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Dear President-elect Obama,

I’ll admit it: you weren’t my first choice, or my second one, either. 

But I sure was happy to see you stride onto the stage at Grant Park two Tuesdays ago. And props to you for even wanting the job. You’ve inherited one big flipping mess. 

Your shoulders are freighted with everyone’s hopes and fears right now. If the economic clouds part under your leadership, then you’ll truly be the Obamessiah (my favorite pejorative back when you handlers trotted you out on the campaign trail to the strains of “Jesus Christ, Superstar.” (Seriously, WTF were they thinking?) It made me want to throw up a little in my mouth–and throw my support to Hill or Edwards.

Hillary fought hard. Regarding Edwards, well, maybe I was thinking, “Charismatic and Shiny,” while everyone else was all like, “Preening Narcissist.” Everyone else got the memo before me on that one.

That’s when I started to pay attention to you, first as a consolation prize, but gradually, on your own merits. I still don’t really understand the Black Liberation Theology of Jeremiah Wright–and it feels presumptuous to say I ever could. Still, that’s my one little bone of contention, which your knockout speech in Philadelphia helped to dispel. 

But Former Senator/President-Elect Obama, the thing that got me was your grace and patience. The Repug ticket played to their wild-eyed, monster-in-the-closet base, whipping up tent-revival style hatred of you because of your race. There were even calls to do you bodily harm–which Gov. Flailin’ did nothing to extinguish. 

Still, you barely blinked. And even though they also gave you a banquet of low-hanging fruit to pluck when Flailin’s daughter’s teenage pregnancy was revealed, you adhered to the high road. 

Me? I was yelling  at MSNBC, wondering aloud why you didn’t just skewer ‘em with their own stupidity. 

You played it just right when the stakes were high. I only hope you can show us more of that in the future.

And if/when you have to disappoint some of us, some of the time, because of the limitations of your power and the world we’re all inheriting from Shrub, the Expert Marksman, and Turdblossom, I hope we can be as graceful and patient in return.

P.S. Good luck with Operation Nonallergenic Rover

No personal stuff, I told myself. Blogging that would be like reading diary entries through a bullhorn. Besides, who wants to hear about trips to the supermarket, etc?

But one car trip I made last week has managed to suck all the oxygen out of my lungs: I had to drive up to my dad’s hunting cabin to identify his body.

He had gone to bed satisfied. He’d spent the day in his favorite place in the world, setting up his turkey blind somewhere on the 40 mountain acres that cradled his one-bedroom “chalet.” (My mom had bothered to hang curtains inside and stock the place with dishes, prompting the undertaker who kept him for us to remark, “That was a woman’s hunting cabin. Real nice place.”)

And it was. It is. The other shoe has dropped. We all knew that Dad–a juvenile diabetic since grade school–was not going to live to be an old, old man. In fact, when my parents were engaged, a doctor counseled them to get cracking and have some kids ASAP if that was in the cards, so that he’d stand a chance of raising them and seeing them launched before his life was foreshortened by his disease.

Well, those hypothetical kids are long past the need for raising (on our good days) and he was able to share his mountainside, his river and the odd turkey sighting with his grandchildren. He beat expectations by a country mile, and kept going. A scientist who went corporate to support his desire to live in the woods , he knew the limitations of the human body in general–and his in particular.

“Why didn’t he just take up golf?” my mother would wail, wondering why a man saddled with a failing heart insisted on a solitary pursuit where success lay in the ability to hide in the woods. While things didn’t end quite the way she envisioned when her worries had her in a chokehold, my father’s final day was not too far afield from her darkest predictions.

But he was never afraid. He knew the risks, and instead of hand-wringing and taking it easy, decided to go run his life the way he wanted to. How many people can honestly make that claim?

Well done, Dad, even though I’ll miss you forever. You were improbably sweet and tender under your hard, crunchy shell. And improbably vigorous in the shadow of an “inborn error of metabolism,” as one of your old books called it.

And improbably patient with everyone you met, for someone who did not suffer fools gladly. Thanks to your remarkable self-restraint, for instance, I grew up believing that Saturday night’s back-to-back broadcasts of The Love Boat and Fantasy Island were the shining twin zeniths of television programming. All because you didn’t shoot the TV.

How did you resist the urge?

I wish I could ask you that, and so many other things.