I’m in Truro, at the tail end of our Thanksgiving celebration. All the gang is here: Bob and I and all the girls and their partners and kids: Sarah, Ariel, Julia, Stuart, and the boys, Tova and Harris, also Ruth and Jack, Rebecca and Charlotte. We couldn’t use Rob Aster’s house as we usually do because his son wanted to use it, so I went online and found this amazing five-bedroom house in Truro that was elegantly remodeled by its two gay owners.

Plenty of room for all of us, and within walking distance of the ocean, too – where people saw both whales and seals on various walks at various times.

Gathered around the Thanksgiving table last night, everyone was thinking of Miriam’s absence – the first time we’ve had Thanksgiving without her. Sad and yet in some way lovely in its inevitability that gradually, as the years pass, one by one the older ones of us will join her in being absent from the earthly table, while the young adults will take our places, the children will become adults, and more babies, as yet unknown, will come along. If you step back far enough to get the right perspective, it all becomes the patterns of a dance.

Hard to believe sometimes that I’ve arrived at a time of such happiness and blessings: what did I do to deserve this? The pleasures of the family, the pleasures of the Cape, the pleasures of contemplating the trip to India in a few weeks (aargh! a few weeks!!), and the pleasures of imagining the return home in May and gathering at the house in Wellfleet again in late June. Lucky, lucky me. And we’ve even got Obama as President!

Starting Up Again

I've been thinking I should get myself back in the blogging mode in preparation for India, and why not tonight, when last week featured both the presidential election and my trip to NYC to hear Chris DJ at the Guggenheim. No, I'm not suggesting that both of those events are on the same plane (certainly not for the nation!), but they were both quite exciting for me. I don't know if anyone who is much younger than me can have the same kind of appreciation of Obama's election -- if you don't remember vividly, as I do, a time when blacks were killed for attempting to register to vote, is it quite as redeeming to see one elected president? Certainly I understood why Jesse Jackson -- who after all, as a young man was standing right next to Martin Luther King when he was assassinated -- was sobbing in Grant Park on election night. But even young people who didn't have this history in their bones seemed quite elated. Now the fun will be seeing who he is as president and what he does. I kept thinking during the campaign that the man we were seeing wasn't really the man who wrote his autobiography, "Dreams of My Father," so I'm not sure what exactly to expect. Perhaps someone more daring and less mainstream, as the book would lead you to believe, or perhaps in the very course of becoming president something inevitably pushes you more toward the center, not necessarily just out of expediency, but because of the very things you do, see, hear. We shall see. . . .

As for Chris at the Guggenheim, that was joy of quite another nature, but certainly joy nonetheless. The rhythmic, throbbing, music; the crowds of people; the look of absorption and intensity on Chris's face as he twirled his dials, consulted his computer, listened to his earphone, scratched his vinyl -- being there, with the loud sound carrying me up beyond the day-to-day, out of my body, was a kind of drugged experience without drugs, an hour and a half entry into a different universe. This is music as transport, and more power to it, I say -- why not celebrate a week that brings us a historic election with a glimpse into another world?