“So, what was the highlight?”

That’s the question most people have asked since I returned from attending the Inauguration festivities in Washington, D.C.

And my answer surprises even me: It is the road trip home, listening for the first time to Barack Obama reading “Dreams of My Father.”

We’ve gone from the ridiculous to the sublime. Somehow Americans have managed to elect an intellectual to the highest office.

As the self-aware reflections in his first book suggest, though, Obama is much more than an intellectual.  Listening to his narration, as he takes on voices as varied as his high school friend Ray and his Kenyan sisters, aunts and “Granny,” I realize our president could just as easily have been a novelist — not simply a stodgy law professor.

Considering Obama’s intellect and artistry, then, I have cringed each time a TV host or pundit has noted that this Inauguration is particularly historic because America now has its first African American president. The significance of that fact is undeniable, but it is such a limiting lens through which to see this moment.

Obama has so many other unprecedented qualities — which his cultural and political analyses in “Dreams of My Father” reveal. He is progressive in the most radical sense, the president who can truly navigate our 21st-century world because he has spent his life thinking … critically thinking … about … everything.

By this time in my own thought process, I shift my mind again (never has a moment of cognitive dissonance felt so good), and I begin to think about that rest stop in Pennsylvania on the way home. I went into the restroom, and I saw four adolescent boys goofing off, as they are wont to do.

But these boys — all African American — also proudly donned big buttons celebrating Obama. I hope I’m not being overly presumptuous here — but I’ve heard it time and time again — boys like these had been brought to the Inauguration by parents who wanted them to witness the moment first-hand: a black man becoming the most powerful person in the world.

The boys would now know they can be anything they want to be (or so the hope goes — more on that later).

There’s no reason, I realized looking at the boys, that Obama can’t be both the first African American president and the first president to grasp the complex realities of living and leading in the Information Age.

In fact, as a close reading of “Dreams of My Father” makes clear, Obama’s lack of a coherent familial and racial identity is what spurs his thinking.  He is able to approach most political and cultural texts (both spoken and written, informal and formal) as an outsider and coolly dissect their messages.

The passage from the book that most resonates in this regard comes when he walks into his first South Side Chicago barbershop — Smitty’s — soon after arriving in the city to start his career as a community organizer.

The talk turns to Harold Washington, Chicago’s recently elected first black mayor:

That’s how black people talked about Chicago’s mayor, with a familiarity and affection normally reserved for a relative. His picture was everywhere: on the walls of shoe repair shops and beauty parlors; still glued to lampposts from the last campaign; even in the windows of the Korean dry cleaners and Arab grocery stores, displayed prominently, like some protective totem. From the barbershop wall, that portrait looked down on me now: the handsome, grizzled face, the bushy eyebrows and mustache, the twinkle in the eyes. Smitty noticed me looking at the picture and asked if I’d been in Chicago during the election. I told him I hadn’t. He nodded his head.

“Had to be here before Harold to understand what he means to this city,” Smitty said. “Before Harold, seemed like we’d always be second-class citizens.”

“Plantation politics,” the man with the newspaper said.

“That’s just what is was too,” Smitty said. “A plantation. Black people in the worst jobs. The worst housing.  Police brutality rampant.”

As the conversation in the barbershop progresses, a post-Inauguration reader realizes how the text of “Dreams of My Father” (along with, for that matter, so many other texts) has been transformed by recent events.

Obama is talking about Harold Washington and Chicago, but he’s really talking about a long, complicated history of resistance, assimilation and struggle for leadership within the broader African-American community. And as the conversation gets deeper and more personal, the present-day reader can’t help but replace Harold Washington and Chicago with Obama and America:

Smitty said, “The night Harold won, let me tell you, people just ran the streets. It was like the day Joe Louis knocked out Schmeling. Same feeling. People weren’t just proud of Harold. They were proud of themselves. I stayed inside, but my wife and I, we couldn’t get to bed until three, we were so excited. When I woked up the next morning, it seemed like the most beautiful day of my life …”

Smitty’s voice had fallen to a whisper, and everyone in the room began to smile. From a distance, reading the newspapers back in New York, I had shared in their pride, the same sort of pride that made me root for any pro football team that fielded a black quarterback. But something was different about what I was now hearing; there was a fervor in Smitty’s voice that seemed to go beyond politics. “Had to be here to understand,” he had said. He’d meant here in Chicago; but he could also have meant here in my shoes, an older black man who still burns from a lifetime of insults, of foiled ambitions, of ambitions abandoned before they’ve been tried. I asked myself if I could truly understand that. I assumed, took for granted, that I could.  Seeing me, these men had made the same assumption. Would they feel the same way if they knew more about me? I wondered. I tried to imagine what would happen if Gramps [Obama's white grandfather] walked into the barbershop at that moment, how the talk would stop, how the spell would be broken; the different assumptions at work.

Smitty handed me the mirror to check his handiwork, then pulled off my smock and brushed off the back of my shirt. “Thanks for the history lesson,” I said, standing up.

“Hey, that’s part’s free. Haircut’s ten dollars.”

On a more personal level, Obama’s ability to question both his and others assumptions about this moment — through the lens of his own complex racial heritage — shows an incredibly sophisticated literacy, an ability to read a text on multiple levels at the same time.

But on a broader level, this moment not only foreshadows the national joy surrounding Obama’s political victory but also reveals how that victory is a somewhat unexpected climax to the larger American racial narrative, an already lengthy story that seemed to have many more chapters to go.

But of course it’s not really a climax. It’s just another story arc. As Charles M. Blow reminds us in The New York Times, the excitement shouldn’t make us forget the enormous racial barriers that remain:

For the presidential inauguration, blacks descended on Washington in droves with a fanatical, Zacchaeus-like need to catch a glimpse of this M.L.K. 2.0. “Ooo-bama!” For them, he was it — a game changer, soul restorer, dream fulfiller. Everything. Ooo-K.

Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina, the majority whip, tapped into the fervor Monday night at the BET Honors awards in Washington when he proclaimed, “Every child has lost every excuse.”

What? That’s where I have to put my foot down. That’s going a bridge too far.

I’m a big proponent of personal responsibility, but children too often don’t have a choice. They are either prisoners of their parentage or privileged by it. Some of their excuses are hollow. But other excuses are legitimate, and they didn’t magically disappear when Obama put his left hand on the Lincoln Bible.

Blow goes on to list many of the heart-rending challenges that remain for black youth in America. He concludes by stating simply but eloquently: “Black people have to keep their feet on the ground even as their heads are in the clouds. … President Obama is a potent symbol, but he’s no panacea.”

Which brings me back to the kids at the Pennsylvania rest stop. Yes, they came and saw. But unless we cultivate in them the same type of complex literacy that Obama himself developed, the significance of this historical moment will be lost. This Inauguration needs to be more than a nostalgic “I was there!” commodity. At its best, it should become an entry-point to reevaluate, retell and ultimately relive a more just version of the American story.