Election enchiladas

By Marc Munro Dion

You! The one cracking your morning paper or grabbing a little online commentary!

Do you know how little a news columnist wants to be caught with his pants down, hopping around like a kangaroo?

So, even though it's Wednesday night as I write this, I won't join the hundreds of other braver-than-I-am columnists who are telling you Joe Biden is the next president. Anyway, although I frequently urge people to vote one way or another, I try not to call elections. Takes all the fun out of it (if there's any left), and I'm running a news column, not a Vegas sportsbook.

So, enchiladas. What could be a safer topic?

On election night, I made a big pan of enchiladas. My wife, Deborah, and I both like enchiladas, and I'm the one who makes them when they need to be made.

"Election night enchiladas," she said, happily helping herself to a couple.

"Maybe this could be a tradition for us," I said. "Enchiladas on election night."

"I think so," she said, as I rumbled out to the kitchen and filled a plate for myself.

In terms of the countries our ancestors left for America, she is French/Polish. I am French/Scots-Irish. There are a lot of root vegetables in our backgrounds, and no tortillas. Still, why come to America unless you want to become something new?

So, with the television grinding out election news, we ate beef enchiladas.

And we wavered for a little bit, watching some of the election returns, switching to a one-hour crime drama, and then back for one long swallow of election news before curling up in our bed like two children facing the prospect of Christmas morning with only socks and underwear for presents.

And, of course, we didn't get the socks and underwear, not the next morning. Instead, we got the reassuring words of Papa Anchor Person telling us we would get socks and underwear, and maybe even toys, in a few days, certainly by the end of the week, and for absolute sure in a few months.

But no one likes a late present, not even if it's a good toy, and so we showered and dressed, and I went off to do a talk radio show during which I am frequently called a "Communist." She set off to do Realtor stuff, a profession that is the very apex of Capitalism.

And we were normal. And we were employed. And I did not exceed the speed limit on the way to work. And I stopped and got a flu shot on the way home because I try to be a careful man.

But Mama and Papa Anchor failed to be soothing on my car radio, reminding me every moment that all my care might not help, that I'm only a little more in control of my fate than my peasant ancestors. We have 24-hour pharmacies where you can get a flu shot and buy frozen pizza. That's the biggest difference between life now and life in the Dark Ages.

Well, that and enchiladas, a food unknown to my potato-grubbing ancestors. They didn't know what a vote was, either. There was the priest, and the Lord in the Big House and somewhere over there, past the potato fields and beyond several thousand acres of forest, there was a king they would never meet.

When the king lost a war, he said he'd really won, and the war was far away, so people believed, and you couldn't ask your son, who'd gone away to fight and never came back, or came back talking gibberish.

It took my family thousands of years to get to this part of America, where there are the ingredients for enchiladas, and the right to vote, and minor civic functionaries to count the vote.

So, from now on, it's enchiladas on every election night, a sacred and spicy food to remember the centuries before we could vote.

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