“Good morning, George,” Cher responded evenly. George and I laughed; Cher was silent.

Everything flowed together, everything fit. The people, the places, the normalcy of a hot July morning in Washington made it a day that otherwise would have been enjoyed, then stored somewhere in my memory and forgotten.

Admittedly that’s a pretty big otherwise.

As usual when I got to work during the morning rush, I took the freight elevator to the seventh floor. While the thermal security camera signaled I was a healthy 98.6, I still didn’t think it was fair to squeeze Mighty Chair into a crowded elevator, no matter how much some of those people enjoyed teasing Cher. I walked into the Pro’s office a few minutes after nine o’clock. Sometime during the night two coffee cups had been added to the tower growing on the edge of my desk. It was now a rigid twelve cups high—substantial but not close to the record.

July eleventh began as what we in the journalism game call a slow news day. The media was still suffering through what was referred to as the post-Resurrection malaise—what stories might attract readers two weeks after Jesus had risen. During Trump’s regime and the worldwide pandemic, digging up a story among the hustlers, scoundrels, liars, incompetents, and dolts who had profited from the chaos had been easier than finding shells on a beach. We had so many stories to choose from that anything involving an official lower than a Cabinet undersecretary got thrown back into the press pool.

The Democrats had given us the excitement of bureaucratic competence and natural disasters. In contrast, the Wrightman administration took great pride in its boring normalcy. Rather than those provocative red Make America Great Again caps or I Survived 2020 T-shirts, Wrightman supporters wore lime-green caps reading Reboot Government to Original Factory Setting. This White House stressed quiet professionalism: no leaks, no turmoil, no fuss, no big-bucks bestsellers. As much as possible, everything was done behind closed doors. This quiet was welcomed by everyone except reporters, who once again were forced, as my great editor in chief Howard Bernstein urged, to do journalism.

Our newsroom at the Pro was a large open space plan with small glass-enclosed conference rooms and offices running almost the full length of both side walls. While we had the option of working remotely, most of us chose to come in at least several days a week. Co-cuddling, we called it. My desk was at the farthest end of the office; on a ship it would have been the lookout perch. Each desk had a low-backed rolling chair, except mine of course, with a visitor’s chair on the side. While the desks were all the same standard office gunmetal gray, every side-chair was different. That was our big perk: express your inner self in your choice of a side chair. They ranged from Costco folding chairs covered by bright cushions to style editor Katy Fitzgerald’s circa 1960s strapped-plastic lounger. I’d brought in one of the inexpensive dining room chairs my sister and I had saved from our parents’ home when it was sold: a brown wooden ball-and-claw with a scrolled back and a long-faded green cloth seat. The gnaw marks chewed into the arm made me confident it had been mine.