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150 Years and One Day Ago Today…

150 Years and One Day Ago Today…

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… President Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. Yesterday’s coverage of the event noted that the speech was 272 words and it took Lincoln only two minutes to deliver it. It was preceded by Edward Everett’s two-hour oration, which is remembered now only because of what followed it: 10 perfectly crafted sentences that conveyed a nation’s aspirations and ideals.

One score and three years ago, I wrote about the Gettysburg Address. About how I memorized it in school, promptly forgot it and wished I had remembered it (among many other things).

Memorization seems even quainter now than it did in 1990. Why remember words when you can look them up on your smart phone? 

Perhaps the reason I gave so long ago is still true today. Learning a passage or a poem “by heart” liberates us, I said. “Once we know the words we carry their wisdom around with us; we are freed from the printed page.”

Lincoln’s words liberated us — in more ways than one. 

Marathon Girl

Marathon Girl

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Her first achievement was signing up, a marathon of its own, requiring hours online and the drive to submit her name ahead of tens of thousands of others.

And then there was the training, which began in March and involved a byzantine schedule of long runs and short runs building up to yesterday’s 26.2 miles (excuse me, 26.6 miles, according to her Garmin).

For some reason, she decided that the training should also include a triathlon, a swim-bike-run event that left her with a sprained ankle less than two months before the big race. But she pushed through that, too, with an air boot and lots of determination.

And finally, yesterday, all the hard work and determination paid off.  Not much more than a year and a half since she started running, Claire successfully completed the Marine Corps Marathon.

There were many moments I’ll remember, ones I didn’t photograph because I was too busy hugging her, but this is one that will stick with me.

A Walk and a Chase

A Walk and a Chase

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Day before yesterday, as often happens on Wednesdays, I was a walker in the city. And because it was the first full day of shutdown (many federal employees having come in on Tuesday to sign papers before being furloughed), I strolled through an eerily quiet D.C.

I angled down New Jersey to the Capitol and walked around it to First Street, N.E. The police were in full force and I remember thinking, this is probably not a good place to be today.

But the blue sky and mild air drew me along, down the hill to the Botanical Gardens (closed), past the American Indian Museum (closed), the Air and Space (closed) and across the Mall itself. Even the grass was closed.

Finally, crossing Constitution and Pennsylvania, angling up Indiana to E Street and the courts (not yet closed), I found people again, and some of the liveliness of a typical weekday afternoon.

Yesterday, as I heard police sirens racing down Constitution from my office (on lockdown), searching for news of the shooting at the Capitol (also on lockdown) I thought about Wednesday’s route.

Twenty-four hours later and I would have been crouching behind a tree.

(Yesterday’s car chase along Constitution Avenue passed a shuttered National Archives, pictured here on a more typical afternoon.)

 

Wedding Day

Wedding Day

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There’s something in the air. Last weekend I learned of two engagements. Today I know of two weddings. One, a colleague’s, is downtown. The other is across the street. Literally. 
All week long the dust has been flying. The gardeners delivered mulch, the tent people delivered a tent (one something like this), and other rental outfits dropped off chairs and tables and a porta-potty (which I’ve heard through the grapevine is a deluxe model).
It’s the wedding of our neighbor’s father — not an event one usually associates with a parent, but delightful when it happens. 
We neighbors have the smallest of supporting roles: We will put up with the parking and the noise. We will medicate our dogs if necessary. And we will send silent cheers their way. 
I may not feel this way tomorrow morning, but right now I can say: It’s good to have a wedding in the ‘hood.
(Photo: Fairytaletentsandevents.com)
“Fists to Knives to Guns”

“Fists to Knives to Guns”

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I looked it up first thing this morning. The Navy Yard is a little over two miles from my office. I could walk there in 40 minutes. That’s how close it came this time.

But despite how close it came, despite how horrific it was — the worst loss of life in a single violent incident here since 9/11/2001 — what’s most notable about this tragedy is how routine it has become.

At least there were no children killed this time, I caught myself thinking. Yet undoubtedly children were affected. Children and other innocent people. The 12 victims all had loved ones — husbands and wives, kids and parents, brothers and sisters, friends and colleagues — and their lives will never be the same.

