Normally I don’t get weepy over politics. I am often disgusted and driven towards reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond and Friends instead of news. Journalism majors are supposed to care about news (imagine that) and I’m surprised they let me graduate with my extreme aversion to it. We could go into why I chose that major in the first place, hating news the way I do, but that will just be convoluted and depressing.
So I, avoider of news and politics, ended up watching the inauguration, not by my own plan but more by luck. On Tuesdays I get to read with three kids at a local elementary school as part of a program called Read and Succeed. When I arrived on Tuesday this week, the room was crowded with two second-grade classes, four teachers, the janitor, and the school guidance counselor. The teacher of the kids I read with, I’ll call her Mrs. W., looked at me apologetically. She told me she didn’t know the kids would be allowed to watch the inauguration, but we both agreed that my three little readers should watch history being made vs. reading in the library with me. I was going to leave but she pointed to a chair and invited me to stay.
So when President Obama was being sworn in , that’s when I got all welled up with emotion and general verklempt-edness. I think it’s because it was one of those rare moments in my life when I have realized the significance of the moment, in the moment. And I will remember the details of that day, January 20, 2009, for the rest of my life. How lucky was I then to be watching Barack Obama being sworn in as our 44th president in an elementary school classroom full of thirty 7- and 8-year olds? Here Obama was, talking about the next generation, and here I was, watching it with that next generation.
There in the front of the room, 2 feet from the TV, was Miguel, my shy reader. Dirty fingernails, tired some days because he stays up too late playing video games; reading through yawns but smiling shyly, he is a good reader but he doesn’t pay much attention to punctuation. He just reads in a long line of monotonous sentences. There he is smiling at Cindy, who I also read with. She is eager to please, a good reader but always going too fast and missing words. She can’t wait to read “chapter books.” Cindy prefers to read the books I bring instead of the ones she takes from the classroom, and she is sympathetic to all characters, even Splat the Cat’s pet mouse Seymour and the Monsters on Machines who still need naps. Sitting right next to me is Josue, my third reader. He sits with his head resting on crossed arms folded on the table, feet swinging, looking bored. He keeps looking sideways at me curiously, and I am dabbing tears and sniffling. Josue always tries to find books I haven’t read yet, and he always asks me which one I’d like to hear first, just like I do for Tommy for his bedtime stories.
I don’t know why I was crying. Maybe it’s because I felt like I was witnessing the coolest historical moment I could remember in a long time. Too often when we are all gathered around the TV collectively watching, it’s something horrific. This was not that. Not September 11, not Space Shuttle Challenger, not fires or high-speed chases or murder, but something good, something positive.
There is a moment in Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in which a newspaper is thrown on Francie Nolan’s desk at work. The one-word headline is WAR! She pauses in that moment. She knows she’ll tell her grandchildren about this day, April 6, 1917, and she fixes every detail in her mind.
Then she offers this prayer:
Dear God, let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry… have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere – be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.
I’ll add let me be brave enough to follow my dreams, let me be more.
I did end up reading with my kids briefly, and as I was walking to the library with Cindy she looked up at me and said, “That was so cool, huh?”
I smiled. “Way cool.” I told her. “You will probably remember this day for the rest of your life.”
Maybe she will and maybe she won’t, and saying that out loud made me feel old, but maybe my saying it means it really will stay with her. Maybe Josue will have a memory with me in it; this smiling, weepy, crazy lady sitting next to him.
But I do hope that our new president will mean change. We could all use a little change. And some good news.
