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Subscribe!The Inauguration: I Was There, Once
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Out of a sense either of literary nonpartisanship or perhaps cowardice, I've been reluctant to drop any hints about my political inclinations. Having written a novel that deals with messy issues like individual rights versus collective needs, and morality during times of crisis -- a novel that tries to put forth very opposing viewpoints in equally sympathetic light -- I've thought it better not to comment on loaded contemporary issues so that whatever I say about Iraq or Bush or Obama or taxes wouldn't somehow overpower what I'd written. I want my fiction to be read and enjoyed by Democrats and Republicans alike, as well as Whigs and Tories, Freemasons and Cool Mooses. I've had old-fashioned hippies and Army Colonels tell me they liked my book, and I love that, and don't want to do anything to change it.
But I can't resist writing about this historic day and revealing myself as one of the many who proudly voted for Obama. I watched the Inauguration this morning with my two-year-old son, who was understandably more interested in playing with his trucks and coloring with his markers but who will one day be reminded that he too saw history in the making. Among all the other emotions dancing in my heart was nostalgia for the six years my family and I lived in the District of Columbia, a mere 15 blocks from where President Obama took the oath of office. We left the area and relocated here to Atlanta just four months ago, a good decision for my family but one that yields a bittersweet feeling during a time like this. I wish I could have been there, in that crowd, in the cold, cheering and just looking into peoples' eyes. Bad timing on my part. As someone who has moved around a lot in the last ten years, I'm somewhat used to this feeling -- I watched my beloved Patriots win their first Super Bowl from an apartment in Chapel Hill, NC, wishing I could be at my former apartment in Boston's South End, running through the icy streets, screaming; I watched my equally beloved Red Sox break their curse from a bar in Capitol Hill, D.C., wishing I could have been with my brother Dan, who at the time was at a bar across the street from Fenway Park with several hundred fans who couldn't pronounce the letter R if they tried. I'm glad I've been fortunate enough to live in many places and fall in love with different cities, but such geographic philandering means that it's easy to be in the wrong place during these seminal moments.
Today, wondering what it must have been like to be in D.C., I can console myself with the fact that I was fortunate enough to attend an Inauguration earlier in my life. In 1993, during my freshman year of college, I volunteered for Bill Clinton's first Inaugural, living in suburban Virginia for a month at the home of my girlfriend's sister. I volunteered for the Inaugural Committee's "Bells for Hope" event, a goofy exercise in which we spent most of January calling churches and towns and asking them to ring their bells at the precise moment when then-Pres-elect Clinton would ring a replica of the Liberty Bell, just outside Arlington National Cemetary, the night before his swearing-in. This act apparently would symbolize national unity and hope, or something. We volunteers worked at the D.C. Navy Yard in a cramped office within a sprawling, moldy, labyrithine structure that was slated for destruction the following spring (and is now the site of one of Washington Nationals Park's many parking lots). We called mayor's offices and spoke to pastors, and every time one of them said they'd ring their bell, we found their town on the large map hanging on the office wall and duly stuck in a thumb tack. By the end of three weeks, we had placed tacks all across our great land. As a reward for this hard labor, we were granted tickets to attend the swearing in.
Obviously, Clinton's first Inaugural lacked the historic power of today's moment, but it was still a big deal. I was 18 and had been raised by Rhode Island Catholic Democrats. Presidential politics were, like rooting for the Sox and Pats, exercises in crushed faith and despair. (How much has changed, in politics and sports.) I had no real memory of a Democratic President -- Carter had been defeated when I was in kindergarten -- so to see a Democrat take his place in the White House was fairly mind-blowing.
I remember getting on the Metro that morning at the Pentagon station in Virginia, remember the packed train cars. My girlfriend's sister was named Hilary, and whenever we lost sight of her in the crowd and called her politically loaded name, dozens of heads would turn. I remember the cold -- we were told that night that Clinton's was the coldest Inaugural on record. We took our place on the lawn just south of the Capitol's west steps at sunrise, clutching a bag of bagels, all of which would be rock-hard seven hours later when the pomp and circumstance had concluded. I remember hearing Maya Angelou's poem (it was so cool to me, the young English major, that Clinton had followed in JFK's steps by requesting a poem). I remember taking a few photos in which you can sort of kind of almost see Bill's head through the maze of scaffolding that we had to look through to see the stage. I remember the cold. I remember, after it was over, the sheer massiveness of the crowd. We were a sea of people, and as we made our way from the Mall, you couldn't tell if you were walking on grass or concrete, street or sidewalk. You couldn't see your feet. You just moved your legs. I remember suddenly hearing an official voice proclaim "Clear the way!" and we stopped, and space opened up before us, and there was a phalanx of Air Force officers in their sky-blue uniforms, and between them walked Nelson Mandela and James Earl Jones. Mandela and Darth Vader, passing no more than ten feet from me! I remember how happy everyone was, and how cold.
