Inauguration

***First, a note that has nothing to do with anything else I'm going to write about: it is almost February, and so far I am sticking to my resolution to cook from an actual recipe at least once a week. I know it has only been three weeks, but I'm considering this an accomplishment since we were skiing or housesitting for a large portion of the month. And this week I cooked three times! I made a whole wheat pasta/chickpea/garlic/tomato sautee dish that I've been eating for lunch this week (I made that one just for me, because Penn will eat anything I make but I don't really need to torture the guy with whole wheat pasta), on Sunday I made this roasted sausage dish, and then tonight I made Greek Wedding Soup. I included the links to those recipes because they were both really good and really easy and I know quite a few of us are on a mission to cook at home more often right now so I thought I'd pass them along. The first one is nice because it requires very little attention and you can relax while it roasts. And the second one came together in half an hour, including defrosting the meat in the microwave. For the record, I used hot Italian sausage in the first recipe, and the grocery store right behind my apartment actually had ground lamb when we were there the other day so I was able to use that and I'm glad I did (I think it would still be okay with the ground beef, but it would be lacking something). Also, if you're counting calories you might want to stay away from the sausage dish, obviously (or just make it your only major meal for the day), but the soup is only about 600 calories per serving AND gives you lots of protein, which is my favorite combination in a meal. Oh, and I realize those are both Rachael Ray recipes and I'm trying to branch out, I swear, but I am a fan of her stuff because a) it's generally approachable and doable for amateur cooks, b) the ingredients are usually easy to find at your basic grocery store (we have every sort of market in the world on my street, but I'm not usually in the mood to go from store to store looking for things) and c) I've made 20+ of her recipes over the years and only one disappointed me, so those are good odds. ***

I really wanted to write about Barack Obama's inauguration on Tuesday night when the excitement was high, but by the time Penn and I got home to our apartment and unpacked I was too tired to think about doing anything else. And then I went back to work and I had other things to catch up on so that's why it's Friday and I'm just now getting around to writing about it.
When I moved here a year and a half ago, one of the things I remember being excited about was the fact that I'd be able to see a presidential inauguration in person. I had decided way back then that I wanted to be there to see it, no matter who won the election. As the media keeps reminding us, an inauguration is "an historic event!" and I wanted to stand in the cold and watch it happen. I would have been there if it had been Clinton, McCain, anyone. Then Obama won the election and it turned into this HUGE thing and over a million people were planning to crowd the public transportation and people were rumored to be renting out their houses for thousands of dollars to the Obamamaniacs from out of town and, well, you know all that. And I thought, "Hmmm. Maybe I don't actually want to deal with all of that." Up until last week, Penn and I were still waffling about whether or not we actually wanted to brave public transportation and go (actually, I think he had more or less decided he wanted to go, but I was beginning to lean a bit more towards the "it won't be worth the hassle" camp). We're within walking distance of a subway stop, one of the last stops on the line, and it takes about half an hour to ride downtown from here. So it would have been feasible to make our way to the ceremony from here. It would have been easy, in fact, compared to what most of the rest of the crowd had to do. But still...
Then my friend who I housesit for occasionally called and asked if Penn and I could stay at her place Friday through Monday while she and her husband took a vacation. This friend lives on Capitol Hill! So I said, "Sure, but can we stay at your place Monday night so we can go to the inauguration?" and she said yes, so that's how we ended up with a place to stay within walking distance of the Mall. Score!
It was fun being there in the days leading up to the big event. We walked down on Sunday afternoon and the Mall was still relatively uncrowded, so we were able to walk right up to the Capitol and check out the set up and watch all the media getting into position. We were also bombarded by the vendors selling an endless array of Obama crap. I think my favorite was the Obama water, or maybe the Barack pistachios. So ridiculous.
On Tuesday morning we planned to get up around 7 and leave by 8 to walk over to the Mall. We figured that would get us there in plenty of time since the musical prelude wasn't supposed to start until 10 and I still sort of thought that everyone was probably exaggerating the estimated crowd counts. But at 6:30 Penn's phone rang. It was one of his friends who gets up early for work, telling us that he'd seen coverage on the news of people already pouring out of subway stations in a steady stream and letting us know that we should probably get up and going. So we got up and were out the front door by 7:45.
