Re-entering Taos always feels to me like re-entering Earth’s atmosphere from outer space in a rocket that might burst at the seams from all the heat, shaking, and pressure.

I could blame it on the thin air at this altitude which, after a summer at sea level, reduces my ability to think, sleep, and eat. I could attribute it to the August heat, dry as a sauna, which leaves my brain, and seemingly everyone else’s, in a general state of afternoon siesta. I could chalk it up to good old jet lag or on the interminably long three hour drive home from the airport with restless six year old boys after two flights and a layover.

Or I could just accept what I know to be true. For all of its raw beauty and its spirituality,  Taos has a special way, upon returning to it, of kicking one’s butt.

After a couple of weeks back home in Taos, when I was certain I had endured the brunt of the transition (thankfully without any serious illness, missing pets, or car damage,) I mustered up the energy and courage to venture into our local Wal-Mart, a true litmus test of my acclimatization.

I went to buy a facial moisturizer, an anti-wrinkle cream to be exact, to make myself feel better about what the strong sun and unquenchable dryness was doing to my Irish skin. The glass cabinet where the facial moisturizers are kept was locked. I asked an employee at the pharmacy if she could open it for me. She directed me to find the “lady at Health and Beauty.” I pushed my cart through Health and Beauty where I discovered no sign of human life. I ventured into Lawn and Garden and found five women clad in blue Wal-Mart vests chatting with each other.

“Excuse me. Could anyone please unlock the moisturizer cabinet for me?”

The women discussed the issue amongst themselves for a while, wondering where that key could have gone now. When they had determined that none of them knew who had it, one of the women pulled a walkie-talkie from her vest pocket, put it up to her mouth and shouted over the intercom, “ We need a customer service representative to the Oil of Olay counter!”

Oil of Olay counter? Never mind the fact that the ten dollar moisturizer I was hoping to purchase was made by Neutrogena, the way she said Oil of Olay reminded me of roaming around the cosmetic booths at Macy’s in New York when I was a kid, where overly made-up and perfumed beauty specialists lured women to their counters by spraying fragrances at them and offering cosmetic “bonuses” from Clinique, Chanel, Dior, Estee Lauder, Lancome… Here, in Wal-Mart, the glass cabinet is apparently the Oil of Olay counter, and it is special enough to be kept locked up.

I wandered back to the cabinet, feeling silly since I was nearly positive no one would appear to unlock it, and pondering how a Target would at that moment feel like a Saks Fifth Avenue. I waited near the case for five minutes, watching the old, weathered men at the Subway counter talk and eat lunch. I considered giving up, but I had already invested so much time and energy into my quest that I decided to persevere. As soon as I made up my mind to walk back over to the ladies in Lawn and Garden, the woman from the pharmacy approached. “You’re still waiting for that key? I’ll get one from the register.”

She disappeared and reappeared surprisingly quickly. “Which one do you want?” she asked while looking in the cabinet. I pointed to a 1.3 ounce tube. She removed it with a regal formality but she didn’t hand it to me. Instead, she said, “I’ll take you to register nine with it.” I was not done with my shopping, but I realized I couldn’t let the opportunity pass. I was personally escorted through Wal-Mart, not allowed to hold my precious moisturizer until I was officially handed off to the employee at the cash register.

“I guess people steal these,” the lady at the register said, without looking up.

“Oh,” I said, unloading my cart, “ but this laundry detergent cost more.”

“This is smaller,” she replied.

“Right,” I said, while a voice in my head, as clear as the one over the intercom, told me, “Houston, the Eagle has landed.”

My dad has never done anything half way. He truly is a force of nature. He is not fiery exactly, not earthy, certainly not airy. His energy is purely electrical. He looks and acts remarkably younger than his 74 years. True to his nature, he has been an electrical contractor for almost his entire life, before which he worked a slew of other jobs, from stock boy to delivery boy. He has worked steadily since he was young, and he has prayed since then too. Even as a child he would wake up in the dark to trudge miles to Mass every morning before breakfast and before school, like a good Irish Catholic son.

