Obama

Tomorrow morning I shall fill this space in with a story about the frontier moving west, new people, and our times. Obama spent time in Hawaii, the furthest west frontier. Now we shall have to await going to the Moon and Mars, whither we shall import our ancient grudge to a yet  newer frontier.

We had gathered for the funeral from all points of the globe, now we were priming ourselves to enter diaspora again; there was a veil in the air - you could feel it. It was a silk diaphanous that cut short your breath and made you speak in short bites of language, often minutes apart, and we began to sound like Ke Sanh when the fight was winding down and automatic gun fire ejaculated in disparate bursts, like a prickly memento mori.
My mother chose this evening to drink. She had not seen my sister for five years, and the tension between them kept the wind hot as the sun was setting. The last time I had spoken to Nan about Mom, she had said that talking to our mother was like living in Germany in WW II: the terror was made banal by the simple fact that you still were alive, and the terror had not yet killed you... you accepted it as part of life, part of a diabolic deal for your life. She said talking to Mom was like watching a horror movie, like Saw III, only the deceptive domesticity rendered it seemingly normal.
So we all drank this evening. We had exhausted the routines of post-funeral gatherings; the eulogy had not been all that good, actually. The church was a misapprehension of German Expressionism, dark in the bowels of a wooden ship, beams and staves crossing at unnatural angles. He had not looked all that good, either, at the funeral home last night.
My mother almost never drank anything but a glass of wine, and now she had a disheveled Tom Collins - an afternoon drink by any standards - in her hand, and the perspiration off that tall glass ran in a slow rivulet over her cool hand. Her profile showed her Puritan stock, a tough race of farmers and entrepreneurs who had come west, western yet of the Western Reserve, and had put down roots.
As the great forests rose in the East, then grew old and were felled, the forests of the western lands took over. Leaders rose up across the country over time, like a sports wave in extreme slow motion, going from the East to the West over the course of 200 years. Our time had come and had gone in this history; the zenith had been World War II when the Midwest had been the Arsenal of Democracy. After the war, things still boomed for a while, but the spirit of the land picked up and moved westward, following the movies to California.
We sat now in the time when the President was born in Hawaii, which was about as far west as one could get. We couldn't go any further. We'd run out of places to run to. When we ran to the airport tomorrow and the day after, and let loose the fragile threads of agnate and enate and watch them drop, we would part again, but none of us could really run away anymore. No U-Turn.