A Man Who Can Make A Woman Scratch A Stranger's Nose

has to be a man who will be a good president. That is why I have faith in Barack Obama.

But we'll start with first things first. Inauguration Day was one of the longest days of my life. It started when I woke up at 4:55. AM. 4:55 is, normally, more a bedtime for me than a time to get up. Ugh. I started off the day by showering in a dirty hotel room bathroom and then layering on my clothing. There were the usual underthings, of course, and then a pair of athletic socks which looked really sexy once I pulled on a pair of black nylons over them. I put on a turquoise thermal undershirt, then a silky gray long skirt and shirt that would serve to keep me warm and also to hide the fact that the dress I was wearing gapped a bit at the buttons. Then on went my red dress and a black sweater. I donned a pair of black tennis shoes that were salted gray from wearing them around at home all winter and a pair of gray fake pearl earrings. I looked like a homeless person, but at least I looked like a dressed up homeless person.

We drove the fifteen minutes or so to the train station, or at least to where my GPS told us the train station was. We found a parking garage and some train tracks, but no train station. Well, I saw what I thought might be a train station, but my opinion doesn't matter much to some people, so we went and parked in the garage and then asked someone where it was. And then someone else. And then... the fourth person we asked finally pointed us to a small structure across the street. I thought Camden Station was going to be a large one, because it had roughly ten times the parking that Penn Station had, and Penn Station was a pretty decent size. The parking mentioned on the website, however, was in a garage also used for parking at Orioles games. The station was a glass building between two sets of railroad tracks. It might have been twenty feet by ten feet. Maybe.

There were lines of people waiting outside and it took us five or ten minutes to be sure we were waiting in the correct line. There were people in line for the 7:00 train, the 7:20 train, and the 7:40 train, which was ours. We interviewed several policemen and people in each line before we were satisfied that we were in the right place.

Before I continue, I need to interject with a little side story. Chris, who rolled his eyes at me and teased me mercilessly for creating an itinerary for the trip, and who mentioned on a few separate occasions that it was ridiculous how I set everything I might need the following day out before I went to bed every night, forgot his coat. He put on his suit coat in the hotel room and walked out without his coat. It was about 15 degrees outside. So, the wait outside the train station was considerably longer for him than it was for me. He, at one point, was going to drive back to the hotel to get it, but he decided against it when I said if he didn't make it back in time, we could just watch the inauguration from our hotel. This incident helped shape the rest of the day for us. Okay, back to the story.

It was shortly after 7:40 when they organized us into a single file line and got us ready for our train. A police officer started yelling a woman's name, asking if she was in line. He found her almost immediately and then another woman, an older black woman with tears in her eyes, jumped out of line and thanked him. She had just wanted to make sure the other woman had her train ticket, she said, because the two of them had been separated. "She's gotta see it. She's gotta get there," the woman said loudly to everyone in line. "She has to. I don't care if I die tomorrow as long as I see that man put his black hand on the bible and take that oath!"

We boarded the train and started on our way. I tried a few times to make conversation with Chris, but I just gave up in the end because every time I opened my mouth, he either said something completely dismissive or just rolled his eyes at me. I get that he was pissy because he was cold, but civility is always a good thing to hold on to.

It was almost an hour before we pulled into Union Station. When we got off the train, the crowd of people rushing all in the same direction must have finally awakened a little excitement in Chris, because he got a tiny bit friendlier. As we were exiting the station, we saw a street vendor selling long-sleeved Obama t-shirts, so I stopped and bought one for Chris. I didn't really feel like spending the ten bucks, but he didn't have any cash at all and I didn't feel like having a horrible day listening to him bitch and bearing the brunt of his wrath. Ten minutes later, we saw a guy selling hoodies, so I bought him one of those, too. He put both of his shirts on under his suit coat and was finally warm enough to be nice for a while.

We followed the signs that pointed us in the direction of the Purple Gate line, since we had Purple Section tickets. What basically happened was that tens of thousands of people were funneled into an intersection flanked by the Mail Carriers' Association and the Home Loan Board buildings. The people in that area had purple, yellow, and silver tickets. There weren't really lines, though. I mean, the people with yellow tickets were all in what might be called a line, but it was several people thick and not in any real line shape, and they were intermingled with silver and purple ticket holders. We all recognized that we were in lines, but the lines were shoved together and twisted through each other and if you looked down from above, all you would have seen was a mob of thousands of people, not in any distinguishable lines at all.

