A cold drizzle had started which suited the morning’s bad news, that 10 more people were losing their jobs at the local newspaper. My newspaper. Our newspaper. A friend and I stood in the park under umbrellas and grieved. It was a surprise, but no shock. This story of layoffs, cutbacks and general shrinkage throughout the industry keeps rewriting itself.

My friend teaches a college course on the media. He used to require his students to read a daily newspaper, not just to study the craft but to stimulate discussion of the news. The need to stay informed was a given. He was sad that morning and wondered who will write the final obituary for newspapers.

But then, only a few days later, newspapers rose from their deathbed and became the hottest thing on the street. Newspaper boxes were cleaned out. It was not “new” news. We’d known what happened since we went to bed the night before. Deadline-wise it was old news, but it was what people rushed to read in their newspapers. Maybe for some it made the election more real. Maybe they just couldn’t get enough of the words: President-Elect Obama.

It was a verification, to see it in print. To have and to hold the history-making proof. With a historic photo and historic headline, officially validated by a newspaper publication date – Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2008. Maybe to frame. Certainly to keep as a souvenir , for children and grandchildren. It was made even better when you saw the front pages of newspapers from around the world. Same news, same face, all languages.

Newspapers help make us part of the whole.

We have a group of photos and prints on our living room wall that is a kind of homage to newspapers. There’s one of a newspaper kiosk in San Francisco that’s part of a mural at Coit Tower. There’s a man framed in a window reading a paper, painted by Sausalito artist Joe Jaqua. We have a sketch from a street artist in France that shows two men, one in a suit, one in a beret, sharing a newspaper on a bench. There’s a man in a green sweater with his newspaper in Pamplona, Spain. One of my favorites is a postcard print from Prague of a woman reading a paper in striped pajamas and smoking a cigarette.

We have them because my husband and I were both in the biz. But I also like the body language of someone engaged with their newspaper, whisked away by some story that has taken them out of their private world.

Newspapers help make us part of the whole. You can get that on the internet, too, but people do a lot more select reading on the web. You go to your favorite sites to talk about your favorite subject and there’s not as much chance that your eyes will unexpectedly be drawn to a totally different subject on the same page.

The media took a lot of hits in this last election season – print and every other kind. Those who didn’t like what was said about them complained about the media elite. If the media were really elite, wouldn’t newspapers be getting a bail-out? Most members of the media are commoners. They do it not for money, but for love of the profession. I find myself defending them a lot lately as they struggle heroically to put out a good, strong product, working long days with dwindling budgets, fewer staff, disappearing ad revenue and doomsday critics saying newspapers are dead.

But, not so fast. They could live again. As newspaper readers on Nov. 5, 2008 can attest, miracles do happen.

Image Courtesy of The Press Democrat

There were signs. Four hot air balloons hanging in the blue sky one early afternoon. Two mornings in a row, I cracked open an egg with a double yolk. Then there was Eric Bibb at a concert singing, “Spread your arms and hold your breath and always trust your cape.”

You can see, I was going for any positive message I could get. You’re thinking, but that was back then. That was when we had nervous stomachs and were afraid about getting too excited. That was back when we still didn’t know.

Maybe years from now we’ll be asking, “Remember where you were when we finally got to exhale?”

When “Yes, we can” became “Yes, we absolutely flipping did.”

We had a small family election night gathering at our house. One TV, a couple of laptops and cell phones to connect us to the daughter in Texas and other loyalists from afar. I was in the kitchen around 4:30 pm. when I heard the first expletive uttered from the living room. “What happened?” I yelled out. “Kentucky’s gone,” he said. But we all knew that Kentucky would go for the other guy, right? Kentucky, schmucky. So maybe that was just a non-sign?

The first bottle of wine was uncorked a few minutes before 5 p.m. I rationalized that we had been dabbling in different time zones all day and someone was drinking somewhere. Austin reported they’d already started.

