Okay, some of you know where I was on January 20th, as a grateful witness to history. Many have asked that I tell you all about it, so, compiled and expanded from various things written for specific people and media outlets, here’s the whole story:

I had tickets to the Inauguration and to the Campaign Staff's Inaugural Ball. It was quite an experience.

Yes, it was very, very cold in D.C., standing in line for the Inauguration ceremony from 2:50 am, to be sure we would be among those who got in to see it. Even with our tickets, I had discerned in advance that the Congressionally-run Presidential Inauguration Commission distributed way too many tix, and not everyone would get in. Sadly for many others, that was the case. I had pre-selected a sweet spot that enabled a view through the trees to the podium, about 100 yards away, and I was grateful that I was able to scramble there and save a spot for my friend from Seattle.

Finally, after the long, cold night, the sky dawned bright and clear and the sun warmed us. Just before the ceremony began, someone pointed to the sky, to a big raptor - either a red-tailed hawk or a golden eagle – that soared in slow circles around the top of the Capitol dome. It was right out of Cecil B. DeMille.

 Eventually, the ceremony got underway. And I want to tell you about how all the TV coverage conspired in a big lie. Political celebrities were introduced over the PA system as they entered the official stands. Ted Kennedy received cheers and applause. Cheers and applause for Bill Clinton. Then a bit less of the same for Jimmy Carter, then less than that for old man Bush. Then, defying convention, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were introduced not individually, but together. It was immediately apparent why. That way, the event would hear only one massive expression of disapproval, instead of two.

The most resounding booooo filled the air. Two million voices echoed off the Smithsonian Museums, off the distant Washington Monument, off the Lincoln Memorial nearly two miles away. It resonated all the way to the West Front of the Capitol. It was orders of magnitude more than the kid at the stoplight with the 72-inch subwoofers. Two million voices, and I felt my pant legs rattle against my knees. It was unlike anything I have ever heard. And the TV people cut the microphones so the world wouldn’t know about it.

From there on, all was very positive, and quite magical. Except when citizen Bush was given a lap around the National Mall in the Marine helicopter, on his way to Andrews Air Force Base and the one-way trip home to Texas. From every far-reach of the crowd, a spontaneous idea took hold, and within seconds, over a million people still on the mall and the Capitol lawn were singing, "Na-na-na-nah, hey-hey-hey, good-bye!"

On cue, the brilliant sun became obscured and the temperature dropped at least ten degrees. It would remain that way the rest of the day, steadily getting colder.

As we finally left our ticketed area following the ceremony, a Capitol Hill cop I had befriended answered a last question I put to him. He told us we could, indeed, see part of the Inaugural Parade. He said, “Stay on my end. Cross the street and go up the Hill where they’re telling everyone to go down the Hill.” (Capitalized because he meant, of course, Capitol Hill.)

After a long wait in the falling temperatures, the official part of the parade began to come over the crest of the Hill. There were a plethora of law enforcement and security agency uniformed people on motorcycles, all sidecar-equipped to help with stability on winter’s icy roads. There was the National Park Service Police, on horseback. And then came the flatbed truck with the high stake sides, overflowing with media photographers, all pointed backwards. An official decoy limo seemed useless, since the photographers were ignoring it.

Then there was the car with Joe and Jill Biden, who looked directly at our small gathering and waved from behind bullet-proof tinted glass, all of 30 feet away. They were followed by some of the Secret Service’s giant SUVs, and another gaggle of truck-bound photographers.

And there was the car with President Barack Obama and First Lady Michele Obama. Both looked directly at us and waved across that ten yard space.

At the base of Capitol Hill, the bulk of the massive parade joined-in behind the President’s limo. We would be spared many hours in the cold, and catch snippets on TVs in a series of D.C.’s watering holes where we sought warmth and opportunities for celebrating on the installment plan.

Exploring the normally traffic-filled streets of downtown D.C. revealed many, many blocks devoid of the automobile, and instead reserved for celebrants and home to thousands of pop-up canopy tent awnings in a city that was given, for one day, to indie cottage industry with a unified theme. Each canopy housed tables covered with a vendor’s unique wares, entrepreneur for a day. Collectively, they had developed or found some kind of commemorative design that was applied to what must have amounted to ten thousand different patterns on t-shirts and mugs and all manner of memorabilia, from the tacky to the very impressive.

Through my camera’s viewfinder, it had a feel like a massive street bazaar meeting the photos of Times Square on V-J Day. The only thing missing was celebratory music, and that was curiously and blatantly absent, except for me singing FDR’s old theme, “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

That night, TV sets all over the world showed clips of one or another Inaugural Ball – there were many. The normal cynicism about all of them is that you wait too long in the cold to get inside, where you wait too long in a cash bar line, and you hope you are in the right part of the room to see the new President when he and the First Lady make their five-to-seven minute obligatory appearance as part of the rounds of all the Balls. All that was on Tuesday, before the new President spends his first full day in the Oval Office.

Fast forward. The Staff Inaugural Ball, Wednesday night, was the one for which I had a ticket. It was run by the Obama campaign, and like everything else associated with the campaign, it was brilliantly run, and flawless.

We got gourmet food from four serving buffets, each with a great many offerings, all complimentary. We got four open bars, no charge for anything. We got some big-hit pop band called Arcade Fire that was delighting the youngest of the young people from the closest of three stages when we arrived, and that was followed on the most distant stage with a performance by some hip-hop celebrity named JZ somebody. (Remember, I’m an acoustic roots-Americana / acoustic renaissance music guy. I don’t know from pop music celebrities, and to me they all sound like Britney Lohan.)

