Nancy and I celebrated our 18th anniversary a little early last night. Our actual anniversary isn’t until Monday, but we could get a babysitter for last night, so a-celebratin’ we went, toasting our marriage which is now voting age.
We went out to Stables Steak House, perhaps the best restaurant in Terre Haute and dropped a cool $120 on a couple of steaks (with sides and salads, of course), a couple of beers (for me) and a couple of $12 glasses of wine for Nancy. We realized that this was the first time we had been out together ALONE since we got the kids (27 months ago). We weren’t gone long – a mere 2 hours – but I think the kids wore our babysitter (the heroic Fran) down, nonetheless.
When we got back home, there was a message from one of Nancy’s students who has done work for the Obama campaign here in Terre Haute. Her message indicated that there were 4 tickets to Obama’s Terre Haute visit (scheduled for the next day) waiting for us at the gates to the Fairgrounds. How could we say no?
So, we packed the kids up in the car this morning and headed out to the Fairgrounds. David was a little upset because when we asked if he wanted to go see Barack Obama he said yes, but it turns out that he thought we were going to his house. David loves to se people’s houses. And then he thought that maybe Sen. Obama would come to our house. David loves visitors. But he doesn’t love crowds.
The crowd itself was actually quite small (a few hundred at most) and the setting was intimate (an equestrian ring), but it was still loud and chaotic. And we sat on hay bales near the back. After a couple of brief rallying speeches and an introduction by Sen. Evan Bayh, Obama took the stage.
And while the speech itself was nothing unexpected (lots of stuff about change, you know), when you meet his eye, which I did do at one point, the guy is electric. I’m hopeful that some day Dave and Trin can look at these brief video clips and recognize that they were in the presence of this historic person.
Of course, none of us heard all that much of the speech because were busy wrangling these two live wires we call kids: jumping off the hay bales, chatting up strangers, wanting to talk to state troopers and Secret Service agents (who are nicer than you’d expect), getting obsessed by the ladder behind us, and much, much more. By the time we left, I was sure that I’d been captured on camera by any number of major news organizations in the act of quietly scolding, looking stern, or getting slammed in the face by Trin’s “First Teddy.” Keep your eyes open for that.
At the end of day, I didn’t come away with much new information about Barack Obama – Nancy and I and our marriage will be voting for him come November. But we did learn that the first rule of civic engagement is: get a babysitter.
