It wasn't part of my plans to show up for the swearing in, but a blue seat ticket was made available to me and how do you say no to that? The blue seats were quite close to the presidential podium and could only be had for quite a premium.
Now bear in mind just what a Californian I am. I had not owned an overcoat until I moved out to the East Coast in my twenties. I would use an expired credit card to scrape snow and ice off my windshield. And until recently, I would wear the most impractical heels and flimsy, but fashionable, gloves. All of this was some futile protest on my part. Giving in to all of the paraphenalia of cold weather was somehow admitting I was actually living in these barbaric conditions.
You see, in California, we
visit our snow. We don't
live in it. As Ronald Reagan so aptly put it, "If the pilgrims had landed on the West Coast, they would never have gone East." Amen. So what was I thinking?.
Getting up before sunrise is not fun on a warm day. But on a cold day, it is particularly rough. I managed to get to the metro and the adventure began.
It got very crowded very quickly. I must have looked like I was a local because everyone was asking me the typical Metro questions. They were so amazingly polite and happy to be going to witness the inauguration of the man they had worked so hard for.
When I got to the Hill, I waited outside the Russell building in a line that wrapped around the building. For an hour and a half.
The cold wind that whipped by the Russell building was actually painful. Even though I was in a sturdy pair of Tony Lama boots, my feet began to go numb. Met some great folks in line, though, who would have waited until hell itself froze over to get the tickets for this Inaguration.
Finally, got inside. Only to realize that I needed to be in the Dirksen building, not the Russell building. I realized this while in the elevator of the Russell building staring blankly at the bank of elevator buttons. I stomped around the fourth floor of Russell for a moment to get the feeling back on my feet and carefully wiped the tears from the corners of my eyes coming from the slow defrosting.
I got back in the elevator and pressed the button to go back down. Suddenly, one of those "hold the door" moments happened.
Mind you, I was still occupied with my tearing eyes, which were temporarily blind. But I held the door open and four figures quickly entered the tiny elevator. When I say "tiny elevator", that is not an exaggeration. This elevator was TINY. We were all squished together with no regard for even an inch of personal space.
My eyes cleared up enough for me to look across the elevator at a very, very tall man who was finishing a sentence about being inside vs. outside. In my typically shy fashion, I popped off that it was far better to be inside than outside and he smiled.
He looked familiar. Really familiar.
There was a woman at my left elbow who was grinning at me like a cheshire cat. She had a beautiful fur hat on that framed an even more familiar face.
I looked back over at the very, very tall man and realized he was the long-suffering, extraordinarily patient personal aide to none other than John Forbes Kerry. If any of you caught Alexandra Pelosi's documentary on the 2004 Democratic presidential primary, you would instantly recognize this aide too.
Wait. That couldn't mean.....Nah. The figure slumped in the corner of the elevator rubbing his face with his hands with a weariness reserved for the aged, the infirm.....or the completely defeated.....yes. The slumped man in the corner was indeed John Forbes Kerry, the defeated Democratic nominee for President of the United States.
The fur trimmed woman next to me? Teresa Heinz Kerry.
All I could think about at that brief moment was the
column I had written inviting Ms. Heinz-Kerry at the behest of stay-at-home moms everwhere to "shove it."
Ms. Heinz-Kerry, still smiling like a cheshire cat, looked at me and purred in her best Zsa-zsa Gabor accent, "Daaaaaaaahhhhhhhlink. If you are going to be outside, you should have brought a blanket."
I didn't immediately answer her because my mind was racing with the profound absurdity of the moment. I was thanking God that they were in an elevator with me rather than being sworn in.
For a fleeting moment of pure gloating, I thought, dare I say to him something like, "You know, Senator, you should have gone after O'Neill early on...." Or, as the staircase wit flooded over me later, "Senator Kerry, why the long face?"
But in looking at this man, slumped in the corner, clearly utterly defeated and then noting the absolute joy of his wife at NOT being in the White House fishbowl, I realized that nothing really had to be said. This man had worked all of his life to become the President and when one has dreams on that scale, it isn't easy to watch them slip through your fingers. So instead, I let the gloat warm me from within.
So I answered Ms. Heinz-Kerry by mumbling something about being a native Californian and just never having gotten used to this barbaric weather. She continued to grin.
The elevator doors opened and they motioned for me to exit first. I walked out, recognizing that I had quite an inaugural day tale to tell my children and grandchildren.
I left the Hill before the ceremony was over to avoid the same crowds that had choked the Metro on the way in that morning. An entirely different crowd comprised the ridership. Rather than the polite, well-dressed, upbeat, happy folks who were on the way to the inaugural with children in tow, these were the protestors. There were whole groups of protestors on the train who were young, scruffy and decidedly foul-mouthed.
One discussion was particularly interesting in which a long haired, unkempt young man clutching a sign and a red balloon was fretting that he hoped that if he did get arrested it would be for something he
didn't do. What an utterly bizarre notion conceived in the framework that all cops are evil and must be discredited at every turn. But he left hope that in the pantheon of illegal activity he would be potentially arrested for, it would be something he didn't do. Hmmmm.
