Hope is in the air. Do you feel it? Since the withdrawal of honest Joe and the ascendancy of laughing Kamala, my step’s been lighter, my mood sunnier. Long had we lived oppressed by dread. Remember that childhood miracle when, having pressed your hands to a doorframe, you released them, and they seemed to float up weightlessly? That’s how hope operates. After long constraint, it feels we might fly!

Hope is the imagination of gratification. Susceptibility to hope ranges. Some folks are born dour – “no nonsense,” “just the facts,” “you’re out of your mind” – and never recover. I catch hope quicker than poison ivy. “Some men see things as they are, and say why,” noted Shaw. “I dream of things that never were, and say why not.”

It can be hard to hope when others feel the opposite. Switching off the TV on November 8, 2016, I felt as if hope had died, pop, like a pricked balloon. Worse than a poor choice, Trump was the monstrous embodiment of everything wrong with our species. He lied, he raped, he gloated, he stole, he was cruel: half of those who voted for him wouldn’t have hired him to babysit; yet here he was, our President, my President, for while I could change my citizenship, I could never change my birth. I was an American and Trump was America’s President! That his support from so many persisted – for more than eight years – deepened my gloom. If humans were so deluded and obtuse, who could dream of a better morrow?

“Too long a sacrifice,” groaned Yeats, “can make a stone of the heart.” Fear petrified my heart. My focus turned inward, rearward, word-ward, to literature, history, myself. I peeked at our nation through the headlines, I inveighed, but I could not gaze – not for long – I could not bear it. What was wrong with my kind, that they could not recognize this vileness? Or what was wrong with me?

Biden’s conspicuous disintegration and onstage collapse turned dread to despair. Hope was dead – “Stick a fork in us, we’re cooked.” That Biden clung to his candidacy those three long weeks I won’t soon forgive, though I honor the man. What was he thinking, risking mankind’s survival to retain an untenable chair?

Then, abracadabra, Biden was out, Harris in, Harris a whirlwind and a whiz, superior to our fondest hopes, saying the right things, being the right human being, smiling, laughing, popped joyously aloft like a champagne cork. Time must tarnish her but for now, wow, she was antibiotic, anodyne, analgesic, just what the doctor ordered, to restore tomorrow in our sullen sky.

I’m not talking politics here, but magic. Yes, she represents my convictions about America’s wisest course. But more, hope permits hope, and more hope, the contagion’s viral: I want to make great, be great, hug my grandkids even tighter, who have life in store. I am not old anymore, or washed up, I can still sing!

Reason derides hope as folly – and so it is. It is also real. For where is reality but in our minds? It is so if – and only if – we think so. We’ve much to do for the next sixty days to avert calamity and scotch the snake, but how gladly, buoyed by hope!

“Hope,” wrote Emily Dickinson,

Perfect, no?