It’s always a surprise to see the stars overhead, up there in the heavens, when you get out of bed and leave the house early, early, while it’s still dark outside. “Stars are up there in morning, too” — I somehow always stupidly think, before the coffee kicks — “not just night?” Setting out in the dark before the sun comes up usually means you are at the start of something, and I associate those black hours before dawn with a certain tingle of holiday excitement, or the promise of something coming, something good. Maybe it’s the start of a journey and you are catching the 5 a.m. Long Island Rail Road and transferring at Jamaica to board a K.L.M. jumbo jet to Saint Petersburg. Maybe it’s some very important appointment for which you have to hustle out of bed, starting a new job, wearing new clothes.
Daylight saving time ended on Sunday, but I had to get up so very early on Monday and Tuesday this week that the sky was black outside — with an unexpected wash of brilliant white stars — for more than an hour before I arrived where I was going, driving west against the flow of traffic on the Sunrise Highway to appointments in my Honda Civic.
Writing this on the Tuesday morning of Election Day, very early, the sun hasn’t come up and I imagine this before-dawn mood spreading across the sleeping nation, from east to west: We are setting out in the dark.
Are you excited? Are you scared?
I think it may be a function of my naturally optimistic nature that I woke with a quickening feeling of excitement this Election Day — my sunny nature that propels me forward, always expecting to win the basket of cheer, always expecting the doorbell to ring and it to be the Easter Bunny not the bill collector. I have the feeling that something good will come. (My attitude may not entirely be rational, but it has proven useful. Life is hard enough but it’s harder if you are pessimistic. A wake-up slap may be coming, but a person in a Honda Civic can still enjoy the stars while they are shining and she can see them from her windshield as a swarm of swallows rises up over the Connetquot River State Park Preserve.)
On Sunday night I went to see what the local Democrats were doing at the American Legion Hall in Amagansett. There was a pre-election pizza party and rally and I wanted to cast my eyes on John Avlon, the congressional candidate whose fate, I expect, will be known — slap or happy Easter Bunny surprise? — by the time this column is in print. Excepting annual visits for the Shoe-Inn “warehouse sale,” I hadn’t been inside the Legion at night for at least 25 years. It was already dark at 6 p.m., the first cold night of November, as I stood in front of the American Legion with an inadequate windbreaker, waiting for my friend Nisse to park.
It was warm inside the Legion Hall, and décorated in red, white, and blue party décor. An unexpectedly large crowd was listening to folk rock and eating free pizza and doughnut holes. Each table had a plastic American flag tablecloth and a sparkly stars centerpiece in red and blue that coordinated perfectly with the banners the Legion kept on the wall that said, “Land of the Free Because of the Brave.”
I ordered a gin and tonic at the bar and admired how the patriotic décor maintained by the service veterans of the Legion coordinated with the décor of the East Hampton Dems. See? We do hold certain ideals in common. It feels nice — it feels better — to share the red, white, and blue, and the stars.
Here’s a little political story for you.
Many, many, many years — and many shattered illusions — ago, during the presidential election year of 2004, when I was a magazine editor in Manhattan, I volunteered during the Republican National Convention as an “election observer” for . . . was it the National Lawyers Guild? I think that’s right. Funny that I have forgotten which nonprofit organization it was. Anyway, we were given a day of training and a neon-green baseball cap that identified our role, and we were sent out on the street to take handwritten notes and make audio and video recordings of any altercations, police, incidents, or arrests that we might witness. The G.O.P. delegates from the Midwest, the South, all corners of the country, were shepherded around town in chartered buses while the New Yorkers marched and screamed objections and helicopters whooshed overhead.
George W. Bush was accepting the nomination at Madison Square Garden. (And, oh, if we’d known then what we know now! I would hug either of the George Bushes if I met them now on Seventh Avenue eating a doughnut.) It was the last days of August, and the city was sweltering. Masses of protesters seethed up and down the avenues.
That week, out on the streets of Manhattan, I raced on foot in my neon-green cap from the United Nations to Central Park West, taking notes of conflicts between law enforcement and protesters. I remember an arrest on the steps of the New York Public Library.
This was right at the moment when cellphones first put a video camera in the pocket of citizens, and it was dawning on us all that protests and police interactions would never be the same. I was out there in the heaving crowd with my phone and notepad for all four days of the convention, and somehow as we all rushed from one side of town to another — protesters, law enforcement, grannies in Bush T-shirts from South Florida — I made friends with a member of the Secret Service who I kept bumping into. He was observing the crowd, as I was, just from a different angle.
The agent was stocky blond and wore the earpiece and a suit. He asked me pointed questions and seemed to think I — as a left-wing liberal but polite and friendly — might not just be privy to some mad plot of anarchists or bombing but would tell him about it, if he flirted with me.
We chitchatted under the awning of hotels on Fifth Avenue.
The agent was there to protect the democratic process from physical threat; I was there to protect the democratic process from the threat to citizens’ constitutional right to freedom of speech and freedom of protest.
We actually got to be such friends, this Secret Service man and I, that we exchanged gifts at the end of that memorable, hot, sweaty, angry, and very enjoyable week. I gave him a badge that said, “Dissent Defends Democracy.” He took it in his open hand, looked me in the eye with his blue eyes, and said, “But I don’t believe that.”
I insisted he keep the pin anyway.
He gave me a small lapel pin in the shape of the American flag, the same kind the Secret Service members wear on the lapels of their suits. I still keep it in my jewelry box.
It was a big week. It was a memorable moment. It was a revelation to learn that this Secret Service man and I, who couldn’t have had more perfectly opposed political views, were looking at the same coin, the same George Washington quarter, just from different sides.