"What're you doing?" the dog-walker asked.
And because I was sitting on the ground, hunkered over the leaves off the walkway, and couldn't imagine answering Thinking about the inauguration poem and Diane's Op Ed piece in The New York Times and watching crocuses, waiting for them to open to the sun, hoping I'll see them open, I said, "Taking a picture of a crocus."
"Oh! Have fun!" she said and walked on.
When I came home, I looked up crocuses, those tiny fried-egg or Easter-basket-decorative blossoms that push up through leaf litter in winter. I read about corms and anthers and styles; I learned that the new corm develops on the old one, year after year after year. I read about the saffron crocuses on Crete and saw a picture of a fresco at Thera, which I studied so many years ago and so enthusiastically in college. I followed a link to the Liddell and Scott dictionary of ancient Greek (online!) which I used when I took the language, pouring through the many volumes in the Vanderbilt library. I read about the many many varieties on the Crocus Pages, admiring their tidily ravishing beauty. I searched for poems that mention crocuses on the Poetry Foundation and Academy of American Poets sites, stopping to read the interviews with the inaugural poet Richard Blanco. I found two poems I like -- "For You Today" by Jessica Greenbaum and "Poem" by Jill Alexander Essbaum.
And then I finally looked at my pictures.
And they were enough.
I have watched television all day long, including now as I write this post. I am seeing something I thought I'd never witness, the inauguration of an African American President. This is a day worth celebrating because it represents the renewed promise of the principles underlying our democracy and of our motley population.
For those who worked in the Civil Rights movement and for those who witnessed, as I did, the horrors of legal apartheid in this country, today is one we'll never forget. Raised in Birmingham in the 1950s and '60s, I went to segregated transportation stations and sat on the "Whites Only" side; I enjoyed Kiddieland and the Alabama State Fair, which black children didn't; I remember the march on Selma and the bombings and demeaning slurs; after sitting in my first integrated audience at Miles College to hear Joan Baez, our group found ourselves stalled on the way home by the Miracle Sunday march toward downtown; I had lengthy conversations with the woman who cooked and cleaned for us about race and about her trip to D.C. for the March on the Washington; and I lost my faith when at church the couple in front of me walked out when black teens walked in, the man muttering "Nigger." I was a child of white privilege living safely in a suburb, but I hated the system and the government that upheld it.
I am proud to say that in this Presidential election I voted for the first serious female candidate in the primary and for the new President in November. I am even prouder to be a witness to the outpouring of joy in our election of a man who, as one bystander said on TV today, carries the blood of all the continents.
He is the American story in one person.
What a day.
