2 Board Alley

Here's Why I Won't Be At The Inauguration

This tops my list of reasons to avoid going to the inauguration, an event that takes place on the coldest day of winter, in the midst of a crowd.  This year, they're closing off some of the bridges into D.C. and some of my fellow D.C. area folk will be watching the event in he warmth of a church, restaurant or city hall. I'd hoped to rent out my house or driveway for a quick buck, but alas, that turned out to be not such a great idea. A good friend of mine wants me to go with her to view this historic event, but I just don't know. . . I quit going to 4th of July celebrations on the Mall because of the crowd on the Metro and at the Mall, and I don't think I want to be in the middle of an enormous, excited crowd in midwinter. 

But I will be watching it on t.v.

Forty Years Ago: Notes For Another Time

I don't want the day to pass without writing about my memories of the day that Reverend King was murdered.  At this point in my life, the memories are like snapshots.  I was ten and living in Maryland, going to the fifth grade and helping out my neighbor, who was wonderful and alcoholic, and who needed help with her kids from time to time.

And that's where I first saw the news--at my neighbor's, sitting on the long, avocado colored sofa in the sunken living room, watching television while the kids slept.  What program was I watching?  Can't remember.  All I remember is watching the news come on and being so frightened that my father had to come over and stay with me until my neighbor came home.

My next memories were of being too frightened to sleep alone in my bedroom and camping out in my sleeping bag on the floor of my parents' bedroom. 

And then came the riots downtown in DC--I recall that they happened, but we were too far into Maryland to be affected by them.  They still scared me.

In June I was walking to school when I became aware of the kids around me talking about Kennedy and death.  How odd, I thought, as I crossed the street in front of the school, that so many kids would be talking about President Kennedy's death.  How odd.  When I got into the classroom and saw our teacher crying, I was even more confused.  It wasn't until she told us that the senator had been shot that I found out.

So another funeral.  More riots and burning cities.  The presidential election. 

So , so much for a single season.

Bethesda, Tapas y Cerveza

After my haircut, Paul and I strolled around Woodmont and Bethesda Avenues in the balmy afternoon weather.  We'd pretty much decided to eat at Jaleo where the tapas is out of the world, but first, we decided to window shop a bit so that we could practice not spending money, as our financial planner has advised, seeing that we are in year two of trying to sell our townhouse.

I'm not certain that there was much to this patch of Bethesda twenty or so years ago, just old houses that were being converted to businesses and two-story buildings which housed barber shops, interior decorators, appliance repair shops--all part of a time that I thought would never change at all, including the Hot Shoppes that used to be at the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and East-West Highway.  The drowsy ambiance of the town was accentuated here and there by antique stores, second-hand book stores and the farmers' market.  Of the three kinds of businesses, only the farmers' market remains, remaining open nearly year-round in the middle of a town where high- rise buildings now erupt on each block, and each building houses at least one chain store (upscale, of course!).

It's just different--not better or worse.  The population seems three times the size it used to be, making the strolling hand in hand more of an ideal than a reality.  We looked like two links from a chain rather than a middle- aged couple enjoying the sunny afternoon. 

If you're ever in the area, you have to try the restaurant.  You just do, and that's that.  The tapas is near-perfect, from the chilled asparagus to the pan-sauteed mackerel and everything in between, including the stuffed squid and the spinach with pine nuts and raisins.  Yes, we spent some money, but since I'm using an old gift certificate for the next four haircuts, and Paul is making his own cost-cutting additions to the pot, we decided to go ahead and eat out--for probably the last time in a long, long time.

If I Had A Camera

I'd have taken many shots of Union Station.  After five days in New York City, coming home to the dignified spaces of shorter buildings, to the quiet white/grey dome of the Capitol Building set against the budding trees, and  the statues and fountains and state flags made me feel home in a place where I belonged. I bring this up because now that the conference is past me, I'm going to be writing an essay on literacy in Appalachia and its effects three generations later.  Needless to say, my prolific grandmother is going to be central to the piece, as will be her letters, photos etc., including her Washington, DC photo album fom 1919.  She has several photos of Union Station and places around DC that I'm not sure exist anymore.  My two favorite photos are of my grandparents in their uniforms, she navy, he army, saluting each other, and of the two of them after their small wedding, leaving for Washington (state).  Once I scan all of the visuals, I'll post a few here, including the ones of the train station.

