My sister Elena and sister-in-law Kenly, two of Jack’s and Liam’s beloved aunties, both live in Brooklyn. They recently sent me this photo of Jack looking drunk with really big hair taken at our favorite restaurant in Southampton, and since I’ve been really needing a distraction from the feeling of carrying a bowling bowl around on top of my pelvis due to my current, torturous bladder infection, the photo thankfully transported me to summer days.

Oban is fond of saying that we do the Hamptons “ghetto style.” And while I’m not so sure about that, we certainly do it suburban style, often commuting about one hour from my parents’ house on Long Island (where we live for several weeks each summer) to the glorious Cooper’s Beach in Southampton with a car full of boys, pails, shovels, beach towels, boogy boards, and Starbucks, parking the Volvo we borrowed from my mother amid rows of spanking new BMW and Lexus SUV’s. We stay at the beach, intoxicated by the rhythmic, buoyant waves, the sparkling ocean and the sun, long after the familiar lifeguards whistle their last call, while the boys climb and leap off the deserted lifeguard stands into piles of soft, warm sand.

We then wrestle a worn out pair of sandy boys with raccoon eyed sunburns (since we never manage to apply sunscreen to their eyelids) into the chilly outdoor showers, change them in the parking lot, since they lock the bathrooms right at 5:00 in spite of the $40 per car entrance fee, and drive into town to La Parmigiana, a small Italian restaurant where we feast on mussels, linguine and penne a la vodka, amid families who bring their nannies to dinner and who will return to their $50,000 per month summer rentals. After dinner, if Oban and I have consumed an adequate amount of wine, we walk over to the candy shop on Jobs Lane where an exhausted Jack and Liam invariably melt down while trying to choose between overpriced gummy worms or fun-dips. When it gets dark, we put the boys, still smelling of sun screen and gritty on their scalps, their ankles, in their shorts, and in between their toes, into their pajamas – again, in the parking lot, for the drive back to my parents’ house. Jack and Liam always manage to keep their eyes open until we get there. It is one of our very favorite ways to spend a day.

Every summer, we also make at least one family pilgrimage from Long Island into Brooklyn, mostly to remind us of what unsophisticated hillbillies we’ve really become. In August we drove into the city to have lunch with Elena, Kenly and her boyfriend Mike at Kenly and Mike’s chic little apartment in an urban garden setting straight out of Dwell Magazine. We could have thrown a rock at Michelle William’s brownstone and actually happened to walk right by her and her adorable toddler, Matilda Ledger, while we were walking back to Kenly’s apartment from a shamelessly hip ice-cream shop. Needless to say, it is not my great-grandmother’s Brooklyn, but it sure is a friendly place to roam around with kids.

By the afternoon, Jack and Liam were getting antsy and Kenly suggested going for a swim at a nearby community pool. We drove a few blocks to Red Hook, which, with its abandoned factories, industrial warehouses and concrete playgrounds, certainly looked different than Prospect Park or Boerum Hill. We walked by a few New York City cops stationed outside the pool, climbed up the cement stairs to the pool’s entrance in front of an institutional brick building, where a rather imposing looking woman informed us that we would need to remove all our clothes before entering and lock our bags in our car since we were only allowed to wear flip-flops, swimsuits and towels. Stripped down to our Calypso bikinis (purchased during a good sale at the shop in Southampton), Elena, Kenly and I were separated from the men and boys and directed down a dark hallway and a long gymnasium to the showers.

“Here comes our Silkwood moment,” Elena accurately predicted before we were instructed to shake out our towels by the shower “attendants” who then watched us shower in shockingly cold, stinging water in order to determine if we had adequately decontaminated ourselves before heading to the the pool area. When we finally entered the sea of humanity, a massive pool ringed by at least twelve life guards and a handful of police officers, I spotted Jack and Liam coming out of the men’s door with blue lips, shaking in their towels, followed by their Brooklyn Queen dad in his pink floral Tommy Bahama swim trunks. Apparently, we do Brooklyn Hamptons style.

We laid our towels down in a narrow, unoccupied strip of sidewalk, where Kenly and Mike lounged comfortably in their urban setting, while the rest of us searched for a space between bodies wide enough to enter the pool. The uniform 3 1/2 foot depth of the pool was just an inch or two too deep for the boys to reach the bottom without inhaling water, and it was nearly impossible to find an available space on the side wall on which to cling so we swam with Jack and Liam through the swarms of excited children out to the pyramid structure that sits in the middle of the pool. The amount of chlorine wafting from the water was staggering, yet we agreed completely warranted in light of the number of swimmie-diapered toddlers being pulled around it.

After about an hour, we left the Red Hook pool, shivering and hungry, and walked three humbling blocks wearing only our swimsuits, Oban barefoot since he hadn’t brought flip-flops, past long rows of taco vendors back to our parked cars.

