Last night (New Year’s Eve) I dreamed I was working back at the travel magazine of my 20s, and Barack Obama was the editor-in-chief.

The office was an entire floor of a skyscraper, a large city-like footprint. My main job seemed to be walking the square perimeter of halls and offices with an exotic young owl-hawk on my shoulder. It was one from nest of orphans an editor had rescued on location somewhere, and we all had one. Mine was a badly behaved alpha that didn’t play well with the others. But he was mine, perched on my shoulder in his cumbersome endearing way, and it weighed on me that I was responsible for finding him a home. Once during lunch I’d tried taking him on a walk in the jungle adjacent to the building. There were similar owl-hawks in the distance and I tried setting him free, but he wouldn’t go.

That afternoon I was called into Barack’s office. He was packing his belongings, loading boxes onto the helicopter pad that extended from one wall. Goodbye, he said. He was leaving the magazine, going to the small village in Africa where his father had lived. In his memoir Dreams From My Father, he’d written about the way he’d lied to his elementary school class, claimed his father had been a Kenyan tribal chief. Turns out it was true, and he was going to Africa to assume the position of his successor. He handed me a photograph of someone who looked exactly like him. The man wore a navy blue cylinder-shaped beret, his face serious but warm.

Even though we’d only had Barack at the magazine a short while, I couldn’t imagine him gone. There was a small sense of having been abandoned. I handed him back the picture, and asked if he’d enjoyed being with us.

He stared at me a long time, beyond what was normal or comfortable. I focused on a glass cabinet of medals to avoid meeting his eye. His silence meant he thought it was sort of a silly question, and that he also knew what I was really asking: Whether he was going to be as sad to leave me as I was to have him go.

He put out his arm to my owl-hawk. “I’ll take him,” he said, and it stepped from my shoulder to his forearm.

*     *     *

When I woke up it was 6 a.m. New Year’s day, still dark. I went downstairs to write by the glow of our misshapen, off-balance, tied-to-the-wall Christmas tree. There was a sound then from the undeveloped woodland behind our house, the loud, low reverberating call of an owl. I don’t hear them often, but when I do the sound makes me wistful. Later this year developers are razing the woods to build homes, knocking down almost all the native trees (“junk trees”) in favor of a more manicured cul de sac. Our family tried to protest the project at town zoning meetings, or at least limit its scope, but had no luck. My children worry where the animals will go, and what will happen to the birds with nests in the trees. 

Another owl answered the first and then there was a volley of them, low stacattos overlapping each other in the dark. It struck me, listening from beside our imperfect tree, that next year at this time the owls won’t be in their place, and neither will Obama.