It's good to be home.  The conference went well (expensively so), and though I lost a friend with whom I'd hoped to patch things up with, I feel like I've turned a new corner professionally, so to speak.

Spring Comes to Washington, DC

Joy

The Blackbyrd's "Walking in Rhythm," moves me in sound to a sunny Silver Spring afternoon in 1974, from the triangle -shaped bus station, past the parking lot and the rectory, down Pershing Drive, the huge oaks outside of the convent are just beginning to put out their green leaves and daffodils are everywhere on  this street of 1940-style homes--everyone has their own clump of daffodils and  the song moves me in sound and I wish I had my own flutist to skip and sway down across Dale Drive and curve down the hill, past the irises, the hydrangeas and the rest of the everlasting garden of my mind--if I want to twirl around a few times, no one will think it strange--grazing in the grass is a gas baby can you dig? The horn section pops up on the convent lawn "I can dig it she can digit he can dig it" sing the nuns emerging from behind the bushes. Hands on hips, every sister who teaches me follows me now, down Pershing Drive "You gottaa go where you want to want to go " we sing , looping down Springvale Terrace past the old house supposed to have been the slave quarters for the convents’ former owners, and down past the hockey field where the noble Owls played, and into the public library, interrupting the silence, into the room where the old back issues of Life magazine were stacked and then down the aisle, tossing my overdue books back on to shelves, and, through the glass picture window onto Collesville Road while “Oh My Maria,” we sing, the sisters and I and the librarians who have thrown down their decimal systems and joined us in our joyous jigging jangle down the road, almost passing Mrs. K's Toll House, but not before we try to get a table for twenty- five dancing ,singing women and a few male library patrons who are warming up to "Games People Play" and we try but do not succeed getting a table without for we have no ties and sports jackets, we don't know where to go . . . .guess we’ll leave it alone and we file out onto the garden and through the old wooden gate, the remnant of the toll house's first incarnation before the family Kreuzberg took it over in this century, and turned it into the expanse of flowers and nuns and dancing librarians and we'll call it a day for now before we’re thrown out, “ooh, ooh child, things are going get easier,” shout the tennis players down  near Sligo Creek at the tennis court where between thwach, thwach, thwachs of their game, they gather by the fence and shout out –“someday we'll walk in the rays of the beautiful sun" so we invite these caged athletes to throw down their rackets, right now, and join the ring around the basketball court right now, morris dancing to “Philadelphia Freedom,” and there's plenty of footwork shining light on the concrete ground, toeing each line and curve and the simultaneous throwing from the free throw line of two librarians who slam, dunk and shimmy through the baskets, and are still standing better than they’ve ever, yeah, yeah, yeah and waltzing we are, tennis players and librarians, sisters and sisters, twirling across the bridge to the picnic area, where weekend families lift their barbeque tongs and “freedom tastes of reality,” they remind us, though we laughed and said nothing’s that simple and we race to the creek to watch it run along the little stones for life so say the crayfish, is but a dream and we let it slip away. We hike up the frayed cuffs of our flared jeans in the dusking evening sun and we pause, foot to claw, and listen for all the secrets of the universe as they pass us up always up, and, before the twilight trawls us into its everlasting net, we ask the poplars along Bennington street: if its magic, why can't it be everlasting? We lift our eyes upward and sigh, and the poplars can’t answer us, they can only advise us to listen to the wind of our souls and then to patter back up the road to our respective beds before the dew on the ground chills our bare feet. Though we want to last forever, we know we never will. “Will you carry the words of the love with you,” whisper the ferns near the stone and slate porch, and, before I close the glass-paned storm door and push the heavy wooden door shut, I smile and think about stopping, and then starting all again.

