Strangers unite as Obama is sworn-in
Updated on 21 January 2009
Felicity Spector shares a late night cab ride and night cap with American strangers, buoyed up after Obama's inauguration.
It was the perfect end to a surreal day: after the crazy traffic jams at 4am, the freezing walk through the Mall as dawn rose over the Capitol, the insane crowds and the speech and the parade and the sheer sense of history: it was finally over.
The streets lay thick with debris: abandoned newspapers, maps of the inaugural route, cans and wrappers and cups and hand warmers that had long since lost their warmth.
After a late drink and an even later dinner - we searched for that most elusive of things - a taxi home.
Suddenly, a car pulled up and a woman shouted "Hey - jump in! We'd love to take you where you want to go!"
And so we did: Cecilia, an actress from New York's Upper East Side, clad in designer sheepskin and a glamorous frock and her friend Abraham, a suave African-American attorney from San Francisco. They'd flown over for the inaugural day.
"We walked here all the way from VIRGINIA!" Abraham kept saying. "From VIRGINIA! And then we walked back but we stopped at every bar along the way!"
The streets lay thick with debris: abandoned newspapers, maps of the inaugural route, cans and wrappers and cups and hand warmers that had long since lost their warmth.
As we skirted around the security cordon, now being dismantled around the Mall, they wanted to know where we were all from.
As soon as Ed said he was Scottish, they wanted a Scottish song and so we drove, along Independence Avenue, to the strains of Flower of Scotland - as I said, surreal.
They insisted, of course, that we came for a drink: "This round is on us!" they cried.
And in a chic little Georgetown bar, we talked about Obama, about New York, about a world suddenly filled with a new sense of hope, way into the small hours.
We'll never meet them again of course, although these days, you never quite know. But it was a symbol, of the kindness of strangers, of an experience shared, of a day so glorious no one really wanted it to end.
