We got back from DC yesterday. I had wanted to blog the events, but, alas there was limited wireless access and my phone kept dying.
I am still processing the extraordinary events of this last week. I expected to be fired up and shouting out when I got home. I also thought I would be yelling and dancing in the National Mall on January 20. Instead, I was mostly quiet at the swearing in ceremony. Granted, I was frozen solid. I couldn't feel my toes underneath stockings, wool socks, monkey socks, feet warmers and two hand warmers stuck in for good measure. Tom was going all out making friends with all of our neighbors and chatting excitedly. I was braving the elements, trying to ignore my neuropathy and in full-on survival mode. The fake fur hood on my jacket made me feel that much more isolated from the world as I couldn't see left to right without wrenching my head around significantly.
We watched the jumbo screen in front of us and sipped Tom's new friends' peppermint tea. Tom held me up in the air to remind me that we were watching it live. I could see the throngs of people and the capital building, the flags and, yes, the helicopters. I'm so glad Tom did that. I had felt alone among all of these people. My fight with cancer was so wound up with the fight for this President. And the message of hope was most definitely tied to my own hope. I knew that this was an amazing historic moment, but it all became personal and I couldn't process it all.
We seemed to join an Eastern European art film following the ceremony. Thousands of people were directed off the mall and onto the south side of DC. Masses of people walked together through construction sites (we literally squeezed through a hole in a fence and jumped from a cement bridge), in and out of dead ends and along a highway with no traffic (roads shut). It was a strange purgatory land where no one talked, they just walked. The buildings had no color (neither did the sky or the water) and random pieces of trash in the wind made more noise than the thousands of people. We saw buses everywhere, but they all said 'not in service.' Behind the buses, there were large, nondescript restaurants in parking lots (one called, fittingly, "The Odyssey"). We would walk up to the restaurant wondering if it was open (it looked closed), get excited when we saw the 'open' sign, and then shocked when we would open the dark door to see hundreds of people in puffy jackets and wool hats huddled inside. "We're at capacity."
We would occasionally ask someone where they were going (because we surely didn't know). "I don't know." "I don't know." No one knew. We all sort of ended up in a very long line for the Metro, not moving, just kind of clustered together for the sheer sheepitude of it. It was surreal. And I think we were all a little numb and not sure how exactly to digest these events. There were many like me, feeling it personally.
We finally made it to a very distant metro where the line actually moved, and at long last a restaurant (we hadn't eaten for a good 20 hours). What has happily settled from our time in DC is the realization that we were all in it together. I felt that I was connected to everyone I passed. If I smiled at someone, they smiled back. I felt as if I were waking up. I was not high and wild. I was slow and feeling. What a moment in our history. And what began for me as a personal, private moment is becoming, as I understand it, a moment for humankind. Wow.
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