Walter Reed and Building 18: I Don't Get It

It's not that I don't believe that the hospital's campus needs to be cleaned up, it's just that the local news over the past several years has been that Walter Reed was closing because it was old and dilapidated, and that Bethesda Naval would become the hospital of the armed services in D.C.   

So, when Dana Priest's article about Walter Reed came out, I thought it was strange that they were using it at all for outpatients, given the push to close the place.  I'm aghast (but not surprised, given the administration we have) that returning wounded soldiers have to live in a dump. While the hospital itself is in good shape, it's the buildings normally used to house visiting family members that are falling apart. (except for the one built for officers--it sounds pretty nice). But they didn't begin molding five years ago, and the cockroaches and vermin didn't just show up.  I  don't understand why the military-medical establishment didn't forsee that there would be a great number of outpatients with this war and plan accordingly.  Maybe they did.  Maybe the career military were ignored. 

However you feel about the war, you have to agree that this is a shabby way of caring for the men and women who have come back injured. 

And in today's Post, there's an article about the findings of an APA comission on the military's mental health service--no surprise that there is a greater need for services than are available, and that the administration  seems to be in denial:

The Defense Department's mental health experts hadn't read the report. Pentagon spokeswoman Cynthia Smith said the military is proud of its mental health services record, including a new program this year that checks up on service members after they return home to their families.

Jeeeeez

Getting Poked in The Eye

My former husband used to say, as a form of extreme understatement, "sure beats getting poked in the eye with a sharp stick." I've thought often of that expression this past week as I've grappled with my new contact lenses--getting the darn things out, to be specific.  There have been moments when I've felt that I'd much rather get poked in the eye and be done with it than to have to keep prying at my eyeball to get at the lens.

This isn't the first time I've worn contacts.  During my fifteenth summer, my best friend, Monica, got contacts (it was her fifteenth summer, too), which motivated me right quick to insist on them for myself.  So, after being fitted and helped with putting them in at the ophthalmologist's, I was given my own set of wetting solution and contacts case and sent home to await the scads of boys who would be so overtaken by my unadorned hazel eyes that I'd be dating all summer and then some.  Given that we went to an all-girls high school, summer was a ripe time to carpe the guys, and I wasn't going to be left out.

Back then, my lenses were the hard kind, and I spent a week getting used to the idea that in order to wear them, I would have to put them in my eye.  Now, you have to know that I have always been a chicken when it comes to pain.  I refused braces because of what I'd heard, and the doctor had to anesthetize my ears in order to pierce them.  So, you can well understand why I spent many happy hours at the kitchen table, with my mother's old yellowed plastic mirror(two-sided--one side magnified everything), a box of Kleenex, and the lenses.  Monica, the child of a doctor and future doctor herself, had a much calmer approach to lenses and was able to pop hers in and wear them, blithely.  I envied her blithe, but whenever my index finger got close enough to my eyeball to be popped on top of it, I'd think, in my non-medical but highly imaginative way, "I'M PUTTING SOMETHING IN MY EYE!  WHAT IF I MAKE A MISTAKE?  WHAT IF I HURT MYSELF?  GO BLIND???????"   And down would come my hand.

I must have spent days at this.  If it had been videotaped, there would have been scenes of daylight and nightfall.  Of my siblings or my dad coming in to eat breakfast, lunch, dinner.  Of the cats being fed and sometimes jumping up on the table to snooze on the newspapers across from me.  Of our housekeeper cleaning all around me on a Saturday.  But Monica was having a great summer, and I was determined to get those lenses in my eyes, so finally, the magic happened and I was wearing two uncomfortable  pieces of plastic in my eyes, developing the ocular callouses necessary for teen vanity.

I wore contacts for ten years, and then my eyes became too dry to wear them comfortably.  Miraculously, I was able to still attract boys and men, and in the ensuing years, dated and then married twice, even though I was seldom without glasses.  In fact, I don't really mind wearing glasses most of the time, but there were times along the way when using glasses was uncomfortable--like when I studied Tai Kwon Do.  I couldn't afford sports glasses with shatterproof lenses, so I shied away from sparring and eventually, from Tai Kwon Do (I've a blue belt, thank you very much). 

