Let! Us! In!

Yesterday afternoon, Rachel managed to beg/borrow/steal two Inauguration Ceremony tickets in the "Purple Section." O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

We came out of the metro this morning to total chaos. Crowds of people milling around, no signs anywhere, people hawking everything from t-shirts to laminated calendars, and not a red-hatted volunteer or policeman in sight. After walking aaaaaaall the way through the D Street/New York Ave exit tunnel for 395, we found the end of the line for purple ticket holders where we waited. And waited. And waited some more.

It became clear, after 45 minutes, that waiting our turn was going to be a losing strategy. So, we developed a new strategy - Rachel would walk ahead and blend into the line. Then I would follow, after a discreet waiting period. Some people might call it "cutting" (and we witnessed several public sessions of booing from other crowd members to try and shame "cutters"). We just called it "getting onto the Mall to see the Inauguration."

Coming out of the tunnel at 10:53 AM, we found all kinds of rumors flying around. The security machines are broken! They've closed all the gates!! The Mall has been taken over by aliens!!! We just carried on.

30 yards away from the Purple Gate, we found ourselves stuck again. Close, but there were still about a thousand people in front of us with only 17 minutes to go. We were literally inching our way forward, en masse, as all thousand of us tried to squeeze through a gate only five feet wide. The closer we got to the gate, the closer we got to our fellow crowd members. At one point, unable to reach my pocket for a kleenex, I was tempted to wipe my nose on the coat of my newest best friend, standing just a few centimeters in front of me.

A lady with a bullhorn started periodically shouting "Purple tickets only - all others please leave" at which point everyone in the crowd would begin waving their tickets, chanting "Purple Tickets! Purple Tickets!"

As it inched closer to 11:30 AM, the cutoff point for getting onto the Mall, the crowd began to turn ugly - people were shouting "Let Us In! Let Us In!" The lady with the bullhorn threatened to close the gates, people started shouting "No Pushing!" And then suddenly, after an impossibly tight squeeze, we were through.

After fighting through the crowd, jumping a fence to get to the South Capital lawn seemed a small price to pay for an unobstructed view. We were in place just in time for the opening prayer.

The Department of Homeland Security got $17 million for planning the Inauguration's security arrangements. We're going to put in a bid to the US Government to do the next one for $10 million...we'll save the USG $7 million and save everyone who attends hours of waiting and having to shout "Hey! What would Obama do?!"

Mayhem, Part II

Apparently chocolate dipped dry-roasted crickets are quite crunchy and fall into "parts" in your mouth when chewed and not swallowed whole. The legs, in particular, tend to hang around for several minutes, mostly between your teeth.

Thornyhold by Mary Stewart

I just finished "Thornyhold" by Mary Stewart. If you paid any attention to my reading list last year, you'll have noticed that maybe a fourth of the books were Mary Stewart books. I can't quite put my finger on why I love this author but I am so eternally in debt to my roommate, Sarah, for introducing her to me.

Although the fact that the love interests usually say things like "my dear girl" before they take the protagonists into their arms for a kiss is a good start, I think that my real love for these books comes from their utter predictability.

I pick them up knowing that there will be a plucky young heroine. She will start out on a vacation/begin a new job/move to a new town, sometimes accompanied by a friend/female relative to provide support and comic relief. There she will meet a stranger who is rude to her. This man will turn out to be her employer/the next door neighbor/ex-boyfriend/husband-disguised-as-a-spy who is ruggedly handsome, with tanned and calloused hands but an educated sensibility. Together, they will embark on a dangerous mission, usually to solve or prevent a murder. Helping them on this mission will be an especially precocious youngster and a cat or dog (or both). Most times, a slatternly woman will get in the way of their obvious but unspoken and growing love. In the end, all misunderstandings will be swept away when the stranger saves the plucky young heroine from certain death, takes her into his arms, and gives her a kiss that stops time.

I remember when I was a teenage, I used to pray every night that I would be graced with a vision of my future husband. Just his face, I would ask, even just a glimpse. Then I could sit back and relax until I was introduced to that face and I would know - he's the one! Suspense has always killed me and to not know what my life would be in five years, ten years, forty years or who I would be sharing it with seemed unbearable.

But these books? I know exactly what will happen...the details change a bit, but the outcome never does. Everything is happily ever after, riding off into the sunset, satisfactorily resolved.

So, until my fervent prayers of youth are answered and my dreams send me a vision of my future, I will continue to turn to Mary Stewart for predictable comfort. On that note, 'Madam, Will You Talk?" is calling so I'm off to find out what will happen to Charity Selbourne, an extravagantly lovely war widow, and her amusing, irreverent artist friend, Louise Cray, when they arrive in the South of France expecting a conventional holiday only to encounter a young man of thirteen who is having trouble with his dog and holds a terrible maturity behind his grave eyes.*



*FYI - that last bit is an almost verbatim quote from the flyleaf of the book and I swear I didn't read it before writing the above commentary on why I love Mary Stewart.

"The Road from Coorain" by Jill Ker Conway

I finished "The Road from Coorain" while in the air, en route from spending Christmas in Pocatello, Idaho. As a brief synopsis, the book details the life of the authoress as she moves from a sheep ranch in the Australian bush to Sydney and on to Harvard.

It started out promising. Detailed descriptions of her parent's carving out a life in the wilds of Australia, building a house, raising, shearing and culling herds of sheep numbering in the tens of thousands, and trying to raise children that matched up to the ideal of colonial Britain.

When her father dies in an accident on the farm, her mother takes her from the bush to Sydney and enrolls her in a private school. She lets the reader into her private struggles to adjust to life with a mother eaten up by grief and frustration at the passive role society has assigned her, to the crowds and noise of the city, to peers who's worries revolved around fashion and boys.

The book started to lose me, however, in the last few chapters. As the authoress entered college and embarked on a path that would eventually take her from her beloved Australia. Here, it was almost like the historian in her took over - the text became removed, the language stilted. An 18-month-long passionate romance was glossed over in a few paragraphs. Her four year college career lasted a few pages. It reminded me of my journal when I am catching up months after the fact - all summary and none of the visceral emotion of the moment.

Despite the disappointment of the final few chapters, I loved the book. It opened a window into a time and place I will never experience. It made me want to get into a truck and drive on dusty roads. I finished wanting to spend an afternoon watching lambs frolicking in the bush. Thanks Emily - it was a great Christmas present!