Three days later I came down with mono, was sick for three weeks, and lost twenty pounds. Still, it was awesome.
For obvious reasons, today is a bigger deal, and I thought about making the trip up and staying with friends, but ultimately decided against it. Instead, my son and I began our day in literary style, going to a bookstore to finally buy Obama's memoir Dreams From My Father. Then, back to our new home, in the city of Martin Luther King Jr., and to the TV. It was very odd to see my former city looking the way it did, overrun with vibrancy and passion and hope. All those streets I'd walked and biked along, places I'd been with my wife and son, and there they were, transformed. I used to ride my bike down Pennsylvania Ave and past the Capitol, loop along the Mall, and would turn around back to the Capitol and up that surprisingly steep hill, weaving between some of the security bollards along the Capitol sidewalk, always slightly fearful some armed guard might not like the way I looked or might be suspicious about my backpack and tell me to stop, killing my momentum (never happened, fortunately). Living in D.C. during the Bush years, the post-9/11 years, was rife with those mixed emotions: awe at the grandeur of where we were but also inconvenience and downright fear that we were a great big target. Still, it was home for me. This morning when my son looked at the Washington Monument and National Mall on the screen, I told him that was where we used to go to see "the museum that had the elephant and the hippopotamus," wondering if he remembered how I took him there once a week. Wondering how long he'll remember.
My son's favorite part of the Inaugural, by far, was the helicopter that took President Bush away. He loved it (in a nonpartisan way, of course). It no doubt reminded him of the many helicopters that flew low over our D.C. rowhouse daily, or hourly, or minutely. (The loud and vibrating presence of helicopters is one of the many annoyances that D.C. residents just have to deal with, though after the birth of my son I learned that they had a definite benefit in kid-entertainment-value.)
I thought, looking at that crowd, about how awful the Mall will look tomorrow. (D.C. residents also learn that the Park Service spends about 4/5 of the year blocking access to and repairing the lawn that gets totally destroyed during the 1/5 of the year in which it is actually used.)
I noticed, during the signing of the nomination papers, that Obama is a lefty, and pointed that out my son, who was at the time gripping a blue magic marker with his left hand and drawing what I believe was a dump truck.
I thought, listening to the Inaugural Address, that this is an amazing time. It was an amazing city, forever part of my past. Here's hoping the future is even better, for all of us.
link to this | File: Politics
But I can't resist writing about this historic day and revealing myself as one of the many who proudly voted for Obama. I watched the Inauguration this morning with my two-year-old son, who was understandably more interested in playing with his trucks and coloring with his markers but who will one day be reminded that he too saw history in the making. Among all the other emotions dancing in my heart was nostalgia for the six years my family and I lived in the District of Columbia, a mere 15 blocks from where President Obama took the oath of office. We left the area and relocated here to Atlanta just four months ago, a good decision for my family but one that yields a bittersweet feeling during a time like this. I wish I could have been there, in that crowd, in the cold, cheering and just looking into peoples' eyes. Bad timing on my part. As someone who has moved around a lot in the last ten years, I'm somewhat used to this feeling -- I watched my beloved Patriots win their first Super Bowl from an apartment in Chapel Hill, NC, wishing I could be at my former apartment in Boston's South End, running through the icy streets, screaming; I watched my equally beloved Red Sox break their curse from a bar in Capitol Hill, D.C., wishing I could have been with my brother Dan, who at the time was at a bar across the street from Fenway Park with several hundred fans who couldn't pronounce the letter R if they tried. I'm glad I've been fortunate enough to live in many places and fall in love with different cities, but such geographic philandering means that it's easy to be in the wrong place during these seminal moments.
Today, wondering what it must have been like to be in D.C., I can console myself with the fact that I was fortunate enough to attend an Inauguration earlier in my life. In 1993, during my freshman year of college, I volunteered for Bill Clinton's first Inaugural, living in suburban Virginia for a month at the home of my girlfriend's sister. I volunteered for the Inaugural Committee's "Bells for Hope" event, a goofy exercise in which we spent most of January calling churches and towns and asking them to ring their bells at the precise moment when then-Pres-elect Clinton would ring a replica of the Liberty Bell, just outside Arlington National Cemetary, the night before his swearing-in. This act apparently would symbolize national unity and hope, or something. We volunteers worked at the D.C. Navy Yard in a cramped office within a sprawling, moldy, labyrithine structure that was slated for destruction the following spring (and is now the site of one of Washington Nationals Park's many parking lots). We called mayor's offices and spoke to pastors, and every time one of them said they'd ring their bell, we found their town on the large map hanging on the office wall and duly stuck in a thumb tack. By the end of three weeks, we had placed tacks all across our great land. As a reward for this hard labor, we were granted tickets to attend the swearing in.
