Last night I drove Bud and Donna to the Indiana Ball. I myself have a big date with my buddies at MSNBC- Chris and Keith to start things out! I did tell Bud, who’s a very big deal in his home state of Indiana to tell John and Elaine Mellancamp I said hello and that he represented Tybee very well yesterday!
I had an experience heading back home that sums up the change in our country- at least for this week… Donna lives in the Capital Hill area which is still a neighborhood in transition. I got turned around driving back to the townhouse and saw a woman at a bus stop and pulled over and asked her for directions to Florida Ave. She gave me great directions and then told me welcome to DC. I realized how cold it must be waiting for a bus and I could tell she’d been working all day. I asked her if I could drop her off somewhere vs waiting for the bus. She paused for a second then said- Sure why not!
We started talking on the way to her home in Southeast DC . She had just finished working at her job with a catering company here in DC and she told me how she just kept tearing up during the party because she was just so proud of what was happening in the country. She said her parents never believed this would happen in their lifetime. Then she said, “and you know, I never would have gotten in a car with a complete stranger and I bet you never would have offer ed a black stranger in downtown DC a ride home either”. We both started laughing and she hugged me when she got out of the car and said “God Bless America. We live in the greatest country in the world and we’re living up to our potential.” I was part of a feeling today that I experienced in downtown Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics where everyone thought the best of each other and truly felt like a global community. It’s a high and is the reason why we all in DC are walking around like giddy kids!
Enough for now, I’m heading to the Mall to say “I was there” to anyone who asks where I was when History was made in our Country.
