Nation's Capitol

Tuesday was spent sightseeing before the Nationals game which was won by the Nats. I confess to leaving in the top of the 6th after Livan Hernandez, yes, THAT Livan Hernandez, threw 124 pitches and Kawakami of the Braves threw 76, for a total of 200 pitches in 5 innings. Usually 200 pitches is an entire game. I was seated next to a 4-year old who whined for all 5 innings and must have a very sore elbow this morning caused by ceaseless ramming into my ribs. And, the last bus to Cherry Hill left the College Park Metro station at 10:02. Talk about whining! I guess the free Nats t-shirt eased the pain a bit.



I did have the pleasure of meeting Princess Beverly McClure, an usher who escorted me through the hoity-toity luxury suites so I didn’t have to circumnavigate the park to get to my seat.





I want to show you Cherry Hill RV Park in College Park, Md. What a nice park!. I also want to show a funny photo op in downtown D.C. There was only one car parked on this street so this officer had many choices of where to stop and do paperwork. Why he chose this spot is beyond me.


I visited the Smithsonian Museum of American Art and the National Gallery of Portraiture. Two works really grabbed me; A View of Oakland by Richard Diebenkorn and Only One by Georgia O’Keeffe. I am one of those “I don’t know art but I know what I like” people. To me, O’Keefe painted flowers, Southwest studies, and other things; Picasso painted LSD dreams; and Dali painted manipulations of time. This tour changed those perceptions. I didn’t mention Dali yesterday but his Sacrament of the Last Supper is astounding.

I saw some historic portraits such as Gilbert Stuart’s unfinished portrait of George Washington. He never finished it because he had promised Martha he would give it to her when it was finished. The work was so good he wanted to use it as a study for other portraits, such as the “Landsdowne” portrait, so he never finished it and didn’t have to give it to Martha.

I visited the National Archives and got to see the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution. These documents are very faded and the signatures are barely legible, of course they are only a couple of hundred years old.

The Constitution caused major goose bumps. The original is on four sheets of parchment, contains 7 Articles, and consists of 4,000 words. It is amazing to think this document which invented a whole new government has only been changed 17 times since it was originally ratified. That is not counting the first ten which make up the Bill of Rights. It is also amazing to consider the mechanics of how it was created through compromise, back-room political deals, and plain old arm-twisting.

Once a final draft was agreed upon, the task of putting it in final form fell to a man named Jacob Shallus, an Official Engrosser (calligrapher) for the Pennsylvania government. It took Shallus 26 hours to hand write the document and he was paid $30. The final sheet has errata statements and one of the sheets has an entire sentence “whited” out using candlewax.

I walked from the Archives down to the World War II Memorial where I took some pictures for my father-in-law and then to the Vietnam Memorial. How ironic that I should visit the Wall on May 4, the fortieth anniversary of the killing of four students at Kent State during protests of the Cambodian bombing and the war in general. Psychologists say we must have “significant emotional experiences” (SEEs) to change our lives. I was in the Navy from ’65 to ’69 mostly overseas. I was fed a constant barrage of “propaganda” over the only radio network we received, the Armed Forces Radio Network. Protestors were dirty, pinko, commies and traitors. I used to yank peace-sign necklaces off people and say the symbol was the footprint of the Great American Chicken. The righteousness of the war was a personal SEE. When I was discharged I found out that maybe my government was presenting a slanted view. I had mixed feelings when Nixon announced the plan to bomb Cambodia to stop the flow of supplies to the Viet Cong and NVA. If it could stop the war then it was a good thing. I think he announced the bombing on May 1 and that set off major student protests across the country. Then on May 4, the Ohio National Guard fired on a crowd of students at Kent State, killing four, two of whom were not even involved in the protests. This was another SEE for me and I became a die-hard liberal, hippie, longhair (curly but long). It was a major SEE for the country because the protest movement spread from radical campuses to everyday people who were wondering why we were in Southeast Asia.

My liberalization made the Wall very emotional to me. There are 58,000 names on the Wall. I had met some of them but I knew all of them. They were the kids I went to school with, they were the boys I drank beer and partied with, and they were the men I served with. Yes, I cried at the Wall again and probably will the next time I am there.

What a day, God Bless America in the morning and how did my country deceive me in the afternoon.

Enough for one day.