Woke up this morning thinking about love, all types of love, romantic and filial and maternal. Of the love of friends and the respect of colleagues. Of the love we’re supposed to show the stranger but (at least I) so often do not.
I thought about how hard it can be to love, and how easy.
And then I thought about having a day that celebrates love. Without expectation of belief or patriotism. Surely unique among the holidays.
Just a day for love — and the expression of it.
Pretend that you’re on a space station, I read this morning in the little book of Lenten devotionals that I picked up, for a dollar, at church. There your existence would be limited — no walks around the neighborhood or spur-of-the-moment drives downtown; and the food, nothing to write home about.
But your vision, your perspective, would be broad. The earth from space, the blue marble.
A funny image, but the more I’ve pondered it the more it has grown on me. Limiting some parts of life so that others might shine through.
Especially the quiet, contemplative parts, those that thrive without distractions. Time alone to think, to put things in perspective.
Forty days of that? Bring it on!
In honor of our 16th president and his February 12 birthday, a quotation. Not from the Gettysburg Address or the Second Inaugural. In fact, no one is sure exactly where it came from, or even completely confident that he said it. Though it has always been attributed to him, it is not an especially well sourced remark.
But still, it is funny and practical and about real life. A break from the ponderous union-preserving tasks with which he was shouldered. A witty aside the man might have tossed out into the world without expecting it to go very far.
“If this is coffee,” he said, “please bring me some tea. But if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.”
So much for uniting the North and the South, those who sought to preserve the Union and those who clamored to divide it.
With one sentence this man could bring together — with humor — those who love coffee and those who love tea.
Now that’s saying something…
The Lincoln Cottage in northwest D.C., the president’s summer home, where he undoubtedly had a cup of coffee … or maybe it was tea.
This morning a choice: Turn left or right out of the park-and-ride lot on my way home to write.
Turn left and I wait twice. Turn right and I drive farther —but without stopping.
I turned right.
It’s about movement. Flow.
It’s about that in so many ways.
It looks like an interloper in the garden, a volunteer tree that decided to grow there overnight. But it’s actually a branch impaled by the wind — just about the only evidence we have of the storm that’s ravaging our neighbors to the north.
Apparently, folks in Boston are getting as much snow per hour as we’ve gotten all winter. That would be two inches.
This makes it official. No complaints about winter this year. They’re not allowed.
My walks around the city are a study in black in white. The white is from the buildings, their facades of marble, limestone and granite.
The black is from the coats. Long, short, open, closed. But black, almost always black. The puffy parkas of the seriously cold. The long topcoats of the multitasking and self-important (a lot of those around here). The dark suit jackets of those impervious to the chill.
Put them all together — the Hill types striding across the Capitol plaza; the office-worker at lunch — and you have a ballet, a choreography, a study in contrasts.
D.C. gets color from its tourists. But it gets its subtlety and its heft and its monochromatic harmony from its denizens.
I began this blog three years ago, not sure how often I would post or for how long. It would be an exercise, I told myself, “a slow, patient accumulation of words,” a daily discipline. Maybe people would read it, maybe they wouldn’t. But if I kept at it long enough, I told myself, I would have a body of work.
Don’t know if there’s quite a body yet. Maybe the beginnings of one.
What I do know is that somehow, every day but Sunday (or Saturday!), the blank screen is filled. Even on the hardest days, the words come. Some days they rush in as quickly as I can get them down. Other days I spend way more time than I’d like with fingers poised above the keys.
But eventually the muse speaks — and I listen.
Today I pause to thank that muse — and to thank all of you who visit, read and cheer me on. Your encouragement means more than you know.
The lunchtime walk is timed, by necessity. No more than an hour, often less. Bracketed by desk work, it is more of a bolt than a saunter.
Down First to New Jersey, over and around the Capitol.
Or maybe down the Mall, to the Washington Monument and back.
Errands might take me up Massachusetts or along E Street to Penn Quarter, the bustle of Chinatown.
Sometimes just to the Botanical Gardens to smell the roses.
In the end, it doesn’t matter. Each route stitches me more securely to this place.
Saturday marked not only the 127th Groundhog Day celebration in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, but also the 100th birthday of Grand Central Station. It was the second train station on that site, and it opened on Sunday, February 2, 1913. More than 150,000 people visited the first day.
For me, for years, Grand Central was the place I passed through on the way to work. My office was in the Helmsley Building, an ornate wedding cake of a structure that straddles Park Avenue north of the station.
Grand Central was where we grabbed a newspaper and a bagel before starting our day at the oh-so-civilized hour of 9:30 a.m. It was where we went out to lunch for a splurge on our assistant editor salaries. It was where we met people for drinks or dinner. It was even sometimes where we caught the train.
Most of all it was — and still is — a grand public space. One of the grandest. And its currency is not stone or steel but motion. Of trains, of people.
To stand at the clock in the middle of Grand Central is to be caught up in a great whirl of activity — but somehow to feel the stillness within the movement.
(Not Grand Central, but something of its scale…)
We’ve had more than our usual share of flurries this winter. Snow without purpose, not driven, not sticking much, just dancing in the air.
One minute the day lightens, the next it grays, and then … it’s white out (though not whiteout).
This is snow-globe snow, decorative, ornamental, does not mean business. It could be lint from an errant dryer. Or ash from a meddlesome volcano. Or bits of fluff from a cottonwood tree.
But no, it is snow. It melts on the tongue. It coats my hair when I walk through it, which I did yesterday.
Flurries are difficult to photograph. They are ephemeral. It is part of their charm.