I knew that it had been a good vacation when yesterday I went to tie my tie before work and completely forgot how. I put it around my neck, one end longer than the other and then I froze. I simply could not remember what to do next. A brief moment of panic passed over me. Did I have a stroke that erased that piece of knowledge? If so, what else did I lose? Would I get on the bus and forget when to get off? Would my words come out garbled and confused?

I tried a few combinations, but I couldn’t get the tie right. Then I tried not thinking about it and just letting muscle memory take over. That didn’t work, either. After several years of wearing a tie almost daily, how did I forget? Next I would forget to wipe, and then I would forget to even go to the bathroom before urinating, and then I would be thrown into a nursing home, wetting my pants and drooling onto my shirt.

Finally, I resorted to the Internet to save me from myself. Thankfully, BrooksBrothers.com has tutorials on how to tie a tie. I followed their examples and finally got myself ready for work… and managed to get off the bus at the right stop.

When the rental car lady attempted her upsell on Christmas Eve, I fell for it. “You can upgrade to a four-wheel-drive Jeep for only $90,” she said. I looked outside, where Michigan winter had hit early. The snow was falling hard, and the roads were covered in snow and slush.

“Let’s do it,” I said.

Good thing, too. Thirty miles from my parents’ house, a firetruck blocked the highway, lights flashing, protecting a scene of towtrucks and ambulances that were buzzing around a vehicle upside down in the ditch. They gave no instructions on how to get around the barrier, so I picked the closest road and ended up on unplowed dirt roads overhung with heavy tree branches and flanked by white fields. I’ve never seen so much white. It was beautiful, falling from the sky, covering the road, the fields, the trees, the igloo houses with their smoking chimneys. The ditch threatened to pull me into its cold embrace, but I laughed at it and drove on.

Three feet of snow covered the ground. “I want to go cross country skiing,” I told my parents on Christmas Day. They said it was too deep and would be impossible to ski in that. I said, “Sounds like a challenge,” and took off with my dad’s black lab puppy, Trooper, and my sister’s German Shepherd, Shiloh. At the bottom of the hill that stretches out to the buried corn field, I biffed it and landed face first in the snow. Getting back upright was an epic struggle, with Trooper bouncing on my face and solid land out of reach. Shiloh, who doesn’t like me but was nonetheless happy to trail along, looked off into the distance and pretended I didn’t exist.

Finally, I made it back onto my feet with only a little snow down the crack of my ass, and set off on the 2-mile trek around the perimeter of the field. Trooper heels quite well, especially for a puppy. Unfortunately, this also meant that he walked on the back of my skis the entire way, which only added to the difficulty of plowing through all that snow. He had a look of unfiltered glee, though, so I let him continue. Shiloh continued her snub from 10 feet behind me.

By the time I made it back to my parent’s house, Trooper was still trotting along with an air of excited discovery, Shiloh was dragging ass and maybe a little sorry that she went along, and my legs were sore.

That was my Christmas. Hope yours was merry and bright.

For weeks, hopes and polls traveled in opposite directions. What happens to a dream deferred? No one wanted to find out, so millions of people — myself included — willfully ignored Obama’s rising stance in the polls and braced ourselves for the worst.

What happens to a dream deferred? Thankfully, we don’t need to know.

Hope has turned into progress.

Obama feels like my president. Last night, as I watched the reactions of the crowd in Grant Park, I suddenly realized that everyone present felt like Obama is their president. It’s why, when I walked in to my neighbor’s apartment to watch the results he said, “We’re winning.”

For the first time in a long time, millions of people feel like someone powerful cares, and it’s an intensely personal feeling.

I had, in fact, forgotten the supreme racial barriers that were being broken. It seemed like such a non-issue (and indeed it purposely was downplayed)… until I saw the many black faces in the crowd at Grant Park, wet with tears. I can only imagine the pride and relief African Americans must feel. Obama is their president, just as he is mine.

Though I’ve witnessed relatively few presidential campaigns, I have to believe that the differences between these two candidates were more pronounced than in previous elections. Not just differences in their personal traits, but in their campaigns, their organizations, their messages. In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, McCain used the word “we” 55 times… Compared to 75 times for Obama’s nomination acceptance speech. Even more telling is that while McCain used the word “I” 114 times in that speech, Obama uttered it only 65 times.

Obama’s campaign, from start to finish, was never about him. It was about us. We the people. He spoke to the deep and the best in us, the rooted human desire for goodness and peace and prosperity, the truth of hard times and sacrifice for the good of all, the things that tie us together.

It is this consistent message of inclusion that brought so many of us, “young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled,” to believe in Obama so intensely, but also to again believe in the United States of America, in our fellow citizens, and in ourselves. It is a message that he must have uttered hundreds of times in campaign speeches, but analyze the election results and you’ll see that it also is the truth. Obama is president for people from all walks of life, not just for me.

Today, I actually believe in that thing… That myth…. That awful cliche…. The American dream.