Moments for Childlike Wonder

When I was eight years old and in the fourth grade, and my parents were recently divorced, my father planned a trip to Williamsburg, VA and Washington D.C. for just the two of us. I still have an album full of photos of him looking impossibly young and me, ditto, with the addition of a truly hideous patchwork coat courtesy of 1978. We generally look happy and fascinated -- except for the photo of me sitting on the thin mattress on the floor of the "gaol," clearly imagining that this would not be a particularly nice place to sleep. The photos of us in the stocks, on the other hand?

Excellent.

But my favorite memento from this trip comes from even before we took the trip itself. My father had said to me, at some point in the planning stages, something along the lines of: "You know, the President lives in Washington, D.C., but he's from Georgia. Why don't you write to him and tell him we're coming, and see if he wants to have dinner with us while we're there?" I'm sure he meant it off-handedly, as a mini-lesson in politics rather than etiquette. But to the literal mind of a serious eight-year-old here was a suggestion well worth following up. And so I did. I wrote to President Carter, and told him that I was from Georgia just like him, and that I would be in Washington for a few days with my Daddy, and would he like to have dinner with us?

And do you know what?

I got a letter back.

Oh, yes I did.

A letter from the White House. On White House stationery. Addressed to ME. Eight-year-old me. It was the most exciting mail I had ever received. If I'm quite honest, I don't think any mail I've received in the 30 years since has been as thrilling in the moment as that small white envelope bearing the White House return address was thrilling in my hands. And although I did not save the envelope, I carefully stuck the letter itself into my scrapbook, so that I would never forget exactly what President Jimmy Carter had told his personal secretary to write to me when he unfortunately had to decline my invitation to dinner.

I was disappointed, of course, that he was too busy for dinner. (I have some vague recollection that I wrote in my letter to him that I knew he was a very busy man being President and all, but even Presidents have to eat, so perhaps he would like to eat with me.) But while I had hoped against hope that he might want to dine with us, I was somewhat mollified by the grandiosity of getting a real letter, signed by someone as important as the personal secretary to the President.

At least, that is how, in my heart, and with my naive eight-year-old sense of how communication worked, I read the following letter.

Clearly, in retrospect, this is a form letter. No one in her right mind would write, "The President is indeed grateful for your willingness to come in to talk with him in an effort to be helpful and woud like to see personally all who are now expressing this desire" to a fourth-grader. But at the time, I was convinced that the "Deputy Appointments Secretary" must have been at the President's right hand, scheduling every minute of his day, and taking dictations (though I couldn't have used that phrase) to write for him all the letters he was too busy to write for himself. I thought... No, I knew, that when Fran Voorde had "been asked to acknowledge" my "thoughtful letter," she had been personally asked to do so by President Carter himself, who was obviously touched by my thoughtfulness in remembering his hunger, but whose schedule was just too busy on the days I would be in town.

And so, it was easy to ignore the fact that she (who I'd never heard of) had signed the letter, and to understand that, truly, it was a letter from the great man himself.

I have been thinking about that letter a lot in the last few weeks, as I have been getting personalized emails from the Obama campaign. There is no doubt that they have used technology brilliantly. In collecting my zip code but not my street address, they implicitly told me that they would not be sending me wasteful paper mail but that they just wanted to know where their supporters were. At the same time, they garnered a vital piece of information that enabled them to tailor mass emails: I got detailed missives about what was going on in the Michigan campaign, notices of when they needed more volunteers to work at campaign stations located within 40 miles of my house, and personal-sounding emails from Michelle Obama about her hopes and dreams for the country, and for women, should her husband win.

Then, two nights ago, I got a short email from the great man himself.

Unlike every other email, whose return address was clearly that of a campaign staffer or Obama for America, or some other such entity, this one had as the sender simply Barack Obama. "Dear Andrea," the letter opened, and then it contained a short but eloquent message about how, before he took the stage to make his victory speech in Grant Park, he felt the need to reach out to all of his supporters who had gotten him this far, and so he was sending this personal email of thanks. It was signed simply, "Barack."

There is something in me -- the grown-up, I suppose -- that assumes that one of his aides crafted this email at his behest and that knows that it is not hard to send an email from "Barack Obama" without actually being Barack Obama.

But the child in me -- the one who thrilled to those typed words on White House stationery, the one who thought, "this means he really read my letter to him; this means he heard me, little old me" -- that part of me swelled with happiness at reading this personal email from Barack to Andrea.

I know he doesn't really know who I am. I know millions of other people received the email. But I also know that there is something incredibly potent in that gesture. Here is a man who is certainly far too busy to have dinner with a random constituent (or child) but who nonetheless takes the moment, the all-important moment, to stop and think, "I would not be here without those random constituents," and then writes, or delegates, or dictates, or gives the order, or whatever he has to do to ensure that his constituents will know he knows that.

It does not make him God-like, or any of the other hyperbolic things I've heard thrown around about him. But it does make him courteous, thoughtful, and a bit humble. It harkens back to past Presidencies, when there were "Deputy Assistant Somebodies" whose job it was to answer the President's mail, all of his mail, even when it came from an eight-year-old girl. It is the sort of gesture that makes an adult think, for one shining moment, "he heard me, little old me."

It has been a long long time since Americans felt their voices were being heard, and really listened to, by politicians.

I found myself reflecting yesterday on the power of this moment. It is easy to identify points in time where things "changed." Typically, it requires history to tell us this. Rarely, so rarely, we know without needing to be told. Our parents, who remember exactly where they were when John F. Kennedy Jr. was killed, knew at that moment that they were standing in history. We, who sobbed watching the Twin Towers fall, we knew. Yesterday, I heard a young man interviewed on the radio. "What's your name?" asked Michelle Norris, "and what are you holding in your hands?" "My name is Ray-Ray," he replied, "and I'm holding history in my hands." It was a newspaper, he said, with a "real handsome picture of Barack Obama" on the cover, and the simple, powerful headline "Mr. President."

Even though we know we are witnessing something monumental, it is so incredibly rare to know, without requiring the benefit of hindsight, that we are poised at the beginning of a new chapter in history. And yet here we are, holding history in our hands. Poised to write the future.


Epilogue

In fact, I met President Carter once upon a time. It was 1986, just long enough after his four years in the White House had proven him to be one of the most ineffectual Presidents in history that people were beginning to talk about how it looked as if he might turn out to be one of the best past-Presidents our country had ever known. I was part of a panel of high school students (there were four of us, I think; I have NO idea how I managed to make it onto this panel) who interviewed him in front of a packed crowd at Emory University for a one-hour PBS special.

I don't remember what questions I asked him, and although I have the video tape of the event, I am too mortified by my sixteen-year-old self to watch it. I do recall that I was the only panelist who managed to ask a second question before our time ran out, and that he shook my hand afterwards, and that I was too shy to look him full in the face, and that I was a little embarrassed for him because he was wearing so much stage makeup, and that my own hair was far too fluffy but my new dress was beautifully red and burnt orange.

I do love the nicely completed circle that is the story of the fourth-grade would-be dinner companion who became the eleventh-grade panelist on a television show with the very same President. It almost makes me brave enough to write a personal letter to the President Elect and hope against hope that I will get a reply.