Air and Simple Gifts

And Yo Yo Ma’s wide smile and the seagulls high in the palest blue around the white Capitol dome, if you were watching on MSNBC. Twelve noon struck during this song, easily the most sublime moment of the inauguration, and one in which Barack Obama became president. This even before the oath so awkwardly offered by a man who surely had not voted for him, and so graciously received by this man who certainly had not voted for him to become Chief Justice. America!
But music carried the moment into time and into the space all around, an aural benediction that captured the power of the course of human events that followed. Words of power, words of pressure, words of grace. Hope and virtue; an air, and simple gifts.