Obama

Yesterday was quite a day.

I had chemo in the morning and felt sick all day, as usual. But that was okay.

I forced myself to stay up as late as I could watching the election results. As states were declared, some for Obama, some for McCain, I thought back. I remembered how, when I was a boy in Chicago, the only Afro-American I ever saw in my neighborhood was a woman – I never knew her name – who did chores for the families on our street. She baby sat for my brothers and me once, that’s all I recall.

When we moved to Clearwater in 1958, the beach was segregated, as were the schools. Blacks would often step off the sidewalk and stand in the street as whites walked by. My only contact with a black man was when I worked in a restaurant, first as a dishwasher, later as a line server. My boss was a 20-year-old with moves as graceful as a dancer. I drove him home after work one day. He refused to sit in the front seat with me, saying he’d better sit in the back. Not for his sake, but for mine. "It’s too dangerous in my neighborhood if people think we’re friends," he said.

During my one year of public school, I saw no people of color other than a janitor. When I went to Catholic high school in Tampa, I was surrounded by young men whose families fled Cuba during the revolution. They were all wealthy, so they had little to do with me. There were no blacks at all.

In the service, things were different and by the time I went to college things had changed, a bit, at least in Chicago. I was a politically active hippy. I found time to Still, help register African-American voters on Chicago’s South Side and marched with Jesse Jackson when he was an unknown. I remember the smell of tear gas and remember reading about the riots in Selma and Montgomery. I never thought I’d see the day when a black man would be elected president of the United States.

So that's why yesterday was quite a day.

As a consequence, I can understand Michelle Obama’s words when she said she was proud of the United States for the first time in her life. She could have said it better, but, hey, I can understand. I’ve never been more proud to be an American than I am today.

And, man, am I glad the cancer let me live long enough to hear Obama’s speech.