Goodbye, My Absentee

I’ve been home from Mongolia for a month now, enough time to cut some firewood, find a new job at the University Press of New England, and vote in a gratifying presidential election—the most gratifying, by far, of the eight in which I’ve had the hard luck to vote.

Here’s Barack Obama back in January of 2008, standing a short block from the Press’s Lebanon office, speaking intelligently and in full paragraphs before losing the New Hampshire primary to Hillary Clinton.



We spent the previous two debacles abroad—in Japan, then China—feeling disconnected if not actually disenfranchised, so it was hard to shake off that uncertain sense of doom, the fear of going to bed whole and waking up in fractions, unrecountably diminished.