A John Glenn childhood

WASHINGTON -- When we walked into the White House Tuesday afternoon, the military pianist in the grand foyer was playing Bob Dylan's Don't Think Twice, It's Alright as a gentle, flowing ballad, oddly denaturing the lament of a lover on the cusp of being unloved; a man who, as Dylan himself once wrote, "gazed into the grey mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze."

Milling on the polished floors, under full-length canvases of Clinton and Reagan and Carter and First Bush, were blasé cabinet members and awestruck Girl Scouts, rabbis in yarmulkes and marines in medals. (Second Bush would unveil his official portrait here two days later.) Then we jaded hacks were herded in.

I never had seen the EastRoom so crammed with photographers and television crews and correspondents. Dozens of journalists were crushed against the eastern wall, and duly credentialed vandals perched and trampled on a rolled-up carpet, straining for a fractional view of the ceremony to come.

I imagined that it must have been like this when the martyred, murdered Lincoln lay in this very salon, 28 presidents ago.

"How fitting it is," I laughed to myself, "for all these people to assemble at the White House to celebrate my daughter's seventh birthday."

Indeed, it had been seven years to the day since our Lizzie made her début at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto and -- coiled in a Onesie and wailing like a Fury -- on Page 1 of the National Post. Now she was a Maryland