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y whole family came for the inauguration. My aunts, uncles, and cousins
came. Our friends from Hyde Park came, along with my girlfriends and their
spouses. Everyone brought their kids. We’d planned twin festivities for the big
and small people over inauguration week, including a kids’ concert, a separate
lunch for kids to take place during the traditional luncheon at the Capitol right
after the swearing in, and a scavenger hunt and children’s party at the White
House that would go on while the rest of us went to inaugural balls.

One of the surprise blessings of the final few months of campaigning had
been an organic and harmonious merging of our family with Joe Biden’s. Though
they’d been political rivals only months earlier, Barack and Joe had a natural
rapport, both of them able to slide with ease between the seriousness of their
work and the lightness of family.

I liked Jill, Joe’s wife, right away, admiring her gentle fortitude and her
work ethic. She’d married Joe and become stepmother to his two sons in 1977,
five years after his first wife and baby daughter were tragically killed in a car
accident. Later, they’d had a daughter of their own. Jill had recently earned her
doctorate in education and had managed to teach English at a community college
in Delaware not just through Joe’s years as a senator but also through his two
presidential campaigns. Like me, she was interested in finding new ways to
support military families. Unlike me, she had a direct emotional connection to
the issue: Beau Biden, Joe’s older son, was serving in Iraq with the National
Guard. He’d been granted a short leave to travel to Washington and see his dad
get sworn in as vice president.

And then there were the Biden grandkids, five altogether, all of them as
outgoing and unassuming as Joe and Jill themselves. They’d shown up at the
Democratic National Convention in Denver and swept Sasha and Malia right
into their boisterous fold, hosting our girls for a sleepover in Joe’s hotel suite, all
too happy to ignore the politics happening around them in favor of making new
friends. We were grateful, always, to have the Biden kids around.

Inauguration Day was bitingly cold, with temperatures never going above
freezing and the wind making it feel more like fifteen degrees. That morning,
Barack and I went to church with the girls, my mom, Craig and Kelly, Maya and
Konrad, and Mama Kaye. All the while, we were hearing that people had begun
forming lines at the National Mall before dawn, bundled up as they waited for
the inaugural activities to begin. As cold as I would eventually get that day, I’d