The walk to the Mall from my friend's house normally takes about twenty minutes, but it took us about an hour and a half on Tuesday. There were lines of people with tickets blocking all of the routes we would normally take, so we just followed crowds being directed by cops and "inauguration volunteers". After being funneled into an increasingly tight mass by an actual human chain of police officers and being held up momentarily by a motorcade (I couldn't see who was in it, other than a military official whose chest was covered with more stripes than I have ever seen on anybody in my life), we eventually came onto the Mall at the Washington Monument. We were far, far away from the Capitol, but, hey, we could see it! We also had a clear view of one of the big screens and the sound system worked well so we could hear what was going on, and the nice thing about the Washington Monument is that it's on a slight rise so we had a great vantage point from which to view the crowds filling in. And fill in they did. There were people around us from Seattle, California, and Ohio, and while I think those people were crazy to travel all the way here to stand a mile from the Capitol, I have to admit that it was really exciting.
The whole thing was really exciting. I'll also admit that it was pretty freezing, but that's why I have a toasty-warm boyfriend. For a while before much was going on he wrapped his arms around me and I stood facing him with my hands in his coat pockets and my nose burrowed into his neck. He kept laughing at me and telling me that it wasn't that cold (it was 26 degrees, that is COLD!) and then he said, "What are you going to do when I have to let go?" and I yelped, "When is that going to happen?!" and Penn is still laughing about how panicked I was at the thought of standing on my own in the cold. Fortunately, he let me use him as my blanket until everything got interesting enough that I was no longer thinking about being cold.
The main thing that stands out in my mind about the actual ceremony was how quiet, calm, and attentive the crowd was. I was envisioning a riotous mob, people so loud that I wouldn't even be able to hear Obama take his oath. But it was the complete opposite of that. All day long people were friendly. I didn't notice any deliberate pushing or shoving, even when we were basically being herded toward the Mall like cattle. There was a really annoying, know-it-all guy standing in front of us but while we all ignored his rambling, nobody was bothered enough to tell him to shut up. During the oath and the ceremony, the crowd was basically silent, except when they were cheering. I can't even explain how strange it felt standing in the biggest group I have ever been a part of (and probably will ever be a part of) in my life and somehow still feeling a sense of calm and quiet. Maybe I just got lucky and ended up in a good section of the crowd, but I also just think that was the general vibe of the day, because everyone else I talked to that was there described the same friendliness and reverence. That alone made the experience amazing, and the fact that almost 2 million people can come together to witness something important and treat it with the proper amount of respect makes me feel like maybe Americans as a whole aren't all that bad.
After the ceremony I was a little worried about how we were going to get through the crowd to get off the Mall and walk back to the house where we were staying, but it ended up not being much of a problem. We walked along the Tidal Basin, then sort of along the waterfront, and then we were able to walk on two different highways that were closed to traffic. That was weird. It looked like those movies about the end of the world, where almost everybody has been killed by zombies or aliens or something and the only people left just stroll along the empty highways to get where they need to go. We did have to scale a fence and jump about 10 feet down a highway median (actually, Penn jumped and then I climbed down into his arms; again, this is what boyfriends are for!), but we were home about half an hour after the ceremony had finished. Not bad!
I'm so glad we went. I feel like there are very few events that happen in a lifetime that are big enough that future generations will want to know about the day in detail. I remember asking my grandparents about Pearl Harbor and about Kennedy, and once having a class assignment where I had to interview my parents about their memories of the moon landing. And now I think that maybe someday someone who isn't born yet might ask me about September 11th, and then they might ask me about this and I'll be able to say I was there. Or maybe eventually we'll get to the point where it's par for the course to have black presidents and female presidents and gay presidents and Latino presidents and future generations won't really think that much about the first time it happened because to them it will just be normal. I don't know if that will happen in my lifetime, but I'm hopeful that it will happen eventually.
I'm skeptical of celebrity worship, and I must admit that the way the world is reacting to Obama feels like that to me sometimes, like we're going wild with excitement before the man has even done anything to really warrant it. Who knows what his presidency will entail. But then sometimes I get swept up in the hype, too, and I really am thrilled that any child I raise will grow up in a world where there has always been a black president of the United States. We grew up being told that we could do anything if we set our hearts and minds on it, but we didn't have many examples of that actually being the case. Now, I think we get much closer all the time to that actually being a reality. I wish Obama well, and even though I know he will screw up (he's only human, after all) I really, really hope that he sincerely has good intentions and will do well for this country and leave a legacy that the millions of people who celebrated this week can be proud of.