Our neighbors are expecting their first grandchild, due any day now. These folks have lived next door since we moved into the house 26 years ago. I remember their daughters as little kids and they remember my daughters as babies.
It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that we would stay in the house more than a quarter century (maybe two years?!), but stay put we have, and the staying and the putting have brought a great full-circle quality to life that almost makes up for the years lost to traffic jams and Metro delays.
So on this red-letter day for my family — one daughter celebrating a birthday and another learning that a long wait will soon be over — I pause to savor the richness of it all — and to give thanks.
(Two rush hours, two red-letter days, much gratitude.)
It is 7, 214 miles from Washington, D.C., to Kigali, Rwanda, where Tom has gone on a business trip. In less than an hour it will be 7,800 miles — just a few hundred more — from Nasa’s New Horizons probe to Pluto.
Earth meets space, the Kuiper Belt, that which lies beyond our solar system in what surely deserves to be called terra incognita (except that it isn’t terra!).
Early pictures show an orange globe with a crown of methane and nitrogen ice and craters the size of the Grand Canyon. By tonight we will have more photographs of this celestial body, photographs that may help scientists decide whether to call it a planet or a dwarf planet.
What we have right now is a tantalizing glimpse, a collectively held breath — and of course, the wonder.
Yesterday I went to the National Independence Day Parade with my dear friend Kay, who is visiting from France. It was mostly a chance to hang out with her, but it was also an opportunity to soak up the holiday spirit and marvel at the expansiveness of the American dream.
There were high school marching bands from Ohio, Nebraska and Alabama. There were cloggers and Irish steppers and Chinese-American dancers. There were the Sikhs of America holding down a Smokey the Bear balloon.
There was, in short, all manner of celebration and diversity. Not exactly a small hometown ensemble — but not sophisticated and glitzy, either. More of a medley than I thought possible in these days of politicized newscasts and gerrymandered districts. And that in itself, I think, is worth a parade.
Like most of the rest of the working world (those of us who are working today) I’m wearing jeans and sandals. Also seen in the office today: flip-flops, shorts and a little gray terrier. The pace is slow, the day is short and the mindset is … what is the mindset? I’ve already forgotten.
I’m tempted to hang up a “Gone Fishin'” sign, but I don’t want to check out completely.
Instead, I’m sitting here in office chair, hands on the keyboard, work piled on the desk, summoning up the energy to dive into it.
I missed National Trails Day (June 6) but am not too late for Great Outdoors Month (all of June). The idea behind these celebrations is to get people outside. No problem for a walker in the suburbs. I’m outside as often as possible.
But Great Outdoors Month is a good time to ponder the great divide between outside and in, between natural light and its artificial cousin, between the elements and our shelter from them.
Thinking back to Benin, open doors, the colorful cloths hung where screens would be. There the line between outside and in is far more blurred than it is here. There people sleep on their little verandas in the hot season. They cook outside, eat outside and often wash their clothes outside, too. They do not need a Great Outdoors Month.
Not to romanticize this, though. The Beninese are in a constant battle to keep their houses clean and dust-free, not an easy proposition with unpaved roads and meager sidewalks. They live with a degree of discomfort most of us cannot imagine.
Still, in so many ways, including this one, they remind me of simple truths we seem to have forgotten. One of them is this: That before we became creatures of climate-controlled comfort, we lived in tune with the wind and the rain and the sun. We belonged to our world in a way we don’t anymore. And it’s good to remember that.
A quick trip to Kentucky last weekend plopped me down squarely in horse country on the big day. I watched American Pharoah clinch the Triple Crown only an hour away from the racetrack where he won the Derby.
There was a certain inevitability about the win, not just the odds and the sportscasters’ predictions but the three-year-old leading the entire race, his second-only-to-Secretariat pace, his supple gallop, his champion’s heart.
Only a few minutes before the race, the televised coverage took what I considered an unusual but heartening turn. It showed a printing press whirring out a newspaper and speculated on what tomorrow’s headline would be.
Was I imagining this? A print newspaper? A headline? Not a click, a tweet or a post?