There has always been anger and hatred in the world. But anger plus gunfire is a potent combination. As Janet Orlowski of Washington Hospital Center said as she updated reporters on the condition of the wounded: “I grew up at a time when people were mad at each other, they put up their fists and they hit each other. And for some reason people have gone from fists to knives to guns.”

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Burying the Lead

Burying the Lead

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Though it originates in our nation’s capital, this blog is decidedly apolitical — with a few exceptions, several of them also occurring, curiously enough, on 9/11. What I have to say today is not a solemn memorial, though — it’s an editor’s view of President Obama’s speech on Syria.

Maybe it’s because I’m in the final stages of getting the magazine to the printer and am thinking best with a red pen in my hand, but it struck me last night that the startling new diplomatic developments that began emerging  the day before yesterday were not so much fully incorporated into the president’s speech as they were tacked on at the end. This gave the address a confusing inconsistency.

For at least two-thirds of the 17-minute speech Obama told us why we should use force to punish the Assad regime for using chemical weapons against its own people — and then for the next five he told us that the vote to authorize such force was postponed in order to explore a diplomatic solution. We in the journalism biz call this burying the lead.

This didn’t just confuse me; it made me feel used. As George Orwell pointed out 67 years ago in his essay “Politics and the English Language, “…[T]he decline of a language must ultimately have political
and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that
individual writer. But an effect can become a cause…” As he noted a few paragraphs later, “[I]f thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

Perhaps there is no hope for political speech. Orwell didn’t think there was. “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible,” he said.  It’s hard to believe that the world has improved much in the last seven decades.

But if last night’s explanation had been more honest from the start, it would at least have gotten my attention.  And perhaps even earned my respect.

Almost Morning

Almost Morning

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Though waking up in the wee hours has its deficits, it also has its benefits. And one of them is watching the sky lighten, the trees gradually emerge from the dusk, each individual branch making a pact with the light. Yes, we are here.

Today it was after 6 a.m. when this happened. And even now, as we edge toward 7, the morning is still uncertain, unknowable.

Soon the sun will glance through the front oaks and sparkle on the dew. I’ll walk out the door with music in my ears, lace up my shoes, trot down the street and put a stamp on the day.

But until then it is still almost morning. A time of infinite possibility.

Mini Reunion

Mini Reunion

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The last high school reunion we made a vow: Get together more often than every 10 years. And now, only two years later, we’re making good on our promise. Tonight, 35 proud (!) graduates of Henry Clay High School in Lexington, Kentucky, will gather at a local watering hole to check in with each other again.

Some of these people were good friends of mine in eleventh and twelfth grades (when I transferred to a new school because my family moved a few blocks away). Others are acquaintances. But all of us shared a moment in time, and it was apparent at the last reunion how much of a bond that is.

With my youngest child just out of high school now I conjure up memories of my own secondary school experience, some pleasant and some painful. But all of them increasingly precious as the years roll on.

In Miniature

In Miniature

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A view of the Capitol Fireworks I’d never seen before, from across the Potomac and down a few miles. The fireworks in miniature but just as splendid.

The spectators were a mini United Nations; they spoke Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Tagalog (maybe). Babies toddled, parents chased, teenagers stared not at the sky but at their phones. Some people sat on blankets, others on the grass. Some had packed elaborate spreads, but more had simply wandered over with a snack and a soda.

Like the fireworks, the venue was a miniature, a snapshot of our country now.

The Fourth in History

The Fourth in History

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I know at least two re-enactors at Gettysburg this week, one fighting for the North and one for the South. And I remember the school trips each of the girls took to the battlefield in sixth grade, playing out roles in their own Picketts’ Charge.

There’s a battlefield site minutes from here where another battle was fought, the Battle of Ox Hill (or the Union name, the Battle of Chantilly) and I think I’ll go there today. It’s a place I’ve passed several hundred times and always meant to see. It’s tucked between malls, hidden in plain sight, a bit of history almost buried by modern life.

But it’s still there, not quite five acres. And visiting it seems like a good way to celebrate the day, here in the Old Dominion.