Obviously, Clinton's first Inaugural lacked the historic power of today's moment, but it was still a big deal. I was 18 and had been raised by Rhode Island Catholic Democrats. Presidential politics were, like rooting for the Sox and Pats, exercises in crushed faith and despair. (How much has changed, in politics and sports.) I had no real memory of a Democratic President -- Carter had been defeated when I was in kindergarten -- so to see a Democrat take his place in the White House was fairly mind-blowing.
I remember getting on the Metro that morning at the Pentagon station in Virginia, remember the packed train cars. My girlfriend's sister was named Hilary, and whenever we lost sight of her in the crowd and called her politically loaded name, dozens of heads would turn. I remember the cold -- we were told that night that Clinton's was the coldest Inaugural on record. We took our place on the lawn just south of the Capitol's west steps at sunrise, clutching a bag of bagels, all of which would be rock-hard seven hours later when the pomp and circumstance had concluded. I remember hearing Maya Angelou's poem (it was so cool to me, the young English major, that Clinton had followed in JFK's steps by requesting a poem). I remember taking a few photos in which you can sort of kind of almost see Bill's head through the maze of scaffolding that we had to look through to see the stage. I remember the cold. I remember, after it was over, the sheer massiveness of the crowd. We were a sea of people, and as we made our way from the Mall, you couldn't tell if you were walking on grass or concrete, street or sidewalk. You couldn't see your feet. You just moved your legs. I remember suddenly hearing an official voice proclaim "Clear the way!" and we stopped, and space opened up before us, and there was a phalanx of Air Force officers in their sky-blue uniforms, and between them walked Nelson Mandela and James Earl Jones. Mandela and Darth Vader, passing no more than ten feet from me! I remember how happy everyone was, and how cold.
Three days later I came down with mono, was sick for three weeks, and lost twenty pounds. Still, it was awesome.
For obvious reasons, today is a bigger deal, and I thought about making the trip up and staying with friends, but ultimately decided against it. Instead, my son and I began our day in literary style, going to a bookstore to finally buy Obama's memoir Dreams From My Father. Then, back to our new home, in the city of Martin Luther King Jr., and to the TV. It was very odd to see my former city looking the way it did, overrun with vibrancy and passion and hope. All those streets I'd walked and biked along, places I'd been with my wife and son, and there they were, transformed. I used to ride my bike down Pennsylvania Ave and past the Capitol, loop along the Mall, and would turn around back to the Capitol and up that surprisingly steep hill, weaving between some of the security bollards along the Capitol sidewalk, always slightly fearful some armed guard might not like the way I looked or might be suspicious about my backpack and tell me to stop, killing my momentum (never happened, fortunately). Living in D.C. during the Bush years, the post-9/11 years, was rife with those mixed emotions: awe at the grandeur of where we were but also inconvenience and downright fear that we were a great big target. Still, it was home for me. This morning when my son looked at the Washington Monument and National Mall on the screen, I told him that was where we used to go to see "the museum that had the elephant and the hippopotamus," wondering if he remembered how I took him there once a week. Wondering how long he'll remember.
My son's favorite part of the Inaugural, by far, was the helicopter that took President Bush away. He loved it (in a nonpartisan way, of course). It no doubt reminded him of the many helicopters that flew low over our D.C. rowhouse daily, or hourly, or minutely. (The loud and vibrating presence of helicopters is one of the many annoyances that D.C. residents just have to deal with, though after the birth of my son I learned that they had a definite benefit in kid-entertainment-value.)
I thought, looking at that crowd, about how awful the Mall will look tomorrow. (D.C. residents also learn that the Park Service spends about 4/5 of the year blocking access to and repairing the lawn that gets totally destroyed during the 1/5 of the year in which it is actually used.)
I noticed, during the signing of the nomination papers, that Obama is a lefty, and pointed that out my son, who was at the time gripping a blue magic marker with his left hand and drawing what I believe was a dump truck.
I thought, listening to the Inaugural Address, that this is an amazing time. It was an amazing city, forever part of my past. Here's hoping the future is even better, for all of us.
link to this | File: Politics