Yesterday I went to the National Museum of American History with my Dad and brother. Since my brother's out west I don't see him much, so that was one great thing about the day. The other was that my dad could directly reminisce about many of the exhibits: WWII and Vietnam, the Chicago El-train car, motor cars, some of the old technology. As I said to him, "Dad, it's not that you're a museum piece, but it was really cool to hear you filling in all these exhibits with your memories." It was a day I'll treasure forever.

An exhibit on Salisbury NC included segregation. Dad said that Chicago wasn't formally segregated but he never met black people until he had a high school job in a factory. When he went down to NC to visit our relatives there, Jim Crow didn't impinge on his awareness; he said blacks and whites just didn't meet with each other. I guess that was the whole idea of segregation. It's not quite over, even if it is voluntary. At the cafeteria where I used to work, blacks sat with blacks, whites with whites, with only scattered exceptions. Change takes time. Sometimes it seems like it'll never come, and then suddenly you turn a corner.

On the mall outside the museum, workers were out in the windy, 20 degree weather, setting up for the Inauguration of our next president, Barack Obama.

Reuter's photo