About ten years ago, I asked my eye doctor if there were any lenses that I could try.  He didn't think so, but he plopped one on my eye and said "try this."  It felt like  sandpaper and he took it out after three minutes.  Resigned, I took my prescription to the optometrist's and got a new pair of frames.

Let's flash forward to now.  In the past few years, my eyes have become increasingly presbyopic (Who knew?  Dad is Catholic and Mom was Episcopalian.), which means that I've had to resort to all kinds of neck stretches and eyeglass contortions to read small print.  You know the kind--where you flip the stems to the top of your head and look through a frame that is now resting at a 90 -degree from you face.   Or holding a paper far away--as in Michigan-- just to read it.  Problem is, I teach writing and reading, and have to be able to do both in a way that inspires confidence in my students.  As the years dragged on, I was inspiring amusement whenever I misread a word. 

I needed bifocals, or "progressive lenses" as they are called these days.  So political, these lenses. A pair of progressive lenses corrected for astigmatism scared me.  Fish eyes.  That's what I'd have, those huge overly magnified eyes that I'd seen on others.  My long submerged vanity came rushing back to the surface, and I asked if I could get contacts.  This time, it was a go, and last week, I spent a happy half hour putting them in, and two hours trying to get them out.  Even did visualizations.  No kidding.  The technician was reduced to getting a lens and putting it in his eye just to show me how easy it really was.  When the doctor came in, I asked if they would leave me alone to poke at my eyes until I got the hang of it.  Having an audience made me too nervous.

Eventually, before another day could be pulled off of the page-a-day calendar, I got the lenses out and back in.   I decided to get some new frames with progressive lenses  just in case these contacts didn't pan out.  I've only worn the contacts twice in the past week, and I put it off not out of fear but impatience.  That first night, I was tired and wanted to go to bed, but not until I removed the lenses.  For an hour, I hung over the sink in one bathroom and then the next, the BINX following me, no doubt wondering why I was groaning and poke my eyes.  This time, my contacts-wearing husband showed me how to take them out by taking his own out.  Like last time, though, it wasn't technique that I lacked, it was the idea of poking my eyeball with my fingers.  Although clean, they were still fingers, in my eyes, poking and pinching.  In my mind's eye, I had visions of looking quite the fashion  fox in my progressive lenses.  Who needed contacts? 

Gradually I've gotten used to the idea and technique of taking the lenses out and suspect that in the next few weeks, will warm to wearing them more often.  In the meantime, I'm sporting my new, cool, Judy Jetson frames with progressive (they march in favor of reproductive rights) lenses.

 

It's a Jungle Out There

Here's an unretouched photo of my brother in the backyard of my Dad's house.  My brother is 6'2" and he's not kneeling.  The bamboo and assorted other growth is that tall.  When we lived there in the 70's, the bamboo was a nice, trim boundary against the back fence.  Kind of exotic for Washington, DC in those pre-panda days.  Now, we're going to pay a landscaper to get rid of it so that, along with a better view of the yard, the other contractors can work back there without fear of getting lost forever.   

Here's another picture of my brother before I lost him to the jungle:

Sigh.

(edited to remove photos. 6/29/08)

Mother of Sorrow

I spent last night reading Richard McCann's new collection of short stories, Mother of Sorrow.  Although the story does involve a Catholic family, it isn't part of my "writing about nuns" series that I did last week.  Instead, this is the story of a man and his relationships with his parents, his brother, and his closeted self.  His father dies when the narrator is eleven, and he watches his older brother, someone beset with learning difficulties, vision problems and the like, fall apart, while at the same time becoming the family "good boy."  That both brothers are gay creates tension as the older brother, despite his many failures, is the one to come out to the family, while the "good son" doesn't even come out to himself until he is an adult. 

The reason why I bought the book is that I've begun to collect books written about growing up in the Silver Spring/Wheaton/Washington, DC area.  McCann draws on his upbringing in this area as he creates his stories.  I wish that I could write a fantastic literary theoretical reason for my collection, but I'm tired, and I think that this collection will go into the bookcase  set aside for nostalgia or hometown.