This season is the thief of time. From here to January, every moment is going to have an awkward, many-sided feel to it, and no matter what I am doing I will feel as though I should be doing something else. This week we’re flying into Chicago to spend Thanksgiving with Michael’s family, and from then on it’s going to be one long, screaming tobaggan ride down to the end of the year and our visit to Hawaii.

But the event to be written down is, of course, the election.

I voted first thing in the morning on November 7, walking down to the polling place at Grace Cathedral. There was a line — I’d never seen that before — and new, huge, sheet-like ballots. After you voted, they were fed into what looked like a giant shredder. At work I don’t remember much talk about the election until the end of the day, when I began to sense a certain excitement. Gore had taken Florida. Several of the agents turned on a TV in one fo the conference rooms, and every now and then would emerge to deliver bulletins. Gore had Florida — and Pennsylvannia and Michigan. The agents were still watching it when I left.

I was in a pretty good mood all the way home, relieved that we weren’t going to have Alfred E. Neumann in the Oval Office. Still, I was wary and didn’t feel inclined to watch the returns. I sat at my computer and Michael watched sports, every now and then changing the channel back to the returns.

That’s when we found out from a wide-eyed Dan Rather that, oops, Gore didn’t have Florida. We watched the rest of the evening with growing apprehension and turned in that night depressed, convinced Bush had won.

It wasn’t until the next day that we discovered everything had bounced back into the air.

And that’s where it has stayed. Tomorrow there may be a decision, but it’s been two weeks and we still don’t know who our next president is going to be. Online things are getting pretty ugly, but in the office, where there is a mix of fervent Democrats and fervent Republicans, things have been pretty civilized. A property manager from England told me she was impressed, “Back home,” she said, “We’d all be engaging in slagging matches over this.”

Things have changed.