Smiling at each other

I've always like Maira Kalman's style, though her subject matter is sometimes too arch and New York-precious for me. But this series of drawings that she did to commemorate a trip to DC for the Obama inauguration (including a still life of the plastic flowers in the Walt Whitman rest stop along the highway, and the portrait, above, of a smiling museum guard at the National Gallery—something one rarely sees) really captured the sense of the day for me. A colleague described these last two weeks as feeling like "I'm coming out of the fallout shelter and rubbing my eyes in wonder...." And maybe seeing an unexpected smiling face or two. See the rest of these charming works at the New York Times website (search for "Hallelujah!").