Part I
I woke up and smelled the coffee. Uncle Paulie gently tapped me on my head and put down a fresh cup of coffee on the nightstand, in what was once my room. Getting served coffee in bed by your very own Uncle Paulie can only be beat by one thing… well…ya’ know. Rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, I knew it was time – it was E Day.

“Get up, get purdy and get your voter card out,” he said and went into his office to write one of his columns.

When I asked if Uncle Paulie had something with the American flag on it for me to wear, he said no, but disappeared upstairs. He came down with his father’s dog tag (singular because one is missing) from World War II and let me wear it. Dressed in jeans and a neutral green T-shirt…and the dog tag that reads George R. O’Connor, we headed to our polling place, a church up the street. It was as I suspected. No line. For the past 10 days or so, I’ve seen early voters have been standing outside polling places in long snaking lines, in both Florida and North Carolina.

North Carolina, my second home, is traditionally a red state, but tonight that might change, some friends, mostly journalists, lobbyists and politicos, speculated during a homecoming dinner for me Sunday.

“Wouldn’t it be cool if we made it by one vote, Majsan’s vote,” someone said. Nobody asked who I’d vote for, I guess they assumed Obama.

The windshield wipers of Uncle Paulie’s red Volvo whisked away the pouring rain as we headed up the hill, a bastard hill I’ve run sooooo many times. We entered the building and were greeted by some last minute local pleas for votes in the local elections. My main goal is, of course, to vote in the presidential election, but I know many of the locals. The Attorney General, Roy Cooper, for example, I crossed paths on the crime beat. I was a little nervous, even though I know it’s easy. But that would just be my damn luck, to F up on such a simple, but very important mission. I gave the voting volunteer lady my name and address and she pulled off the sticker with my name on it off a thick pad. Then she explained to me how to mark my candidates and showed me to one of those standing booths. All I could think of was the Florida fiasco in 2000. To my irritation my hand was shaking, as I colored the first oval box, for the presidential candidate, with a black pen and continued down the double sided form.

When finished I carried my vote across the room and fed it into the vote-counting machine with a nervous smile. The machine swallowed my very first vote like a paper shredder and I had for the first time placed my personal imprint in the election of an American president. (I have written stories about elections.)

Afterward we went to Whole Foods, where I grabbed a latte and we sat down and discussed the historical moment. Historical for me, but also a very historical election. Women, black candidates, oddballs and crazies have been running the headlines on world media for two years and today is (hopefully) the pinnacle of that.

I asked Uncle Paulie what his prediction was.

“Obama just have to win Pennsylvania and hold on to the rest of the blue states and he’s the next president. That’s my prediction,” he said but went on, shaking his finger, to say that Pennsylvania was the big question in this election.

“If you see Pennsylvania go up as a republican state and Obama’s leading by six or seven points, who knows,” added my mentor, a politics journalist and my j-school professor, who we called Stalin behind his back.

He then looked at me and I said:

“You know what my prediction is?”
“What?”
“That I’m gonna get really drunk tonight.”

I’m no longer a voter-virgin and part II of my E Day is soon to start.

I’m in the process of getting “dolled up,” waiting for my Godfather who’s promised to talk me to all sorts of political parties tonight. (Only after I promised to leave my pen and paper at home.) I am looking forward to sip flashy cocktails and rub elbows with the North Carolina political elite, hoping for scandals and mayhem to break loose... stay tuned.