If you're reading this on Facebook, I'm sure you saw my delirious status updates on election night. If you're reading this on the blog itself, you've probably noticed that Daily Kos is one of the four sites on my minimalist blog roll. I don't really hide my political leanings, so it's probably not a surprise I've been in a pretty good mood all week. (The first thing Socks said when I walked into ballet Thursday was "You look happy.") But out of all the historic craziness that has happened since Tuesday night, it was a random morning show interview that finally made my mind explode.

When I turned the TV on Wednesday morning, Good Morning America was at the tail end of an interview with Toni Morrison. The anchor, by way of thanking Morrison for her time, mentioned that when she had interviewed Obama during the campaign, he'd talked about how much he'd enjoyed meeting Toni Morrison and how she was "just how you'd expect her to be from reading her work."

Morrison laughed. "Well," she said, "He's a writer." The interview concluded, the anchor threw it to commercial, and I sat on the couch, crying spontaneous tears of joy into my orange juice.

After so many months of considering this election in terms of the entire country and the big issues at stake, it's almost shocking to find myself attached to a moment that's so small, that's only remarkable in the context of the last eight years and my own personal history. It's not as good a story as Chitown Chick, who was actually in Grant Park on Tuesday, realizing that forty years earlier her own father had been arrested there while protesting the Democratic National Convention. It's not as funny as another fellow Lady, who commented that she keeps hearing Kevin Garnett in her head. But it's what I'm going to remember next week, on January 20, and twenty years from now when I tell the story to someone who hasn't been born yet. A Nobel Laureate laughed and my mind exploded. In real life, history seems both bigger and smaller than it did in my textbooks.