So yesterday, before I left Lexington, I picked up the newspaper. The Lexington Herald Leader‘s headline, which I regret I did not photograph, was “Long Live the King.” The Washington Post‘s, which I regret I could not photograph better, was “American History.”
You can do a brunch or a picnic. You can do church and a corsage or dinner and a movie. When asked how I’d like to spend Mother’s Day, I said, let’s take a hike.
We went back to Great Falls again, the park I visited Friday to see vintage aircraft but left that day without walking even 10 minutes on one of its inviting trails.
Yesterday the road to the park was closed when we first drove by. Completely full. But after trying a crazy trail head parking lot we could barely get out of once we got into it, we drove back by the park and found it was admitting visitors again.
We strolled above the chute and the falls and Mather Gorge. Then we looped down to Sandy Point where we picked up the Matildaville Trail that took us back to the parking lot. It was a perfect Sunday amble with rocks to scramble, straightaways to savor and views to inhale.
And when it was over, we had a piece of the sinfully rich chocolate strawberry cake that Claire made.
I heard them before I saw them, a great roar that meant business. I craned my head out the car window, but the tree cover made it impossible to see the planes overhead. I was sitting in line to enter Great Falls Park, an idea that I realized wasn’t so very original as I saw the dozens of cars ahead of and (soon) behind me.
Less than a few thousand feet away was the Potomac River. The World War II aircraft assembled yesterday would fly down the river to the Capitol. It was my best chance to see the planes in flight.
Finally, I reached the gate, paid $5, found a parking spot and ran — full-out ran — to the overlook. As I did, I heard more engines. A group of four planes rumbled overhead. This was enough. Just to see and hear these four.
But oh, it gets better. Because the planes were actually circling above us before they flew downtown, so we saw most of the formations twice. And it quickly became apparent that I was standing with a bunch of die-hard WWII aircraft enthusiasts. “Look, it’s a P-38,” said one. “You can tell by the twin fuselage.”
Maybe it was just me, but I think most of us were there not just for ourselves but for others. The man standing next to me said his father was a tail gunner in a B-29. And when I nodded and smiled at one woman about my age, I noticed her eyes were as full as mine.
One thing I’m sure about — and I’m not sure about much — is that once our loved ones are gone, we become their eyes and ears. Yesterday, Dad was all around me — in the warm spring sunshine, in the contrailed sky. And he was there especially when the B-17s flew out of the clouds, over our heads and into the limitless blue beyond.
It’s the 70th anniversary of VE (Victory in Europe) Day and what I’m thinking about most is that my dad is not here to see it. How he would have loved to see the planes roaring down Independence Avenue and soaring above the Capitol.
It’s being called the “Arsenal of Democracy Flyover” and is the largest array of World War II aircraft ever assembled.
If we were watching it with Dad, we would have needed no cheat sheet; he could have identified all the aircraft himself with his still-sharp (at 90 years of age!) eyes.
“There’s a Mustang, there’s a Wildcat, there’s a Lightning,” he would have said. Of course, he would have been most excited to see his beloved B-17 bomber, the Flying Fortress. I grew up hearing stories of that plane and his special spot in its, the tail gunner position. He flew 35 missions over Europe — two on D Day — and in every one of them he was facing backwards.
The WWII veterans are over 90 now, but there will be a great gathering of them today, too. This flyover is in their honor — and the honor of all their fallen comrades.
The news had escaped me until after dinner. Baltimore was burning. The governor was declaring a state of emergency. The National Guard was moving in.
I have a daughter a dozen miles from center city, so the situation took on a greater urgency. But whose heart doesn’t skip a beat when the streets of a major American city are in chaos, when buildings are being looted, police attacked?
As is so often the case, the “cure” is worse than the disease. Or maybe the cure is the disease. Maybe we can no longer tell the difference.
I remember when Baltimore’s slogan was “The City That Reads,” a slogan too easily mocked with “the city that bleeds.” Now it’s the city that burns. But what city does not have this capacity? I think we’re all asking ourselves that question right now.