I suppose it should seem fitting then, in a sense, that tests have revealed that my father is potentially at high risk for ventricular fibrillation, which causes cardiac arrest – also known as sudden cardiac death. Cardiac arrest, I’ve learned, is different from a heart attack, which occurs when a blockage of blood vessels interrupts the flow of oxygen rich blood to the heart, causing the muscles to die; a plumbing problem of the heart, if you will. Ventricular fibrillation, on the other hand, is an electrical problem, where the signals controlling the heart become rapid and chaotic, causing the ventricles to fibrillate instead of contract so the heart can no longer push blood to the rest of the body. Death usually ensues within minutes.

The news has sent our family into its own fibrillation. My sister Christina, my mother and I have all become nervous and jittery with chaotic emotions jumping from one extreme to another. Feelings switch on, then off again, unpredictably. My eye has started twitching. It feels like we are waiting for a clear signal.

Tomorrow morning, my father will undergo a procedure called an eletrophysiology of the heart. The way I understand it, specialists will actually try to instigate, through the use of tiny electrical impulses, the potentially dangerous arrhythmias they are hoping to halt. Electrode tipped catheters pushed through his veins will detect his heart’s electrical activity and help map the area where the arrhythmia is occurring. If necessary, they will implant a defibrillator.

And when they are doing this, while I try to forge through the ordinary routine of a Wednesday morning – getting Jack and Liam up and ready for school, I will do what my father would do if it were one of us. I will pray for him, mapping and navigating my love for him through an electrophysiology of the terrain of my own beating heart.

My Boots

My boots are going to the inauguration tomorrow. Unfortunately, I will not be joining them. They will accompany my photographer friend, Dorie, who did not deem her rubber toed duck boots fashionable enough for Washington, DC. So, my mud splattered size 5 1/2 brown leather, lugged sole, sheepskin lined Uggs will be there celebrating without me, presumably splashing through slush on their way to the capitol to hear Barack Obama make his inaugural address to our nation, keeping Dorie’s feet warm while she snaps photos documenting this historic occasion. And while part of me is glad to watch tomorrow’s events from the comfort of my warm home, my heart and sole (forgive me) will most certainly be in DC tomorrow.

In the meantime, I am still trying to digest the Miracle on the Hudson, the unexpected precursor to this inaugural week, which seemed to hold a heavy deal of symbolic weight for a nation suffering from post- traumatic stress disorder. My sister flew out of New York that same Thursday. I was driving when I heard the news on the radio that a plane had landed in the Hudson. “Not Elena,” I thought as both a promise and a prayer until it registered that the plane had been bound for Charlotte, not Chicago. It reminded me of 9/11 when I listened to the news on the radio that a plane had crashed into one of the twin towers, while driving to the middle school where I worked. While I did not begin to wrap my mind around the scope of that catastrophe, assuming that it was accident involving a prop plane, my brain began trying to locate my father, who worked then in different locations around the city. I called him from the principal’s office since I didn’t own a cell phone. He was safe at work somewhere in Queens. The news had, of course, gotten unimaginably worse in the short time it had taken me to reach him.

Just over a week ago, on a frigid and bright full moon night, we went to a dinner party at our neighbor’s home. There we met a lovely couple with a three year old son, and a twelve year old daughter who was sleeping over at a friend’s house. All of our boys played together while we chatted around the kitchen table before dinner. As we got lost in the thick of conversation, a glass of wine tipped, the redness quickly permeating the cream colored tablecloth to its edges, and I found myself physically pushed back against my seat with the sudden, shocking recognition that the warm and resilient woman across from me had lost her husband – her daughter’s father, and numerous friends on 9/11 in the World Trade Center, where she had also worked. She hadn’t gone in to her office that day. Her life and the life of her daughter spun around like a car in an accident for years afterwards at the mercy of fate and circumstance and unimaginable grief, until it seems they crashed in Taos. Her then five year old daughter was teased and bullied on the bus on her first day of school here. She met a wonderful man, had a beautiful son. There was the sense that both she and her daughter were only very recently coming back to consciousness.

