This day began at a dining room table, over bowls of granola with a 6- and 3-year-old. After a spirited discussion of how grapes become raisins, they want me to know that Hanukah and Christmas are their favorite holidays. They know that they’re not the same, but they want me to know that they don’t like one more than the other.

What they don’t know is that my heart is breaking. Everyone’s heart is breaking.

My practical side knows that I’ve felt this way before. Almost all of 1968. September 11. Times when I knew the powers that be didn’t share my values, or (worse) didn’t have any. Times when I felt there was nothing I could do except muster up more kindness and not treat the unthinkable as normal.

So here we are. I’m still good with the kindness idea, and I know the amount of time I’ve spent angry in the last few days means I haven’t succumbed to any of this being ordinary. I keep hearing myself say Election Day.

My first Election Day memories happened when I was about eight. I was on my way to a friend’s house—walking, which shows my age. Our next-door neighbor, Mr. Schwindt, was burning a small pile of brown leaves in the street in front of his house (again…my age).

He commented on the beautiful day we had off from school. Then he made a joke: “Are you leaving to go vote?” I’m sure I giggled. He said something about growing up and how important voting was. He told me one day I would understand.

Mr. Schwindt didn’t need to give me that patriotic little pep talk, and chances are he knew that, too, since my parents never missed an election, even a midterm, even a School Board referendum. My father voted the way he did everything in life—quietly but with purpose. Never calling attention to himself. Willing to listen to all sides of the argument even if it got a little painful.

My father was something of an arm-chair historian. He loved to follow politics, feeling, maybe, that as a WWII combat veteran, son of an immigrant, a dad and a taxpayer, he had a vested interest in being informed. My cousin, Anne, who used to have political phone calls with him weekly, says she has it on good authority that in Heaven both CNN and the New York Times are available. That makes us both smile.

So Dad, if Anne is right and by some quirk of the universe you can actually see my words as well as those of Maggie Haberman, you would just love this Early Voting thing we have now. There is so much that feels out of my control this week. But one thing that doesn’t. My heart is broken. But I showed up and voted. Thanks.

Young friends have a baby due soon. At their shower, I watched the mom-to-be unwrap soft blue outfits that made the room go, “Aww.” On still evenings this summer, I sat outside with the dad, talking about how life is about to change.

Now it’s time to start planning the dinner I’ll make for them. I have a signature dish for celebration and a different one for grief. I’m big on making food no matter what, a product of my upbringing. I grew up believing that the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach. Apparently, I internalized that aphorism more seriously than my grandmother’s warning about giving away the milk for free.

For a new baby’s arrival, I usually go with Chicken Tarragon Crepes. It’s fancy but mild. It’s showy, but it’s only chicken, so how fancy can it be? I chop the tarragon and make the crepes from scratch. I blend the cream sauce—making sure it doesn’t curdle—thinking about the new mother and father in that space of wonder and trepidation that new life brings.

It’s something I do well. But as much as I love to cook for other people, I grew into the role shakily. There was a time my cooking could be almost scary.

In college I lived in an enormous off-campus Victorian that had been cut up into student housing. I had an apartment on the ground floor. The young men who rented the single rooms upstairs were poor and always in need of a good meal. Senior year, I began to fancy myself as the resident “First Lady of the Boarding House” and decided to give my very first dinner party. I hope I didn’t actually call it that because it was five starving college guys who were happy to be shoveling almost anything into their mouths at my kitchen table, which was about two feet from the stove and sink.

I bought a cookbook from the bargain bin at a drug store and trusted the author to guide me. I found a recipe for beef stew, something that sounded hearty and satisfying. I followed it word for word, the way a Fundamentalist might interpret the Book of Leviticus. I trusted every syllable. How hard could it be? The recipe told me to add ¼ cup of cloves to the beef and the vegetables. I did.

As the stew simmered on the stove, all those cloves made my apartment smell like what you’d think Thanksgiving in a Currier and Ives painting might smell like, but somehow it didn’t concern me. By the time my guests arrived, the clove smell was burning the inside of my nostrils. Still, it was food and they were game.

First bite. Up went their napkins to their mouths. There was coughing. Our tongues burned for days.

Years passed and I got better. Maybe a little cocky. So much so that I planned an elaborate Chinese dinner for my boyfriend. We had spent most of the summer apart, and this was to celebrate his homecoming. He had lived in Manhattan and had stories of “real” Chinese dishes he loved, so I had a goal. I did my research. I bought a wok and a rice steamer and got up to speed on ginger and hoisin sauce. The day of his arrival came, and I was in the kitchen chopping carrots and bok choy and picturing how impressed he would be.

The recipe called for four cloves of garlic. Somehow, I’d lived for 23 years thinking that a head of garlic was just another name for a clove of garlic, and in the pre-Google era, I was on my own. It took an hour to chop four heads of garlic, but somehow this didn’t alarm me. You can sort of picture the rest of the evening.

