Becoming a “Friend of the President’s”

picture from Express-Times

How I became “A Friend of the President”

I’m standing in the Rose Garden — yes, that Rose Garden — waiting for the President, Mrs. Clinton, the Vice President, and Mrs. Gore to come out. There’s about a dozen of us, under a canopy, in a circle around a podium with the Presidential seal, waiting. We’d had some refreshments in one of the rooms of White House and then were led to the Garden. The area was lovely, and I could smell roses.

Each one of us had a story we were to tell –a health care story to tell. Mine was about caring for my mother before she died of lymphoma and how, in their small town in West Virginia, there were few services to help us.

Several weeks earlier I’d received a phone call from a facility where I’d once worked before taking a nursing management job. “The White House wants you to call, I have the direct line number.”

I was a bit taken aback. “I guess you don’t mean the Chinese Restaurant on Fourth Street.” A great restaurant was known in Easton as The White House for years. There was silence and then a snort. “No, Mitzi. It’s the one in Washington.”

Now in the Rose Garden, I wasn’t nervous, for some odd reason. Maybe it was because I was in this beautiful area with other people who also had healthcare stories to tell. I wasn’t even nervous when the…