As you can see, I’m—well—under the weather. I was up way too late the other night, reading a Donald Westlake mystery [Nobody Runs Forever, written under his pen name Richard Stark—quite gripping], so I originally chalked up feeling lousy to fatigue.

But on the way home from work, I realized I didn’t want to eat the pasta dish I was planning to cook for this week’s post. I wanted soup. And I figured out the scratchy throat was a sign this was more than lack of sleep.

Good soldier that I am, I started thinking about what kind of soup I could make for this week’s post instead. Then I realized the kind of soup I was up to making involved a can opener and a saucepan. And any interest in setting up my camera to photograph food was displaced by an interest in fluffing up pillows and hunkering down.

So the kitchen is closed this week. Sorry. I’ll be back next week with the planned pasta.

I really try to keep politics out of Blue Kitchen. At first blush, this post may seem political in nature, but it’s not. It’s about something much bigger.

An extraordinary thing happened yesterday. Americans went to the polls and elected a black man as the next president of the United States. Just as amazingly, earlier in the campaign, it looked as if we were poised to elect our first woman president.

For far too long now, our national politics have been about what divides us as individuals, what makes us different, instead of what brings us together as a people, what we have in common. And if ever there was an opportunity for what divides us to define an election, this was it. Race and racism have a long, sad history in this country. In fact, racism has been called the wound that will not heal. The notion that a majority of us could move beyond that and actually elect a person of color required a cockeyed optimism in our fellow man, a huge leap of faith.

Once the selection of the two candidates was decided, race was the elephant in the room. The thing no one felt comfortable discussing, but that would not be denied. It was couched in terms of demographics, the Bradley effect and even the anti-Bradley effect. There was the expected fair share of hatred and bile, scary stories and incidents. But there were hopeful moments too, even if some were left-handed. Our daughter Claire told us of having breakfast in a pancake house in a traditionally white neighborhood in St. Louis and overhearing a boisterous conversation from a table of old, white-haired white ladies. They were complaining bitterly about being compelled to vote for Obama, but knowing that they must, because they believed in what he stood for. Like it or not, they were overcoming long held beliefs and, albeit reluctantly, fulfilling one of the dreams in Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

As you listened to people talking, watched people’s faces, felt the incredible energy the upcoming election was stirring, you could feel us turning our backs on Us vs. Them thinking and once again becoming “We the people.” A mix of things brought this about, I think. Yes, some extraordinarily difficult times have us heeding Benjamin Franklin’s admonition that “We must hang together, gentlemen… else, we shall most assuredly hang separately.” But just as much, it was the message of unity at the heart of Obama’s campaign: “We aren’t Red States. We aren’t Blue States. We are the United States.”

Whatever your politics, an important thing happened yesterday. We weren’t white Americans. We weren’t African-Americans. We were Americans. Once again, we became “We the people.” And for the first time in a very long time, I once again feel that America can do anything.