Gary descended into the L’Enfant Plaza Metro station just after 7:00 a.m., escaping the cloudless, gradiant-sunrise sky that let any semblance of warmth escape into the atmosphere above.  He rubbed his mitten-less hands together as a series of escalators carried him down to the platform at the bottom of the cavern carved out beneath Washington, D.C. 

Catherine always hated State of the Union day. 

A blue horse dragon sits quietly in the night.  Ten feet away, drops of Budweiser the same temperature as the hands that have been holding it for two hours spatter out onto my clothes and the ground around me as I toss the bottle in the air.  I make it flip over once, then twice, then three times.  The bottle turns gently in the soft light of the one nearby light that’s casting a glow on the carousel.  The fourth try is too violent, too fast, sending the only big drop of beer that remains directly into my eye.  It burns for the second it takes for the bottle to clang against the hard-packed dirt at my feet.  I’m sitting on the National Mall in Washington next to the carousel where my daughter, Annabelle, made me bring her every Saturday.  The blue horse — the one that looks more like a dragon by the time you get to the back — that was hers.  If some other kid got on there before I could hoist Annie up to the ornate saddle fit for a medieval fantasy princess, she threw a fit.  We would wait until the next round, waving ahead the families behind us with an awkward “no please, go ahead” without the chance to properly explain the situation.