"What if life were only moments..."

Moment #1: I was in a room with a beautiful hard-wood floor, wooden tables, bookshelves, and piano, lit by a dim but sufficient yellow-light lamp. The gleam of the homey light on the wood, combined with the smell of another delicious home-made dinner, gave the feel of being in a moment trapped in time, transcendent, ever-lasting, yet instantaneous, all at once. It's one of those moments where all you really remember is the feel and the mood of the place, not the events or the words. I was sitting at the piano, accompanying my cousin Evan as he practiced his violin (yet another piece of beautiful wood in the room). It was a simple song, played well, and played better each time. His diligence in practicing, my chance to help out, made it all feel like a home away from home. It was a moment filled with family, and beauty.

Moment #2: An old man, dignified by a masterful white beard, wheels an old woman, still lovely with her well-used smile, to my printing press in a wheel chair, accompanied by two faceless younger people. The woman wears large, dark glasses, but it takes me a minute to realize that she is blind. The man takes a card, I tell him to push down on the lever until it clicks, he pushes, and pulls out a freshly printed card with red ink that says, "I printed this at the Smithsonian!", accompanied by an ink picture of the Smithsonian castle. He smiles, looking at it, and gently leans down to the woman in the wheel chair, and reads the whole thing to her. She looks so at home with just the sound of his voice, so familiar, though she cannot see a thing. He looks back at me and says, "I've been her boyfriend for 63 years!" A prouder man I cannot imagine - she looks up at me and tells me that they have been married for that amount of time. As they wheel away, she reaches her hand out to me and clasps mine; I feel like all the love in her heart and the warmth in her smile travels through her farewell into my heart, my smile, my life. This is one of those encounters that, however brief, sticks with you and changes you. That old woman in the wheelchair with the beautiful smile will always be with me.

Bonus points to anyone who can tell me the source of this post's title.

"The First __________"

At long last, the entire purpose of my summer in D.C. has come to pass. My internship at one of the museums on the National Mall here has begun! I work with the Office of Public Programming (OPP), and have great supervisors and great co-interns. It is a blast so far. One of the best things about my specific duties is how much time I spend on the floor interacting with visitors. Just the other day, in fact, I witnessed an event that brought to my attention an unfortunate misunderstanding of what sorts of things museums hold, which I would like to here correct.
I was in the Star-Spangled Banner exhibition, where the very flag that Francis Scott Key himself saw that inspired the writing of our national anthem is kept. In the exhibit there is a display case of some of the sewing tools from the time that the flag-maker, Mary Pickersgill, would have made the flag. As I was standing by said display case, a little boy came rushing up to it, his eyes alight with excitement and wonder. He stared at the case, gasped, and pointing at the scissors inside turned to his mother and said, "Look, Mom! The first scissors!"
And although it was one of my favorite things anyone has said yet, and although many museums do have original artifacts, and although I too would prefer to believe that those were the very first scissors ever, I must here repudiate the unfortunate misconception that if an item is in a museum, it must be the first of its kind. I would like to think that I could tell my child that when they get excited about seeing the first scissors, or key, or feather-duster, or what-have-you, but when it comes right down to it I will probably respond just as that boy's mother did, with a voice filled with as much awe as theirs, and say, "wow, that really is amazing, isn't it son?" After all, why ruin their childhood sense of wonder? So, I think I for one will adopt a policy of treating the first scissors rather like Santa Clause, and until children are a little older, all they will ever know is that those scissors are indeed the very first. Ever.