I don’t do stuff like that anymore. I’ve learned how to read recipes. I’ve learned to taste my food as I go. I’m a solid cook, a poised cook, sometimes an adventurous one.
But for all the great food in celebration that I’ve given and received, it’s a simple Mason jar full of hot soup—in grief—that is my strongest food memory. In January 1978, my brother, Rob, died suddenly. He was 26. My parents were out of their minds with grief. Lots of friends and family filled up the house, and it seemed everyone was talking, but nothing was registering.

The doorbell rang. It was our friend and neighbor, Joan, from across the street. It was the first time she and my mother had seen each other since the police officer had come to my parents’ door and opened his horrible, sad speech by telling them both to sit down. I don’t remember what Joan said, but I remember this: She handed my mother a Mason jar of soup across the front stoop. My mother was thanking her profusely. Joan smiled and said, “It’s just Lipton’s. I wanted to make sure you had something hot tonight.”

Sometime in the coming weeks, I’ll probably opt for the chicken tarragon crepes for my young friends when their baby boy is born. Lucky for this couple, there will be no cloves or garlic. But just like Joan’s gift on that freezing night so long ago, it won’t matter if it’s fancy and took hours, or if it’s “just Lipton’s.” I’ll want to make sure they have something hot. That’s all that matters. That’s all that ever matters.

I haven’t written in over a year. A few times lately, I see someone I know in a store or on the street (or even, once, at a friend’s wake) and that kind person will say, “I haven’t read anything from you lately.” I usually come up with the same response, which is pretty weak because my honest reaction is that the person is just being nice or wanting to soothe a writer’s fragile ego.

I most often say: “I ran out of things to say.” I guess I’m looking for a quick laugh, and usually I get one. But now after a year of not seeing my name in print, I feel little phrases or sentences forming when I least suspect it. I think: “I need to remember that. That’s not bad.” So maybe I haven’t run out of things to say after all.

This brings me to last Sunday.

A neighbor emailed. She had agreed to canvass for a political candidate we both believe in. She hadn’t exactly planned it; it just sort of happened. Would I go with her because if we went together it might not feel so terrifying? I said I would, and then spent three days picturing the angry people we’d meet—called away from their lunch or their televisions—slamming front doors in our faces. But for more than a year I’d been talking about the demise of the world as I saw it, and I thought maybe I’d feel better if I did something. (Yes, it’s all about me.)

On the designated day, it rained. Poured. All morning. The candidate sent out a group email saying that usually on a day like today, everyone would stay in the headquarters and make calls. But we couldn’t waste a day this close to the election. The last line said something like, “Grab your umbrellas and let’s make this happen.” I checked the temperature. It was cold. I convinced myself that people my age shouldn’t be walking out in the rain for hours. I convinced myself that life would go on without my contribution. I convinced myself that my neighbor would forgive me.

I bailed. But I promised the candidate I’d be there next week. And I was.

The local Democratic headquarters was full of signs and young people. I saw phone banks but no one sitting at them, so I ran right for my comfort zone, trying to sell the woman in charge that “I’d be really good at making calls.” I don’t remember if her answer was “Nonsense,” or “No, no, no, no,” or “Oh, please,” but she cut me off with a comment about the sensational weather and that they needed everyone to canvas.

She meant business. Within a minute or two, I had signed in and was being paired with a young man who was already scanning a map of the neighborhood we’d been assigned. As we got into my car together, I was relieved that he had done this before but a little shocked at how quickly I was now sitting in traffic with a complete stranger on our way to letting other strangers be rude to us at their front doors. Although I was rattled and thinking I was in way over my head, he calmed me. I asked him about his unusual first name, and he told me he is an immigrant. I asked him how long he’d been out canvassing. Since March.

The day was full of surprises. For one thing, it was hotter and more humid than I’d predicated and early on I regretted not packing something to drink. Yes, we were waved off a few times. Yes, we knew people were really home when they heard the bell but pretended they weren’t. But there was the young man in a Metallica shirt who listened intently and asked great questions. And the funny woman who petted her dog while she tried to give us some advice about what we were up against in her neighborhood. And the 89-old man who came out onto his stoop to talk and knew more about the issues than I did and—after a long and spirited discussion of the candidates—said, as he looked at my flushed face, “Let me go get you a bottle of water.”

I was conscious after a couple of hours that I was probably slowing my partner down. He kept telling me how much better it was to do this with another person. (And unsaid: “even if she’s red-faced and a little out of breath on the hills.”)

Here’s what I was left with, words that have been floating around my head since last Sunday. Words that got me to my desk this morning to write something after a solid year of no words. My favorite Leonard Cohen:

“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in”

I rang some bells. On a Sunday. For a few hours. Trying like hell to be just that tiniest sliver of light in a bleak time. Maybe that’s what you’re being called to do, too.

Go.