Suspended - Take Two

status check - Contemplative
background ambiance - Charlatans UK, "The Blonde Waltz"

Thank you, Blogger, for deleting the post I wrote earlier this afternoon. That was real swell of you.

Anyway. Like anyone else with access to a television during business hours, I've been innundated with coverage of Inaugural Day pomp and circumstance. When I wasn't busy rolling my eyes at the happy frappy Republicans reveling in their success, I found myself staring at the Capitol.

It's funny, realizing just how experience can fracture one's perceptions of a place or, in this case, building. I looked at the dome, at the statue perched on top, the red, white and blue draped on the West Front. A sea of people streched out along the pavillion and and beyond.

The building never fails to look impressive - whether on television, in movies or in person. But it's a different kind of awe inspired in me when I look up at it in person - and I can't figure out which one, if either, renders me more awe-struck.

I find I have to force myself to think about how it looked when I walked through its halls on a regular basis - it doesn't feel like I actually worked there, now that I look back on it in retrospect. Big, grand place - little, normal person. Doesn't equate.

So, as I watched it on television, I started thinking about the little things I found in my travels. The whir of the subway's engine as it traveled from the office building to the Capitol. The faded mustard walls that formed tunnels through "the catacombs," the metal grating on the floors I led constituents over during tours. I used to joke with them that it was the Capitol you don't see on television - as we walked around serving cars and rolled-up carpet, they understood what I meant. The air always smelled a little musty, laced with the faint scent of floor cleaner and sawdust (which always perplexed me).

There is an entrance to the West Front that I passed each time I went to deliver flags - during the later portion of my time in D.C., I would pass through the doorway to look out at the Monument and the Mall. I leaned against the cool wall, concealed from the busloads of school children and tourists gathered on the pavillion to take photographs and stare at the building. They were far below, but I could always see the flash of cameras. I always smiled during my perches at that spot - partly in case there was a zoom on the camera lens, partly because I felt such a sense of pride and astonishment about being there.

My favorite moments of any Capitol ventures, however, were those in which I led tours into the Rotunda. No matter how cool or aloof someone tried to be during the tour, the moment they stepped beneath the dome, eyes widened and heads tilted back at the same angle. I watched their faces with a grin while they stared up at "The Apotheosis of Washington."

I remember the moments so vividly, but now, tinged with time and new experiences, they feel like they happened to someone else.

OK, enough rambling.