It's been forever...and yet: today!

I know I know I know I am a bad substacker who lives in hope of one day being better, though maybe that day will be when I don’t have (two) other jobs pulling at my time. But whatever, writing about why I haven’t written is boring.

Here’s what’s not: it’s Election Day. I am, unsurprisingly, a person who cries every single time she votes. Sometimes because I’m scared; sometimes because I’m so full of hope I feel like I’m about to crack and spill; sometimes because I’m thinking of the people I loved who are no longer here to make these choices; and sometimes just because I’m remembering an episode of Murphy Brown that aired in 1992 when I was seventeen, chomping at the bit to vote away what had been my entire political lifetime lived under Ronald Reagan and George Bush, but not yet old enough to pull a lever.

I am also notoriously superstitious about Election Days. I do weird things. In 2004 I wore a favorite sweater, one I’d saved up for for months, for good luck. I never wore it again after that day. Which is bananas; it was a nice sweater.

In 2008, my boyfriend and I cooked pans of artichoke lasagna to serve to my colleagues who came over for Election Night; that was a good night.

In 2016, I was at the Javits Center, an experience so lacerating that as I wrote those words just now, my stomach turned and my eyes filled, reptilian reflex. As I texted a friend last night, “Any body that was at Javits is not capable of rest on election eve.” Of course I know that that’s true for lots of bodies that weren’t there as well.

But I also remember 2017, home on my couch where I swore I would spend every Election Night after 2016, watching results come in from Virginia and Alabama; a friend who’d been at Javits with me texted, “Maybe we’re the backlash.”

Today in Maine, where I live, there are two crucial referenda on the ballot. One aims to rip away voting rights by requiring ID for in-person and absentee voting (without acknowledging tribal IDs, which would disenfranchise Wabanaki voters) and also by making absentee ballots harder to get, hurting seniors and those with mobility challenges. Question 2 would permit family members and law enforcement to petition a court to restrict a person’s access to firearms. I am voting no on 1 and yes on 2; they are both likely to be close. I am scared but hopeful.

I am also excited for New York City, my former home of 25 years, where today voters will decide who their next mayor will be. As previously covered in this space, I care very much about the political fate of Andrew Cuomo, perhaps my least favorite politician and it’s a competitive list! It’s quite a feeling to wake up knowing that today could be a day that guy claws his way back to power, or a day in which a final stake is plunged into the heart of his political career! I am laughing nervously as I type this.

But actually here’s a far more important thing I woke up to: this ad that Cuomo’s opponent, Zohran Mamdani, posted last night. In it, he visits the “Lucky Corner” in East Harlem where former mayor Fiorella LaGuardia used to hold election eve rallies with seven term Congressman Vito Marcantonio, a Socialist and a member of the American Labor Party whose own career was brought to an end by the suffocation of the Red Scare during another grim period of this country’s history.

I knew about Lucky Corner, but hadn’t until this morning considered it in terms of my own stupid electoral superstitions, hadn’t thought about how generations of people who have worked for better in this country have also been human beings, beset by their own rituals and practices around luck and hope and fear, about place and community and gathering and longing for a juster world.

By invoking Marcantonio, Mamdani was thoughtfully rebuking those who have cast his left Democratic Socialist politics as untested or dangerous. His point was that Socialist policies and ideas are far from new, in New York, or indeed in the United States. “We need to look only to our past for proof of how socialism can shape our future,” he says in the video.

Unsurprisingly, I cried. At the beautiful willingness to simply proceed boldly and with moral clarity, unafraid of the red-baiting fear mongering that has been a feature my adult political life, coming from the right but also from Democrats.

I cried because my father’s mother, the grandmother I never knew but who I am named after, was one of those early 20th century New York City Socialists, her brother jailed for his Communist activities. The first Rebecca (Betty) Traister, like Vito Marcantonio, supported both LaGuardia and the New Deal vociferously. She was also often unimpressed by what the Democratic party had to offer, and in the years that Robert Wagner Jr. ran for mayor, would write in her cat rather than cast a vote for him.

Watching Zohran’s video this morning, I cried because I imagined that Betty would be thrilled today to get to vote for Mamdani. I called my dad; he is 83. “Yeah,” he said. “She’d be delighted.”

Thinking about the past is a funny thing. Yesterday I published my first piece back at New York since I returned from book leave in September. It was about the older Democrats who cannot seem to loosen their grip on power to make room for the next generation, and about some who have moved aside with gusto and hope and belief in the young. I wrote in the piece about how the reliance on models of our recent past can leave us stalled, unable to see what might be possible, to see that there even is a future ahead of us.

But there are other ways to turn to the past: not as a force that constrains our imagination but that expands it. That’s what Zohran’s video did this morning.

Looking at our deeper history can offer richness, depth, perspective: in it are reminders of how it has very often been hard — that our bad times are not without precedent — but also that the violent inequities, the losses, the disappointments of that past have been the impetus for change and challenge, innovation and evolution. Against all odds these days, I am optimistic.

And I am nervous.

This weekend I made the most comforting thing I could think of for us to eat tonight while we wait: a chicken tagine with olives and preserved lemons, because I’m still the person of superstitious lasagnas and banished sweaters, my anxiety setting up shop on the lucky corners of my own mind.

But I will also always wake on election mornings, again and again and again, with determination and hope and recollection of the people who have come before us and those who will come after us, because this work does not have beginning or end.