To my little girl, on 1/20/2009

This is one of those days. It's one of those days that will stick, that will leave its mark, that will live on as a story I tell, a "I remember where I was when . . ." kind of day. I have a handfull of those: the Challenger (when I was nine), the fall of the Berlin Wall (at 13), the start of the Gulf War (at 15). I remember how I felt when I first heard about Ryan White, and the genocide in Rwanda. I'll always remember the curl of my legs under the blanket on my sofa at 9:03 AM on 9/11/01 as I watched the morning news on TV.

Happiness and sadness, joy and despair. The outside world striding into our lives, easily dodging the delusional walls we erect when we believe that it doesn't matter, that we're immune, that it doesn't affect us.

There was much sadness in that list in the first paragraph. Shocking surprises that shifted reality into a new, darker place. Not today. Today is neither a surprise nor a tragedy. I feel today that our country is taking a new path toward a future that will look more like your adulthood than my childhood. We need to make some profound, difficult, stressful, unpleasant changes in this country. Habits, ways of thought. I believe, in the next few decades, we will have to change where we live, what we buy, how we keep ourselves healthy, and how we interact with our neighbors. We might be in the first stages of the end of our usual means of travel, the end of the exurbs and the suburbs, and the end of current ways of consuming resources and spending money. And I believe, as a parent, that it is my role to help you navigate this transition as smoothly as you can. The bumps in this road ahead are going to be tough for all of us, but if your Dad and I give you some survival tools when you're little, if we think about what the road ahead might look like, perhaps the bumps will feel a bit smoother.

Today isn't historic simply because of President Obama's background (although that's remarkable, too, considering the racism in our nation's history and its present). To me, there's an element of heaviness to the joy I feel in my heart. The heaviness comes from the hope I have that we have finally elected a President who is going to lead us down a path that we do not want to travel, but we MUST.

I believe deeply in my heart that the old ways of being are fading. They're even starting to feel old, aren't they? We can fight it, or we can be clear-eyed and know that it's coming.

Maia, President Obama is your first president. President Bush was mine. He did not belong to you, to your future, to your life. Those moments I listed in the first paragraph, the days I remember, stay with me not just because of the event itself, but because of the way in which a way of being was altered, or an old understanding of the world was replaced by a new one. This is one of those days, I hope. I cannot tell you how much I hope that it is.