For me, the highlight of Election Night 2000 came when Peter Jennings set burst into flame. He was droning about the electoral college in his usual candyass Canadian accent: "And of course the race is aboooout deadlocked at this moment, as we wait for the-- excuse me, but I do believe we are on fire here." And the camera cut away to show... some television-necessary equipment-- it was black and electronic and very millennial looking, I think it was a speaker of some sort but I cant be sure; whatever it was, flames were shooting out of it and we were watching it Live. The producer shot across the set with a fire extinguisher, and George Stephanopolis wireless mike cut out and Peter Jennings started laughing at nothing at all and we still didn't have a President and that is when it occurred to me that it was going to be a very, very long time before I or anyone else knew exactly what was going on; but that some way, somehow, Jesse Jackson would be involved.

At times I fill lifes brainless little moments-- staring at a red light, hands lax on the steering wheel, or sitting on the toilet, examining the tile grout-- with the thought: I wonder if, somewhere in the world, anything is happening, right this very second, that will wind up affecting the history of the world.

This never fails to fascinate me. Nobody turned to their spouse mid-Nixon administration with, "Can you imagine the shit-- the utter and absolute shit-- that would go down if the President were handing out hush money and taping every word uttered inside the Oval Office?"

But that night, a very great deal of Something Historic was going on, right in front of me. I never went to bed that night, even though I was scheduled to teach the next day. I sat and I watched waves of apparently decisive, now-we-shall-settle-this-once-and-for-all blue or red sweep across those huge electronic maps; a tidal wave of certainly starting with Maine, seeping down to my Ohio, rouging the South and down across the Rockies and finally over the shards of Hawaii-in-the-box.

It reminded me of this wooden puzzle my sister and I worked when we were small-- a lap-sized plywood board which when tipped would scatter the country all over the coarse kitchen carpet. Each piece, each state, was a different color, and you had to put them in place exactly right or you had irretrievably fucked yourself for fitting together the rest of the country. We used to have races, my sister and I, to see who could reconstruct the nation the fastest. Kansas and Nebraska were the most likely to trip you up, or the pebbly hell that was New England. But Florida-- Florida, with its outline already faint against the cardboard backing and jutting into a sea of flat blue paint.... you always knew where Florida went.

Much of the nation slept through the Great Jennings Fire of 2000-- this happened around four AM-- and in the weird tumult of the next day and month I never so much as heard it mentioned in the media. My father missed it, and my mother too-- one snoring and flung on the couch before a stalled electoral count, the other resting neatly between the tucked rose sheets and blankets of the master bedroom.

"Mama, its over," I whispered at two in the morning, jabbing her in the arm. "Bush won, they've called it."

She'd inhaled, opened her eyes-- pale, squinting, and vulnerable without her glasses. "Go to bed," she said.

"I will," I told her, bare toes scrabbling against the carpet. "I will hear the concession speech and the acceptance speech, and then I will go to bed."

And now-- and now, Florida pulsed on, neither red nor blue but an unwieldy gotcha white. He's waiting for Florida, George Stephanopolis said as I raised my eyebrows at images of a limousine on pause, slick black in the Tennessee rain. "He needs Florida plus another state, and Iowa's dropped his way now, and the vice president is just.... waiting, now, for Florida."

Oh, he's not going to do that, I told him.

But he did do that, and the CNN cameras and the nation swung to and fro, removing graphics of a gigantic misty George W head looming over the Presidential seal in favor of a milling mass of Nashville Democrats in a downpour, poncho hoods draped over flattened hair, some of them crying, some of them cheering, setting first chins and then closed eyes over folded knuckles. A man in full Elvis regalia delicately leaned a sideburn against a platform strut, palms together in pursed supplication. And in Austin, bottom lips were being bitten and foreheads were being furrowed and eyes were being widened.

I felt myself as I did in college, crouched, frayed and half-drunk on a weathered wooden bleacher, throat raw and knuckles too, from the cold and the clapping. The '98 Notre Dame-Michigan game, that is what this feels like, I typed to an online friend, also awake and also bewildered. Only when the whistle blew we knew we were going to be jumping into the fountain in the middle of campus and they were going home on a very quiet bus. The Presidency was not a thing to be jerked back and forth between TV time-outs.

The networks slid Florida back into the undecided column, virgin white, as if it had never been claimed and touted at all. At five, the Jennings fire out, stomach aching with emptiness, I returned to my parents domain on the second floor-- past my father, still asleep as watery sunlight wilted up against the glassed-in porch, past the curve of the settee and the hard round oval of the coffee table. I sighed, and thought against it, but opened my parents bedroom door again and knelt against the bed again and laid cold fingers against my mothers arm once more.

Her eyes opened more alertly this time. What's wrong.

"They're saying its not over."

"What's not over?"

"George, hes not the President anymore, they dont think."

"Have you been to bed at all?"

I thought. No.

"Florida?"

Florida.

She sighed, stared at the ceiling. Go to bed, she said again, and by this time tomorrow, we'll know. They know what they're doing down there.

I came home from the college where I taught later that day with a copy of the paper, a second edition, unheard-of. ITS NOT OVER, said the Enquirer, the ink so fresh and so assaultingly laid that the forearm against which I'd carried it was black and streaked. I held it up so that my mother could see it from her seat at the kitchen table.

"They only reserve headers this large," I told her, "for wars and dead presidents."