We got the entertainment. Then we got the good stuff: on the center stage, the Secret Service appeared, set up a podium and hung an official seal from it. Almost immediately, Joe & Jill Biden stepped out, and Joe talked for about 25 minutes. He was delightful. Then the Secret Service removed the seal and the podium, and there was a collective sense that we had gotten the star, but not the superstar.

A key campaign staffer, one of the campaign’s six “surrogates,” took the stage to tell of his road-warrior adventures at the hands of volunteers who almost got him killed in all 50 states with their crazy driving. He had good comic timing, and was quite amusing. Then came David Plouffe, the brilliant "field general" campaign manager, who shared some insider tales that no one had heard, but that didn’t violate the mantra of no-drama-Obama.

Then, just when it seemed the evening would end with Plouffe, he made a quick introduction, and out walked President Obama from one wing of the stage, and Michele Obama from the other. They met at center stage, embraced, kissed, and she remained on stage while he walked around with a hand-held mic and talked to us for half an hour. I was about 80 feet away. He was brilliant and charming, and he engaged in some insider humor.

Almost immediately, he looked directly at someone in the audience and said, “My, you’re young.” Then, looking a few feet away, “So are you! I see a LOT of very young faces out there. I mean, VERY young faces. I guess that’s how we did this, and why it worked: so many of you are so young and inexperienced that you didn’t know enough to believe them when you told you, ‘Don’t you know you’re wasting your time? You’ll never do this! Don’t you know it can’t be done?’ Well, thank goodness you didn’t have enough experience to believe ‘em!”

Big cheers, of course. And many more followed during that half-hour. The President was brilliant and charming. The First Lady was radiant, smiling and applauding with us each time the President scored. And I automatically smile when I recall those moments, because for so long it was inconceivable that anyone would ever again be able to apply words that make those associations with a President of the United States.

There is a postscript. To the end, everything planned and operated by the campaign organization was flawless. It could not have presented a more polar opposite to the mess of things made by the Congressional Presidential Inauguration Commission. At the Ball, the metal detector / security screening to gain entry was a new model of quick efficiency the airports should copy. The coat check was easy and very fast, as was retrieving coats when everyone left, all-at-once, at the end of the evening. The event was structured to conclude with enough time for everyone to board the DC Metro trains and make connections to the farthest ends of the system before it shut down for the night. And the venue was the DC Armory, perfect not only for its own amenities, but because it is across from RFK Stadium where the Metro rail stations were built to handle massive crowds quickly and efficiently.

Yes, I attended Clinton’s Inauguration 16 years earlier. I covered Nixon’s funeral as a working journalist. I was there when the first civilian space flight happened, when Spaceship One took flight in 2004, and Buzz Aldrin pinned astronaut wings on the test pilot just after he landed. I’ve been in the presence of movers and shakers and celebrities and a few genuine heroes.

But those two days in D.C. had an altogether different feel. The outrage and humiliation and anger and sadness of an arrogant era of shock and awe and no-bid contracts for war profiteers and those who governed exclusively to benefit their backers, an era of antiscientific confrontation by absolutist religion and litmus tests for ideology but not for integrity, all were at last leading their lemmings off the cliff.

I believe the 21st Century finally arrived on January 20th.

God knows, everything before that, since 2000, was an extension of the worst aspects of the 20th Century. But there was, in the nation’s capital, a shared and undeniable sense of something altogether new, the promise of fulfillment of Lincoln’s New Birth of Freedom. Something fresh and powerful in an unprecedented way is upon us, something welcomed by so many that it can supplant the old and decaying and decrepit, the volume of history that has so steadfastly refused to have its final words recorded, and its covers closed. At last, I could feel that heavy cover being lifted with its pages of war and genocide and fear and loathing. I could sense that essential preparatory act in closing that very heavy book. I believed it can, at long last, be filed on the reference shelf, not to be forgotten, but never again to be emulated. I could sense the rise of Martin Luther King’s call of a Drum Major for Justice, one who can overthrow those who worked overtime to add endless pages to that sadly epic volume of persistently dark history, and bill us for the printing and binding and ink made of blood and tears and suffering. And I could see the pages opening on a new book, where the words have yet to be writ.

Yes, I know that the Republicans parting gift was leaving all of us a destroyed economy, and it wouldn't surprise me if they did it just so the new administration and the country are too broke to finally provide health care for everyone. But I know that the highest rampart of my government is again, at long last, in the hands of people of good will. That alone, makes everything possible.

I can, once again, look at an American flag and feel pride. I hadn't been able to do that for a long time. I spent some time in the Smithsonian with the Star Spangled Banner. It meant something again.

I visited the FDR Memorial, and the Lincoln Memorial. I thought of Marion Anderson singing on the steps with the statue of Old Abe looking out over her seventy years ago in 1939, and Eleanor Roosevelt making it possible for that great American contralto singer, a woman of color, to sing there after the Daughters of the American Revolution of that era had banned her from singing in the DAR Hall.

I though of Dr. Martin Luther King speaking to the Poor People’s March on Washington from those same steps, and delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech forty-six years ago, in 1963. And here we were, in the shadows of giants, in the presence of some who witnessed either or both of those momentous events, and whose lives had included this day. A man had been judged by the content of his character and not by the color of his skin, as Dr. King had dreamed, and that man had just become the President of the United States. A new century has, indeed, finally arrived.

I am privileged to have been there, and I know it.

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HAPPY NEW YEAR!

See you in 2009!

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