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" NEWTONVILLE, MASS. -- I didn&amp;#039;t do much on Election Day 2008. I helped get the house ready for the folks who were coming over. I laid into the refrigerator a six-pack of Turbodog from the great Abita brewery in Louisiana and a twelve-pack of Narragansett lager for the local heroes and a bottle of Taittinger champagne, chilling next to the milk and butter.  I drifted in my mind, though. To the Lorraine Motel in Memphis and to the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where my oldest boy was doing work at the polls. To Mississippi, where my second son was in grad school at the place where they once opened fire on federal marshals to keep James Meredith from enrolling. And down the road from there in Jackson, to the abandoned house on Guynes Street, where I once stood and stared for a long time at an old, ragged, dark stain on the cement driveway. In 1963, a man named Medgar Evers had bled out his life on that spot on the same night that President John F. Kennedy had spoken to the nation about the moral imperative of the cause to which Evers had dedicated himself. It took them thirty years to convict the cowardly back-shooter who&amp;#039;d done the crime. Kennedy, of course, also had got himself shot. I have never been able to shake what the Movement did to me. I was a child of the Northern suburbs. I had nothing in common with anything I was watching on television, but I never turned away. As I went through my career, I collected places and moments from those days the way some people maintain a life list of birds or visit Civil War battlefields. I sat there, in my living room, in yet another Northern suburb, and I went in my mind back to that driveway in Jackson. I wondered how we had come to this moment, a quarter million people in Grant Park in Chicago and the redoubtable John Lewis, whom I had gone out of my way to meet and who&amp;#039;d told me about how they had to cool him down at the March on Washington because his proposed speech was so angry. And Lewis came on NBC, and it was hard for me to hold it together.  This country is jazz. It is all about improvisation and feeling and heart and soul and surprise. There is always something over the next line of hills, as long as we don&amp;#039;t stop, stagnate. I tilted the Taittinger and took a long, deep, and signifying swallow. Damned if this country couldn&amp;#039;t surprise you. Damned if there wasn&amp;#039;t another riff coming from the cool distance, notes bent and supple and entwined into shapes you&amp;#039;d never imagined. We had turned a bend in the road. We were home, and home, and home again. Goddammit. THE OBAMA DIARIES: NOVEMBER 4, 2008  TOM JUNOD: How the Obama Blogosphere and Joe the Plumber Helped Me Cope with Death  ROBERT KURSON: Obama&amp;#039;s Fellow Illinoisan and Classmate on Run-ins with Mr. Cool  LISA TADDEO: Election Night 2008&amp;#039;s Historical Buzz in the Big Apple  SCOTT RAAB: Happy Tears for Obama on the New Jersey Turnpike  TOM CHIARELLA: One Sunny Day in Indiana and One Victory Beer for Obama  CHRIS JONES: How McCain Lost Himself Before He Lost the Election  JOHN H. RICHARDSON: It Ain&amp;#039;t Over &amp;#039;Til It&amp;#039;s Over, But Sen. Joe Biden Is Feeling Good   "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a5450/obama-historic-election-0109/>