Amazing

This has been an incredible trip to D.C. and I want to describe it but I don't have time! We've been out of the hotel for 12 hours, and now we've just dropped in to change clothes and head out to dinner.

In brief... yesterday morning we went to the Ford Theater -- just happened to be passing it on the way to breakfast -- and saw a fascinating lecture there. Eric and I were sitting no more than 10 yards away from Lincoln's box. It was chilling (something I didn't expect), and the person lecturing was a really good story teller.

Then we went the National Museum of American History. That's one of the Smithsonian museums... one of several we thought we'd visit yesterday. Ha! We could have spent four days in that one museum. Instead we spent four hours, and just barely scratched the service. It was amazing.

We saw Mama Mia last night. It was cute. After the theater we went to dinner. A hustling, busy, restaurant at midnight. (Oakland shuts down at 8:00 PM.)

This morning we headed out for the Capitol at 7:30 AM, for Diane Feinstein's constituent breakfast. Fienstein was polished, as expected, but she didn't mince words about everything . We appreciated what she had to say about stem cell research, for instance.

After breakfast, speech, question & answer session, and photo ops.... we went on an extensive tour of the capital building, led by an intern.

We rode in the underground trolley system that connects all the capitol buildings... and Edward Kennedy came shuffling past us & caught the trolley before ours. He's old and moves like it.

After the tour we sat in on a Senate session -- Kennedy making a speech & being very big and puffy.

Then we sat in a session of the House.

THEN we went to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Two hours in that place was intense. Tears & tears.

THEN we walked to the Washinton Monument, the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial, and the Lincoln Monument.

We tired & we're off to dinner. Super Shuttle is picking us up at 3:30 AM.

Next stop Oakland.

My dogs are barking.

Where does that expression come from, I wonder?

Eric and I walked so much yesterday -- we walked & walked & walked. The history here is amazing, and all but lost on the kids I see being dragged around from old building to old building. This is the right time for us to be here.

Yesterday we went to the White House in the morning. It wasn't nearly as grand as I expected it to be... it's kinda small. Even the State Room, where they have state dinners, isn't as large as I had anticipated. But I didn't anticipate that it would be so cool just to be there. Every room had a zillion stories, and so many of the rooms were familiar. I even recognized the bottom of the stairs where Bush & foreign cohorts stop for photo ops.

Ya'll know I don't give a hoot for celebrity. But this was different. The White House was history.

Next we went to the The National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden. It was the hottest part of the day -- boy is it hot & humid here - but the garden & sculptures were very cool.

Yesterday we also went to the International Spy Museum. The literature suggested that we plan three hours for the museum, but we thought there was no way we'd be there that long. We ended up being there three hours. It was very interesting -- lots of real spy gadgets & equipment, and taped interviews with spys and spy-catchers. There was a special exhibit about the history of terrorism in the U.S. that was particularly well done.

Today we're going to the Smithsonian Museums. There are many, many, of them. I hope our feet hold out! Tonight we're going to the National Theater to see Mama Mia. What the hell?

Here are a few pictures from the Sculpture Garden. (No cameras allowed in the White House or Spy Museum.)

I like D.C.

We went to the National Archives this afternoon. It's really pretty amazing to stand before The Bill of Rights.

Eric pointed out to me that we were surrounded by Christians. It was true! There was one family in particular that was very spooky. The barely-teen blonde daughter was wearing a t-shirt that said, "X-Treme Noze... knowing the Lord to the extreme".

Her big, blonde-peach-fuzz-headed father had a hitler mustache. For reals.

I overheard one father saying to his son, "Now you see, it's says we have a right to bear arms but they wouldn't let me bring a gun in here!"

I think more liberals should go look at the Bill of Rights. As far as I can tell, most of the folks looking at the Constitution were way more interested in God than anything else.

Tomorrow morning we're going to the White House, and then the International Spy Museum. Now we're off to find dinner.

Here are a few pics before we go.


The National Archives -- chock full o' interesting documents! Did you know that Ross Perot BOUGHT the Magna Carta?


The National Archives. Art shot!


