The warm shuffle of a DC crunch
Saturday, January 17, 2009
TO BE in Washington that weekend was to feel cold like you've never felt before. Dry American January cold: the cold that cracks the skin on your knuckles and stretches your face taut so that smiling hurts. The ground on the mall was frozen earth and the grass was yellow, dead, and flattened. The fountains were off and the room I was staying in was a little too cold and a little too dependent on frozen firewood from a too-bent urban tree that had been felled by the city on the sidewalk in Columbia Heights. It was cold.
But it was also warm, in a way Washington never really is. Gone were the vast spaces between the glass and steel set back impersonally from the wide Washington streets, replaced by gushing masses of people bundled and shuffling from one place to another. The heat given off was human.
And the scene on the Metro was even warmer. The last Saturday night of the Bush era was one of celebration and calm excitement. On the packed platforms, the fictional scene of ten thousand New Yorker covers played out in real life: packed, integrated, tuxedoed and glamorous; black, white, young, old, dressed to the nines in gleaming satin and fur and top hats, off to their respective parties and celebrations. The faces of the passengers told the story better than anything else - excited eye contact with friends and neighbors, knowing smiles between total strangers. The smell of starch and perfume wafted a little each time the doors opened and people exchanged, off to who knows where or to who knows what, framed by that wonderful soaring shadowy world of the capital train.
On Sunday night I went to Annapolis, where I realized finally that certain things meant to maintain the air of great estimation can fade under the scrutiny of proximity. Not to say that my respect for anything there diminished, but rather, it was brought down to Earth by increased understanding and friendship. I understood that my own perceptions had been and could be swayed by mannerisms and pageantry and that what was hiding beneath the façade was actually better, more human, less patronizing. We returned to Washington with two sailors and drank until four in the morning, stumbled around, teeth chattering, until the sun came up, demanded a roasted pig, and kept going strong until the inauguration the next day.
It was through that clear lens that I looked up through the cuttingly cold air on that Tuesday morning as Barack Obama placed his hand on that old book. "He's got to be normal too," I thought. "He's got to look out on this crowd of millions of people and think to himself, 'How on Earth am I here?'"
Everyone else seemed to be thinking the same thing, with faces most unlike the ones I saw on the Metro: they were weary, tired, crying, smiling, entranced. I think some of us were stuck in that slack-jawed moment where eyes slide out of focus, unsure if what we were seeing was real life. From his high perch I thought Obama might even see the Earth's curvature, so great was the mass of people there, sharing our heat and sharing the moment so many of us never thought would come to pass.
