There's Got To Be A Morning After

It being Thursday, I calculate that it’s now only 20 days until the day we’ve been waiting for with hope---yes, the day AFTER the presidential election!

One sign that I am getting older is that when I look ahead to special dates marking holidays, events, or deadlines, I am looking forward more and more to the day AFTER that special date as a time when I can finally relax from the tumult and stress that the buildup to it has caused. Being a postal worker, this is especially true with the whole December Christmas/Hanukkah season, marked by a flood of parcels to be processed at work. The great goal then is to make it to December 26 in one piece! New Year’s Day on January 1 is a major milestone on the calendar, but the routines associated with truly serious New Year’s resolutions don’t get started (at least for me) until the 2nd (yes, I’m one of those New Year’s resolution people).

I have mixed feelings about holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries. With birthdays and anniversaries, the stress caused by preparing for them is more than offset by the positive feelings of love and appreciation for the people and relationships being honored. Holidays, on the other hand, can be pretty tedious to deal with. And for those three-day weekend holidays officially observed on Mondays (like the recently-observed Columbus Day), it’s not the day after (Tuesday) that I look forward to: that’s when the piled-up mail (from non-delivery and pickup on Monday) can make for a pretty overwhelming work day (which just happened a couple of days ago). No, in those instances, I look forward to the day after the day after!

But, bringing it back to the special event of the 2008 presidential election, my relief at it finally being over is, of course, predicated on the condition that, on Wednesday, November 5, it really will be over and we won’t have a repeat of the disastrous 2000 election debacle.

And I do appreciate Maureen McGovern’s contribution to this article (through its title). Her 1973 hit song for the summer blockbuster disaster flick The Poseidon Adventure is one of the best “get-through-the-ordeal” anthems ever produced.