January 2009 Archives

Seven-thirty on Inauguration Day is day three of a cold. I'm so rarely sick that a cold qualifies as a full-blown malady, even in January. It's terrible timing. From the minute I struggle awake, I know with a far-off sense of alarm that I am not feeling up to history. I am barely up to making coffee and walking dogs, both of which I do in slow motion. It dawns on me with equal slowness that after months of suspense and anticipation, protracted debating and columnizing about race and politics and the collisions and possible outcomes therein, I can't muster the energy on Jan. 20, 2009, to be excited about Barack Obama's impending coronation and the country's new era of change. I had planned to go to some viewing party, share the moment with somebody besides CNN. But on this painfully ordinary day, I'll have to go it alone. I go hunt for Kleenex.

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When is a splendid, record-breaking Southern California Saturday in winter a bust instead of a boon? A privilege instead of a right? When you have to spend it in traffic school. This was my second time doing time in the breakfast club for wayward motorists (for the same offense--don't ask), and when I scheduled the date last month, I was hoping it would rain, or that the temperature would at least drop below 60. It didn't. Not even close. Eight in the morning, and the guests at the modest hotel where this school was convening were already heading out in shades and shorts, looking as if they couldn't quite believe their good luck. It was going to be a long day.

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Early January is a perverse time. It cheers the future but is hardly out of sight of the year just done; it invites change and new deals without encouraging specifics; it trumpets a new season, but you wouldn't know it to look out your window--winter's just settling in and the weather's lousy. In short, January is a time of emotional and practical contradictions that are at best tantalizing, at worst cruel. What better month/metaphor for the upcoming presidential inaugural that, with a mix of grand parties and grander policy rollouts, will try and lay to rest the recent past that will almost certainly haunt us for decades to come? We plan, January laughs. For a while anyway.

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