A Hick in Washington

Notes from Margo:

I’m a San Franciscan. So that makes me a bona fide city sophisticate by California standards. But man!! A few days of walking around Washington makes me feel like a hick.

You expect to be awed by the White House. And I was. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is, as the tourist information sign said, “the most famous address in the United States.”

What I didn’t expect are waves of amazement as I walked the streets. That’s Blair House, across from the White House, which you read about every time a foreign dignitary pays a visit to our president. The Justice Department! The EPA! The Supreme Court! The Internal Revenue Service! These icons of the nation – we usually think of them as acronyms or relatively abstract entities. They actually exist; they have street addresses; the addresses are in Washington. (The Library of Congress, inside the actual building, not the number assigned to the book you're reading, is at right.)

Not only that. I walked down the street with our friend Alex Neill. That’s Ben Bradlee’s house, he said. And that’s where Jackie O lived after the assassination. And on the way from the bus stop to the Smithsonian Institution museums, there was Ford Theater, where Lincoln was shot. And there’s the alley where John Wilkes Booth, his assassin, limped out the back and fled on a horse that an accomplice held for him.

And our friend Tibby works in retail. Except that her job is in the Capitol Visitors' Center. What's their best-selling item, by dollar value, Lynn asked, thinking postcards, paperweights, or copies of the Constitution. No, that would be the Congressional Cookbook, she said. (That's her, at left, on the steps outside her place of employment.)

After a while, I just felt like a big hick – gawking at every historical plaque, every monument, feeling like I’ve never seen a place so dense with history. Lynn and I stopped in our tracks as we left the American history museum. The floodlit Washington monument (at 5 p.m., darkness had already fallen) was a brilliant white obelisk against the night sky. The last little bit of the sunset at its foot silhouetted the flagpoles circling its base. Man! We are in the Nation's Capital! For real!

I walked by the White House three times in one day, going back and forth from museums in a disorganized half-lost way. Each time, I passed protesters – an antinuclear vigil that's been in place for 25 years, a group of Tamils with a big banner publicizing their plight in Sri Lanka, and boisterous protesters who object to the bank bailouts. What struck me is that the various cops – the Secret Service, the Park Police – are so accustomed to dissent that their expressions don't change. In one way it was disappointing. You bring your cause to the White House, and not only do the spectators not share your outrage, they are visibly bored. No reporters. No TV cameras. Even the cops are suppressing yawns. On the other hand, I said to myself, I bet there are folks in Burma and Tibet who wish that dissent were so commonplace that the cops aren't interested.

I had a number of weird little harmonic convergences as I cruised from one museum to another. I've been reading Michael Chabon's "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," which is about, among other things, the early days of superhero comic books. So, in the Renwick Gallery of American Crafts, I ran across an exhibit by Mark Newport. He does some odd superhero-based artwork. He knits these huge, sagging, lumpy beige outfits that look like what Batman would wear if his grandmother knitted his bat-suit with heavy-gauge woolen yarn.

Also, I went over to the Dumbarton Oaks gallery, and almost tripped over a docent-led tour about bird imagery in pre-Columbian art. It fit right in with my amateur birding-across-the-country.

Notable: Starlings are doing some odd-ball flocking. I noticed it two days running, and then saw a little squib in the Washington Post. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of starlings flock together around sundown, and make boisterous swirling descents onto some selected trees. When we arrived at Alex and Tibby's house, we parked across the street. As we got out of the Guppy, the whistling song of hundreds of starlings surrounded us. A starling party! And then the next day, when I was waiting for the bus around sundown, hundreds of chattering and whistling starlings swirled into the trees next to the bus stop. As a superhero might comment: Shazzam! Then I saw a little write-up in the Post about huge flocks of starlings and a concurrent rush on the google search engine of "starlings" and "Washington." Sign me, just another googler.

Notable: The tourist information sign, referenced above, outside the White House, which said 1600 Pennsylvania is "the most famous address in the United States," got me thinking about its writer. In my years as a copy editor – writing photo captions and figuring out if descriptions in news stories were accurate – one task was to place brackets around claims. The biggest rodeo in the West; the highest peak in the contiguous 48 states; the oldest continually operational synagogue in California. But what a pleasure that must have been to write: the most famous address in the United States. And that's unquestionably true. But the immediate next question: Is it the most famous address on Earth?

Mileage: None for the past week. We've stayed in Washington with Alex and Tibby, as Lynn recovers from a bout of respiratory distress. Details to come.

Mileage so far: still 7,550