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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

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Upon being alone together…

Original Photo by the Associated Press, now proudly retained as a favored photograph of my personal archive. DL (The Spokesman-Review)
Original Photo by the Associated Press, now proudly retained as a favored photograph of my personal archive. DL (The Spokesman-Review)

Good afternoon, Netizens...


Today's Picture of the Day, personally a favorite, shows former First Lady Nancy Reagan spending quiet time with her late husband, which brings me to my commentary on matrimony in the White House.


A blogger for the New York Times asked a question of her readers, one that I will pass onward to you. At http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/sometimes-a-president-is-just-a-president/ asked about obsessions about Barack and Michelle Obama. She wondered whether a friend and her couldn’t possibly be the only ones dreaming, brooding or otherwise obsessing about the Obamas, and then she put that question to her readers.


There were, as you might suspect, a lot of fantasies about the Obama marriage. And I quote, “Barack and Michelle Obama look like they have sex. They look like they like having sex,” a Los Angeles woman wrote, summing up the comments of many. “Often. With each other. These days when the sexless marriage is such a big celebrity in America (and when first couples are icons of rigid propriety), that’s one interesting mental drama.”


The first thought that came into my mind, perhaps unwanted or at least unexpected was, I agree that Barack and Michelle probably were used to having sex frequently, or at least did until they moved into the uppermost circle of the White House, complete with Secret Service agents everywhere.


Yes, to answer you unspoken question, there are Secret Service agents just outside Barack and Michelle's bedroom, ostensibly listening over audio devices to their every sound. This is in case, God forbid, that someone should ever manage to gain access to their bedroom and attack them as they sleep. Perhaps that is taking security a step one too far, but nonetheless, it is plausible that someone could invade their household and attack them at their most private moments in the White House.


I hold no such obsessions about the Obamas. My only visions of Michelle Obama is that she is a extremely beautiful woman of extreme discernment, a person whose graciousness has only begun to make itself evident in how she greets and deals with persons great and small who enter her new life as First Lady. I did wonder, however, how Michelle Obama internally has adapted to her new life in what I call the ultimate fishbowl, where her every statement, even in the paroxysms of having sex with her husband, are overheard. I wonder how she is adapting to the circumstance where she is never alone with her husband, and how long it will be before she wants to run away.


I couldn't live in that fishbowl, simply because I have to have my private time, quiet time when no one else is around, even listening to me from outside my bedroom door. I would have to run away eventually, to someplace where only myself and my Beloved wife and I could hear ourselves whispering in the dark.


And yes, I hope that when both Barack Obama is gone from life, that both his wife will come and spend quiet time with each of us respectively. It might be the only time they will spend together alone together again.


When you and I are both gone, who will come to spend time in solitude with our memories?


Dave





Spokesman-Review readers blog about news and issues in Spokane written by Dave Laird.