pauraque_bk | sketch :: ford's theater (Reply)

I'm happy with the way Scabbers turned out. Ron looks a bit OOC... maybe I should have tried Percy instead.

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And, because

maidenjedi reminded me, this is my paper journal entry for the day I visited Ford's Theater (the site of the Lincoln assassination). It incorporates a lot of other Washington DC thoughts and sightseeing. It was somewhat edited for coherency when I first typed it up.

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Sunday, 16 December 2001
Washington, DC

At the National Cathedral, we're walking quietly up the left-hand side, with pillars between us and the people starting to file in for the service. The choir echoes clear and mournful. I look over and up and the morning light shines through the blue stained glass window, the sun is framed perfectly by the round panel at the apex, rays gleaming down, and I almost cry.

The statues are of saints and Presidents, all gazing down benevolently in the same poses. Lincoln's right hand is worn where pilgrims have reached up and touched it. Church and State going together like peanut butter and jelly.

It takes forever to get all the way down the aisle and back, because we're walking so slowly and delicately, trying not to let our shoes creak or echo -- whispering. We go along the wall, as if we're afraid of being caught in here. If you lay the Washington Monument down on its side, I keep thinking. It's not quite as big as it looks on TV, but then, nothing ever is.

We go down into the crypt during the service, still whispering and wowing at the mosaics and the Latin inscriptions that Mal can almost read. This place isn't old, but it feels completely medieval -- this religion feels completely medieval. Suddenly I can't believe it's something modern people still do. Do I feel God here? When we were in Ancient Egypt at the Met, did I feel Isis there?

It's a relief to get out into the cold morning air, able to talk again, able to laugh again. We go visit Ford's Theater, and unlike so many things, it feels as real as it is. Nothing is behind glass. You can sit down in the chairs, anywhere you want, and you can see John Wilkes Booth tripping on the Presidential decorations as he jumps down onto the stage -- it's a short drop, but he lands badly. The moment is fresh in the air -- you can still taste the adrenalin. And here we go across the street, retracing the steps -- it must have been so hard to get him up the twisting narrow stairs into the house. Here's where they sat, here are the pictures that were on the walls. Here's a mirror that was hanging in the room. The mirror gets me somehow. Here's Edwin Stanton standing and staring at himself in the rusty mirror. Blinking. Just not believing what he sees in his own eyes.

We see a lot this day. The J. Edgar Hoover Building -- closed on Sundays. The National Aquarium, which is in the basement of the Department of Commerce. We see a male crab doing his mating dance for the completely oblivious female crabs. We pet something in a touch-tidepool that looks like a trilobite. We have to eat dinner at TGI Friday's because the center of DC isn't a real city, and doesn't have real restaurants where real people go. There are little conversation-starting questions on the backs of all the sugar packets. How many US Presidents can you name? asks the sugar packet.

We keep naming Presidents as we walk down the Mall. James Madison. It's getting dark, but we heard that the monuments are better at night. Grover Cleveland. We can walk all around the White House, because some Representatives whose names I can't remember are getting let in through the South Lawn. James Buchanan. I'm pointing through the fence, telling Mal that what we're looking at here is the back door to the Oval Office. In a rainstorm, those doors blow open, you know? We're such geeks. Woodrow Wilson.

A tenor is singing something patriotic in a completely overblown operatic style, over by the big Christmas tree and huge Menorah. We walk off the other way, because we want to see the Lincoln Memorial. We've seen a lot of Lincoln already today, and we're starting to like the guy. It's a long, dark walk, and we're the only tourists around, and finally we climb the stairs -- a lot of stairs -- and there he is.

He's big, his chair is big and the columns are big, and I feel like a mouse. I come around and approach from the side because he's so imposing, godlike, saintlike. I find it difficult to go up and stand right at the foot of the statue. Mal is way over there, reading the text of the Gettysburg Address in six-inch-tall letters carved into the wall. I step out in front of him, and I look up, and I want to look down again. I want to kneel. This is a temple and I don't have an offering. But I'm facing him. Alone. Could anyone ever have really been this great?

I turn back, turn around, and walk off to stand on the landing before the stairs, where Martin Luther King stood. The reflecting pool is black with the night sky, struck through the heart with the blinding white streak of the Washington Monument. I think about how many people it would have taken to fill the lawn, the courtyard. I think about talking to them. Could anyone ever have really been this great?

We walk back down the stairs and go to the Wall.

There's no one else here, and the only lights are the little ones that point up and illuminate the names, like water cascading down the rock. It starts out small, and as we walk slowly along the path, we're walking down, down into the earth, because it's a wall cut into the ground, not standing on top of it. And it gets bigger and deeper and taller, and we're walking down. And the names are all there but it's hard to feel anything, because it's just too many.

Mal stops to crouch down and read a card that someone left. So I stop too, and I'm looking, and one of the names catches my eye. Richard B. Fitzgibbon. I look at it because it's a strange name. And it was a person. That thought stabs me right in the gut.

I step closer and touch the name. Richard B. Fitzgibbon. He died too young, and he could have been anybody.

We keep walking.

The wall trails off into nothing, and the path leads you back up onto the surface of the world, back onto the concrete path. We don't say anything. We just walk back towards the center of the Mall, because it's the only direction to go.

Mal stops and goes to use the public bathroom. I sit down on a bench and wait. I'm thinking about Jim. He worked at [the school in which I used to be a teacher's aide], as a substitute aide. He was tall and weathered and his hair was getting thin, and he always sat with the kids at lunchtime. He talked like a kid, with laughing sarcasm, and he never talked down to anyone, and he never bought into the melodrama. He drove an ancient yellow truck with misspelled vanity license plates, and when he could get away with it, he shared his Chinese takeout with the kids. They loved him.

He was shot twice in Vietnam, in the arm and in the head. Once a kid asked him how it felt to get shot; he thought a minute and then said it was like getting whacked with a baseball bat, the way it knocked you down. Once the class was watching Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the part with the shootout, and I looked over and he was sitting by himself, his legs crossed and his fingers in his mouth. His eyes were a little bit afraid, but mostly just sad. Could anyone ever have really been this great?

It's a long walk back to the hotel, from one end of the Mall to the other, turn left at the Capitol Building, and then a few more blocks down. We stop at the Washington Monument to watch some Indians dancing in a circle in street clothes, practicing for something. But the rest of the way we just walk, talking about nothing important. Presidents, mostly. We're close to naming them all, but there are six or seven we just can't remember. Who are the Presidents people always forget? We console ourselves by saying that we've already gotten twice as many as most people probably could. Did we already say Grover Cleveland?

We've been walking all day, and my feet hurt. She's been complaining of the same thing. I'm sitting on the bed in the hotel. I take off my shoes and socks, and rub the spots that are still deciding whether or not they're going to blister. Very blue veins, circulatory system that's been working hard all day trying to get the blood in and out through the squeeze of tight leather. She's sprawled out, exhausted.

I'm remembering that summer afternoon when the kids were just too goofy to do any work, so we put on a tape of the Simpsons. Me and Jim sitting in the desks, laughing together at the references that went over the kids' heads. Jim always treated me as an equal, he said, because somehow I always seemed to know the same things he did.

We're up to thirty-nine Presidents.

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This was the same trip, by the way, where I saw the WTC site.