The year is 2032, and Thanksgiving’s at your house this year: family’s flown in from all over the country, turkey’s browning, guys in tight stretch pants are killing each other over a small leather object on the TV.

Then someone switches the coverage to CNN, and they’re breaking a story that gives everyone the warm fuzzies: Barack Obama has won a second Pulitzer, this time for his long-awaited memoir, a two-volume set covering both Presidential terms.

And everyone begins to tell their Obama stories: someone shook the guy’s hand once in Jersey, your niece the lawyer tells a story about working in the Obama Justice Department when they busted Google and Microsoft for full-scale collusion in creating a global, predatory monopoly.

Your grand-daughter comes up and takes your hand. The room is suddenly quiet, and her little tinkerbell voice suddenly loud: “Where were you when Obama announced, Grampa?”

And you feel, frankly, half the man you might have been, if things had been different all those years ago.

Because there was a moment, in 2007, Saturday, February 10, 10:45 am, at the Euro Cafe on Main Street in Burlington, Vermont, when you had the chance to jump on that train just as it was looking to head out of the station.

It was the third meeting of Vermonters for Obama, and this one was scheduled to coincide with Obama’s now legendary speech, broadcast from the Old Capitol Building in Springfield, Illinois. You knew people who were going; you felt a little tug yourself.

But then, at the last minute, you went to Denny’s instead, and porked down a Grand Slam and a chocolate milk shake.

And it has made all the difference. And your grand-daughter knows it, as the silence stretches out. So does everyone else. But no one says anything, of course, because they’re family. No one wants to spoil the turkey with the bitter sauce of eternal regret.