There are thirty-six lots fronting our block of North Upper Street here in Lexington, a city-sized blue life raft in a sea of red. It's a pretty diverse block, architecturally. There's an Episcopal church built in the late fifties at one end and a wood sided shotgun house converted to a daycare at the other. Otherwise, it's mostly single family homes of various shapes and sizes built about a hundred years ago, though two of the biggest Victorian piles have been converted into apartments, as has the largest building on the block, four stories of white brick that the YWCA dedicated as the Phillis Wheatley Center about seventy years ago. There are wealthy people and working class people living in these homes, students and retirees, office workers and factory workers and even one science fiction writer. The racial makeup is so close to a fifty/fifty balance of black and white that I think it tilts on who has grandkids staying for the weekend.

I've just come back from taking a little walk with the dogs, and while I was out I counted the number of Obama signs I saw in the yards and windows of those thirty-six lots. There are twenty (including two in one yard and one in the daycare playground.)

I decided to count them because while I was sitting at my desk earlier this morning, I heard some very young children slowly walking up the street and making quite a noise. There were three of them, all less than five years old if I'm any judge, holding hands in a clumsy, toddling daisy chain anchored by a smiling woman in her sixties. Every few steps they would stop, and she would ask, "How do you spell it?"

And the three children, one little boy and two little girls dressed identically down to the pink bows in their hair, would peer at the closest sign and shout, "O! B! A! M! A!"

And the lady would say, "That's the President's name!"

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Our local Pulitizer Prize winning editorial cartoonist offered this today.