From that point on, all we did was stand in "line." We moved a little bit, but I am not exaggerating when I said we moved fifty feet in two hours. And there were too many people for us to see why we weren't going anywhere. We met some cool people in line. Lots of other people who had worked on the campaign. One woman said she was in heaven because, like during the campaign, she was talking to hundreds of people about Barack Obama, but unlike during the campaign, she didn't have to convince a single one of them that he was a good guy. It was incredible to be surrounded by so many people; I've never even seen such a crowd in my life, much less been in one. It was even more incredible that they were all like-minded.

There were snipers on the top of every building I could see. It made me feel safe in some ways, of course, but it left me a little uneasy, too. If there was a need for a sniper, I figured, bad things were going to go down, because no one would be able to move to get away to safety. Besides that, I was mildly frightened that I or someone near me would, completely innocently, make a wrong move and get blown away. Luckily, that didn't happen. After a couple hours, though, some people did start getting restless. People were trying to leave our "line" and go figure out what was going on, but they weren't so much walking through the crowd. Instead, they were moving by hugging the person in front of them and then spinning to trade places with that person. That's how crowded it was. One woman, when she got to a tree, climbed it and tried to incite a riot by demanding that they let us in and encouraging us to take charge of the situation and MAKE them let us in. Luckily, no one took her too seriously.

Another guy climbed up into the tree when he got there, but for more innocent reasons. He just wanted to see if he could tell what was going on, because we were only 200 or so feet from the gate but we hadn't really moved in over an hour. That led to a rather interesting phone conversation between the man next to me and a friend he had gotten separated from. "Oh, you're by the Mail Carriers' building?" he asked. "I am too. No, not really. I have no idea what direction I am in from it because there are too many people for me to figure out where you are. Okay, wait. Do you see a guy in a tree? Yeah, that guy. I'm to his right."

It was incredible being a part of that line. I saw people talking down others who were struggling to convince us to get in by force. I saw people clearing the crowd away to the best of their ability to make things easy for a couple of elderly women who had been standing in line since 6 am with walkers. I saw a woman scratch another woman's nose for her. Yep, that's right. There was a woman who was making funny faces and sounds until someone asked her if she was okay. "Fine." she said. "It's just that my nose itches like hell and it's driving me crazy. I can't move my arms to scratch it. There's too many people." "Is there someone around who can scratch the lady's nose?" someone asked and we all laughed. "My boyfriend's right over there," she told us, nodding in the direction he was in, "But he can't reach me." Another woman asked her, "Do you want me to scratch it?" "Of course not. That's ridiculous. You're a stranger. I can't ask you to--okay, yes. Please. Scratch my nose." And so she did.

We had hope right up until the end. At 11:30, when they were supposed to close down the gates, we still had hope. We thought maybe we'd get in at the last minute. No such luck. At noon, they finally shut the gate and there were still hundreds, maybe thousands of us, who never made it in. Security told us that there had been an equipment malfunction, even though we could see the x-ray machines through the fence and everything looked fine. They also told us that there had been too many tickets printed and they couldn't let everyone in. They also told us that things were just too chaotic and they thought they had let everyone in who had a ticket. Whatever the truth of the matter was, we didn't get in. It was disappointing, to say the least, after the months we spent working on the campaign and the weeks we waited to see if we would be given tickets and the hours we spent traveling to Washington and standing in line. But Mike Prusi, our state senator, didn't get in, either. Either did Jesse Jackson, who was in the same section we were in. Or the two elderly women with the walkers. Or the AP reporter who was in line near us, who had been sent there on assignment. So at least I was in good company.

As soon as we knew for sure we wouldn't get in, the crowd dissipated. Many ran toward the National Mall to try to get in on the last few minutes. Others ran to get a good place to watch the parade from. There were still several hundred people around, but it gave us some breathing room. As I was walking along the fence around the Capitol grounds trying to find a place I could hear President Obama's voice from, I suddenly heard it, clear as a bell. It was coming from a man's cell phone. He had, in desperation, called someone he knew who was watching it on TV, and they, in turn, had placed their phone next to the TV. There were about ten of us huddled around him listening to the speech on speakerphone. And as I looked around, there were groups of people all around us doing the same thing. There was a kind of poignancy to the moment. There were people in every group crying joyful tears and hugging each other.

It is a moment I will never, ever forget, as long as I live. It was history. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever been a part of.