In getting tickets to the inauguration events, we had made an early donation to the Inaugural Finance Committee, when the only package they were offering included tickets for 4 people.  Since Avra and her boyfriend Justin couldn’t go we split the package with a friend, Sam Perry, who had been one of the main organizers of the Obama Campaign in Silicon Valley. Some of you may have seen him – he was the unidentified man on whose shoulder Oprah cried on election night in Grant Park.  He ended up having his fifteen minutes of fame, being on Oprah’s show as “Mr. Man” whom she had befriended. 

Pairing up with Sam turned out to be one of the smartest things we ever did.  In addition to much delightful conversation with him and his wife Lisa (the CIA Kid – see later), he turned out to have an equally wonderful brother Art, who lives in the DC area.  On Saturday when we expected to be trekking from place to place collecting tickets, Art and Sam came by and drove us.  Art is a hoot, the logistics were great, and we even managed to get to the official Obama Memorabilia store, where we picked up a wide variety of, as they say in the hood, “tchatchkes”. This included a stocking hat I ended up wearing almost all the time and a big warm Obama/Biden blanket for being out in the cold.

Waiting for Sam and Art to come pick us up at the tchatchke store, we went into a Starbucks (not our favorite, but it was right there). As everywhere, we got into the inauguration spirit. For this one weekend in Washington, you could approach anyone and start a conversation without hesitation.  There was a shared topic, a shared feeling, and a party mood that extended everywhere.  Sort of a Woodstock without the sex and drugs (at least as far as we saw).

We talked with Karen, an African-American woman who had come from the South with her two young kids, Tanner, and Sydney, to stay with her sister in Maryland.  I oohed and ahed over the baby, and Carol, of course ended up hugging her and becoming old friends.   They could not go to the inauguration itself but just wanted to be there on Saturday to walk on the mall and get a feel for the scene – and know that their children some day could tell their children, “We were there.” .  

Back at the hotel we went to room they had set aside to provide inauguration information. Yakelle, one of the concierge staff, patiently went through our schedule step by step, plotting out Metro routes, walking distances, and times.  I had my laptop with me for the schedule spreadsheet. When we went to the neighborhood gourmet store next door to get lunch and stock our hotel room with just-in-case food, I didn’t feel like taking it back to the room.

You can guess what happened next (especially if you know me). When we got back to the hotel with the hot crab bisque and tomato soup, which were both delicious, I had one of those sinking moments where you realize you’ve screwed up big time.  I ran back to the store, and the computer was sitting right where I had left it, along with a pair of gloves.  Thinking that Carol had also been forgetful, I grabbed it all and went back.  When I got to the room, we realized they weren’t her gloves (half the people there had the same back leather gloves with pleats on the back).  I ran back again, just as two fellows were coming out of the store to see if they could find the grey haired guy who had run out with their gloves.  That was the kind of feeling – I’m sure there was crime and less-than-generous behavior going on in Washington, but it sure didn’t feel like it. [I learned later that on inauguration day, there were no arrests at all]

Finally, back in the room we did our daily meditation exercise. We were pretty faithful about doing it every day, and pretty much every time we fell asleep within the first few minutes. That’s not exactly the idea of meditating, but we did make an effort!

That evening we had two receptions – the Democratic National Committee Reception for outgoing chair, Howard Dean, and the Finance Committee party.  The Dean reception was in the National Museum of American History, an impressive building as are so many in Washington. The architecture in that city is indeed monumental (and not just the official monuments). Designed to impress and intimidate the “common man”.

The reception was very pleasant with excellent food, and started us off on our meetings with new friends with amazing life stories.  Carol wore the antique purple embroidered dress we got on our trip to India, to an event where most women wore black cocktail dresses.  As we walked across the room balancing our plates of lamb, beef, corn pudding, asparagus, etc., a woman wearing an equally non-bland African dress invited us to the table (because of Carol’s dress!).

She turned out to be Sarian Bouma, who came from from Sierra Leone where as a teen she had been a television broadcaster. I won’t try to tell her whole story, but you can read it in her book, Welfare to Millionaire.  She got married, abandoned, was a single mom, ended up on welfare, then started a janitorial business, got rich, was featured by Oprah, now has a flower business and is an inspirational motivational speaker.  She has been a big supporter of the Democratic Party in Maryland. Her (WASP) husband John is in charge of some aspect of computer systems for the VA. A very nice guy, but a big contrast to her dynamism (hmmm, maybe Carol and I come across that way…).  A side note is that whenever Carol wore out-of-the-ordinary clothes like  this, she got lots of compliments, almost always from African-American women.

There were speeches in front of a huge art work based on the Star Spangled Banner, where Kaine (the new chair) said nice things about Dean, and Dean said nice things about all the people who worked for the party. I actually got tearful when he talked about the activism of young people and what it had meant in this campaign. It is of interest that Kaine opposed Dean’s 50 state strategy, which was obviously very successful. Now there seems to be some conflict about next time around.

On our way out, Carol stopped at the women’s room (a standard procedure) and took a very long time coming back (I browsed the American history exhibits, all very carefully politically correct).  She had struck up a conversation with a woman who said that the whole Obama phenomenon was surreal for her.  She grew up in a small town near Birmingham, Alabama.  At age 12, her mother insisted that she be among the first group to integrate public schools. She didn’t want to go and was very frightened on the first day. She and the other African-American students who integrated that year came from an academically solid segregated school. She said that they all did very well academically because they “had to” and had been well prepared. After a relatively short time, most of the white kids really did accept the black ones (though many of the teachers never did). 

Her story tied back for me to Dean’s youth theme – change comes from them, not us.  We also met an African-American couple who had grown up in the Bronx, went to college in Nebraska, and stayed.  She is a lawyer who works in the courts with non-English-speaking immigrants, and did a major project to use video to explain things to them so they could effectively get out on bail when a translator wasn’t available.

The Finance Committee Party was for a smaller group (the Dean event had a thousand or more) and we expected elegance. But there was no food, loud music, so you couldn’t talk, and not much of interest if the open bar wasn’t enticing.  We did run into Owen and Audrey Byrd. Owen was another major organizer for the campaign in Silicon Valley and drove us and helped at the Obama event in San Francisco when I was on crutches.  He also is the one who hired Avra into her position in the campaign.  The Silicon Valley group was a major factor in getting the Obama campaign going, both in funding, in spirit (startup culture and lots of technology) and a horde of volunteers.  We really enjoyed being part of that and saw a number of our friends from the campaign at the Inaugural.

In discussing the campaign, Owen he said that after it was over, he drove past the now-empty headquarters with his ten-year-old son, who asked if he planned to do another campaign soon.  Owen started to explain about two year and four year cycles for elections, when his son interrupted with “I hope you don’t do it again soon. While you were doing it I felt like I lost my dad.”