I looked back 4 years to see what I wrote after the 2016 election had finally wrapped up. This is what I said: “It’s over. The presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is mercifully over. Look, forget who won or lost, just for a moment. If your candidate won, you’re still smiling and gloating. If your candidate lost, you’re still researching real estate in Canada. I get it. It’s been a tough one on all of us. It’s been emotional. It’s been trying. It’s tested us, individually and as a nation. But mercifully — whether you won or lost — there is this: We can all start to get our lives back.”
Rings true again today, doesn’t it?
I looked it up because I felt I had said it before. That I had FELT it before. Another time. Another place. What seemed like ages ago, but was just some 1,460 days in the past. (Yeah … I can do math. Not well … but math.)
And I’m feeling it again. Exhausted. Glad it’s over. Won’t tell you who I voted for. But I will tell you about what I’m sure a lot of us feel: Elation that we don’t have to deal with the election anymore. We can start to get on with … well … whatever did we do before there was an election. And no one quite knows what that is.
What did we do before the vote counting went on for days? Before we swiped endlessly at our phones for the latest updates, or sat glued to TV’s talking heads – all remarkably good at saying the same thing over and over again as if it’s always new and profound and full of revelation. Before the debates and the conventions. Before the primaries, and back and back and back.
What did we do?
And I wonder what I do now. What do any of us do? Does anyone know? There was so much buildup to the election itself that no one prepared us for going back to normal life. (Not that it’s normal: Coronavirus is still running amuck, the economy is sputtering back and here in Florida we keep staring down the barrel of tropical twisters when we should be eating our unused hurricane rations.)
What DO we do now?
Which is maybe why Saturday was so hard. So disorienting. When the surreal life of an election collided with real life. Like a lost cat I thought was dead – literally … that’s no hyperbole – and a daughter breaking down into tears.
I missed the TV networks call this historic election because I was out crawling around under my house looking for a wounded, or worse, porch cat named Sunburst.
Because he went missing Saturday morning. The morning votes were still being counted, and no one knew what to make of it all.
That morning the cat didn’t show up for breakfast.
That doesn’t happen. He arrives like a five-alarm fire brigade every morning. Since he’s deaf, he has no concept of volume, and screeches like an out-of-tune opera singer. Combine that with his propensity to slam screen doors to get attention, and some neighbors have contemplated moving.
But this Saturday – this momentous, monumental, history-making Saturday – there was no Sunburst.
Do you know how hard it is walking around a neighborhood calling for a deaf cat? You think exaggerated movements or loud stomping might help, but it doesn’t. And when you have a cat or a dog missing, you look everywhere. In the car. Up in the attic. You walk the same blocks over and over again. You poke through all the bushes, finding nothing but a wide assortment of unidentifiable things.
Then a neighbor came out and told me about how the night before there was a fight between a dog and a cat in the street. How he thought it was one of his cats, but they all seemed accounted for and unscathed. He didn’t think anything more of it … until he saw me. “So, your cat was outside, too?!?”
Oh, man … that’s a sick feeling. Keep looking. Maybe he’s injured. Under the house. Waiting for someone to come get him. Or worse.
And because this is the way the universe works, that was about the moment the networks called the election.
Only – and this sounds really strange to say it – there was something bigger happening in the world now. I had to find a cat, and that was all that mattered.
I was crawling around under the house when I heard my neighbor call out that he saw him. And when I finally squeezed myself free, my wife was coaxing him over. Frazzled and freaked out. Ready to bolt, even from us. Scruff-ed up, and hobbling a little, but definitely alive.
Not even badly hurt. Miraculously, and someone explain this, he only seemed to be missing a nail on a hindleg. A little blood, but nothing a rough-and-tumble former street cat couldn’t handle.
Oh, the relief. The absolute and overwhelming relief.
Clean him up. Get him fed. Settle him in. Tell him not to go near dogs. Oh yeah, and did something big just happen?!?
Maybe it was an important reminder. Life goes on. Elections are important, but some things are bigger. We all will move on and find new things. Go back to our normal lives, or whatever we’re now living. Re-focus on what we need, remember what’s most important, and mercifully watch the talking heads a whole lot less.
That line from a column four years ago sure seems to ring more true now, more than ever before: “We can all start to get our lives back.”
And maybe that porch cat might just start sleeping inside for a few nights from now on.