This morning, feeling somewhat under-par from an evening of celebration, I found myself in the Memphis airport, waiting to change planes on my way to a meeting in Nashville. My usual method for dealing with the sleep deprivation of airline travel coincides with my usual method for dealing with a slight hangover, which was fortunate, in this case: I find a restaurant and have a big, artery-clogging breakfast. Something about protein, starch and lipids does the trick.

As it happened, my waitress was a young African-American woman. (I'm a white guy, by the way.) When she brought back my credit card receipt she said, "We share the same name." Sure enough, we have the same last name. I told her it was always a pleasure to meet a relative, and wished her family well.

This was an perhaps inconsequential encounter. But I've lived in the South long enough to have met a number of African-Americans with my last name, which is pretty common. It's always slightly awkward to  comment on such correspondences, since (this being America) the way this probably came about is undoubtedly a fairly pointed synopsis of why Americans aren't one big multi-racial happy family.

But today, November 5, 2008, for some reason, this young woman felt comfortable remarking on the similarity of our names--claiming, in a sense, a degree of kinship with me.

Today, November 5, 2008, we're free to  make a start--at being a single nation, a single people, a single community. President Obama may acccomplish nothing else, but that's not going to go away. Once people have tried letting the old barriers down--barriers that exist on both sides of the racial divide that defines so much of our fractured national identity--it's going to be very hard to ever put them up again.

Various science fiction writers have speculated on what might happen to race relations on earth once we meet an intelligent species from another planet. Wouldn't the seemingly enormous racial divides that split humanity into many parts come to seem about as important as differences in eye color?

America isn't there yet, and probably won't be within the lifetime of anyone now alive to read this. But we've started the journey to a place where racial differences, even those that are packaged with centuries of mistrust, oppression, violence, and rancor, become just one more way that the infinite richness of humanity expresses itself. This country has been preparing for the journey for a very long time; now it starts. What won't we be able to accomplish now that we've begun?

Happy birthday to my unknown cousin in Memphis. And to all of my kin, all of my neighbors. Let's see where we end up!