An Argentine grandmother used the word “esperanza,” the Spanish word for hope, when I asked her about Barack Obama. A Russian traveler said she planned to find a bar with a television along Lake Atitlan to watch the inauguration.

In the week before Tuesday’s big day, I was traveling in Guatemala. Most of the time we were in a news blackout zone – no CNN, no English language newspapers. But we all knew what was ahead.
Obama was on our minds. The whole world has been between hope and a hard place for a long time and maybe there’d be good things ahead with this new guy in the White House.

The women in my travel group toasted Obama more than once. When we gathered with a shaman in the Guatemalan highlands and threw offerings into a fire my automatic prayer was for Obama. We discussed Obama with our Mayan guide in the jungle at Tikal. The Guatemalan economy is hurting. Tourism is off, he said. Whatever good Obama does for the American economy will surely help his own.

Flying back to California on Monday, the day before the inauguration, there was a kind of Christmas Eve giddiness in the airports. Maybe I was projecting my own thrill over getting home in time for this historic day. Maybe it was the Obama button I was wearing on my new hand-woven purple Guatemalan poncho. It got a lot of smiles and thumbs up, even at George Bush Intercontinental in Houston.

When Tuesday came my husband and I ended up celebrating with a roomful of little kids. Our daughter is a second grade teacher in Santa Rosa. She had the TV on and her room decorated with red, white and blue streamers. The kids in her class are the same age as Sasha, the younger Obama daughter. Sasha’s father is now their president. When they look back on their youth it will be the Obama Years.

We brought cookies covered with sprinkles. My daughter poured cups of milk and we all wished each other Happy Obama Day. After anticipating how best to mark the day, the perfect place turned out to be a second grade classroom with a rainbow of Sonoma County faces in a school threatened with budget cuts.

Another daughter was one of the million people on the National Mall in Washington. She heard and watched the real thing and called into her sister’s classroom with an on-the-scene live report. She told the kids she was wearing long underwear, two pairs of gloves and two pairs of socks and had never been so cold in her life. She also told them it was the most exciting day of her life and that when she and her friends started hugging after those words “Congratulations, Mr. President,” a stranger came up and said she needed hugging, too, and jumped into their group embrace.

A lot of pundits this week were recalling Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. But I was thinking about another one of his - the “How Long, Not Long” speech he gave in Montgomery, Alabama in 1965, after the march from Selma for voting rights.

On Tuesday Barack Obama answered the “How Long?” question. Now, the question is “How Far?” do we still have to go?

After time out on Tuesday to celebrate, wars and worries didn’t end. People didn’t wake up the next day to new jobs. But there is hope. Esperanza.

As the guy next to me on the couch said Tuesday, “We have a chance.”

Photo credit: antiguadaily.com

We were playing bocce ball and talking about – what else? – the election, and my friend whispered, “I said it today.”
She had been getting a massage and looked up at the person rubbing the knots out of her neck and quietly said, “I think he may do it.”
And the masseuse quietly said the same thing back.

Nervously looking around for spies, I told my friend I’d said it, too. In bed, drinking coffee, listening to a rare upbeat report on NPR. I said it to my husband and he shook his head and said, “Not yet, too soon.”

My teacher friend and I were walking our dogs when she confided that she and a colleague had just that morning agreed that they were daring to think positive. And then they cringed and agreed not to say it again.

At a neighborhood party I heard a college student start to say something about winning when an older woman across the lawn suddenly turned and said “shush.”

You don’t want to go too public. We’ve been tricked before. So if you must say it, maybe you should throw salt over your shoulder or kiss a newt or something.

You don’t want to jinx anything.

And good Lord, if you feel a victory dance coming on, pull the shades.

One thing, though. Hope sure beats dread and despair, which has been filling some people’s hearts. Witness the not-so-jokey-talk about the best places to move to in Canada. Vancouver has water. Montreal has French sympathizers.

But it’s still many days until possible jubilation. There are many intermissions in this endless movie. Confidence is risky. Cockiness will get you in smarty-pants trouble with the gods.

With this in mind, I took a day off and put my torn psyche in the hands of a two-year- old, a creature who faithfully believes that fog eventually lifts and rain stops, just because she wants it too. And when the sun comes out it will dry all the swings in the park before lunchtime.

The world of a two year old is, as she says “pretty fun.” With shoulders to ride on and swings that go higher and higher. No wish is denied. All wishes are reasonable. And tolerance is a given. If the yellow slide is occupied, you run over to the green one.

No one will challenge your claim that cows have Cheerios for breakfast. And if they do try to argue all you have to do is ask “why?” 20 or 30 times and they will concede.

Two-year-olds don’t have to meditate to be in the moment. They don’t wake up scared and asking, “Now, what’s happened?” They sing just because they feel like it. When they get cranky they admit it and say, “I’m having a hard time.”

They can deal with a financial crisis. If they covet a stuffed giraffe with legs that move and you throw up your hands and say “no money,” they accept it.

They are loud but they are not mean.

You can tune out all the grown-up junk when you’re sitting with a two year old and spreading peanut butter on apples. You can get very close and whisper, “Maybe, even better times are coming.”

Listen to the Whispering Hope Podcast of Another Voice on KRCB-FM