Last night there was literally dancing in the streets here in San Francisco.  I was over in Berkeley watching the coverage with a friend.  When it became clear that Obama was going to win, we got a few bottles of champagne together and walked over to the Obama campaign hub around the corner.  The scene there was, obviously, lively.  We passed around some champagne and watched McCain's gracious, and amazing concession speech (IMO if he had shown half that much character during the campaign it would have been a very different result).  Then we watched Obama's speech.  In between I had a conversation with an older black gentleman.  He has had a great many family members die while in military service.  During our talk he told me he felt proud to be an American for the first time, and that his kin were all facing upwards and smiling in their graves.  Then he thanked me for being part of this race, and for letting him be too.

Then the woman who had donated her building, time, and food to the effort over the past weeks, expressed her feelings.  She is a first generation Mexican-American.  She said this day meant that her children might finally be able to become the President some day too.

After the speeches I headed over the bridge back to home.  I met up with Daisy and we went around the corner to the local pub for a beer.  We were met with another ecstatic party scene.  As we got to the door, a group of people rushed into the intersection and started dancing and yelling and chanting and smiling.  More people came pouring in from all directions.  Eventually there were drums, fireworks, and the police blocked off the street from traffic and stood, watched, and let the party roll.

It was still going when I put my head to my pillow at 2am.

For me, the best part is that this morning the street was not trashed.  All the parked cars had not been vandalized.

People partied hard, and peacefully.

I don't know what this next four year term is going to produce, but I sure as hell love the way it's started!

I have written before about my Mother's passing.  (You can see that here.)  Today my amazing wife Daisy, and I, were plowing through boxes of stuff at Mom's house, getting it ready for the movers to show up bright and early tomorrow to clear it out in preparation for selling it.  Box after box surrendered to our clawing hands and keen eyes.  We separated the wheat from the chaff, memories from melancholy, keeping what was worthy and laying the rest aside for sale, contribution, or the dump.  I managed to recover a presumed lost family heirloom for my brother and almost literally a ton of photographs, including a great one of my maternal grandmother's clan from 1910.

The work of letting go went by easily as we lent each other our often silent support.  I was smiling through most of it, and determined through the rest.

Then I found IT!  (Cue spooky TV show music.)   A photo album from my Mother's trip to Machu-Picchu.  My Mother went there some 20, or so, years ago on a small inheritance form an aunt who had died.  She always was fascinated by the Incans, and she simply fell in love with the place.  When she returned she was a changed woman.  Never quite the same.  She often regailed my borther, and I, with stories from her trips and interesting facts and secrets of the Incans.  She always longed to go back.  For years she promised to get healthy and strong again to go back to that place, and to take us with her this time.

When my Mom passed away, my brother suggested that he and I should make good on Mom's promise.  It has become our plan to take her cremains to Machu-Picchu and scatter them in that place she loved so much.  So, it was with a deep love and joy that I looked through the photo album of her trip there decades ago.  The last page was a yellowed old copy of the itenerary that the tour agency had sent to her.

My Mother died on April 14th of this year.  On April 14th of that year she arrived in Cuzco, to rest for a day to acclimate to the altitude.  Two days later she took a train to Machu-Picchu, which will become her final resting place.

If Scully, and Mulder, knock on the door in the next five minutes, I am going to freak right out.

I love you Mom, you're one spooky chic!