Talk Show with Jay Dino:

Moving House with Barack Obama

** Cindi Jay: When my family moved house five times or more whenever Father was transferred it was no big deal. The Government code expected such transfers and travelling claims by train or road and transport by lorry and cart and subsistence payments during the travelling days. In Colombo itself we moved into four houses at different times while Father worked in the same office, the Colombo Kachcheri.

** Jay Dino: What provoked you to talk about the childhood past?

** Cindi: Reading Barack Obama's Dreams from my Father. There are so many versions of moving house like From Log Cabin to White House. Barack said in his address that he was taking an oath of office in Washington, making him the highest in the land when just one generation ago his father would not have been allowed to eat in a restaurant there.

** Jay: Wonderful and out of this world as that may be I was visiting my friend in California and he too is moving house. Just a block away from Mt Jasper to Mount Olympus, walking distance half a mile. It takes a week to complete it all. He has hired a mover's lorry almost as long as a cricket pitch and it cost $2500. I counted 58 cardboard boxes of stuff each with details printed like whether it contains stuff from the family room, master bedroom, living room, from a house 2,600 square feet large plus beds, tables, chairs, fridge, washing machine etc etc. And this from a normal middle class household.

** Cindi: And when we were kids we could hardly fill a lorry to move from Panadura to Wattala. And our possessions seemed so many. Perhaps Barack too moved from place to place in USA with his mother and her parents just like any working class child. And he moved from the mainland to Hawaai and from Haawai to Indonesia to his stepfather and back again to the mainland, a black child but not a descendant of slaves.

n Jay: Commentator says as Barack walks into the place on Capitol Hill at the end of a long procession of important Americans, mostly white: "There he showed his calmness both outward and interior, which is his special identity."

** Cindi: And when he spoke those long sentences filled with abstractions quite uncharacteristic of the American mode of oratory I wandered how he was going to make the closure as the rhetoric soared from phrase to phrase and suddenly without a forewarning it ended. Though the audience was the largest ever at an inauguration, most of them knew not when to clap because they did not understand what he was saying, specifically, but they understood that he was arousing emotions of expectation and hope.

** Jay: So did you compare the words he unloaded to the boxes and furniture and equipment that your friend moved from one large house to a more ornate and equally large house a half mile away?

** Cindi: And to the poor trappings of our own middle class homes in the outstations when the typical middle class man was Citizen Perera, English speaking, office wear coat and white suit with tie, travelling by foot or train with railway season tickets and coming home in the evening, like the villager described in Gray's Elegy, making his way "along the cool sequestered vale of life," trudging the noiseless tenor of his way. Barack Obama with his calm tread and speech reminded me of that archetypal figure, though Barack's own father seems to have been a brilliant intellectual and a violent man much given to women and achievement and travel abroad. It is Gramps or the maternal grandfather that Barack most resembles in his baby picture, carried by the Gramps and loved and supported by Toot, the maternal grandmother, who ended up as the Vice President of the village bank.

** Jay: Yes, it was Barack's greatest achievement to make the poor and lowly equal to the high and mighty by the events of his own life. It is an impossible story but true.