When I was a teenager, I didn’t cry at all, really. As I understand it, that’s very age-appropriate. Plus, it was the 80s. It’s not like Samantha Baker cried when her parents forgot her sixteenth birthday, right? But I know that on January 20, 1989 — four days after my eighteenth birthday — I cried.

I grew up in Huntington, Indiana, which happens to be the same hometown as Dan Quayle. And in the summer of 1988, George H.W. Bush was running for President, and he chose Quayle to be his running mate. It was an unexpected experience for my hometown, starting with a rally at the county courthouse and ending with me attending the inauguration in Washington, D.C. I was a fan of Bush, and even did a little campaigning (both the Republican Party and I have changed a lot since then!). Most of the town was crazy about the idea of the hometown boy becoming VP. And Quayle’s family owned the local newspaper, so it wasn’t like there was an alternative narrative. On the day after the election, the front page read, in letters about four inches high, “We Won!”

Anyway, after the Bush/Quayle win the local Republican Party took a HUGE contingent to D.C. for the inauguration. I was lucky enough to be able to share a room with three other senior girls, and there was a group of four senior boys sharing a room also. The trip was my eighteenth birthday gift to myself, and two days after my birthday, I took my first airplane ride to D.C. And I am not exaggerating when I say that everyone on the plane to D.C. was from my town. We four girls were seated near the front and some super kind senior citizens, who gave us tips on dealing with the flight, and at the end invited us to tour the White House with them the following day. We enthusiastically accepted!

I remember almost nothing about the White House itself. But I remember two things very clearly from the outing. The first is that one of my friends took a picture of a homeless man in a park. And he was NOT happy about it. He came over and demanded that she give him money for his picture. Our accompanying adults just told us to “keep walking,” and we did. That may have been the first time I saw a homeless person; I didn‘t get around much as a kid. The other thing I remember is waiting inside the White House for our tour to start, and a very friendly Secret Service agent came over and talked to us for what felt like a long time. He could not stop saying how great Ronald and Nancy Reagan were, and how much they were going to miss them.

The next day, we attended the inauguration. And when I say attended, I mean that we were in a standing area about a hundred yards from the Capitol, behind the press stand. But we were there, in person, and we could see in the distance, and also on video screens. We could hear what was happening right there on the steps of the Capitol. While I stood there watching, one man (Ronald Reagan) went from being the most powerful person in the world to being . . . not. And at some point during the ceremony, the weight of that just hit me, and I started to cry. (Quiet, happy tears. Not huge sobs. It was still the eighties.)

Inauguration Day has been very special to me ever since. Whether I liked the guy taking over or not, I’ve marveled at the way our democracy provides for an orderly handoff, from one President to the next. Based on the will of the people.

So last week’s invasion of the Capitol Building hit me hard. I know it hit everyone hard. It was jarring, as the invading mob meant it to be. But when one reporter pointed out that we no longer had a peaceful transition of power, I thought of how I had felt that day in 1989, and how completely opposite I felt on January 6, 2021. And I cried again.