The Department of Justice

We made it!

Woo hoo! I'm some place I've never been before, and that's very cool.

Our hotel is completely adequate AND it's the best possible location. Walking distance to everywhere.

We're just heading out now to pick up our tickets to the International Spy Museum for tomorrow, and to check out the National Archives. First, we'll stop for a latte.

God, I love a city that doesn't shut down at 5:00 PM.

More later...

Airport

We're sitting in the Fort Lauderdale airport, waiting for our flight to D.C. My back has been getting better & worse & better & worse. Right now it's worse. I'm happy with that! As long as it didn't continue to go downhill, I'm perfectly satisfied and happy to go on to D.C.

Florida was juuuust fine. We ate & ate. Eric's family plans their next meal while eating the food in front of them.

His father is quite frail -- collapses often -- and sleeps much of the day. He has end stage renal failure, diabetes, heart disease...

Ninety-one year old grandma (Nana, in this family) is still a hoot. Still talking about politics and popular culture. She's always been the second coolest member of the family, second to Eric (of course).

Power's fading... must run...

Well, phooey.

The good news is that I had an excellent steak tonight. The bad news is that I am in pretty bad pain, and double doses of Ibuprofen, Tylenol-4, and Flexoril (not all at once) aren't having any impact.

Unfortunately, in the afternoon on Wednesday, an hour or two before heading out to the airport, I slipped and slid and fell down in a grocery store parking lot. Since then I've been in pain (chest and back), but I kept thinking that I'd wake up in the morning and feel better. Problem is that every morning I feel worse!

So now I'm pretty bummed. Sitting is okay for a few minutes, standing is okay for a few minutes... nothing's good for very long. This is a bad way to start vacation... and REALLY bad way to go to DC, on accounta all the walking we need to do.

Oh, well.

I'm sure I hurt my back in the fall, and jarred my chest at the same time. Still, I start thinking that it's cancer in my spine. So many women I know have mets to their spines, and it's quite painful. But I guess I should look to the simplest explanation first, and I DID fall.

So here I am, hoping that I feel better tomorrow!

That's all I have to report from Florida tonight.

This one's going out to Jeb Bush.

I know that all of the Christians in this country aren't racist, but are most of the racists in this country Christian?

Pastor and KKK-member Edgar Ray Killen was found guilty of manslaughter in the 1964 slaying of three civil rights workers in Mississippi:

Ex-Klansman Found Guilty

When I began my mission to understand Christianity, I was disinclined to make generalizations about Christians.

That was before I knew that most Christians in this country have put more thought into what breakfast cereal to eat in the morning than they've ever put into whether or not they actually believe in an omnicient, omnipotent, God.

Many (if not most) of them think they're Christians simply because they're Americans. Or, they're Christians because they're "good people who try to do the right thing", a grossly mistaken notion of Christianity.

What I've observed is that the more seriously they take their doctrine, the more likely Christians will be hateful, seething, right-wing, racist, warmongers.

They may well be misinterpreting their Good Book. I'll leave that for others to decide, because personally... I don't think anything good can arise from an idealogy that's founded on bullshit. What the bible has to say isn't very pretty, frankly, even if the most benign Christians think Jesus was a groovy guy who preached lovelovelove. Even if it were pretty... is it a plus to believe a pretty lie?

Bottom line is that Christianity and racism go together like peanut butter and jelly. No one needs to send me a list of exceptions, either. Exceptions prove the rule.

Pastor Killen lived to be an old man. Bully for him, huh?

Day 1 ends or Day 2 begins?

It's very green here. It's green and hot and humid. It can be 90 degrees -- as it will be this weekend -- and raining.

It would be easy to criticize this community where Eric's parents live. It's not what Eric and I would consider "cool". It's not diverse. It's 2000+ households of aging, New York, Jews at their own sort of Disneyworld. But, as always, I'm impressed with how happy folks are here.

The apartments are beautiful and spacious... the grounds are well kept... the facilities -- indoor and outdoor pools, restaurant, game room, movie theater -- are all nice and well maintained. People are happy, even if what makes them happy is discussing their ailments.