Crossing back over to the yuppier side of town, we ate a mouthwatering meal at a loud Thai restaurant. We meandered around Brooklyn in the warm evening, Jack and Liam contentedly perched on top of Oban and Mike’s shoulders while licking Italian ices. Driving home that night , we turned around a bend on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, and were stunned by a vision of the dinner plate full moon hovering above the twinkling Brooklyn Bridge with its luminous waterfall installation flowing beneath it.

Jack and Liam didn’t fall asleep the whole way home.

“They better get him a popemobile,” my mother said, through tears of joy, in response to the outcome of Tuesday night’s election. Yes, mom, and we can call it the Obmobile. My mother has always had a way of getting to the heart of the matter. If anyone harms this man, with his sparkling, happy daughters awaiting their new puppy and new home, I swear I will personally hunt him down.

My in-box has been flooded with short, emotional e-mails since Tuesday night. My friends have been using an array of metaphors, allegories, song lyrics and art to try to express the meaning of it all. Heck, as Stephen Colbert noted last night, even the New York Times op-ed page has resorted to poetry. What else can we do? This moment is bigger than us.

My dad, meanwhile, is grieving John McCain’s loss, while I’ve been celebrating the beauty and grace of his concession speech, a speech which resurrected the John McCain we all knew and deeply respected before this election began, a man much braver and smarter and greater than the dangerous rhetoric of his increasingly desperate campaign.

My husband Oban (who can have an Obmobile too, if he wants), staring at Obama’s image on the TV screen as he gave his acceptance speech, said, “I feel like I just got out of a dysfunctional relationship. He’s pretty. He’s smart. He tells the truth. I can’t believe it can be this easy.”

And I couldn’t help but feel that he appeared, standing at the podium on that fateful night in Chicago, in a term coined by my young son Jack, a little “alonely.” Without his mother or father alive to witness his extraordinary achievement, and even more poignantly, still grieving the loss of the grandmother who largely raised him, he seemed to bodily recognize the weight and gravity of his new position. I thought of the prayer he had written on a piece of stationery from the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, that was removed from cracks of the Wailing Wall and subsequently published back in July:

Lord, Protect my family and protect me.
Forgive me my sins, and help me guard against pride and despair.
Give me the wisdom to do what is right and just,
And make me an instrument of your will.

On election night, Obama did not claim his leadership like a trophy. He gave it humbly and quietly, as a sacrifice and as a gift. And it was received that night, as such, by a grateful world.

The day before the election, I canvassed with a young woman from Finland, who had recently graduated with a degree in Arabic languages from a university in London and who was here in Taos on vacation. She is not an American citizen, yet she had arrived that morning at the Taos campaign office, eager to work on Obama’s behalf. “The people in Finland don’t understand the way Bush speaks, in slogans and catchphrases. They like Obama because they understand the language he uses – and they like that he discusses things,” she told me as we drove together to a neighborhood behind the soft adobe walls of the Saint Francis de Asis Church in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico.

And while, for many reasons, I expected the worldwide outpouring of emotion and jubilation upon Obama’s election, what I did not expect was my own sense that the wizard behind the curtain had finally been completely revealed. When L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was originally published in 1900, the United States had recently experienced a predicament similar, in several respects, to the one it finds itself in now. Many believe that it was written not only as an entertaining fairy tale for children, but as a political and economic allegory for America in the 1890′s, particularly the Panic of 1893, a depression resulting from railroad overbuilding and shaky railroad financing which set off a series of bank failures. With a dramatic rise in unemployment, the once secure middle class could no longer make their mortgage payments and many were forced to walk away from newly built homes which, interestingly, gave rise to the image of vacant (haunted) Victorian homes in the American psyche.

The theory is that while Dorothy represented the hopeful Everyman, the Wizard represented the President, as a charlatan who played on people’s fears and tricked people into believing he possessed immense power. The Good Witch of the North stood for the electoral mandate while the Wicked Witch of the West symbolized the moneyed establishment. Even the word Oz conveyed the concept of gold and silver ounces, as the nation’s gold reserve had shrunk, resulting from the lavish overspending of the “Billion Dollar Congress,” weakening the value of the US dollar. The cyclone that carried Dorothy to Oz provided a metaphor for the political upheaval that would transform the drab, black and white country into a land of color and possibility.

Remind you of anything?

“You’re a humbug!” shouts the scarecrow (farmer) at the Wizard, as I would like to say to Cheney and to Palin and all those who tried to appeal to the the lowest common denominators of our nation, and to convince me of their collective power.

Doesn’t it seem appropriate that Dorothy should end up back in Kansas, birthplace of Obama’s grandmother?

“And oh Aunt Em! I’m so glad to be at home again!”