The US Airways accident seemed to me to introduce the idea to our exhausted national psyche that even when things go miserably wrong, somehow, by a combination of luck, preparedness, fate, leadership, and teamwork, the outcome can potentially be miraculous. After seven years of stars apparently aligning to produce the worst possible outcomes of inherently disastrous situations, what a stunning and almost giddy relief it was to watch people stepping off those airplane wings floating steadily in the icy Hudson into the arms of those reaching out from ferries, as if they had been just sitting waiting there for that particular plane to fall out of the sky in that particular spot in the river at that particular moment.

“Daddy our plane turned into a boat,” said a four year old boy on flight # 1549 to his father after the plane landed in the Hudson.

And in that spirit, on this inaugural eve, my wish for the incoming administration is that when things go wrong – as they inevitably will, may they unfold in a way (whether by effort, brilliance, chance, or grace) that allows our children to retain their natural sense of wonder, their innocence, and most of all, their hope.

We locked our children in the bathroom. There, I said it. Technically we didn’t actually lock the door since it’s impossible to lock the bathroom door from the outside of it, but Oban did hold the door shut as tightly as he could for about two minutes while Jack and Liam tearfully pleaded for mercy. I’d like to blame our ridiculous, mean, and embarrassing parental behavior on the full moon, which this month happened to be thirty percent brighter and fourteen percent larger in appearance than any of the other full moon’s we’ve seen this year, due to the moon’s proximity to the earth. Oceanic tides were extra large at this full moon due to the strength of the gravitational pull. Is it possible to excuse ourselves with the argument that what our family experienced was a period of Super Moon induced temporary insanity? I wish. It certainly may have explained why Jack and Liam had utterly transformed for five days prior, while the moon waxed into roundness, into Thing One and Thing Two from The Cat in the Hat.

Thing Two and Thing One! They ran up! They ran down! On the string of one kite we saw Mother’s new gown….Then those things ran about with big bumps, jumps and kicks. And with hops and big thumps and all kind of bad tricks

I could even try to blame our ineptitude on physical pain, as I had experienced a cystoscopy the day before that left me feeling like a needle was passing through my urethra. The medications I was prescribed to prevent infection made me nauseous and gave me a throbbing, unrelenting headache. When I returned from my book club that night, an oasis of sanity in my life, Jack and Liam were tucked into bed, looking positively cherubic while their dad read to them from Charlotte’s Web. I figured we had finally worn them out with a combination of school, skiing, and running around the zoo, aquarium and science museum (in Albuquerque where I had my doctor’s appointment) in the course of a couple of days. Somehow though , as soon as it was time to turn out the lights, complete chaos ensued; tumbling, joking, farting, flipping, running, jumping, hiding. In an effort to be “fair” we made our biggest and most obviously stupid mistake when we put both of our boys in the same room, the dreaded guest room/office/hamster room, for a time-out. Within seconds they had escaped and wearing only their pajamas scampered barefoot across the snowy ground in the backyard, reappearing through the sliding glass door in our bedroom, triumphant and energized. Game on.

Oban grabbed Liam and I went after Jack.

So, as fast as I could,
I went after my net
And I said, “with my net
I can get them I bet,
I bet, with my net,
I can get those Things yet.”

Before I knew it, we had locked them both in the bathroom, threatening to make them spend the entire night in there.

Then I let down my net.
It came down with a PLOP
And I had them! At last!
Those two Things had to stop.

Their wild whoops turned to genuine shrieks and it dawned on me that what we forgot in the heat of the chase was that they would actually BELIEVE us. When Liam began frantically begging for his blanket, my heart dropped and I made Oban let them out, ashamed that we had become the parents of our worst fears. Or at least I felt ashamed. Oban seemed to relish his moment of successful capture.

I prefer to torture myself with the knowledge that my sweet Liam, who is an absolute model of good behavior – at school and in public anyway, now leaves the door open when he uses the bathroom, scared not of monsters but of his own parents and that when Jack and Liam are one day in therapy we will not be remembered as the parents who didn’t sleep for years, who read to them before bed every night and sent them to a Waldorf kindergarten because of the kind teachers and humanistic educational philosophy, but the parents who locked them in the bathroom.

If only the Cat and the Hat had shown up to intervene.

“Have no fear, little fish,” said the Cat in the Hat. “These things are good Things.” And he gave them a pat. “They are tame. Oh so tame! They have come here to play. They will give you some fun on this wet, wet, wet day.”

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!”