Praise Song for a Sweater

My newspaper reading habit now includes a new ritual. Checking the weather in New York City. I know there are easier, more efficient ways of doing this. I could, for instance, check my weather app on my iphone. But instead, I dig through the LA Times to the back of the California section and glance down the list of US cities past New Orleans, occasionally passing Oklahoma City until my finger finds New York City. I've become accustomed to the little abbreviated codes. Su, sunny. Pc, partly cloudy. R, rain. Sn, snow. This morning, as the bright sun poured into my bedroom, I remarked to Steve, "It's warm in New York. 47 degrees."
I mentally go through Gillian's wardrobe. I hope her coat will be warm enough.

I know she lived in Seattle for four years and is used to cold, wet weather. In fact, the year that Brendan spent away at college in Philly, the weather was colder in Seattle. All my worries about my California surfer boy adjusting to an east coast winter were for naught. It was Gillian who had to bail out of a stranded bus and walk across a bridge in a snow storm. It gets darned cold in Seattle.
So, New York should be a piece of cake for her.

My obsession with weather goes back to my mother, who insisted in the middle of August that I take a sweater because "it always cools down in California at night." Since I was born and raised in California, I never understood this comment until I took a trip back to Cincinnati in the summer. It doesn't cool down in Ohio at night in August.
To this day, I never leave the house without my "sweater" - be it a microfiber jacket, pashmina, or a cashmere coat. "It doesn't cost you anything to carry it," Mother would say.

Never was I so glad to have a cashmere coat than a year ago, on January 20th, 2009 in Washington, DC. It was 11 degrees with wind chill the morning I herded forty girls from California onto the mall in front of the US Captitol for Barack Obama's inauguration. I wished more than once that the mothers of those girls had taken weather as seriously as my mother always had. Bear midriffs, unlined rubber boots, and acrylic knit hats and gloves that might have been appropriate attire for the coldest California night failed to provide adequate warmth for the eight hour wait to hear that botched inaugural oath.

My cashmere coat had come from Bloomies in New York. Steve had tenaciously searched the outer-wear department for a coat that met my specifications. After hours of searching, he found one and toted it back to California for my trip to Washington, DC.

Little did we know that I would use that coat to wrap deliriously cold and miserable girls in, as I tried everything in my power to keep them warm - from having them dog pile - to jumping up and down - to begging a girl to share the foot and hand warmers her mother had wisely sent with her with girls who didn't have any ( equivalent to asking someone to give up their last sip of water on a desert island). Or that a girl would go into a full fledged asthma attack from the cold and would have to be sent to the Red Cross station with a friend because she had forgotten to bring her inhaler.

Looking back on my freezing odyssey that included being deserted by my fellow chaperone who panicked in the crowd after losing a few students en route to the porta-potties (the students found their way back to us but she did not), dazedly watching the jumbotron as Aretha sang in her now famous hat and holding on to a little freshman girl in a near state of collapse as I said, "Some day you will be glad you did this," I wondered. Would she? Would I?

The moment Obama's speech had finished, those girls were ready to go. As the only adult with a group of now utterly frozen and exhausted California teenagers, I had no choice but to begin the "pardon us, excuse us" through the throngs on the mall as I strove to listen to Elizabeth Alexander recite the inaugural poem, "Praise Song for the Day." Those kids could have cared less about listening to a poem.

Had I known, as we began our exit from the mall, that we would be another four hours attempting to make our way to the metro, first over a fence that had been pushed down and then an hour to get past a horse trailer against which we had been pressed to climb over the hitch, all while I held a red and gold pom pom over head, resulting in several trips to the chiropractor, I might have waited until the poem was finished to leave.

It never warmed up - in fact, it just got colder and grayer. As we abandoned our efforts to get to the metro because of the numerous road blocks and barriers, I led the group back to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum to get warm. By that point, I was on the verge of desperation and a near emotional breakdown from the stress of the responsibility of getting those girls safely back to our hotel. I will never forget getting into an unimaginably long line in the Smithsonian for a Boston Market chicken meal, ordering two because I was starving, and numbly sitting next to some strangers who were also semi-comatose, asking them, "So - how was it for you?" It was like we were survivors in a refugee camp. I think I was actually in a mild state of shock.

When we headed back out, a barrier was being moved by a security guard, blocking once again our path to the metro, a primal- survival instinct came over me and I yelled "RUN!" and we all ran like mad to make it past the barrier before we were trapped again. As we finally reached the metro, our cell phones once again were operational. They had been scrambled for the hours up to and during the inauguration for security reasons. I had a text message. It was from Brendan who said, "So exciting. Can't wait to hear all about it." He told me later that my texted response was unintelligible.

By the time we exited the metro station back in Arlington, we had been gone for thirteen hours. The excitement of our departure at 4:00 a.m. that morning, seemed a lifetime ago. The victory of having made it through the metro to the Federal Station without getting separated, the strangely silent masses slowly inching their way along Independence Avenue to a small opening in the fence to get on to the mall, the feeling of having "made it" after having lost half the group for forty-five minutes as we turned the corner onto Independence Avenue and frantically waited to be reunited as we stood on a wall in the pitch dark yelling the names of the lost students - seemed like a surreal dream.

I remember I got back to my empty hotel room, closed the door and curled up in a fetal position on the bed and sobbed uncontrollably. Even as I write this account, my stomach churns with the memory. It had been an endurance test.
We all survived to tell the story.

And my guess is, those California girls, will never forget to "bring a sweater."