The Biden win

 

On the warm Saturday afternoon of November 7, I crossed the street I live on to sit in a neighbor's front yard and join them and another neighbor to celebrate the announcement that morning of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris's winning the 2020 election, which had been held four days before. I suggested the gathering, saying I had found a bottle of champagne in the back of my refrigerator I didn't know I had. 

The champagne had been bought and put there by my parents, who had been friends of all three. My parents died in 2011, and the last two or three years of their lives were such that I doubt they'd bought the champagne after 2008. It was bottled in 1982, the year they moved into the suburban Philadelphia house I began living in after they died and remain in now, with my own demise probably not far off. I doubt it had been bought then, though.

This November has been unseasonably warm for this region. It's the first November in thirty years to have temperatures of over seventy degrees for five consecutive days. One neighbor, whose husband died earlier this year, brought large hard pretzels over. She doesn't eat them, she said, but has them for when her sons and grandchildren visit. The hosting neighbors had champagne glasses they'd gotten as a wedding present over thirty years ago and have used no more than twice since. We sat and talked about the election and other things as the sun set and birds and a bat flitted around us, all preparing for the night in different ways.

I know little about alcohol even though I worked for a time in a liquor manufacturing plant in Minneapolis. The bottle had been stored on its side. Opening a champagne bottle is one of those adult things I've never done, so I wanted to open this one. I was told to loosen the little cage holding the cork in and then to pry it up with my thumbs while making sure the bottle was pointed away from anyone. I pried. The cork broke. A corkscrew was provided and I managed to get it out.

The champagne still had some fizz but not much. I don't think I've had champagne for nearly three decades, if that, but the neighbors told me it tasted as it should. 

Later, I thought about how appropriate that bottle had been in relation to what was being celebrated. A broken cork, a delayed opening, no exciting explosion or geyser once it was opened. Biden's win was not an exiting event and was exhilarating not because of what was coming in, but what was going out.

 

A few houses down, someone played loud music. In the suburb I'm in, that counts for wild. I'd gone to Philadelphia on Friday, November 6, for a doctor's appointment. Afterward, I went to the Pennsylvania Convention Center to witness what was going on around it as workers inside counted votes. Trump supporters—old, white, fat, dour—clustered behind a thick police line as Biden supporters—young, and racially diverse—danced in the streets. I took the first two pictures above.