The way we were!
"On a June afternoon in 2009, something quietly extraordinary unfolded in the Diplomatic Room of the White House, a moment so human, so warm, and so beautifully unexpected that it stopped political Washington in its tracks. President Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States and the first African American to hold that office, gently escorted 87-year-old former First Lady Nancy Reagan into the room to sign the Ronald Reagan Centennial Commission Act, a bipartisan piece of legislation that passed the Senate unanimously, honoring the upcoming 100th birthday of America's 40th President. Two people from opposite ends of the political spectrum, bound together in that moment by something far bigger than party lines: grace, history, and a shared love of country. And then it happened. As President Obama picked up his pen and began to sign the bill into law, Nancy Reagan leaned in and exclaimed with a delighted laugh, 'Oh, you're a lefty!' She was not talking about politics. She was talking about his left hand. The room burst into laughter, and in that single unscripted moment, the walls between Republican and Democrat, between generations, between two entirely different Americas, came tumbling beautifully down. Obama had publicly praised Nancy in his remarks that day, saying she had been 'extraordinarily gracious to both me and Michelle during our transition here,' and describing how, in what he called her 'long goodbye' with President Reagan through his decade-long battle with Alzheimer's disease, she had become 'a voice on behalf of millions of families experiencing the depleting, aching reality of Alzheimer's disease.' When Obama later signed an executive order to resume federal stem cell research, one of the very first phone calls he made was to Nancy Reagan, because nobody understood better than she did what that research could mean for suffering families across America. This was not a political moment. This was a human one. A young president honoring an old love story. A nation, briefly, at its very best.