the word?
a friendship with the vast sky
which is very -- give me a minute -- very blue
but with much great paleness
at this special time of day, or as we say in America, now."