Sometimes I am delighted with myself for saying “yes.” Like agreeing to meet my friend Wendy at the inauguration. “I’m flying in from Oakland,” she said. “How about it, will you meet me?” Filled with not a little trepidation at the thought of the crowds and especially the cold, I said “of course.”
There were crowds and there sure was bone-chilling cold. But there were heart-bursting moments, one after another. Moments that left me reaching for the rumpled Kleenex in one of the six pockets of my four layers of clothing.
There were three days of those moments. Like singing along with 89-year-old Pete Seeger (and a half million others) the song he made famous so many protests ago, including the last two verses second graders are never taught. Like accidentally coming upon the outdoor Feeding America soup kitchen on MLK’s day of service and finding, not 50 feet away, Josh Groban and Herbie Hancock performing John Lennon’s Imagine to a small, grateful crowd of beaming faces. John Lennon would have reached for a Kleenex too.
There was Marielle from Holland who had decided only three days before she had to get on a plane and be there. We became friends huddled by the icy reflecting pool, waiting for two and a half hours for the concert to begin. There was the young couple from Naples who right after leaving the cold monument grounds were headed to even colder Minnesota and the adorable Jamaican man with his white girlfriend, both from Brooklyn. There was the student from GW who dreaded having to go back to his dorm to write a paper and the two young women who told us how it was to camp out all night on the mall.
There was the doorman who smiled and tipped his hat to us as we slipped into the fancy hotel to get warm, looking like a couple of vagrants. There was the middle-aged, demure Linda who, at our invitation, decided to accompany us to DuPont Circle to “Give Bush the Boot” – a cathartic shoe throwing at a giant inflatable Bushoccio. There was the older gentleman from Chicago and his grown son from Hightstown, New Jersey who offered his lap in the jammed Metro car. There was the man from Kenya with that lovely lilting accent who told us he would not have missed this for the world and the two beautiful black women coming down 18th Street – so exotic in their African mudcloth coats that they could have been from Kenya too, instead of Silver Spring.
Black and white, young and old, rich and poor, we talked to each other, held doors for each other, helped each other over barricades. We said “oh, excuse me” and “I’m so sorry” when we bumped into each other. We kept each other calm when the crush of the crowd felt threatening, assuring each other as if everyone’s life depended on it.
We sang together, danced together, cheered together. We smiled at each other, even hugged each other. We laughed together, and I doubt there was a soul who didn’t reach at least once for his own rumpled Kleenex. There was human kindness in the air, a feeling of joyous benevolence, just within striking distance of love itself. For three days, it felt possible. It felt like the way we are supposed to live with one another on this planet of ours. For three days, we did. Imagine.
Sixties Chick 