One waiter said to another.
I was sitting in a parked car in Pennsylvania when the news broke on Saturday that Joe Biden had won the state, and thus the election. I couldn’t shout or honk the horn because my kids were napping in the back. Instead I watched the front steps of the Italian restaurant outside my window. |
Two waiters were talking about how that morning, it had seemed like it was going to be a really long day. Now one punched the air and said, “I can’t stop punching the air!” |
A guy in an apron stepped out and tipped his face up at the sun like it was a bowl and he wanted to fill it to the brim with light. Then he said, out loud, like he was actually hoping there was some creep in a car ready to quote him, “The sun feels a little bit brighter today, doesn’t it?” I’m pretty sure the waiters rolled their eyes, but only a little. |
In a Starbucks parking lot nearby, some Biden supporters waved at cars. Happy people honked. Angry people gunned their engines. Just up the road, a bigger group of Trump voters were gathered. |
“Didn’t you lose?” a passer-by asked. |
“No. There’s still a court case,” one answered. |
That was in Bucks County, which went to Biden by four points. A few hours later we were in Lehigh, the last blue county before a lot of red. My husband had wanted to check out a protest in Allentown calling for all the votes to be counted. By the time we got there, it wasn’t a protest anymore, but a celebration. Someone gave my kids chalk, and they drew Marvel characters on the pavement. |
It still felt hard to believe it was over. The vote was close, so close. As the columnist Michelle Goldberg pointed out, Trump got more votes in Pennsylvania this time than he did when he won the state in 2016. “There was in fact a red wave,” she concluded. “It just wasn’t big enough to carry Trump to victory.”
“The next chapter of American politics won’t be easy,” Michelle writes. “But this one — squalid, terrifying, degrading, tragic — is almost over.” |
There are lots of reasons to be grateful for that. As Stephen Colbert tweeted last week, “The human body was not made to expend this much energy thinking about Pennsylvania.” |
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