The first election night I can remember was in Meadville, PA. My boyfriend’s father was a union leader and union people, I had learned, partied more than management. It was a small local election but celebrated in a big way with pork and sauerkraut and mashed potatoes. Cold night Pennsylvania comfort food. Plus lots of bourbon.

On Tuesday I made a high carb cheesy concoction known in our family as Courthouse Noodles, a recipe that came from a friend of my husband’s who worked at the Sonoma County courthouse. It’s un-fancy food that appeals to two-year-olds on up and won’t slide off the plate when you dash from the kitchen to the TV.

Giddiness started to erupt early. At 6:40 p.m. my daughter the lawyer who had been working election protection online all day and was now giving reports from her laptop, declared, “It’s a done deal.” The Austin daughter, who had been making get-out-the-vote calls to swing states, whooped with equal certitude. My other daughter, the teacher, was holding back. I too, was worried about premature exhileration. Every time someone sung out high numbers in the blue column I asked, “What does Jim Lehrer say?”

I would believe it when the concession speech came from Phoenix. And when it did I went out on the front porch and hooted and hollered at the neighbors. It would have been thrilling to be with all those joyful tear stained people in Chicago. Or swarming outside the White House. Or dancing in Kenya. But you didn’t need to be holding hands to feel the connection. I thought about Deddrick Battle, a movie theater janitor interviewed in a New York Times story about black voters. At age 55 he had registered to vote for the first time. “This is huge,” he said. “This is bigger than life itself.”

Mr. Battle was right. It will be some time before we can really appreciate the enormity of this week. But for starters, there’s fresh air coming to the White House. My daughter, who never got over the loss of Jed Bartlett – you know Martin Sheen’s TV president – grinned as she was packing up the baby to go home and said: “Hey, the West Wing is back.”

Photo Courtesy of Ohio University Post

We laughed. We wept. We danced. We waved flags and when Michael McDonald softly crooned “America the Beautiful” I looked around and thought the same thing that Obama reminded the world later. This is our country, too.

A last minute credential delivered a nose-bleed seat at the top of Invesco Field with a straight open view to the podium. My Denver friend didn’t have a ticket and stayed home to watch so I went by myself. Maybe it’s the Rocky Mountain hospitality or maybe every convention is this way but there were no real strangers in Denver this week.

We were all on the same side and going to the same party.

On a standing room only bus that crawled two miles from downtown to the arena I met a young techie from Colorado Springs who said to follow him and got us to the front of the first security line.
Inside I sat next to a Denver woman, giddy with disbelief that she’d been given a ticket just that morning. A man came up to her on the street at the Convention Center and asked her if she wanted his ticket. She and I sat in mile-high bliss, sharing nachos and dancing in our seats. Every so often she’d shout out “Bless you, Barack.”

I kept telling myself, “Remember this.”

I met a teacher who got in line at 9 a.m. to wait for the gates to open at noon for a program that didn’t start until three hours later. She’d read two newspapers and was on her third large Coke and raring to roar. I watched a woman hooked up to an oxygen tank, slowly make her way up the steep steps, assisted by a teenager in a “Super-Obama Man” T-shirt.

A young woman in a business suit stared up into the packed stands and plaintively wailed, “Tony. Where are you?” Hundreds applauded their reunion.

More than 80,000 adoring people were so ready for Obama we started cheering for the sound technicians, long before Nancy Pelosi called the historic meeting to order. We didn’t stop cheering until the last fireworks exploded and streamers and confetti covered the stage and the Obamas kissed and the Bidens hugged.

The masses emerged from the stadium desperately seeking shuttles. A small band of us went up and over a hill to finally locate the promised buses. Back onboard I sat with a Baptist from Houston who talked about Obama being a good example to black fathers. Off the bus, I went looking for a cab to get to my friend’s when a woman asked my destination. She said she was going my way and we could take a city bus.

We got to chatting and discovered that we grew up in the same part of Connecticut at the same time. We knew the same movie theaters, the same beaches and remembered our mothers taking us shopping at the same long-gone department store.

It felt like a safe, small world, full of tender-hearted people. All hoping in the same direction.