It's Been A While

since I could hold my head up high...

Okay, not really. It's actually been a while since I logged in to Blogger. But once I typed my title, the lyrics of that damn song stuck themselves firmly in my head. I don't even like the song that much.

I will just pick up where I left off, though, at the Michigan Inaugural Ball the night of President Obama's inauguration. (Although, before I continue, I will pause to say I am very proud of what he's been up to, and therefore very proud of myself for working so hard to get him where he is. Not that it was all my doing, of course, but I did what I could!)

So anyway, like I was saying, we made our way from the Museum to some unknown-to-us busy street where we could see, every so often, a taxi making its way by. I was, as usual, walking several feet behind Chris and struggling to keep up. Next to us, there was another fairly fit and healthy man walking ahead of another woman with a figure similar to my own who seemed to be in the same situation. As we were nearing a corner, two cabs saw us and skidded to a halt. The woman headed toward one. The man headed toward the other. I thought about racing the woman to the cab she was headed for, but she was roughly half the distance I was away from it, and although I was pretty sure I was younger and somewhat more agile than she was, I wasn't sure it was enough to make up for the distance. No problem, though, because Chris artfully dodged in front of the man and ducked under him to stick his head into the other taxi. I hobble-ran over to him and bent down so I could hear what was going on.

"Hey, can you take us to Baltimore?" Chris asked the driver. Chris and I climbed into the backseat without bothering to wait for an answer.

"Uh, yah, Mon," the driver said, but he didn't sound too certain. He did not begin to drive. We waited. Finally, he shrugged. "It going to cost you," he told us. "Maybe one hundred dollar." Chris looked at me. I looked out the window. There was no way I was going to get back out into the cold, and there was no way I was going to walk any farther, and our only other option was to hang out on the street all night anyway.

"Yeah, that's fine," I told the cabbie. Fine might not have been the best word, but it was the best one I could think of. And we were off.

I'm petty sure he wasn't really watching the road, because he was on his cell phone calling every other cabbie in the company, in Washington, maybe in the world, to tell them to head down toward the museums. And then he asked us which way we were going.

"Do I go east/west/north/south/whatever on 1234567890?" he asked us. That's not really what he said, of course--he just asked about one particular direction on one particular highway. He may as well have been speaking whatever his native language was, though, because we didn't have a clue. It's not like we were seasoned DC residents or something. We just nodded in agreement because we figured, confused as he seemed, he probably had a better idea than we did, and whatever Interstate he mentioned sounded familiar and I was pretty sure it actually did run through Baltimore. It took us almost an hour to get there, even though several of the bridges in and out of Washington that had been closed for security reasons earlier in the day were open by then. Traffic was slightly insane, and it was, after all, a good fifty miles.

The cabbie, also, was slightly insane. As he chatted on his phone in barely discernible English, he came within inches of sideswiping at least 47 cars. I really didn't care. It was 2 am and I'd been up since 4 am, and I ached from hiding out in Union Station all day, and I was cold, and I just wanted to be asleep or not aware that I wasn't asleep, so dead along the highway somewhere would have worked for me, too. But that didn't happen, and in retrospect, that's probably a good thing.

Finally, after we had reassured the driver 79 times that we were parked in a parking garage near where the Orioles play, which HE figured out based on what we told him, giving us the impression that he knew where he was taking us, we could see Baltimore in the distance. And the cabbie had questions.

"What lane you want me drive in?"

Um... not a good question, since it was almost 24 hours since we'd slept and we didn't have a clue in the first place.

"Whatever one you want to," Chris told him. "Uh, middle is good?" So that's where we drove. The cabbie asked us a million questions and we kept our eyes peeled for familiar sights. Finally, we saw a hotel that looked like the one we'd seen when we parked, and as we drew nearer, we could see the parking garage Chris's car was in. "HERE!" Chris yelled. "TURN HERE! Right! Right lane! Turn!" And the cabbie barely avoided a thirteen-car pile up as he slid into the right lane and onto the ramp. A few turns twists and we were stopped in front of the parking garage. I threw a handful of money--a hundred and ten dollar handful of money--at him and disembarked.

"Hey!" he yelled.

"What?" Chris asked, as he, himself, disembarked.

"She gypped me!"

Chris looked at me. I looked back, indignantly.

"I gave him a hundred and ten bucks," I said. "If that's not enough..."

"She gave ya a hundred and ten bucks."

The cabbie recounted. He nodded in agreement, so Chris slammed the door and the cabbie drove away in a cloud of dust. Or maybe there was no dust and the fogginess was just in my sleep-deprived eyes. We staggered into the garage, stumbled into the elevator, guessed at what floor we were on, stabbed at the elevator buttons, and were pleasantly surprised to see Chris's car in front of us when the doors slid open. A few minutes later, we were on our way back to the hotel and a mere 23 hours after we had woken up, we collapsed into our beds and slept. We had arranged for late checkout, so we didn't have to get up until noon. Ahhhhh.