Our Nation's Capital

This is my second trip to Washington DC since Obama was inaugurated and the entire feel of the city has changed. It's always been a young city, with ambitious recent graduates pouring in every four years to grab those jobs on the Hill and if their party is out of power, at the various think tanks around town. But this feeling, as summer is delayed with rain and cooler temperatures is different from anytime I've been here before.

I lived here from 1966 to 1970 through the Johnson and Nixon administrations. And one thing that was nowhere to be felt then was: hope.

Now the city is full of hope and pride.

Riding in a cab through rush hour to a meeting yesterday, I got into a conversation with the driver, a man, exactly my age--60--dark skinned from the islands with a seventeen year old son, because like me, he didn't marry and have children until he was in his forties. First, we pandered and told the other how damned good we looked for sixty!

Then we got down to the business of Obama. He spoke about his pride, how much he loves listening to him speak, how he might not be doing as much as we want him to, but that if he continues to speak and keep our spirits up that we have hope now.

"We didn't have any hope during the Bush years," he said.

His sadness was that his seventeen year old son seemed lost already. "He was such a good kid until he hit those teenage years," he confided, "and now, now I don't even know him."

Will the Obama hope reach into the hearts of these young African American men who seem to be getting lost in shameful numbers, having internalized racism to such a degree that they cannot learn in school or find the discipline to work at a job. Have we lost yet another generation despite the narrative of Barack Obama: he, too, was lost for a few years. That's what makes his story so powerful, that he was lost and then he found himself again. Redemption.

The Power of Hope

If I were a list maker, and I'm not, there would be more things to worry about than I've ever worried about before: Israel and Gaza, the financial crisis, unemployment, the disintegration of the tax base for local government, homelessness, a health care system that just doesn't work even for those with insurance, Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, Somalia, Russia cutting off natural gas to all of Europe, the collapse of portions of the progressive philanthropic community, Guanatanamo Bay, renditioning, torture, tainted food imported from other countries, and tainted food processed here in cruel and inhuman conditions like those in the Agriprocessor Plant in Postville, Iowa.

Oh, right, I said I don't make lists, and I seem to be making them.

Maybe it's that I am in San Diego and looking out over the marina, or maybe it's because no one else is panicking that I'm not panicking either.

This is the power of hope.

Barack Obama will surely disappoint me and many others, because he wants to be a great president and in order to do that he will have to appeal to the largest possible portion of America and the world that he can.

That is why people voted for him. He has that intention to bring people together, like he did at the White House today, at the luncheon with all of the living presidents.

I also know that the worst hasn't happened yet. We haven't hit bottom yet.

The power of hope is amazing me and so many other people I meet. At least we have hope.

What Obama's Election Means To One Voter and La Boheme

In just these last few weeks, we have experienced some of what an Obama administration will feel like, and so far, his intelligence, wit, strategic thinking, and desire to surround himself with the best and brightest, continue to provoke a sense of optimism and hope. Yes, it looks a bit like what it would have been if there had been a Clinton III, but these press conferences convey a very different attitude towards the press and consequently to the American people and people of the world. Who said Barack Hussein Obama doesn't have a sense of humor?

Here is an email I received from a nonagenarian—that means he is over ninety—African American attorney with whom I worked at Legal Aid Society back in 1973, and with whom I've stayed connected through jazz piano (not mine, but his incredible talent):

I don't know anybody who wasn't for Obama, even though I am kind of boxed in these days as a nonagenarian with impaired mobility. I can't describe the feeling I had when I realized he had won as I woke up from napping. It is the most significant election of my lifetime. I thought of all the humiliations and segregation I had experienced during the early part of New York life and here and now this man had become president of the United States!

I am doing fairly well these days and someone has asked me to accompany them to the inauguration if the tickets she has been promised materialize. There is also one for my son. Soooo… . We have that to look forward to. That weekend is also my birthday weekend as well as Martin Luther King's. If all this comes out right, it should be quite a time for me.

More from Prague: Last night we attended a performance of La Boheme at the State Theater in Prague. The building is not just baroque, it is the epitomy of baroque: statues hold up the individual boxes that rise from the orchestra section, the pit, where we were seated; cupids and cherubs all about; a painted ceiling; crystal chandeliers; and gilting everywhere. The stage is much small than the Metropolitan's in New York City, and none of the performers was using a microphone hidden in his or her hair.

This version of La Boheme was shortened into two acts from four and didn't have the gravity of an American production. The performance was entertainment not grand culture, as originally intended! This is a play about four young men--a poet, a painter, a philosopher, and a musician--living in Paris poor and living hand to mouth precariously in search of their talent and great art. Two of the men seek love; two of the men prefer to live without it. The poet, Rodolpho, and the painter, Marcello, need muses and they arrive in the form of Mimi and Musetta.

The grand recognizable arias of the first act brought tears to my eyes. The closing scene when Mimi dies, well, just being at the opera reminds me of my grandfather. He told the stories of the great tragedies as if they were his own stories. So whenever I go to the opera, I feel this connection to him; I adored this elegant and European man who never left the house without a tie and a hat. Now I realize that he told us these stories, complete with him humming the arias as a way of avoiding telling us much about himself. After he died, my father discovered that he had arrived in the United States under an assumed name, so I wonder now whether he left a wife and children in Roumania about whom he never spoke. We might never know.

The feel of the performance was more like Rent or Moulin Rouge than anything I've ever seen at either the New York or San Francisco operas.

After dinner we had dinner at Pravda, serving a menu from around the world. Two of our group had a chicken curry from Africa, I had a roasted halibut over spinach cannelloni, my daughter ordered a French duck breast with blood orange sauce, another ordered a Japanese tuna, a steak, and a black seafood risotto. Elegant, spectacularly plated and presented, and with live music provided by two guitarists. The first number they performed was the Frank Sinatra classic "My Way" performed in Czech.

We haven't had a bad meal in all of Prague.