Everyone talks and laughs and tell stories about operations, grandchildren, cruises, and the blintzes they had last week.

Eric and I are constantly reminded of the retirement we won't have. Our retirement wouldn't have looked like this. We had our own vision, if not plans. We were working on it, refining it... slowly, because we thought we had years.

Not that we haven't had fun all along.

We went to bed at 8:00 PM. Now it's 3:00 AM and we're up.

There are pictures of me all over this apartment. I think that every picture I've ever sent them is framed and on display. I believe they have in their possession more photographs of me than my parents ever had.

They introduce us to their friends as "our children".

I make them laugh, particularly my mother-in-law. Even when I must have seemed an alien creature to her -- crazy, make up-less Californian girl -- I made my mother-in-law laugh.

No one's said the word "cancer". She looked at me once and said, "It's not fair," and I knew exactly what she meant, and silently agreed.

3 AM and we're wide awake. Oy vey.

We made it!

We're here in Florida... tired and hot and sticky but no worse for wear. Old people abound. Seriously.

More later!

Rules of Despair

Sixteen years ago next month, Eric and I had what we'd forever call "The Summer From Hell".

We had planned to travel to Alaska together for the summer -- I had quit my job, and we had given up the rooms we rented in a shared house -- but that train was derailed when my brother was killed in Southern California. Eric followed me down to Long Beach to be with my family. I was sick, and distraught, and there was conflict with my family, and we soon hightailed it out of there.

We left Long Beach in the van we still hoped to drive to Alaska, but I became even more ill. Without a job, health insurance, or a place to live, I was admitted to a county hospital in Los Angeles for a week. Eric stayed in the van in the parking lot.

After I was released from the hospital -- still in shock that my brother Mark was gone, and still in pain -- we set out for Alaska again. Ah, youth. We made it to Oregon, but Eric injured his leg. We were doomed. So... we limped back to Oakland, and were crashing on a friend's floor while we regrouped and figured out what to do.

By the second day of crashing, I had had it. I was done. My brother was dead, and I felt I'd lost the rest of my family along with him. I was sick, and tired. I had no job, and no home. I said to Eric, 'Please, find us a place to live. Just the two of us."

Eric had been my boyfriend for just over a year.

He went out that day and found us a place that we could move into immediately. (That's Eric for you.)

I was grateful for the space, but depressed by the apartment. It was technically a studio, but there were french doors separating the rectangle into living and bedrooms. As we unpacked, I lamented the blue grey carpeting, the tiny kitchenette, the old bathroom. I questioned the dubious location -- across the street from a car alarm installation business. If you haven't lived across the street from a car alarm installation business, you've really missed something! It makes me laugh now to remember it.

But I wasn't laughing then. I was sad... not just about the apartment, but I was beaten up in general. I kept saying, 'This place sucks," and then I'd enumerate it's failings. And the whole time, Eric was beaming sunshine. He'd say, "Look, it's not so bad! Look at all the light it gets! We'll decorate it and make it cute! Look how nice the front door is!", and on, and on.

And then Eric went to set up the stereo. He looked for an electrical outlet on the wall where he wanted the stereo to go, but there wasn't one. He checked adjoining walls: none. He checked the "bedroom"... one outlet, far away from the living room. None in the bathroom. One in the kitchen.

Eric sat on the floor and put his head in his hands. Now HE was done. He said, "This place sucks! I hate it! There aren't any outlets and it's too small and..."

And I sat down next to him and said, "Honey, it's not so bad! Look at all the light it gets! And we'll make it look cute!"

That was a looooong time ago, and our lives and circumstances are very different now. we're heading off on a new summer -- a summer of fun, but without entirely sunny skies.

I'm sad sometimes. Sometimes I bemoan my fate, and sometimes I'm scared. Eric's always there, loving me up, as hopeful as he can be. I have some dark things to say. Eric hears them, and counters with whatever light he can find.

But when there are thunderclouds on Eric's face, and I ask him what's going on, and he struggles to even say the words: You're dying -- I hold his hand and squeeze, and say, "But first I'm going to live, right?"