Witness

It was the afternoon after the inauguration and I was at a security desk in a midtown Manhattan office building where I was watching the guard—an African emigrant—print out my visitor pass. I’d been to the building several times and so with the easy familiarity that I associate with big cities like New York, we exchanged small talk about the weather, sports, and whatnot. As I was about to head for the nearby elevator bank—having finally been cleared to enter—I referred in passing to the previous day’s events. He reached out and tapped the watch on my right wrist: “You got a minute.” “Sure,” I said. He then told me he’d driven to Washington to go to the inauguration, taking his two sons—aged 13 and 11. “I wanted them to see, to feel history.” He told me they had arrived about 5:30 p.m. and the streets were already packed with people for miles. “There was a calm that I had never experienced in Washington before. Imagine mobs of people and no one acting the fool, strangers smiling and embracing each other.”