Going up?

Since late August, I've been living in South Harlem (SoHa, to those of us in the gentrification brigade). Coming home last night around midnight, I enjoyed the improvised woodwind section of honking horns intertwined with a scattered but lusty chorus of citizen-singers intoning, shouting, moaning, screaming, yawping "O-baaa-maa!" The name was a mantra, a catchphrase, a password, a vocal meditation, its abundance of vowel sounds soothing as a palm on your feverish forehead. The streets were a syncopated symphony of civic ecstasy. I walked home in a bubble of private silence. In my building's battered, tiny elevator I crammed in with three African-American teenage girls. They chatted and laughed amongst themselves. One leaned back and looked up into the wan flicker of the florescent tube. "My President…is black," she sighed contentedly. Feeling shy as ever, I glanced over, smiled, but didn't know what to say. I got out at Floor 5. They kept going.