In the cognizant stillness of a hurricane freshly passed and the appointment of a President soon to come, Lina and I took to walking and marched upon Washington. A city carved from the wilderness and laid out monumental as if for a race of giants. Dwarfed by its riches and likewise short on time, we elected to divide and conquer: museums by day, memorials by night.
In Washington, there is a curious echo to footsteps. In part this may be attributed to the grand scale of the design, but consider also, underfoot, the culmulative weight of history. The city carries itself like a memorial, a time capsule, a necropolis. A place where Walt Whitman is still a civil servant, and Watergate, a hotel. One can almost smell the gas-lamps down stately corridors with their bone-white facades, picked clean. A smug confidence chills the air born of some half-remembered Golden Age, every urban space clicked into place without a seam. Perhaps the echo is the conquering of time, with but a defiant flock of pigeons to blunt the inlaid precision of it all.
Into the sky like the gunshot scatter in Dallas. For here Kennedy slept, and there, some say, the rifle that got him (a must-see exhibit), and over there, across the bridge, beyond the Potomac, where I could not reach - his body. In the gift-shop of the National Archives a book by Mark Lane accuses its host of collusion in the assassination it presently profits from. Beside it, a book by Bill O’Reilly soothes in support of the official record; only crazy people kill.
A November wind struck home as we turned past the obelisk onto the west Mall. As forgetful tourists we marked the memorials with our uninspired photographs -all but the one paying tribute to the fallen soldiers in Vietnam - here we walked wordlessly and reverently past names that meant nothing to us at all, to hang meekly by the binder of registered names as if intent on finding some long-dead relative. How many pages did we turn before we moved on?
Before long we reached the Lincoln memorial and found in its temple some reprieve from the cooling evening air. Lina read the inscriptions on the walls dutifully; bused-in kids darted through the crowd; a mother fed her newborn on a stoop; and I, slurping a Dr. Pepper, stared blankly at the statue of Abraham Lincoln, inventorying in my mind the movie backdrops it had served. Outside the sky was blushing. As if cut from the draping clouds there broke an oblong circle of sky. Winking in the dark of the wooded edge, it seemed undignified; a blemish to the otherwise postcard symmetry of the horizon-tipped monument.
As night fell we retreated from the Mall in search of food. Just up the street from the theater where Lincoln had been slain, I savored a birthday meal of sea scallops, sauteed spinach and crab-meat hash. I would later learn that a childhood acquaintance was dying right then, perhaps dying as I took dessert. He had been 36, like me. Our last correspondence occured a week before his death, in the thread of a Walt Whitman quote I had posted on Facebook; his epitaph was short and unsweetened: "Pretty deep!". I offered no reply. Outside of the restaurant a civic sign reminds the passerby that this is "The Street Where Lincoln Lives On". O Captain! My Captain! Our fearful trip is done... O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells.
Deposits of a life leftover come back and ring. That echo again, perhaps chilled of the dead expanse that memory edits out: the construction scaffolds outside of Union Station, the salvageable goods of homeless occupiers strewn by statues, the crooked old newspaper box that ate my loose change. For all of this is Washington too. In the unrehearsed symphony of nothing much happening one bids the moon to be more luminous. What is happening and what has happened never quite meet: the memory rewrites itself; history is carved in stone.
In Washington, there is a curious echo to footsteps. In part this may be attributed to the grand scale of the design, but consider also, underfoot, the culmulative weight of history. The city carries itself like a memorial, a time capsule, a necropolis. A place where Walt Whitman is still a civil servant, and Watergate, a hotel. One can almost smell the gas-lamps down stately corridors with their bone-white facades, picked clean. A smug confidence chills the air born of some half-remembered Golden Age, every urban space clicked into place without a seam. Perhaps the echo is the conquering of time, with but a defiant flock of pigeons to blunt the inlaid precision of it all.
Into the sky like the gunshot scatter in Dallas. For here Kennedy slept, and there, some say, the rifle that got him (a must-see exhibit), and over there, across the bridge, beyond the Potomac, where I could not reach - his body. In the gift-shop of the National Archives a book by Mark Lane accuses its host of collusion in the assassination it presently profits from. Beside it, a book by Bill O’Reilly soothes in support of the official record; only crazy people kill.
A November wind struck home as we turned past the obelisk onto the west Mall. As forgetful tourists we marked the memorials with our uninspired photographs -all but the one paying tribute to the fallen soldiers in Vietnam - here we walked wordlessly and reverently past names that meant nothing to us at all, to hang meekly by the binder of registered names as if intent on finding some long-dead relative. How many pages did we turn before we moved on?
Before long we reached the Lincoln memorial and found in its temple some reprieve from the cooling evening air. Lina read the inscriptions on the walls dutifully; bused-in kids darted through the crowd; a mother fed her newborn on a stoop; and I, slurping a Dr. Pepper, stared blankly at the statue of Abraham Lincoln, inventorying in my mind the movie backdrops it had served. Outside the sky was blushing. As if cut from the draping clouds there broke an oblong circle of sky. Winking in the dark of the wooded edge, it seemed undignified; a blemish to the otherwise postcard symmetry of the horizon-tipped monument.
As night fell we retreated from the Mall in search of food. Just up the street from the theater where Lincoln had been slain, I savored a birthday meal of sea scallops, sauteed spinach and crab-meat hash. I would later learn that a childhood acquaintance was dying right then, perhaps dying as I took dessert. He had been 36, like me. Our last correspondence occured a week before his death, in the thread of a Walt Whitman quote I had posted on Facebook; his epitaph was short and unsweetened: "Pretty deep!". I offered no reply. Outside of the restaurant a civic sign reminds the passerby that this is "The Street Where Lincoln Lives On". O Captain! My Captain! Our fearful trip is done... O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells.
Deposits of a life leftover come back and ring. That echo again, perhaps chilled of the dead expanse that memory edits out: the construction scaffolds outside of Union Station, the salvageable goods of homeless occupiers strewn by statues, the crooked old newspaper box that ate my loose change. For all of this is Washington too. In the unrehearsed symphony of nothing much happening one bids the moon to be more luminous. What is happening and what has happened never quite meet: the memory rewrites itself; history is carved in stone.
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